The temporary hijrah subsection has moved to a page of its own, located here.

US general tells British special forces:  Stop rescuing people in Kabul, you're making us look bad.  I understand that the commanding general of the 82nd Airborne Division has told the commander of the British special forces at the Kabul airport to cease operations beyond the airport perimeter.  Maj. Gen. Christopher Donahue has told his British Army counterpart, a high-ranking field-grade officer of the British army's 22nd Special Air Service Regiment, that British operations were embarrassing the United States military in the absence of similar U.S. military operations.  I understand that the British officer firmly rejected the request.

After the Debacle:  Six Concrete Steps to Restore U.S. Credibility.  The indelible images from Kabul this week have done serious damage to U.S. credibility abroad.  The Chinese Communist Party media mouthpiece, the Global Times, has already used the chaos in Afghanistan to warn Taiwan that the United States cannot be counted on to come to its aid when China eventually attacks the island.  There will be ample time to assess how things went so wrong so quickly for the Biden administration in this still-unfolding crisis.  We fully support our diplomats and troops as they execute their mission to evacuate U.S. citizens, allied diplomats, and the United States' Afghan friends over the coming days and weeks.  Rather than get drawn into a political blame game over the harrowing scenes the world is watching on TV, we believe it is far more important for the United States to immediately take steps to shore up its alliances and diplomatic standing, especially in the Indo-Pacific region.  Fortunately, there are efforts that can be undertaken without delay to reassert U.S. leadership.

Biden Can't Escape Blame for Afghanistan Fiasco.  The American-nurtured Afghan military of the last 20 years that had suffered thousands of prior casualties evaporated in a few hours in the encirclement of Kabul.  Enlistees apparently calculated that their own meager chances with the premodern Taliban were still better than fighting as a dependency of the postmodern United States — despite its powerful diversity training programs.  Forces more powerful than the Taliban, in places far more strategic, will now leverage an ideologically driven but predictably incompetent administration, a woke Pentagon and politically weaponized intelligence communities.  Why not, when President Joe Biden trashes both American frackers and the Saudis — only to beg the Kingdom to rush to export more of its hated oil before the U.S. midterms? [...] And why not, when our own military jousts with the windmills of "white supremacy" as Afghans fall from U.S. military jets in fatal desperation to reach such a supposedly racist nation?

Fire the military and intelligence bigs who bungled Afghanistan — now.  There are many lessons to learn from the disastrous US pullout from Afghanistan, but there is one that we should take home right now:  Failure must be punished.  The United States has been in Afghanistan for almost 20 years.  It has been obvious for the last few years that we would be leaving soon.  Former President Donald Trump wanted to leave Afghanistan, but the generals managed to slow him down and wait him out.  Instead of making plans, they stonewalled.  When President Joe Biden ordered them to get out, there wasn't a lot of time for planning, but they managed to get what they did wrong.  US forces fled Bagram under cover of darkness, with no warning to anyone.  (But botched even that, turning off the lights as they left, which gave looters free rein for many hours before Afghan officials showed up.)

6 Reasons China, Not Just Taliban, Benefits from US Exit From Afghanistan.  [Scroll down]  China now could have access to oil, copper, and rare earth minerals in Afghanistan, experts say.  The communist regime also will want infrastructure, roads, and railways to access mining areas.  The connection would be part of China's "Belt and Road Initiative," a multi-trillion-dollar strategy of investing abroad to gain influence over other countries.  "China benefits immensely" from the U.S. exit from Afghanistan, said Marco Rimanelli, a professor of political science and international security at Saint Leo University in Florida.  "By expanding the Belt and Road Initiative, the Chinese are using a form of predatory capitalism by making nations completely dependent on China," Rimanelli told The Daily Signal.  "Once a country is unable to pay back its debts, China tries to extract political concessions."  China has used this model to gain leverage in Africa and in Latin America, often in smaller countries with extensive natural resources.

Lara Logan confirms what we feared about Afghanistan.  Biden's pullout from Afghanistan has been the worst managed event in American history.  With Saigon as an example, the administration knew exactly how bad it would be.  There's a lot of finger-pointing going on now but, at bottom, people are wondering if the unconditional Taliban takeover, including the trapped Americans, is a deliberate policy.  On Tucker Carlson's Wednesday show, Lara Logan said, "Yes, it is.  This was what the government wanted." [...] [Unlike Japan,] We never flattened Afghanistan.  Instead, we imposed ourselves on top of a medieval Islamic country, including the whole LGBTQ+ madness.  It worked for those already geared to Western values and those looking to take American money.  The Afghan military, many members of which were brave fighters, clearly would never be ready to lose their training wheels — with our military being the training wheels.  Some of you may remember this video, which embodies problems of both culture and competency:  [Video clip]

Assabiya Wins Every Time.  Democrats and Republicans are right to blame each other for the fall of Kabul.  It's a loss for America's bipartisan foreign policy establishment as a whole.  For nearly two decades Washington sent thousands of Americans to their deaths and spent trillions of taxpayer dollars to wage a strategically pointless war.  And because both sides of the political divide should be held accountable, military as well as civilian officials, too, it is unlikely that anyone ever will be.  Since everyone is to blame, holding anyone accountable implicates everyone.  The reality is that America lost its war in Afghanistan more than a decade ago, roughly around the time when CIA officers began bribing aging warlords with Viagra.  The Americans knew all about the young boys the tribal leaders kept in their camps; because the sex drug helped Afghan elders rape more boys more often, they were beholden to America's clandestine service.  Losing Afghanistan then is the least of it.  When you choose to adopt a foreign cohort's cultural habits, customs for which the elders of your own tribe would ostracize and perhaps kill you, you have lost your civilization.  Yet military strategists, political pundits, foreign correspondents, and even historians will spend the next several decades wondering how a gang of rough Pashtun tribesmen galvanized by a fundamentalist version of Islam managed to defeat the most advanced military in the world.

Afghanistan's Tragic Collapse And The Death Of U.S. Influence.  It's one thing to lose a war intentionally, quite another to botch it so badly that it damages our relations around the world.  But thanks to the epic ineptitude of the Biden administration, our military leaders and dysfunctional intelligence agencies, that's exactly what has happened.  The news couldn't be more depressing.  Our president's response was, no joke, a strongly worded letter to the Taliban from our United Nations ambassador.  At the same time, our own State Department informed U.S. citizens now stuck in the capital of Kabul that they should make their way to Karzai Airport if they can, but that the U.S. can't guarantee their safety.  Even as the horrible images of the Taliban's takeover come tumbling in over social media and news sites, the harm to the U.S. and its global reputation has been significant.  The Taliban has already started killing people, including a woman for not wearing a burka, while making up more comprehensive death lists of those who will be summarily murdered once it takes total control.

If You Live in Taiwan, Time to Worry.  Taiwan needs to worry about American reliability.  Unlike Afghanistan, where the United States had committed its forces for two decades, Taiwan has no U.S. forces and no assurance that the United States will come to their defense if attacked by China.  The United States has a bad habit of walking out on its allies and friends.  The list is long.  It includes Vietnam and Cambodia, Iraq and Afghanistan, and Iran.  In all of those cases, one way or another, the United States, for its own reasons, took a hike.  Obama pulled U.S. troops from Iraq, opening the door to Iran.  While the United States has a few thousand soldiers still in Iraq in training and advisory capacities, they're under siege and it's unlikely the United States will protect them.  In fact, President Joe Biden has said the United States will end combat missions in Iraq by the end of 2021.  Unless U.S. troops are pulled out in the middle of the night, as they were in Afghanistan, they'll quite possibly have to shoot themselves out while exiting.

The 'Thank You for Your Service' Red Pill.  One thing we need to examine is our dogmatic praise of the military and its members.  For the last 80 years, since the great shift to the post-World War II order, the military has become a hallmark of the American regime.  But this was not always the case.  Praising a professional military, especially a massive, standing army in times of peace, would have been antithetical to American virtue to most Americans living during the first 150 years of our history.  During the founding, for instance, professional soldiers were seen for what they are:  mercenaries.  We debated some after establishing our regime about if and how much we needed some small portion of a professional cadre of soldiers, but I have never come across a founder who did not see professional soldiers essentially as scum.  Ours was to be a republic, and republics cannot use mercenary armies.  The hallmark of the American military was the citizen-soldier — the direct opposite of the professional.  The logic is simple.  There is something less than admirable about someone who would fight and kill for a living.

The very center of all US problems is the rejection of Christianity.  Christianity has always been hand in hand with the greatest empires.  The abandonment of Christianity has always led to the collapse of any nation or people or family or person who abandons it.  This is an axiom. [...] Christianity itself is the most difficult way of life to live.  Any other religion is far, far easier, because they don't require of the faithful what Christ does:  everything.  Many people use "Christianity" as a brand to justify their own existence and behavior.  Look at Imposter Joe, for example.  He claims to be a "devout Roman Catholic", yet he supports gay marriage, abortion anytime anywhere, and acts like a pedophile at times.  He is false.  He probably doesn't think he is false, and many who prefer him because of political (not religious) reasons will participate in perpetuating the delusion.  But "by [his] fruits", we see he is no follower of Christ, he is instead, a hijacker of Christ, using the Lord's good name to get ahead politically among seculars.

The Pandemic Gave Americans A Taste Of Government 'Help' And They Didn't Like It.  It's fair to say Americans, especially the pre-revolution colonists, have always had a healthy skepticism of government.  What's frightening is some days we seem dangerously close to losing the unique quality that separates this country from every other.  The Washington Examiner's Byron York posted last week in his Daily Memo some interesting data that tells us a lot about Americans' attitudes about their government.  He tracked a long-term Fox News survey in which respondents are asked which message they would send the government if they had the chance: "lend me a hand" or "leave me alone."  Over the course of the last decade, only in August 2020 did a majority (57%) say it would ask for government help.  In that same poll, 36% said "leave me alone."  This year, however, the numbers were flipped — 47% said "leave me alone" while 44% still wanted aid.

Our Ridiculous Way of Fighting Wars.  As we look at the disgraceful coda of the Global War on Terror and the tens of thousands of our countrymen who have been maimed or killed with scant results, it is clear to all but few (sadly, those few seem to occupy a lot of Defense Department jobs and think tank posts), there must be a better way to fight our wars.  If we look to history, and even demands from the anti-war Left, we might find a better way forward. [...] Which "victory" was more decisive:  World War II or Vietnam?  Are we to believe that timelines are beneficial to every type of work (construction, budgets, school testing, sports), but when it comes to deploying our military efforts that is the one thing that somehow needs zero accountability for how long it takes?

Tucker Carlson:  We must hold someone accountable for what is happening in Afghanistan.  There's a pattern, if you look around for a moment, you may notice things that add up:  gas lines, inflation, spiraling crime, collapsing cities.  If you're over 40, it could look familiar.  It's the 1970s, but without the free speech and Brezhnev running our government and, as if it could get more perfect, now we may have another fall of Saigon.  Remember the fall of Saigon?  If you were watching television in April of 1975, April 30th, you remember it well.  It was the single most humiliating day in the history of the United States abroad.  American officials fleeing in terror as a peasant army swept through the capital city, desperate civilians clinging to the struts of helicopters as they took off from the roof of the U.S. embassy.  It was a complete disaster.  It was a total ignominious defeat.  We'd spent more than a decade in Vietnam and in the end, we lost.  So no matter how you felt about that war, it was painful to see it happen and nobody wants to see it again.  Last month, Joe Biden promised we never will see it again.

Why Everything We Thought About Drugs Was Wrong.  Over the last 20 years the U.S. liberalized drug laws.  During that time, deaths from illicit drugs rose from 17,000 to 93,000. Two and a half times more people die from illicit drug use than from car accidents; five times more die from drugs than homicide.  Many of those people are homeless and die alone in the hotel rooms and apartment units given away as part of the harm reduction-based "Housing First" approach to homelessness.  Others are children found dead by their parents on the floors of their rooms.  Many progressives today say the problem is that we didn't go far enough, and to some extent they are right.  A big factor behind rising drug deaths has been the contamination of cocaine, heroin, and counterfeit prescription opioids with fentanyl.  Others say that concerns over rising drug deaths are misplaced, and that alcohol and tobacco kill more people than illicit drugs.  But drug deaths were rising in the U.S. long before the arrival of fentanyl, and most of the people who die from tobacco and alcohol do so in old age, not instantly, like they do when they are poisoned or overdose.  Of the nearly 90,000 people in the U.S. who die of alcohol-related causes annually, just 2,200 die immediately from acute alcohol poisoning.

Accountability for Afghanistan.  It is probably too much to expect that there will be accountability for the debacle in Afghanistan — we have a Democratic president, after all.  But we can still hope.  We can turn to the foreign press for their perspectives on what is happening.  France24 posted this video of chaos at Kabul's airport:  [Video clip] [...] One country that isn't withdrawing its people is Russia.  They expect to get along just fine with the Taliban.

My scooter was stolen last week. Unknown to the thief, I hid two Airtags inside it.  [Thread reader]  I was able to use the Apple Find My network and UWB direction finding to recover the scooter today. [...] Here are a few lessons learned if you're using Airtags for theft recovery:
  [#1]   Use an Airtag adhesive that blends in and muffles noise.  It's clear my thief was looking for them.
  [#2]   Do not turn on Lost Mode.  It immediately alerts the thief they're being tracked.
  [#3]   Act quickly, before the anti-stalking feature kicks in.  Damage done to my handlebars was likely in response to the regular noises from the Airtag.
  [#4]   Limit your in-person interactions and always involve the police.  Don't try to retrieve your stolen goods until you have backup.

Where was the US Navy when Iran Took Over the Strait of Hormuz?  Neither Congress, nor President Biden, nor even the U.S. Navy has registered interest in the following alarming developments in the Gulf of Arabia, first reported by Israeli intelligence.  On Tuesday, August 3, at least six ships off the coast of the UAE in the Gulf of Oman suddenly announced via their Automatic Identification System trackers, nearly simultaneously, that they were "not under command."  In other words, they had lost power and could no longer control their steering.  Shortly afterward, Britain's maritime trade agency reported a "potential hijack" unfolding off the UAE coast.  One of the stricken ships, the Asphalt Princess tanker, was boarded by operatives suspected of being Iranian troops, seized and towed into Iranian waters, and then released the following day.  This was not the first attack against a tanker off the UAE in the Gulf of Oman.  Iran apparently used one or more armed drones to carry out a deadly tanker attack the previous Thursday against the Mercer Street in those same waters.

'Preppers' Quietly Stock Up for the 'Perfect Storm'.  A crippling ice storm that left Travis Maddox and thousands of other Missouri residents without power in 2007 had an "almost apocalyptic feel to it."  "No one could move.  It just shut the whole region down for two weeks.  I wasn't as prepared as I thought," said Maddox, a burly man of 43, sporting a long black beard, T-shirt, cargo pants, and baseball cap, while tending his garden.  Those two weeks made Maddox realize that being prepared — "prepping," as it's called today — was the key to a life of self-reliance and personal freedom.  As an Eagle Scout, he never forgot the Boy Scout motto:  Be prepared.  "To me, the ultimate level of prepping is being self-sufficient.  You're still being modern, but you're in control," Maddox told The Epoch Times on Aug. 5.

British Commentator's Monologue on the Nature of Freedom Will Make You Stand up and Cheer.  I've never heard of Neil Oliver before today, but I am now following him on social media and I can count myself as a bonafide fan after reading his Twitter timeline and watching this incredibly moving and salient monologue on the nature of freedom.  Oliver is an archeologist and podcaster out of the United Kingdom. [...] But it's not his accent or his smooth, calming tones that are most engaging.  Oliver's most recent weekly monologue on freedom and the nature of freedom is a must-watch for everyone, but especially those who believe freedom is a privilege that can only be meted out with the guarantee that nothing bad will ever happen.  Oliver's monologue is quite Mike Rowe-esque, and should be shared everywhere.

Why Managers Fear a Remote-Work Future.  In 2019, Steven Spielberg called for a ban on Oscar eligibility for streaming films, claiming that "movie theaters need to be around forever" and that audiences had to be given "the motion picture theatrical experience" for a movie to be a movie.  Spielberg's fury was about not only the threat that streaming posed to the in-person viewing experience but the ways in which the streaming giant Netflix reported theatrical grosses and budgets, despite these not being the ways in which one evaluates whether a movie is good or not.  Netflix held firm, saying that it stood for "everyone, everywhere [enjoying] releases at the same time," and for "giving filmmakers more ways to share art."  Ultimately, Spielberg balked, and last month his company even signed a deal with Netflix, likely because he now sees the writing on the wall:  Modern audiences enjoy watching movies at home.

Will China bail out Biden?  Renmin University professor Jin Canrong has Washington's attention.  The senior director for China at the US National Security Council, Rush Doshi, cited him two dozen times in a new book entitled "The Long Game:  China's Grand Strategy to Displace American Order."  Professor Jin's warning on Friday [7/30/2021] at the "Observer" website that US inflation might lead to the bankruptcy of the US government will be read carefully in Washington — especially because Jin claims that China can help America out of its economic problems.  "The United States is in a state of mental transition," the Chinese academic averred, citing the late Elizabeth Kübler-Ross's five stages of grieving: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.  America was in denial three years ago, and shifted to anger, but "some sane people may be ready for the third stage," and "be ready to bargain."

Did Karl Marx Really Know What He Was Talking About?  [Scroll down]  Perhaps Marx's communist economic model reflected how he lived his personal life.  To put it bluntly, Karl Marx was a lifelong free-loader, was always in debt, and was constantly begging for money to pay his bills from his mother, his wife's family, and from a generous, rich Friedrich Engels (whose father was a rich industrialist!). So, while Marx was busy attacking the industrialist class, he was living off the money of a rich industrialist, an extraordinary brazen act of hypocrisy by the "leader of the proletariat."  Although he lived in poverty in a poor section of London, Marx had a family maid, Helen Demuth, although he really couldn't afford one.  In 1851 while Marx's wife was away on the Continent begging for money, Marx impregnated the maid and fathered an illegitimate son, Fredrick Demuth, who Marx never saw and totally abandoned.  It gets worse.  To cover up Marx's betrayal of his wife, professed principles, and public image, Engels agreed to pose as the father of Marx's illegitimate son and paid off the maid to keep quiet.

Slouching Toward Dictatorship.  "Progressives" (the quotes flag the falsehood behind the label) are corrupters of reality who think nothing of corrupting even science in order to achieve their goals.  Taking no lessons from history and drunk on political power, they move ahead to make the state command every aspect of our lives in the mad obsession to own us.  Their contempt for reality punches us with "justice" that kills babies because they happen to be on the wrong side of a mother's abdominal wall.  It thumps us with "reasoning" that makes killing a non-human creature a criminal act and killing a human being legitimate because Homo sapiens is not on a list of endangered species.  And so it is that the government in an America adulterated by "progress," exercising a power taken from its people by eviscerating the Constitution, has the "authority" to control every aspect of our lives.  And that includes everything we own and everything we need to stay alive.

Conservatism Is Over:  A New Vocabulary for a New Right.  [Scroll down]  Surveying American life and government in 2021, the failure of American conservatives cannot be denied.  What we lost was precisely the vision of American governance and virtues that Benjamin Franklin warned us would be a struggle to maintain.  Equality under the law?  Despite successes in recognizing the humanity of previously oppressed minority groups, the free market has enabled a crass commodification of legal representation that ensures many Americans must routinely settle for inferior counsel.  Another sign of bias in the legal institutions is that informed citizens who aren't lawyers can reliably predict the outcome of key cases merely by learning the number of the circuit court before which they will be argued.  But the betrayal of equality under the law isn't only evident in formal court proceedings — it can be seen in things like the increasingly discriminatory affirmative action policies in higher education, or the Biden Administration's overt racial favoritism in allocating COVID relief funds.

There's Something Happening Here...  There is an undercurrent going on that is felt but not seen at this time.  Stills's words expressed great dissatisfaction with the national government, estrangement of government from the discontented, and a sense that the government is ignoring and does not care about the masses.  There is a real sense of physical threat by the progressive government against the people.  And there is a real arrogance by the powerful government elite that the populist masses, including the patriots, just cannot do anything about progressive abuse of power.  A real sense of estrangement, isolation, and unfairness that the outsiders felt in the '60s, is what the patriots (conservatives/Christians/constitutionalists) feel today.  There appear to be many events happening all at once and closely linked that give hope.  And the people are aware and noticing.

Taiwan Is Next, but Should We Care?  Taiwan is a small island state (about 24 million inhabitants) in the western Pacific.  There, Chinese nationalists, led by Chiang Kai-shek, took refuge following the fall of China to Mao and the Chinese communists in 1949. Since then, Taiwan has remained a contentious issue for Beijing's communist government, which has vowed to "reunite" Taiwan with mainland China either peacefully or through force of arms.  But let there be no doubt:  Taiwan is one of the brightest lights of freedom and prosperity in the world.  Fully democratic, Taiwan routinely holds free and fair elections.  Taiwan elected a female (Tsai Ing-wen) as the country's (yes, I will refer to Taiwan as a country!) president in 2016 and remains staunchly anti-communist.  President Tsai was reelected in 2020 with a historically strong majority.  Taiwan boasts a significant free market economy, producing the 20th-largest GDP globally — incredible for such a small population.  And Taiwan's per capita income ranks with that of the United States.

What Is to Be Done?  Restore Federalism and Elect DeSantis as President.  One of the things the Left hates most about the United States of America is that there are 50 of them.  A leftist revolution is more easily accomplished in a country in which power is already consolidated in a single place among a small group of people.  Despite the vast territory of the Russian empire under the last of the Tsars, Lenin was able to hijack the initial anti-Tsarist revolt and turn it into a Bolshevik seizure of power.  Over the course of the centuries, similar things have happened in France, England, and Germany. [...] The system of checks and balances instituted by the Founders cooled the passions as it was designed to do, rejecting the "fierce urgency of now" in favor of gradual change.  From 13 east-coast colonies to 50 states, marked by deep regional differences, America weathered the storms of civil war, anarchism, socialism, National Socialism, and communism without succumbing to any of them.  But the hammering on the gates of our republican democracy has only grown louder and more insistent.

The radical left is going to wish Rush Limbaugh had lived to age 99, when they see the people who replace him.
The only reason the media tries to cancel Joe Rogan: He terrifies them.  Joe Rogan is staying one step ahead of Cancel Culture, but not if the media has anything to say about it.  The host of "The Joe Rogan Experience," the podcast sensation who joined Spotify last year following a jaw-dropping $100 million deal, is under near-constant attack from his woke critics — and, sadly, journalists who pledge allegiance to the new woke order.  The short list of complaints against Rogan?
  •   He's too willing to speak to fringe players like conspiracy monger Alex Jones.
  •   He's too willing to give "problematic" voices like Abigail Shrier, a critic of the trans agenda, a platform.
  •   He's too willing to question the government's COVID-19 dog-eared rule book.
  •   He's too willing to curse out Cancel Culture.
  •   He's too enamored of free speech, worst of all.
Rogan invites guests on his show who have been deplatformed by social media giants (Jones, for example).  He blasted Joe Biden as too old during the heat of the 2020 presidential campaign after endorsing an even older Sen. Bernie Sanders in the primaries.  More recently he brought up President Biden's mental fitness anew, something the mainstream media refuses to consider after years of questioning the mental state of Donald Trump.

When 'Woke' is More Sacred than Old Glory.  On my desk is a framed political cartoon with the caption:  "Burning the American Flag is a form of free speech?  Try burning a rainbow flag and see if that too is considered a form of free speech?"  You could replace "rainbow flag" with "BLM flag," or even "Antifa flag."  The cartoon lances the recent rise in free-speech hypocrisy that promptly abandons the First Amendment and drums up hysterical charges of "hate speech" when certain sacred cows du jour are so much as mildly criticized.  In the Left's campaign to "fundamentally transform" America and rid it of soi-disant racism, homophobia, transphobia, and other perceived ills, certain symbols — the American flag, and a panoply of images of western culture — have been isolated as representative of "the white patriarchy," deserving of derision and destruction.  Therefore, it has become perfectly acceptable to desecrate them.  At the same time, it has become hateful to even give a disapproving look to banners or murals representing the LGBTQ+, militant black groups, or anything remotely leftist.  "Woke" symbols are untouchable; free speech [notwithstanding].

Liberals do have more mental health issues.  [Elizabeth] Condra offers few opinions as to why liberals have more mental health issues, such as "an unrelenting focus on oppression, verbal violence, and microaggression."  And while I do agree with her analysis, I think it's an even deeper issue.  Conservatives are inherently more grateful for the country we're born into.  It's in the very name we call ourselves:  we want to "conserve" our country.  Progressives want it to "progress" into something else.  Conservatives are more focused on micro-values (improve myself to be the best I can be) and liberals on macro-values (improve society to be the best it can be).  The problem with focusing on macro-values is it's a lot harder to change society.  I have massive influence over my own disposition and perspectives, but I have little effect on society at large.  Conservatives are more logical.  As much as I might want to change society into improving, I know that logically I can control only myself and perhaps influence those around me.  So I am not depressed when my efforts at producing a "utopia" fail.  Conservatives have more traditional values.  And, perhaps, those values have been around for centuries because they make a happier society, not just due to the evil "patriarchy."

America's 'forever war' is here to stay.  America's withdrawal from Afghanistan is already leaving chaos in its wake.  The power vacuum will be exploited by the Taliban, Islamic terrorists, Russia and China.  The disregard for America's strategic interests and the resulting human calamity could end up matching President Obama's callous dismissal of the ISIS threat.  These days, both Republicans and Democrats think blasting a policy of "forever wars" makes for a good line.  The refrain may score cheap points with voters, but it also telegraphs to the world that America is increasingly conflict-averse and tired of leading on the world stage.  Make no mistake: an increasingly aggressive Communist China waits in the wings to assume that mantle.

A brilliant Twitter thread perfectly explains what drives today's conservatives.  Darryl Cooper, AKA MartyrMade, is a researcher, writer, and podcaster who has put together one of the most brilliant Twitter threads you will ever read.  Over the course of 35 tweets, he examines fact after fact from the last five years to explain why conservatives — the people who used to believe in our government, in law enforcement, in the election process — have become cynical, disillusioned, and prone to accepting conspiracy theories to explain the manifest breakdowns in the American system.

Great Thread on How the Election Was Rigged, and How the Nation Was Stolen.  [Scroll down]  Not a single person has gone to jail.  Even Kevin Clinesmith, the fall guy — and no one believes he forged that document without orders from Comey or McCabe or Lisa Page — got community service, and what was, effectively, a one month suspension of his law license.  Not a single other person paid any price.  And we're supposed to keep believing in the government, huh?  We're supposed to keep enlisting in the military?  We're supposed to keep obeying the laws?  We're supposed to keep believing the FBI and law enforcement?  We're supposed to keep returning "guilty" verdicts at trial when the Ruling Class tells us to?  Why?  The Ruling Class ignores the laws.

Does the Biden Administration Understand Inflation?  There seems to be a lot of confusion today about inflation.  Pick up the paper or follow an internet site and you will read that the inflation rate this year is expected to be 2% or 3%.  What they really mean is that prices are expected to rise 2% or 3%.  But is that inflation?  Inflation is an increase in the money supply.  So why is the difference in definition critical?  Prices rise because of inflation; they are the result of inflation but they are not inflation, nor are they the cause of inflation.  This is important because the government is the only one that can increase the money supply.  This is done in a number of ways, but for the moment just think of it as printing more money.  That is what countries have done when they ran out of money; they just printed more money until it came to the point where their money was almost worthless, where a wheelbarrow load of money would just barely purchase a loaf of bread.

The Costs of Biden's Big Government.  The Biden administration submitted its first 10-year budget to Congress last month.  The budget projects average annual economic growth for 2023 through 2031, after it's done with all the stimulus spending in 2021-22, of 1.9%.  What does 1.9% growth mean?  Economist John Cochrane, of Stanford University's Hoover Institution, notes that from 1950 to 2000, the U.S. economy grew at 3.5% per year.  Average real income over that period grew from $16,000 per person to $50,000.  Suppose instead of 3.5%, growth over that period of time was 2%, asks Cochrane.  With average growth of 2% instead of 3.5%, a $16,000 income would have grown over the 50 years to $23,000 rather than $50,000.  In recent years, since 2000, average growth has been more sclerotic, in the range of 2%.  What's the problem?  Too much growth of government, says Cochrane.

America's Ruling Class and China's Ruling Class Are More Similar Than You Think.  In the oft-cited issues of the day, we discuss censorship in public spaces, corporate and military institutionalized wokeness, Critical Race Theory indoctrination of our youth in publicly-funded government education centers, upending traditional cultural norms, domestic surveillance of political opposition, an election no one is permitted to question, enormous spikes in murders and drug deaths across every major American city coupled with the demonization of law enforcement, a financial sector that is increasingly working against the interests of working and middle-class Americans, and a manufacturing base that has been sold off to our greatest world rival, the People's Republic of China (who bears responsibility for a deadly worldwide pandemic that likely emitted from their dangerous lab experiments in Wuhan).  If you dare to speak out about any of the above, you risk ostracism, reputational attacks, career termination, banning from public discourse, removal from payment processors, and in the most extreme cases, prosecution.  Why is this happening?  Because there is a 1% in America that wields powerful influence over the rest.

Why This Veteran Worries Wokeness Is Poisoning Our Military.  Jason Beardsley served his country in the U.S. Navy and the U.S. Army Special Forces before taking the helm as executive director of the Association of the United States Navy.  Today, he's speaking out to urge military leaders to focus on their primary mission of defending America — not advancing the left's woke agenda.  Beardsley recently wrote a commentary for The Daily Signal about the challenges of readiness and morale in the U.S. Navy.  "Wokeness is well on its way to poisoning our military, even as it claims the military is moving toward utopia," Beardsley says.  He tells The Daily Signal that his own military experience taught him radical ideas like critical race theory have no place in our armed forces.

In a cancel culture, anonymity must be a civil right.  Anonymity, in ordinary times, is a tough topic to wrestle with.  These days, however, it's easy:  Dissent, and thus democracy, will only survive in today's culture if anonymity is preserved.  That's why the Supreme Court's 6-3 decision striking down California's donor-disclosure law was correct and crucial.  In Americans For Prosperity v. Bonta, the court struck down California's law requiring all charities and other nonprofit organizations to disclose their donors.  California, in defending its law, was in effect trying to demolish the precedent set in NAACP v. Alabama, in which the court barred Alabama from requiring the NAACP to disclose all of its members.  Freedom of association is a fundamental right protected by the Constitution.  Supreme Court jurisprudence holds that if a government wants to regulate it, the government needs a compelling interest, and the regulation needs to be narrowly tailored.  California's law clearly didn't meet these standards.

Is It a Conspiracy Theory to Say All This Racial Discord Is Intentional?  What do CRT, the 1619 Project, BLM, and white supremacists have in common?  All promote the depraved idea that some Americans are sufficiently different from others not to have a common interest in a unified country, a melting pot of immigrants of all races and ethnicities connected with the binding force of nationalism.  The left denounces nationalism repeatedly even though it is the sole force that holds an entity like the United States together. [...] Vladimir Putin, the first suspect who comes to mind, grew up in an empire that stretched from Central Europe to the Pacific Ocean. [...] Putin now looks at the United States to see a multiracial and multi-ethnic nation that is very similar to the former Russian Empire in terms of everything except the binding force of nationalism — the idea that an American is an American regardless of what he looks like or where his ancestors came from.

Will EU Christophobia Drive Hungary Out?  Respect LBGT rights or get out of the EU, Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte instructed Hungary's Viktor Orban at last week's gathering of the European Union in Brussels.  According to Reuters, attendees described it as the "most intense personal clash among the bloc's leaders in years."  What caused the clash?  Hungary just passed a law that bans schools from using materials seen as pro-homosexuality.  According to the AP, the new law "prohibits sharing content on homosexuality or sex reassignment to people under 18 in school sex education programs, films or advertisements."  Rutte eagerly related details of his confrontation with Orban:  "It was really forceful, a deep feeling that this could not be.  It was about our values; this is what we stand for."  "I said, 'Stop this; you must withdraw the law, and if you don't like that and really say that the European values are not your values, then you must think about whether to remain in the European Union.'"

Has the Military Lost Middle America?  Traditionalist and conservative America once was the U.S. military's greatest defender.  Bipartisan conservatives in Congress ensured generous Pentagon budgets.  When generals, active or retired, became controversial, conservative America usually could be counted on to stick with them.  Flyover country supported marquee officers such as Gen. Michael Hayden, Gen. James Mattis, Gen. Barry McCaffrey, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, Gen. David Petraeus and a host of others when the media went after them for alleged unethical conduct, financial improprieties, spats with the Obama administration, or accusations of using undue force or hiding torture.  When Democrats railed in Congress about the "revolving door" of generals and admirals leaving the Pentagon to land lucrative board memberships with corporate defense contractors, Middle America, rightly or wrongly, mostly yawned.  Yet traditional America also assumed its military leaders were largely apolitical and stayed out of politics.

China vs. America.  There can be little doubt the United States is now in a contest with China over which will be the most important country in the world.  In important respects, we are replicating the German challenge to the United Kingdom prior to World War I and the renewed German challenge of the 1930s, or the Soviet challenge for 45 years after World War II.  As China grows stronger and bolder, and especially as the United States fumbles its way through periods of great distraction and internal political strife, the Chinese — like Hitler — become more brazen and provoking.

What does woke heart surgery look like?  As a practicing cardiovascular surgeon for 25 years and member of both organizations, I look with deep regret upon the embrace of woke ideology and obsession with skin color.  It will lead, I suspect, to diminished membership appeal and prestige, a distracted focus and mission, and less respect for surgical heritage, in time, in both organizations.  The elite surgical leaders, working within academia, have ignored the surgical majority in the ACS who do not support this political dogma or identity politics in general.  As a kind of secular religion, woke ideology dictates that a person (in this case, a surgeon or a patient) is considered not as an individual, but rather as a member of a group, a category, based on skin color or sex or both.  Woke ideologues reduce all persons in society, it seems, to the simple binary categories of white and non-white skin color, which are defined further as oppressor and victim groups, respectively.  A person as an individual becomes irrelevant.  The profession of surgery, in my opinion, needs to disregard this harmful ideology, preserve meritocracy, and maintain race and sex neutrality.

Should children be required to recite the Pledge of Allegiance?  The United States flag is a symbol for freedom, and freedom is essential to life.  It stands for individual rights, and individual rights are essential in order to pursue happiness.  When I pledge to the flag, in my mind I know that I am pledging to the original ideals put forth by the founding fathers:  life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  Therefore, it is logical to say that you're teaching children about the fidelity that the Pledge represents — the fidelity of the concept of individual rights.  By reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, Americans promise to be true to these ideals, not to take freedom for granted, and to remember the countless men, women, and children who have given their lives through the centuries so Americans can live peacefully today.  When children recite the Pledge, they are given the opportunity to think about their roles as citizens, the founding principles of their country, and may be incentivized to think more about the meaning and significance of the Pledge.

America Needs Critical Infrastructure Training.  The United States has 16 key critical infrastructure sectors, each one providing a vital service to the country.  These include the chemical sector, the communications sector, IT and transportation, to name just four.  As the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) warns, the "incapacitation or destruction" of these sectors "would have a debilitating effect on security, national economic security, national public health or safety, or any combination thereof."  Distressingly, the "incapacitation" or "destruction" of at least one of these key pillars looks increasingly likely.  Every 39 seconds, somewhere on the planet, a cyberattack occurs.  The United States is now the most targeted country in the world.  Last year alone, the United States was the victim of 65,000 ransomware attacks; that's more than one every eight minutes.

JoeBamanomics — An Honest Outlook of Inflation and What is Coming.  Despite the deflective talking points by the professional financial pundits this massive spike in inflation is entirely predictable due to Biden economic policy and Biden monetary policy.  Keep in mind the FED has already said in April they would "support inflation" but that's because while they will not say it openly they know there's no way to stop it.  The massive inflation is a direct result of the multinational agenda of the Biden administration; it's a feature not a flaw, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with COVID.  Also keep in mind the first group to admit what is to come are banks, specifically Bank of America, because the monetary policy is the cause.

This item is presented for what it's worth, with a big grain of salt:
County gathering celebrates local law enforcement.  Northeastern Nevada sheriffs were recognized Sunday [6/20/2021] for their special role in government, as a crowd of a few hundred people gathered in Elko City Park to celebrate Elko County becoming part of a "constitutional sheriff" organization. [...] Ramos introduced author and former Marine Corps officer Robert David Steele as the driving force behind Mack's "Arise USA" tour. [...] Steele cited major threats to America as traitors, Wall Street criminals and satanic pedophiles.  "The National Security Agency has every single email, cell call, text, game chat and banking transaction for every traitor, every elite pedophile and every Wall Street criminal and every corrupt government official at the local, state and federal levels," he said to applause from the crowd.  "And I remind you that no army of lawyers are going to be able to stand up to an Army Ranger battalion with fixed bayonets.  We're coming."  "I will tell you with absolute certainty that the thing that Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff fear most is not jail, but us releasing their 10 most treasonous phone calls to their own public," he continued.  "They will be torn limb from limb on their own streets."

General Insists Military's Not Woke, Just Wants to Study 'White Rage'.  After claiming to be "personally" offended over accusations the drag queen-loving U.S. military is woke, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Army Gen. Mark Milley said, "I want to understand white rage, and I'm white."  Oh, okay, because that's not woke at all. [...] Okay, just for starters, only an idiot would see skin color as a factor in the January 6 protest in and around the U.S. Capitol (which was mostly peaceful, per the corporate media's own definition) January 6 protest in and around the U.S. Capitol, but here's a question that should put a chill up everyone's spine:  Why is the U.S. military brainwashing our troops with the openly racist ideas behind Critical Race Theory that push the wild and wicked claim people with white skin are inherently evil and racist oppressors?  I'll tell you what this sounds like to me.  Like the U.S. military is studying up on its next enemy, and not to "understand" this enemy.  No, to dehumanize this enemy in a way that will justify making war against this enemy.  This is exactly what happened at Waco in 1993.

Ingraham: Congress should halt military funds after Gen. Milley's support for 'far-left Marxist ideology'.  On Wednesday [6/23/2021], Laura Ingraham, host of "The Ingraham Angle," blasted General Mark Milley for propagating a "far-left Marxist racist ideology" in the U.S. military over his support of Critical Race Theory.  Milley testified before the House Armed Services Committee and was questioned concerning diversity training and racism within the ranks of the military.  He stated that he found recent attacks on the military over those issues "offensive."  Milley voiced his support for Critical Race Theory and he blamed the Jan. 6 riot on "white rage."  "I do think it's important for those of us in uniform to be open-minded and be widely read," stated Milley seemingly insinuating that troops were closed-minded and uneducated.  "The fact is, Milley has made his choice," noted Ingraham."  And he's chosen to indulge the radical whims of Democrats.  He'll do everything they tell him as long as they keep the military-industrial complex flush with cash."

A Terrible Day for the Republic:  Biden and His Top General Strike at America's Foundations.  In testimony before the House Wednesday [6/23/2021], Army Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was asked about the military's new emphasis on politics and critical race theory.  Milley's testimony is telling in many ways.  He didn't deny the military is pushing CRT and its ideas down the ranks.  How could he, with so many whistleblowers calling his military out on it?  The nation's top general leads in this segment by suggesting that he's merely studying critical race theory and wokeness to understand them as a military leader should study ideas to understand their nature and whether they pose a threat or not.  That would be fine, even commendable, if it was true.  As Sun Tzu wrote, know your enemy.  But then Gen. Milley, America's top soldier, gets within inches of trashing the United States Constitution, which he swore an oath to defend with his life.

What will become of the useful idiots?  As the Marxist revolution oozes forward, I occasionally wonder what will happen to the useful idiots when the commies seize absolute power in this once great Republic.  I believe that most AT readers are familiar with the term, but for those who need a brief refresher, a useful idiot, as defined by Wikipedia, "is a derogatory term for a person perceived as propagandizing for a cause without fully comprehending the cause's goals, and who is cynically used by the cause's leaders." In my opinion, this definition can be applied to a majority of the young, brainwashed radicals who have no idea about the true history of Marxism...or the real history of their native land that they're working so hard to destroy.

The DeSantis doctrine.  The term 'Florida man' usually comes loaded with negative connotations, but not if you're talking about Ron DeSantis.  The first-term Republican governor's approval ratings have reached 64 percent; a recent poll had him at 55 percent, still high for an unabashed conservative in a swing state.  Enterprising apparel companies are already selling 'DeSantis 2024' gear — and a Trafalgar poll of likely contenders (excluding Trump) shows DeSantis leading the pack with 35 percent support among Republican voters.  The Florida governor also bested Trump in a straw poll conducted during June's Western Conservative Summit in Denver.

Cancel Amazon Prime.  Today is Prime Day. [...] The holiday was invented by a corporation in honor of itself, to enrich itself.  It has existed for six years and is observed by tens of millions of people worldwide. [...] Prime is Amazon's greatest and most terrifying invention: a product whose value proposition is to help you buy more products.  With 200 million subscribers worldwide, it is the second-most-popular subscription service on Earth, poised to overtake Netflix in the not-so-distant future.  This popularity is both extremely logical and a little perplexing.  When you subscribe to Prime, you're paying to pledge your fealty to a single company's ecosystem — something that consumers once wanted to avoid.  You're paying to have your every purchase cataloged — also something consumers aren't wild about, at least in theory — so that Amazon can use that information to sell you, and people like you, more goods.  You're paying to become part of a system that is purpose-built to keep you paying, forever, and to keep Amazon growing, forever, [...]

Petition to Remove Admiral Michael Gilday as Chief of Naval Operations.  Our military is under attack by "anti-racism" activists whose message is that white America is racist.  "Critical Race Theory" is the academic discipline that is used to justify the attack.  Critical Race Theory is a hateful Marxist fiction that maintains America is evil because the majority of its citizens are white, and that its Constitution is evil because it was written by white people.  The agents of this dogma, including those lecturing at the Naval War College, teach that white people — from the Founding Fathers to the 200 million white people in the country today — are oppressors, who are an internal enemy[.]  Critical Race Theory began by destroying the moral integrity of colleges and corporations.  Now its target is the U.S. Navy.  Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Michael Gilday has told the third of a million naval personnel that they should be reading and learning from Ibram X. Kendi, a mediocre, fact-challenged university professor who has become the go-to "anti-racism" expert for America's woke elites.

'Where Are The Admirals?  Where Are The Generals?  Where Are the Veterans?'.  On 17 August 1955, President Dwight D. Eisenhower prescribed a Code of Conduct for members of the Armed Forces of the United States.  The purpose was to inform each service member in a combat unit about their basic responsibilities when engaged in combat or if they were captured by enemy forces. [...] Given the inherent and undeniable virtues of this colorblind, merit-based system based upon shared values, the Armed Forces of the United States travel a pernicious and destructive path if they embrace Critical Race Theory, with its core belief that America and her citizenry are irredeemably racist, along with the tenets of "white supremacy," "whiteness," "white privilege," "white fragility," and "systemic" or "institutional racism."  Critical Race Theory does not build up, it tears down.  There is nothing aspirational or uplifting about it.  And as a springboard to establishing "diversity" as a goal unto itself, as its own concurrent priority, inculcating those values into troops will not equip the military to succeed at its first, and most important goal, which is to fight and win in armed conflict.

Candace Owens and Brandon Tatum Are Not Who They Pretend to Be.  [Scroll down]  I have said it in my past writings. the Black community is not a monolith; there are many shades and structures of the Black community, just as with any other community.  It is the political Left and Right that wants to reduce the depth and breadth of our contributions to the nation and the world to a monolithic structure.  Just as the Black community is not a monolith, neither is Black conservatism.  I enjoy listening to viewpoints among the various aspects of Black conservatism the same as I do hearing the viewpoints among legacy conservatism and the new young cons.  Why are the differences accepted in one camp, but impossible to conceptualize in another?  What I will focus on is what results from platforming the disingenuous, and we are seeing this disingenuousness in Owens' behavior of late.  What results is a loss of credibility, and a rejection of the concepts on which you are supposed to be an authority.  This is bad not just Blacks in general, but for conservatism specifically.

Woke, Inc:  Why I'm blowing the whistle on how corporate America is poisoning society.  I used to think corporate bureaucracy was bad because it's inefficient.  That's true, but it's not the biggest problem.  Rather, there's a new invisible force at work in the highest ranks of corporate America, one far more nefarious.  It's the defining scam of our time — one that robs you of not only your money, but your voice and your identity. [...] I'm fed up with corporate America's game of pretending to care about justice in order to make money.  It is quietly wreaking havoc on American democracy.  It demands that a small group of investors and CEOs determine what's good for society, rather than our democracy at large.  This new trend has created a major cultural shift in America.  It's not just ruining companies.  It's polarizing our politics.  It's dividing our country to a breaking point.  Worst of all, it's concentrating the power to determine American values in the hands of a small group of capitalists, rather than in the hands of the American citizenry at large, which is where the dialogue about social values belongs.  That's not America, but a distortion of it.

Leftists are a minority... so why do they keep winning?  The truth is, normal, happy, well-adjusted people don't really care about politics — or care only when they are forced to by rioting mobs of looters in their cities.  Normal people of any and all colors don't want to tell you their pronouns, chemically castrate their sons with puberty-blocking drugs, or defund the police.  They're neither oppressors nor oppressed.  They just want to live their lives in peace, attend their kids' soccer or baseball games, and enjoy summer afternoons grilling[.]  Therein lies the problem:  it turns out that, with a very few exceptions, the absolute worst people on the planet — the kind of people who were hall monitors in high school and enjoy creating and enforcing petty regulations on their fellows — go into politics.  These are the entitled few who believe that rules and regulations are for other people, never for themselves — the grifters, tax cheats, and adulterers who run for office instead of working for a living.

Critical Race Theory Will Destroy Our Military.  As a young Marine Corps first lieutenant assigned to an infantry battalion in the late 1980s, I had charge of the unit transport section of operators, mechanics, and supervisors tasked with taking care of our fleet of combat vehicles. [...] Everything just worked and worked well.  Why?  Because they were all Marines, wearing the same uniform, supporting the same combat organization, serving the same country.  They all had been through the same training.  They had to measure up to the same standards.  They had to make the same cutoff scores for promotion.  They humped the same combat loads, ate the same field rations, fired the same qualifications at the rifle range, suffered the same annual refresher training for proper use of gas masks.  They worked the same long hours in hot and sweaty, cold and damp, sunbaked or frigid or windblown field conditions, tolerated the same irritating micromanagement, and enjoyed the same positive leadership interventions from higher headquarters. [...] It was wonderful.  I can't help but wonder what it would have been like if each person in that section had been pitted against each other, assessing his fellow Marine's trustworthiness or reliability or capability based on the color of his skin.

The case for Congressman Trump.  In his article "Will Trump run in 2024? A fascinating clue from Don Jr.," Thomas Lifson sets forth a credible scenario in which Trump is keeping his options open, while a possible presidential successor, Florida governor Ron DeSantis, proves his bona fides.  If no messy skeletons jump out from DeSantis's closet, he is a dream presidential candidate: brilliant, patriotic, practical, and empathetic.  Should that come to pass, Trump would give another gift to America.

No Leaders Attended the G7 Summit.  [Scroll down]  And that brings us to the picture of the G7 leaders on the beach in Cornwall.  Nobody who watches the film of these people arriving, coming down the boardwalk carefully spaced, hygienically elbow-bumping in lieu of shaking hands, and finally taking up positions for their photo op — nobody would believe these people are world leaders.  Because they aren't.  They aren't running the western world.  They are run by the people who really are running the western world — people whose names we don't know.  The people on the beach in Cornwall are there simply in recognition of the working man's need to see an elected head of state.  They are actors.

Four Ways I Am Preparing For The Dollar's Collapse.  In the era of financial and societal insecurity, I have taken it upon myself to best prepare for the unknown.  Will inflation wipe out my savings?  Will the price of common goods become unaffordable?  Will the effects of Critical Race Theory implode on our shared cultural and societal underpinnings?  These are critical questions with serious repercussions if and when the answers come to fruition via the affirmative.  In the event there is a massive fallout, whether from inflationary pressures or a collapse of civic coexistence among the alleged classes of the oppressed and oppressors, it is better to be over-prepared than under-prepared.  I would prefer I never discharge my firearm, and despite the bland taste, I would much rather dine on soon-to-be-expired cans of beans out of parsimony than out of necessity.  However, if catastrophic changes sweep through the country and those items are vital for either short-term or long-term survival, then it is literally the difference between life or death.

Social Mobility is a Lot Less Mobile Than We Thought.  Inequality is the worst thing in the world.  Even my racist neighbor at the top of the hill with his BLM "Equality Hurts No one" yard sign knows that.  And we have gubmint programs to the tune of 36 percent of GDP per annum working like mad to un-hurt people from the horrors of inequality.  Only, writes Gregory Clark in The Son Also Rises:  Surnames and the History of Social Mobility, all that lovely lucre hasn't made much difference to social inequality.  The scions of the elite pretty much stay in the elite.  Almost everywhere in the world, from way back.

The Coma Before the Storm.  [Scroll down]  Grandpa Badfinger is a rickety joke, bumping elbows with his younger fellow-incompetents at the G7, wandering about mindlessly chasing moths until his ridiculous wife, with her ridiculous "Dr.", wrangles him back into the hapless pack.  You look at this sorry set of leaders of the formerly-free world and the vibe you get is "exhaustion."  There's no energy, no drive, no hope.  Boris Johnson, formerly a man, explained to a bored UK that that "nations coming out of the pandemic need to 'build back better' in a 'greener,' 'more gender neutral and perhaps a more feminine way.'"  Hack clichés are their solution, but these relics have nothing else.  They are weak and stupid and they represent a spent elite that cares about nothing except just a little more time holding fast to their uncertain sinecures.

Once You Realize The US Government Is An Organized Crime Syndicate, Everything Makes Sense.  CDMedia wrote weeks ago that our sources informed us the alleged 'ransomeware' attack on the Colonial Pipeline was not a foreign operation, but likely executed by domestic entities for monetary, or political gain.  Some have entertained the thought of internal strife between U.S. government agencies, essential criminal gangs, reaping the benefits of organized money laundering on a massive scale.  Now we learn the FBI reportedly seized the millions of Bitcoin paid by Colonial pipeline for the alleged ransom.  Was the hack was solved so quickly because there's a power struggle between the FBI and the CIA going on?  In that story, did the CIA hack the pipeline and the FBI decide to punish them?  In Russia this is common.  Different security agencies of the Russian secret services are in regular competition for illicit gains.  The FSB regularly takes over businesses to reap ill-gotten profit.  Corruption is what the Russian system is built upon.  This is what Obama and his minions have brought here.  Think about it, if parts of the U.S. government are in bed with the Chinese Communist Party, looking to rape the American people of trillions of dollars, agriculture, energy, and so on, then the entire Russia!  Russia!  Russia! hoax makes perfect sense.  Blame it all on the rival criminal gang!

Living With the Limits of Our New Clerisy's Knowledge.  [Scroll down]  Unfortunately, the new clergy seem too fallible to take on trust.  They flip-flop on expert advice and one scientist denounces the other on YouTube.  Once things seemed more cut and dried.  Once we were at the End of History.  Science could predict the future more or less and the public hoped with increasing accuracy.  Ever since the 17th century, the expectation was that the scientific revolution would supply the answers. [...] In the coming years, the new clerisy will come forward with even more global solutions, endorsing trillion-dollar multidecade proposals in the fields of climate engineering, genetic alteration, and artificial intelligence.  In each case the public will be asked to trust the science — to put all our eggs in the expert basket.

Why the government cannot answer the UFO question.  The anticipated release of a government report about UFOs (or UAPs) later this month has created a lot of public discussion about what might be included in that report, and perhaps more importantly, what might be excluded.  But in the end, the government does not know, nor can it, what the UAPs really are, or are not, because they are a paradox. [...] That paradox is this:  any nation (or organization) that possesses the technology to do what the UAPs are reported to do would have in its hands such power, such force, such a threat that no one could oppose it.  Yet we see no evidence of any nation wielding such power, an inaction that would be highly implausible were they to have it.  Another paradox is that the development and manufacture of such technology would require enormous scientific infrastructure.

Fighting Woke Capital.  If were trying to define this term and understand what it means, it's rooted in the fact that the biggest businesses, the most powerful institutions, the most powerful banks in this country have aligned themselves against us.  Now that is an obvious fact, you see it in a number of ways.  A couple of years ago Stacey Abrams said, about a Georgia abortion restriction, that this was a bad bill because it was bad for business.  That was the argument of our new corporate, neoliberal class.  And she was right.  This is something that those of us on the right have to accept.  When the big corporations come against you for passing abortion restrictions, when corporations are so desperate for cheap labor that they don't want people to parent children, Stacey Abrams is right to say that abortion restrictions are bad for business.

'Woke' Asset Managers Rip You Off — Using Your Money.  If most Americans noticed at all the election of at least two climate-focused dissidents to ExxonMobil's board, they certainly missed the significance.  But they may soon notice as ExxonMobil and other companies knuckle under to climate activists, leading to higher energy prices for American consumers.  Note the little victory dance by three massive asset managers — BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street — in the Wall Street Journal.  Their votes elected dilettante climate activists, who own approximately 0.02% of the oil giant's shares, because "Exxon's yearslong refusal to make board directors available for frank conversations irked investors."  Yeah, right.  Big Finance pulled the rug out from under Big Oil for one simple reason:  To feather its own ample nest, using your money.

Biden's 'Made in America' Tax Plan Destroys Any Incentive for Anything to Be 'Made in America'.  The United States has spent the last decade-plus destroying most of the reasons to create Intellectual Property (IP) in the United States.  This is more than a mite problematic — given we are in the nascent stages of what will increasingly be an Information Economy.  Where more and more of what we do will be digital and thus require more and more IP.  The US has three branches of government.  All three have been actively attacking IP and its creators.

The Great Conservative Migration.  In fact, my wife and I were part of the migration.  We lived for 36 years in American Siberia — otherwise known as Minnesota.  Politics in Minnesota has always been dominated by the Democrats.  However, in recent years it has taken a decidedly radical turn.  When Keith Ellison — former supporter of the Nation of Islam and attorney to cop killers — was elected attorney general, we knew it was time to leave.  This anti-Semite, race baiter, and woman abuser was now the state's top law enforcement official.  What could possibly go wrong?  One year after we left, the George Floyd riots happened.  That's what could go wrong.  We moved to the small town of Star, Idaho.  I call Star the nicest refugee camp in the world.  It's a community of new housing subdivisions, wonderful schools (that don't teach Critical Race Theory), numerous churches, and friendly people.  It has also doubled in population in the last 10 years — almost entirely from west-coast transplants.

The U.S. Military's Love of America:  We need to find a way to get our country back.  Most of our uniformed service members — and most Americans — believe in the fundamental goodness of our great country.  And they want to preserve it.  But fighting for what is right means first understanding the truth about what is happening.  We have the world's most powerful military and it is an all-voluntary force.  We all took an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.  We believe in the sanctity of that oath.  All of our civilian and military leaders take the same oath.  Today we are confronted with a very serious domestic enemy which, if left unchecked, will threaten our way of life and our ability to remain a beacon of freedom and a leader of the free world.  The threat has been allowed to exist in our educational systems over many years and has gained additional support and momentum with recent left-leaning media which shapes public opinion.

Joe Biden is the last person in America who will criticize China.
Biden must rally the world against an increasingly malevolent China.  "We must pass the history of the Holocaust on to our grandchildren and their grandchildren in order to keep real the promise of 'never again,'" President Joe Biden said in a statement earlier this year marking International Holocaust Remembrance Day.  "That is how we prevent future genocides."  Today, there is a dark and evil force testing the world's resolve to keep its "never again" promise.  In western China, Xi Jinping's tyranny is showing what a genuinely racist regime does.  Through violence and persecution, he is attempting to eradicate the remnants of a racial minority's culture and religion.  The resemblance to the Nazi genocide extends even to Xi's liberal use of concentration camps, where rape, torture, and indoctrination have been part of daily life for hundreds of thousands of prisoners.  Oh, and then forced labor for the ones who are able to escape.

The Middle East Dispute Is About Religion, Not Land.  If you've seen videos of recent attacks on Jews in New York City, Los Angeles, London and elsewhere, you may have missed a very revealing aspect of those attacks.  They were almost always — as they have been for decades — accompanied by curses such as, "[...] the Jews."  Now, given that the perpetrators are almost always Muslims — whether immigrants or children of immigrants from an Arab or other Muslim country — two questions present themselves:  Why attack American or French or British Jews?  And why curse "the Jews"?  In other words, given that the recent wars have been between Hamas and Israel, why aren't these attacks outside of Israel on Israelis and Israeli institutions?  And why level curses at "the Jews"?  The answer is this:  The Muslims who seek Israel's destruction do so because Israel is Jewish, not because Israel occupies the West Bank or Gaza.

Ridicule is an Important Weapon, Keep Throwing Sand in the Machine.  Ridicule is an important weapon.  The left is overreacting to sunlight because they know the machinations behind their ideological endeavors are based on fraud.  In this brilliant piece of agitprop, the White House situation room looks at the landscape.

The Two Uncle Joes.  [Scroll down]  American military battle readiness, ingenuity, and cunning have been the core of our national defense spanning our entire history, from Steven Decatur and William Tecumseh Sherman to Chester Nimitz and George S. Patton, Jr.  Yet today our own politically driven Uncle Joe, with support from his newly appointed military commissars such as DoD Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III, appears far less concerned with training and operational readiness than with mindlessly obsessing over the chimeras of right-wing extremism in the ranks and climate change.  I can assure Secretary Austin that yes, climate change will be a factor if an American city goes up in a mushroom cloud because our commanders were too busy trying to figure out a policy for how trans officers should be addressed or directing servicemen and women to the cause of saving the earth for Gaia.  A million degrees Fahrenheit is most definitely a significant change in climate, Mister Secretary.  You got that right!

Scott Atlas:  The Last Word.  The coronavirus pandemic has been a great tragedy, there can be no doubt about that.  But it has also exposed profound issues in America that now threaten the very principles of freedom and order that we Americans often take for granted.  First, I have been shocked at the enormous power of the government, to unilaterally decree, to simply close businesses and schools by edict, restrict personal movement, mandate behavior, and eliminate our most basic freedoms, without any end and little accountability.  Second, I remain surprised at the acceptance by the American people of draconian rules, restrictions, and unprecedented mandates, even those that are arbitrary, destructive, and wholly unscientific.  This crisis has also exposed what we all have known existed, but we have tolerated for years:  the overt bias of the media, the lack of diverse viewpoints on campuses, the absence of neutrality in big tech controlling social media, and now more visibly than ever, the intrusion of politics into science.  Ultimately, the freedom to seek and state the truth is at risk here in the United States.

Newsmax Reporter:  "Colonial Pipeline "Hacker" Story Doesn't Add Up".  When this "Russsian Hacker" pipeline story first broke, I did a piece on how MANY people online didn't buy it.  They felt like there was a deeper plot afoot.  And now, more folks are saying this — even reporters over at Newsmax.  The reason being is because since this so-called "hack" happened, Biden has now caved to Russia in a big way — as a matter of fact, it's so big, that if Trump ever pulled off a move like this, he'd likely be impeached.  But suddenly, the party of "Russia boogiemen" no longer cares about "Russia boogiemen."

Donald Trump Should Not be the 2024 Republican Candidate.  [Scroll down]  While the manifestly unconstitutional Civil Service Act creates a lot of headaches, there's one thing that can be done immediately.  All "civil servants" who have been employed for longer than, let's say, five years, must be reassigned, preferably to an office at least a thousand miles from their present station.  This "stirring" will lead to a mass exodus of federal employees, most of whom should not be replaced.  This is crucially important in the DC area.  Those people cultivate news and business contacts so they can be enriched when they leave Uncle Sugar's employ.  And, as before, all security clearances must be suspended or revoked upon separation from government service.  Finally, President DeSantis needs to identify which "Republicans" cry loudest.  Their districts, along with those of the most powerful Democrats, should immediately receive "Most Disfavored Nation" status when it comes to government contracts.  This is fully legal and will cut the opposition off at the knees.

Top Retired Officers Are Right:  Biden's Leftism And 'Woke' Military Threaten U.S. Security.  The letter was not couched in military jargon or bureaucratese; it was plain-spoken and blunt in its concern about America's course.  It starts with a call for protecting our free and fair elections, but then turns toward the ominous political and cultural trends of recent years.  No need for a translation:  ["]Aside from the election, the current administration has launched a full-blown assault on our constitutional rights in a dictatorial manner, bypassing Congress, with more than 50 executive orders quickly signed, many reversing the previous administration's effective policies and regulations.  Moreover, population control actions such as excessive lockdowns, school and business closures, and, most alarming, censorship of written and verbal expression are all direct assaults on our fundamental rights.  We must support and hold accountable politicians who will act to counter socialism, Marxism, and Progressivism, support our constitutional republic, and insist on fiscally responsible governing while focusing on all Americans, especially the middle class, not special interest or extremist groups which are used to divide us into warring factions.["]

Two Actions [the] US Must Take in [the] Wake of [the] Colonial Pipeline Crisis.  After a group of cybercriminals known as DarkSide succeeded in causing massive disruption in the southeast with its ransomware attack on May 7 — which wasn't resolved until Wednesday evening — it became clear that U.S. infrastructure remains at risk.  The stakes are extremely high.  In our highly interconnected world, cyberattacks against critical infrastructure can leave us highly vulnerable.  As we saw with this DarkSide incident, a ransomware attack can cause immense (but fortunately short-term) economic disruption across a large segment of the country.  But state-based cyberattacks from countries like China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea could lead to loss of property and even life.

This Time Israel Should Finish Off Hamas.  It is time to put paid once and for all to the evil terror organizations Hamas and Islamic Jihad that have been attacking the heartland of Israel virtually ever since Israel freely gave Gaza to the Palestinians, first to the Palestinian Authority and then to Hamas after they murdered the PA officials in a mini-civil war and took over the territory as a fanatical dictatorship.  Every few years Hamas (and their now-billionaire leadership) seizes on something, some issue on the Temple Mount, a neighborhood where, in their view, too many Jews are moving in, and start a missile barrage, aiming to hit as many innocent civilians as possible and ignite the "Arab street."  The current barrage, thanks largely to Iran, is the biggest ever, with modern weapons that can reach the entire Jewish state with significant payloads.

Biden needs to tell Democrats that Hamas is the bad guy.  "Israel has a right to defend itself," Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Wednesday [5/13/2021], as America's staunchest Middle East ally faced criticism for its retaliations against rocket attacks by Hamas.  It's an anodyne statement from the Biden administration with two problems.  First, it fails to state clearly that Israel is defending itself against a terrorist instigator.  Second, too many officials in Joe Biden's own party don't actually believe that Hamas is the bad guy here.  Before its recent attack on Israelis, Blinken and Biden seem to have laid out a somewhat reasonable strategy:  Support the more moderate Palestinian Authority and marginalize Hamas.  The Palestinian Authority is corrupt, to be sure.  But it at least does not view its political purpose through the lens of maximal Jewish blood.

Monopoly: An overview of the Great Reset — Follow the Money.  If you've been wondering how the world economy has been hijacked and humanity has been kidnapped by a completely bogus narrative, look no further than this video by Dutch creator, Covid Lie.  What she uncovers is that the stock of the world's largest corporations are owned by the same institutional investors.  They all own each other.  This means that "competing" brands, like Coke and Pepsi aren't really competitors, at all, since their stock is owned by exactly the same investment companies, investment funds, insurance companies, banks and in some cases, governments.  This is the case, across all industries.

Clean House in 2025.  When President DeSantis is sworn in at 12:00 pm on January 20, 2025, he should give a short speech and by 12:10 be firing people.  Lots of people.  Okay, it might not be the current Florida governor — we do know it's not going to be Gov. Nikki!  Haley (R - Establishment) or Kristi! Noem (R-NCAA) — but whoever beats Kamala Harris like a drum needs to come into the Oval Office ready to clear-cut the bureaucracy.  Just level it.  Every keen observer understands that Donald Trump's first and foremost failure as president was personnel.  He did not get it right until the end, and then it was far too late.

Are Americans Becoming Sovietized?  Here are 10 symptoms of Sovietism.  Ask yourself whether we are headed down this same road to perdition.
  [#1]   There was no escape from ideological indoctrination — anywhere.  A job in the bureaucracy or a military assignment hinged not so much on merit, expertise or past achievement.  What mattered was loud enthusiasm for the Soviet system.  Wokeness is becoming our new Soviet-like state religion.  Careerists assert that America was always and still is a systemically racist country, without ever producing proof or a sustained argument.
  [#2]   The Soviets fused their press with the government.  Pravda, or "Truth," was the official megaphone of state-sanctioned lies. Journalists simply regurgitated the talking points of their Communist Party partners.  In 2017, a Harvard study found that over 90% of the major TV news networks' coverage of the Trump administration's first 100 days was negative.
  [#3]   The Soviet surveillance state enlisted apparatchiks and lackeys to ferret out ideological dissidents.  Recently, we learned that the Department of Defense is reviewing its rosters to spot extremist sentiments.  The U.S. Postal Service recently admitted it uses tracking programs to monitor the social media postings of Americans.

The Editor says...
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Federal Reserve turns the dollar into toilet paper.  Toilet paper was much on the mind of Americans Wednesday when Boston Federal Reserve chief Eric Rosengren told MarketWatch that today's higher inflation is as temporary as last year's shortage of paper products.  The toilet paper they were thinking about, though, was the green stuff in their wallets.  Rent asking prices rose an all-time record 17% between the first quarter of 2020 and the first quarter 2021. Home prices rose 12%, used car prices rose 26% and freight costs rose 17%.  That's the biggest year-on-year jump on record for rent and used cars, and a near-record for homes and freight.  Recent data are even worse; used car prices are up nearly 20% during the first four months of 2021 alone, and gasoline is up 55% during the same period.

It Got Serious In A Hurry.  This exchange of imaginary money supposedly creates wealth effects that have replaced boring old savings, capital investment, and entrepreneurial activity as drivers of the economy.  Asset prices elevate, the government's GDP statistics hum while its inflation statistics slumber, and the rest of the world accepts FDIs for real goods and services.  There's even snake oil peddled by PhDs that blesses all this:  Modern Monetary Theory.  Wealth for all — without boring old work and deferred gratification — is just around the corner.  From the dwindling ranks of the reality-bound come those inevitable objections.  The key word in fiat debt instruments is debt, which carries an obligation to pay it back sometime in the future.  They can't honestly pay back the debt they have now, why are they adding to it?  The key word is honestly.  The plan is to issue so many FDIs that they depreciate the value of existing ones, making them easier to pay back.  None dare call it a swindle.

They Were Promised a Socialist Paradise, and Ended Up in 'Hell'.  On a bright August morning in 1960, after two days of sailing from Japan, hundreds of passengers rushed on deck as someone shouted, "I see the fatherland!"  The ship pulled into Chongjin, a port city in North Korea, where a crowd of people waved paper flowers and sang welcome songs.  But Lee Tae-kyung felt something dreadfully amiss in the "paradise" he had been promised.  "The people gathered were expressionless," Mr. Lee recalled.  "I was only a child of 8, but I knew we were in the wrong place."  Mr. Lee's and his family were among 93,000 people who migrated from Japan to North Korea from 1959 to 1984 under a repatriation program sponsored by both governments and their Red Cross societies.  When they arrived, they saw destitute villages and people living in poverty, but were forced to stay.  Some ended up in prison camps.

Talking the Talk on 'Climate Change'.  What are we to make of an article by William Hague, a former U.K. Foreign Secretary from 2010 to 2014, that predicts Britain's armed forces may one day be sent into action abroad to safeguard the natural environment from such predators as oil companies and loggers? [...] That prediction is startling from several standpoints.  To begin with, it could be read as confirming a frequent left-wing allegation — hitherto hotly denied by the British and other Western governments — that in the two Gulf Wars the West intervened not to prevent Iraqi aggression or to stabilize the Middle East but to get its hands on Arab oil.  I don't think that's true, as a matter of fact, but if it is, it's a big admission and a big news story.  And it was merely the first of several startling predictions.

Our Country Was Founded by Geniuses, but It's Being Run by Idiots.  The eminently quotable Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana said sometime back:  "Our country was founded by geniuses, but it's being run by idiots."  I heartily agree, and the problem is not self-correcting.  The principles behind the formation of America's government were and are exquisite, but the American government, like all forms of government, is corrupt as [it can be].  This isn't an extraordinary statement.  Exquisite things often break, and even the noblest of institutions become distorted over time until the original purposes for their creation are eclipsed (and often contradicted) by the personal motives of the men running those institutions into the ground.  This phenomenon is apparent anywhere there is power.

Biden Deserves Zero Credit For Booming Economy, COVID Gains.  Take the GDP number.  Far from being in a Great Depression-scale crisis, the economy had been rapidly recovering from the government-mandated (and scientifically unjustified) lockdowns — with GDP leaping 33.4% in the third quarter of last year and another 4.3% in the fourth quarter.  When Biden took office, Q1 of this year was nearly a third over, and he didn't sign his "American Rescue Plan" into law until mid-March, just two weeks before the quarter ended.  So, even though checks started rolling out to people, that rescue plan was too late to have a significant impact on overall growth.  As a matter of fact, the GDPNow forecast for Q1 — which is a running estimate of the economy based on available data as they are released — was much higher before Biden signed his rescue plan than where it ended up.

Power back to the people.  According to conventionofstates.com, which tracks the progress of resolutions, 15 states have approved calling for a convention of the states to reign in what they believe is out-of-control government.  The support of 34 states is needed.  Thirty-eight states are required to ratify any proposed amendments.  The website says seven states have approved a resolution in one of their legislative chambers and 22 state legislatures will consider doing so this year.  The Founders saw state conventions as the ultimate safeguard against government overreach and a necessary workaround should Congress exceed its constitutional authority, which supporters of state conventions believe it has. [...] I have been on the side of the cautious on this issue, but as I see President Biden issuing record numbers of executive orders, bypassing the authority of Congress, and Congress on a spending binge that is driving the debt to record and unsustainable levels, perhaps threatening our very survival, I have come to the conclusion that nothing but a carefully organized and controlled constitutional convention can return power to where the Founders intended it to reside — with the people.  The reason government has become so dysfunctional and unwieldy is that it has for too long exceeded the boundaries originally set for it.

Using Progressive Means to Restore Liberty.  Globalism is the antithesis of nationalism — or should I say, patriotism.  CEOs of major corporations act like oligarchs who can do as they please as long as they have government on their side.  So, they donate hundreds of millions of dollars either directly or indirectly to the party of government and tilt the electoral process toward their friends in high places.  What's more, many of those big corporations have gone woke in an effort to please their Democrat allies.  In the aftermath of the recent intervention by much of corporate America into the controversy about Georgia's election law, many conservatives are awakening to the magnitude of this problem.  Scores of millions of Americans feel helpless in the face of this overwhelming threat posed to our liberty.

If We Lived in a Perfect World... 
  [#1]   CNN would have been pulled from airports and other public places long ago.
  [#2]   There would be no political censorship by Big Tech.
  [#3]   The media would all convey truth instead of agitprop. [...]
  [#7]   Hillary Clinton would be in jail.
  [#8]   Black Americans would realize that the Democrat Party has been abusing and exploiting them continuously since the days of slavery.
  [#9]   The Democrats would admit that "Trump-Russia collusion" was a hoax.
  [#10]   Barack and Michelle Obama would admit that they are racists.
  [#11]   The Lincoln Project would admit that they are not Republicans.
  [#12]   George Soros would be in jail. [...]
  [#14]   Taxpayer funding of PBS and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting would have ended long ago.
  [#15]   Native American reservations would never have been established.
  [#16]   Hollywood would be producing patriotic movies.
  [#17]   The Ten Commandments would never have been pulled from public schools.
  [#18]   Clapper, Comey, and Brennan would be in jail.
  [#19]   Donald Trump would still be in the Oval Office (with no election fraud).
  [#20]   Abortion would still be illegal except for extreme cases. [...]
  [#24]   Barack Obama would produce his original birth certificate.
  [#25]   Lebron James would never again receive another endorsement contract.
  [#26]   Nancy Pelosi would have been voted out of office years ago.
  [#27]   The wall on the southern US border would have been completed decades ago. [...]
  [#30]   All federal forms would be English-only.
  [#31]   The US dollar would be backed by gold, just as it was for most of the country's existence.
  [#32]   All federal funding would be pulled from sanctuary cities and states.
  [#33]   All federal laws would apply equally to members of Congress and the Executive Branch without exception. [...]
  [#37]   All of Obama's records would be unsealed.
  [#38]   Any public school pushing Project 1619, critical race theory, and other cultural Marxist curricula would lose federal and state funding.
  [#39]   Planned Parenthood would never again receive another taxpayer dollar. [...]

Is America Led Today By Anti-Americans?  [Scroll down]  What other nation has provided the same measures of personal and political freedoms and material blessings for 40 million Black people as has the United States?  If people of color are treated "as less than human" in America, as Harris says, why are so many people of color seeking desperately to get across our Southern border to build their future here?  What is the real truth about race in America that goes unmentioned in the mainstream media's endless hunt for encounters between Black men and white cops?  The main perpetrators of violent crimes against Black Americans — are other Black Americans.  Black men, ages 16 to 40, are 3% of the U.S. population but commit roughly a third of America's violent crimes.  Defund police, restrict police, remove police and you will get more of what the police prevent — crimes, especially violent crimes, in your community.

Archbishop Vigano rips Vatican conference with Fauci, says Holy See 'servant of the New World Order'.  Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò said an upcoming global health conference at the Vatican — with guests such as Dr. Anthony Fauci, Deepak Chopra and Chelsea Clinton — constitutes "the umpteenth scandalous confirmation" of Pope Francis leading the Catholic Church astray.  A new op-ed by the Catholic Church's former Apostolic Nuncio to the U.S. blasts the pope and his allies within the Church for betraying the faithful by cozying up to "representatives of Big Tech ... a whole slew of abortionists, Malthusians, and globalists known to the general public."  "The Holy See has deliberately renounced the supernatural mission of the Church, making itself the servant of the New World Order and Masonic globalism in an antichristic counter-magisterium," the archbishop wrote Tuesday for LifeSite.  "The submission of the Cathedra veritatis to the interests of the Masonic elite is manifesting itself in all its evidence, in the deafening silence of the Sacred Pastors and in the bewilderment of the People of God, who have been abandoned to themselves."

How Much Ruin Do We Have Left?  As Americans know from their own illustrious history, any nation's well-being hinges on only a few factors.  Its prosperity, freedom, and overall stability depend on its constitutional and political stability.  A secure currency and financial order are also essential, as is a strong military.  Perhaps most important is a first-rate inductive educational system.  Of course, nothing is possible without general social calm (often dependent on a reverence for the past) and secure borders.  The ability to produce or easily acquire food, fuel, and key natural resources ensures a nation's independence and autonomy.  Unfortunately, in the last few months, all of those centuries-old reasons to be confident in American strength and resiliency have been put into doubt.

How Empires End.  [Scroll down]  Chances are, future leaders will be just as uninterested in learning from history as past leaders.  They will create empires, then destroy them.  Even the most informative histories of empire decline, such as The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, by Edward Gibbon, will not be of interest to the leaders of empires.  They will believe that they are above history and that they, uniquely, will succeed.  If there is any value in learning from the above, it is the understanding that leaders will not be dissuaded from their aspirations.  They will continue to charge ahead, both literally and figuratively, regardless of objections and revolts from the citizenry.

Comedy Is a Dictatorship's First Victim.  Humor has always been one of the first targets of a dictatorship.  It is no surprise that in America, comedians can no longer function because of rampant political correctness.  Thus, according to Mel Brooks, "we have become stupidly politically correct, which is the death of comedy.  Comedy has to walk a thin line, take risks."

Not Dead Yet.  Our nation began with an initial declaration of independence and now every law and executive order from this administration is leading us toward dependence — debtor dependence, energy dependence, and government dependence for the begged permission to pursue life, liberty, and happiness.  The list of grievances and offenses are staggering and too numerous to mention and if one does, they are censored or banned by the government's confederate oligarchs of Big Tech.  It's a depressing situation and the truth of the matter is a sobering one.  The diagnostic is that in the predawn darkness of the morning of November 4, 2020, the American Republic flatlined.  The nefarious and somewhat dubiously defined Deep State does not want it revived.  We've got some work to do.

Every Physical Silver Ounce Has Been Sold Up To 1000x.  The silver price is today half of the January 1980 level.  That was the peak at $50 which silver reached again 31 years later in 2011.  But alas, the bullion banks, aided by the BIS (Bank for International Settlement) and central banks have again managed to push it down again and today silver is only $26.10.  The current silver price has nothing to do with supply and demand.  In a real market the Price of Silver would be substantially higher.  In a fake market, the manipulators have no problem to suppress the price by selling virtually unlimited fake paper silver. [...] If a salesman has a demand for 1,000 items of a product of which he possesses the only one available, he will first rub his hands and then perform a victory dance.  He knows he will achieve an astronomical price.  And that is exactly what would happen in a free silver market.  But since the paper silver issuers know that they are dealing with totally clueless buyers who don't understand that there is no silver, they will continue to stuff the gullible buyers with more fake silver.  That is, until the buyers wake up and ask for delivery to find out that the silver vaults are empty.

Federalism In The Form Of Strong Governors May Be Our Only Hope.  I am not a Constitutional Scholar, but it seems to me that absent the specific granting of authority to the federal government, that the states have legal control.  Here the author is most exercised by the 17th Amendment (direct election of senators), but the trend has been clear since the War of The Rebellion; the accretion of power by the federal government and the creation of a vast regulatory state by exercise of this power.

The Federal Reserve Should Not Finance Insane New Spending.  Since the onset of the pandemic, Congress has been spending more money than ever.  The pandemic hit when it was already projected that in fiscal 2020 the federal budget deficit would once again top $1 trillion.  On October 16, however, USA Facts reported that the 2020 deficit was $3.1 trillion.  That's more than twice as much as the previous record of $1.4T set in 2009 in the wake of the financial crisis.  On April 12, the Fiscal Times reported that the deficit for just the first six months of fiscal 2021 was $1.7T:  "In March alone, the deficit came to nearly $660 billion, driven in large part by $339 billion in pandemic-relief payments to individuals."  On top of that, the feds just enacted a $1.9T stimulus bill, and on March 31, Pres. Biden proposed his "infrastructure bill" that will run to $2.3T in new spending, and more new spending is promised.  A trillion here, a trillion there, and pretty soon Americans will be thinking that no one in D.C. cares about the federal deficit anymore, and that the "deficit hawk" is no longer an endangered species but is extinct.

Russia Stuff And Our Corrupt Rulers.  This is all very depressing to see — the utter mendaciousness of our ruling class:  elected representatives of the American people, appointees, the military establishment, the intelligence community, and last but far from least, the media.  The corruption is so sweeping that you're left almost breathless.  And they're utterly feckless, to boot.  Let's start with Gilbert Doctorow [and his article,] Bombast From Washington:  Joe Biden's Russia Sanctions.  Doctorow first explains that nobody who understands the current shape of the world is taking those sanctions seriously.  Putin himself is obviously unfazed.  The DC armchair imperialists have crossed a red line, and Putin has responded — as Doctorow explains in a Postscript to his original article: [...]

Chauvin:  The Case Against the Mob.  One of the main arguments being advanced by Eric Nelson, sole attorney for Derek Chauvin in his trial for the murder of George Floyd, is that the hostile crowd itself prevented the officers from attempting to perform CPR in the last minutes of Floyd's life.  Even the prosecution's "use of force" experts admitted repeatedly on cross-examination that a hostile crowd would justify Chauvin keeping Floyd restrained until an ambulance arrived.  An officer's duty to provide care is overridden by his duty to keep himself, the suspect and the bystanders safe.  As was evident from the videos (and admitted to by the bystander witnesses), they were shouting obscenities at the police, threatening them with bodily harm and, in a few instances, had to be held back from rushing the officers.  And of course, because of the presence of the angry crowd, the EMTs themselves did not stick around to provide care, but did a "load and scoot," heaving Floyd into the back of the ambulance and driving three blocks to get away from the mob on the street.  They didn't even want to work inside an ambulance near this feisty group.  As it becomes increasingly obvious that the belligerent onlookers themselves may have gotten George Floyd killed by creating a dangerous situation for the officers, media commentators leap in to do backup work for the prosecutors by sneering at the idea that the officers might have felt threatened by a few rowdy teenagers.

The Real Reason for Daunte Wright's Death.  Daunte Wright, or at least the life he led, killed Daunte Wright.  He wasn't pulled over because he had air fresheners hanging from his rearview mirror.  He was pulled over because he had expired tags on his license plate.  Then it was noticed that he had air fresheners hanging from his rear view.  Then it was noticed he had an outstanding warrant.  Then it was noticed he resisted arrest.  Then it was noticed he got back in his car and drove away from the police.  Which he had done before, as it turned out; Wright had fled from officers in June.  The circumstances from which that police encounter arose make for scintillating reading.  He was reported to the police for waving a gun around, and when the cops showed up it turned out Wright didn't have a permit for the gun.  He ran away.  And he was cited and ordered to appear in court.  He didn't, which occasioned the warrant for his arrest.  That's not all that appears on Wright's record.  There was the February arrest for aggravated robbery.  There was a disorderly conduct charge arising from a 2019 incident.  There was the guilty plea in late 2019 to possession and sale of marijuana.  And there was an arrest warrant for armed robbery; [...] In other words, this is someone who chose to be a penny-ante John Dillinger.  He ended up with the full ante.

Why Does Society Revere Drugged Up Black Criminals?  Breonna Taylor.  Dijon Kizzee.  Jacob Blake.  Daniel Prude.  Rayshard Brooks.  George Floyd.  Each name is or has been a rallying cry for both Black Lives Matter and every believer of the manufactured narrative that blacks are oppressed by a white supremacist system and then killed by racist police.  Had any of the aforementioned names been born of European descent and followed the same life trajectory, they would have immediately been discarded into oblivion after their unremarkable demise.  They would be lucky to even have garnered a footnote in the annals of police interactions.  It's not hard to see why.  Drugs, violence, and chaos are not the recipe for emulation.  However, our culture has chosen to make the deceased, black "victims" our focal point of idolatry, grievance, and remembrance.  What other culture has ever sunk to such depths?

Understanding How 'Critical Events' Lead to People Getting Killed by Police.  Most people would consider the death of George Floyd or Daunte Wright to be a critical incident.  They would make that rash assumption because they are "critical" to our political environment.  Many pundits and businesses are piling on because the same faulty assumption is applied to voter integrity laws passed in Georgia and under consideration in other states.  No one should be rash enough to discount the importance of these events.  But the term "critical incident" refers to a completely different concept — one that can inform how we address and prevent such public events.  The process of "critical incident analysis" is a method of examining a series of events to identify where a single critical intervention or altered critical choice would have brought the whole "chain of events" to a different conclusion.  Daunte Wright's death cries out for such an analysis.

How not to get killed when stopped by a cop.  I'd like to take a rational look at the confrontations among cops, motorists, and pedestrians.  When we see incidents of cops shooting blacks (which are the only shootings the media cover), one thing becomes clear:  resisting arrest often ends up with a loss of life.  Something else is obvious:  when a cop is the one losing his life, it's practically overlooked by the media.  When a police officer, whether during a traffic stop or a street stop, is making an arrest, the person being arrested has no right to resist.  If that person believes it's an unlawful arrest, he can make that argument at the station house or in a courtroom.  However, let's be clear about this:  the cop has the legal authority to make the arrest, simply based on the penal law.  Moreover, once the officer has uttered the words "you're under arrest," the only right that person has, under the law, is to submit to said arrest.

Is A Cultural Revolution Brewing In America?  There is a whiff of unease in the air as beneath the cheery veneer of free money for almost everyone, inequality and polarization are rapidly consuming what's left of common ground in America.  Though there are many systemic differences between China and the U.S., humans in every nation are all still running Wetware 1.0 and so it is instructive to consider what can be learned from China's Cultural Revolution 1966-1976.  China's Cultural Revolution was remarkably different from the Party's military-political victory of 1949.  Where the political revolution was managed by the centralized hierarchy of the Communist Party (CCP), the Cultural Revolution quickly morphed from a movement launched by Mao into a decentralized mass movement against all elites, including Party and state elites which had been sacrosanct and untouchable.  The Cultural Revolution is not an approved topic in China today, and that alerts us to its importance.  Although ostensibly launched by Mao (as part of his 1966 purge of Party rivals), the Cultural Revolution very quickly devolved into a decentralized, semi-chaotic movement of Red Guards, students and other groups who shared ideas and programs but who acted quite independent of the Party's central leadership.

It's Time to Call the Bluff of These Woke Corporations, Here's How to Make Them Pay.  Yesterday, news broke that somewhere around 100 companies joined a private conference call to discuss how to combat red states that dare have reasonable regulations around voting.  This is, of course, all stemming from the lies surrounding Georgia's recent election reform law. [...] Well, let's give them their wish.  Mitch McConnell should call up Joe Biden and say he's got a deal on raising the corporate tax rate as long as it's only on the Fortune 500.  Leave the small and moderate-sized businesses that are currently being squeezed by these monopolistic behemoths out of it.  Let the woke, virtue-signaling among us see what it's really like to live under unfettered, Democrat rule.

From American Dream to American Nightmare.  Our society has devolved into an oligarchy since The Epic of America was published in 1931, where a powerful few rule over a willfully ignorant many through propaganda, mistruth, fear, and an iron fist. [...] The real questions are why did the American dream turn into an American nightmare and is there a pathway back to the kind of country our forefathers created?  There are numerous reasons why the country has fallen far from its original conception as a proud defiant Republic to its current state as a dying empire of depravity, decay, debt, and decadence.  The conspiratorial creation of the Federal Reserve and implementation of a Federal income tax in 1913 marked a true destructive turning point for America.  These two choices, implemented by greedy bankers and sleazy politicians, put the country on a road to perdition.  They centralized the power of money printing and confiscation of our wages at the point of a gun.

Guns of April and Global War.  In the thirty years since the fall of the Soviet Union, the United States has squandered much of its time as the world's sole superpower.  Rather than winding down NATO's mission in a post-Soviet world, the West redirected and revitalized the alliance after 9/11 into a global military engagement against "extremism," with the U.S. fortifying its role as the world's policeman.  And rather than using the end of the Cold War to balance budgets and fix America's unstable financial footing, the U.S. aggressively burdened itself with new and unsustainable levels of debt.  In effect, the U.S. rejected the possibility of multipolar peace, assumed the role of global hegemon, and never saved up for a rainy day.

The Left Doesn't Want You to Believe in DeSantis Claus.  Is the race for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination already over?  "60 Minutes" seems to think so.  They did a dishonest hatchet job on one governor, leaving all the others jealous that the media doesn't think enough of them to try and destroy them before they become Joe Biden's nemesis.  That governor is Ron DeSantis of Florida.  "60 Minutes" didn't attack Greg Abbott of Texas.  They didn't attack Kristi Noem of South Dakota.  They didn't attack Doug Ducey of Arizona, or even Brian Kemp of Georgia. "60 Minutes" admitted which Republican fuels its nightmares by attacking Florida Man Ron DeSantis.  Governor Ron DeSantis is just 42 years old.  He may only be 5-feet-9-inches, but Florida's 46th governor is currently America's wise giant.  He's the most popular and the most successful governor in the land.  DeSantis is the governor who is calling the shots for all the others. [...] The state's media have been trying to hit him just about every day.  They're not targeting him because he's bad.  They're targeting him because he's right and he terrifies them and the Democrats.

The Hard Road.  The current regime in D.C. has some issues, to put it mildly, and its handlers are busy working to shore up its power.  Creating a faux internal enemy with the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act, H.R. 1 election rigging, gun control, lawless immigration, Puerto Rico and D.C. statehood initiatives and a rash of executive orders are all part of a plan to give the Left unassailable political dominance and implement permanent one-party control.  The regime is moving fast, aware that traditional America is disorganized.  They realize that this sleeping giant will eventually awake, and they are racing to put in place the cage to contain it before it does.  History doesn't always repeat itself, but you can make it rhyme if you try.  In 2010, the Tea Party grassroots movement halted the Obama Administration's overt agenda to radically transform America.  It wasn't the GOP establishment, the RNC leadership, or the politicians who made the Tea Party the destroyer of utopian fantasies — it was the people.  More specifically, it was the little people — the grassroots.  The working class, the independent-minded conservatives, and the rowdy not-in-my-house Americans took back the House of Representatives and staved off the Democrats' planned transformation of America in a 2010 version of the spectacle we are seeing today.  We need to take the lessons learned from that grassroots Tea Party effort and make them rhyme in the present.

The End of an Era, or the Return to an Earlier One?  [Scroll down]  Now, one of the key factors on everyone's mind with last year's lockdowns, particularly for the kids, is their total isolation with respect to school and after-school activities.  These constraints are bubbles within bubbles that utterly inhibit all exposure to the natural world as well as direct personal interactions.  Part of that is enforced by an ever-increasing sense of danger in the urban environment where crime and degradation are expanding.  Flashing back to mid-20th century and before, kids could be 'feral' without any serious consequences as Mother Nature was steadily upgrading their sense of what being truly alive is all about.  If true, I believe there will be a steady shift to more conservative thinking as the autonomy and liberty of those new locations quietly enhances what was once a common denominator across this vast country.

The Kind of Leaders Needed to Save America.  First and foremost, the movement needs leaders who follow the True North principles of conservatism — principles based on the genius of America's founding and on the many lessons we've learned since; principles that have made this nation exceptional for nearly 250 years.  They include the idea that the federal government was created to protect fundamental freedoms and rights such as life, property ownership, freedom of speech and religion, the right to bear arms, and the right to be treated equally under the law.  They encompass the concept that the government works for the people, not the other way around, and that taxes should raise the minimum revenue necessary to fund only the constitutionally appropriate functions of government.  They also include the notion that the greatest driver of prosperity for all citizens is the free enterprise system.

America Must Go Beyond Wishful Thinking About China.  Ever since President Richard Nixon's infamous 1972 trip to China, the West has deceived itself into believing that being nice to Red China is a win-win proposition.  The policy's underlying reasoning was that opening China up would expose the communist nation to freedom, which would induce its dictators to change and do what is best for the Chinese people.  Alas, how wrong the West has been.  The wishful thinking revolved around several myths about China.  The first myth is that by introducing a free market system into the country, the leadership would gradually adopt a capitalist-like scheme that would be communist in name only.  The West has long asserted that the Chinese have abandoned Marxist ideology and embraced world markets.  However, the Chinese have never stopped insisting that they are genuinely communist.  The more the West claims that China is not communist, the more the Chinese openly say they are.  The recent hardline developments of the Xi dictatorship have dashed the hopes of Western optimists.  Hong Kong and the persecution of the Catholic Church now offer bitter testimony that nothing has changed.

The Fed vs. the Real World.  Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell has made some interesting statements in recent weeks about the Fed's view of inflation.  In summary, Chairman Powell has stated that overall inflation remains below the Fed's 2% long-term objective, and that while reopening of the economy could produce price increases later in the year, inflationary pressures from rising prices are likely to be neither large nor persistent.  Given the transient nature of these effects, and a long history of deflationary pressures in the U.S. and around the world, Chairman Powell believes that inflation isn't something to worry about.  And in any event, Chairman Powell reassures us that the Fed "has the tools to deal with that [inflation]" should it rise above long-term target levels.  These statements stand in increasingly sharp contrast to the real world in which ordinary Americans live.

How 'It's Covered by Insurance' Wrecks Health Care.  A 58-year-old patient came to see me one Monday morning not long ago.  He was like so many in his age group — he had spent the weekend getting in a week's worth of exercise.  His left knee was sore, and he wanted an MRI.  He was not a professional athlete with a huge stake in his physical well-being, and he had not fallen on it or twisted it; it was simply sore from his three-mile jog on Sunday morning.  "It's covered by insurance," he told me.  Never mind that there was no medical indication to qualify this particular hurt for an MRI.  Never mind, too, that he has a $5,000.00 deductible on that policy.  Never mind, also, that his knee would very likely heal quickly with the simple intervention of rest, ice, and maybe some physical therapy.

Woke Wars:  Say the Magic Word!  Do you think that last week was Peak Woke?  What with Delta's genius CEO Ed Bastian falling into line to criticize Georgia's new election laws, What with MLB pulling the all-star game from Democratic Atlanta, What with Amazon joining in the fun.  And then there is the ticklish question of The Dam Busters movie.  I probably saw the movie, way back.  But did you know that the pilots of 617 Squadron had a black labrador, and its name was... unmentionable?  Tell me:  is the Woke Capital thing due to Big Business getting bullied around by lefty activist groups threatening to make trouble?  Is it CEOs getting a quiet word from Our Nance and Chuck E. Schumer?  Is it the wokey ladies in HR?  Or is it just Big Business trying to stay out of trouble?  The world would really like to know.

Where There Is Chaos.  We have been diligently working on film production efforts in the midst of an industry meltdown.  But that's actually good for a company such as 12 Round Productions.  The days of super blockbusters are not economically feasible in a theater industry decimated by Covid restrictions.  It is a time of scrambling in the film industry to produce and distribute films with Covid restrictions.  Now is the time to get our message out to the masses.  This environment forces productions to seek out low and ultra-low budget films for the streaming services.  The sort of films that can be made for $500,000 to $5,000,000.  The box office for the last week I saw was $28 million across all films for the entire week.  Two of those that were moneymakers were legacy animated films.  The message to be concluded from that, is that people were taking their children to see films now that the theaters are opening to a greater degree.

Who Killed George Floyd?  In the death of George Floyd, the State of Minnesota has charged former Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin with second-degree murder and former officers Thomas Lane, J. Alexander Kueng, and Tou Thao with aiding and abetting that murder.  But, as will be shown in detail below, the physical, scientific, and electronically recorded evidence in the case overwhelmingly and conclusively proves that these defendants are not guilty of the charges and, in fact, played no material role in bringing about Floyd's death.  Instead, the evidence proves that, when he first encountered the police, George Floyd was well on his way to dying from a self-administered drug overdose.  Moreover, far from publicly, brazenly, and against their own self-interest slowly and sadistically killing Floyd in broad daylight before civilian witnesses with video cameras, the evidence proves that the defendants exhibited concern for Floyd's condition and twice called for emergency medical services to render aid to him.  Strange behavior, indeed, for supposedly brutal law officers allegedly intent on causing him harm.

There's No Way to Disprove That George Floyd Died of a Drug Overdose.  George Floyd, a violent criminal who had robbed a pregnant woman at gunpoint, and a drug addict, is dead.  That much is clear.  What is also clear is that George Floyd's death was exploited to incite the massive BLM race riots that killed and wounded many people, destroyed lives, wrecked communities, tore apart a nation, and helped the Democrats take power.  The show trial now comes down to a very simple question, a few really, but one of the basic ones is what actually killed George Floyd.

How Stupid are American Voters? Very!  Perhaps stupid is not the right word.  Gullible is not right either.  It's really hard to pinpoint the main reason behind the disastrous state of our country but the cold hard fact is that many Americans have fallen for two of the biggest hoaxes perpetrated by the left, the media and corrupt politicians.  It's too simple to blame the voters of any particular party when the main culprits are the individuals who just can't be bothered with politics.  They don't want to get involved so they don't vote yet they complain when their taxes go up or their civil rights are taken away.  American voters have rarely come out in huge numbers on Election Day.  But last year for the first time in many decades, millions of people whose eyes had been opened to the hoaxes of covid-19 and global warming went to the polls but the damage had already been done.  The left had been planning a coup many years ago because they had control of the mainstream media to spew the politics of fear and envy and of course the stay at home voters allowed the Manchurian candidates to seize the legislatures, city councils and school boards.

Pence "Laying Groundwork" For a 2024 Presidential Bid?  Two media reports [Here and Here] about former VP Mike Pence considering a potential run for President in 2024 present the most laughable political hypothetical in recent memory.  Particularly, and specifically, because even President Trump would likely not include Pence in a short list of people for endorsement.

The Editor says...
Really.  Mike Pence is the least inspirational politician since Spiro Agnew.  Have a nice long retirement, Mr.&Nbsp;Pence.

As We Look For Others.  South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem's recent self-disqualification as a potential leader bids us recall that the public will follow only those who actually lead them by personally defying the oligarchy.  Focusing on themselves is the worst thing that they can do.  Noem had seemed to be such a leader. [...] When the test came, she failed it.  A bill passed overwhelmingly by her legislature would have prohibited biological males from competing on girls' and women's teams.  She declared eagerness to sign it.  Then, the usual corporate executives threatened South Dakota business with boycotts, and the Chamber of Commerce transmitted the pressure.  Her claim to have followed the advice of unnamed "legal experts, legal scholars," was standard responsibility-shifting.

The Trump-Hate Coalition Is Crumbling.  It is remarkable to see how quickly the unified opinion against former President Trump and for the alleged necessity of removing him from the White House has cracked apart since that goal was achieved.  Following the inauguration, there were endless purposeful assurances that the former president would be pursued to the ends of the earth for his iniquity.  Even hard-bitten Fox News commentators like Brit Hume felt compelled to toe the line and denounce claims that the election had been rigged as discredited bunkum.  Questioning the integrity of the election result was considered tantamount to an attempt to continue the quest for insurrection, and questioning whether Trump had attempted to generate an insurrection was itself a racist offense.  The president-elect assured us that the January 6 assault on the Capitol was a white supremacist attack bungled by white supremacist Capitol police.  Racism, like treason with Russia four years before, was everywhere.

The Real Five Laws of American Politics.  To summarize:
  •   The next time a Democrat accuses a Republican of a scandal, start an investigation — of the Democrat.
  •   When Republicans say they'll work together if we just give them a chance — start identifying primary challengers.
  •   Never give up God-given liberties in the name of science — which is never really settled.
  •   When the government says, "we're here to help," ask them to help by leaving.
  •   Finally, the next time a politician "invests" your money, recognize that it's state-sponsored robbery — you're not getting anything back.

The Seventh Crisis and the Millennials.  Over the course of recent decades our country has endured an assault on its institutions, its traditions, and its good and decent people.  This relentless assault has driven the country into a grave crisis, causing it to pass through a great gate of history.  This crisis will be momentous, consequential, and we will be profoundly changed by it.  Our nation has experienced similar existential crises before in the American Revolution, the Civil War and the Great Depression/World War II.  Each of these crucibles brought about wide-ranging transformations.  As events have accelerated in the past several years, there appears to be little doubt the nation has entered another such crisis.

Women should not deliberately be sent into combat.  I know I will upset many readers with this column, but I speak from experience.  Women should not be combat soldiers on purpose and should not have combat commands, either.  This has suddenly become a pressing matter because Biden just nominated women to those positions.  I used the phrase "on purpose" because we can't always predict where fighting will occur.  Women in the military must, therefore, be trained and equipped to fight as effectively as possible.  However, we must not throw them into harm's way as a matter of course.

The Nature of Chinese Contempt for Us.  Last week in Anchorage, Alaska, Chinese diplomats dressed down Biden Administration Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan.  Both seem stunned by the Chinese broadsides.  Apparently, as elite Americans readily confess to inherent white supremacy and racism — highlighting the complaints of BLM and Antifa — the Chinese are happy to agree that such admittedly toxic Americans should not dare to criticize China's racist policies.  Not since newly elected President John Kennedy was humiliated at the Cold War Vienna summit in June 1961 by USSR strongman Nikita Khrushchev have American diplomats been so roughly manhandled by a Communist government.  China's defiant provocations are not just verbal.  Nor are they aimed only at our high officials.

Whenever You Disagree with Liberals, You're a Conspiracy Theorist.  The fact is that, unlike Jimmy Carter, Reagan and his advisers, including the formidable Jeane Kirkpatrick, knew who our friends were — and who were our enemies — and he backed this knowledge up with a willingness to use force.  That is the only basis for a foreign policy that will ever work.  Now, with Joe Biden, we have another Carter-style president who doesn't know friend from enemy and who wouldn't act if he had to.  That's just the kind of policy that brings on a confrontation, and one is coming because our enemies, sensing weakness, will press Biden as far as they can.

On China, Biden Is an Empty Suit.  The Biden administration continues to show itself to be an empty suit on foreign policy.  In the wake of the crisis, er, challenges on the southern border, Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez called Biden "the migrant president."  After President Biden confirmed in an interview that yes, Russian President Vladimir Putin is a "killer," Putin wished Biden good health and challenged Biden to a "basically live ... open, direct discussion."  Add China to the list of countries making us a laughingstock.  The opening remarks of last week's meeting between the Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan with China's foreign policy chief Yang Jiechi and State Councilor Wang Yi in Alaska clearly reveal that the Biden administration lacks a credible, substantive China policy.  There were several key takeaways from that meeting. [...]

Taming the Chinese Rare-Earth Tiger.  Synonyms for REE include rare-earth metals (REM), rare-earth oxides (REO), and lanthanides.  Unless writing technical papers, distinguishing among the various synonyms isn't worth the effort.  In general, REE are 17 elements that are critical in our high-tech world.  REE are not rare but are typically not found in significant concentrations anywhere in the world.  For example, large ore deposits with concentrations above 6% are virtually unknown outside South Africa's closed Steenkampskraal mine.  Refining REEs presents its own problems, since the refining process often produces significant amounts of toxic and radioactive waste, like thorium and uranium.  The takeaways are (1) feasible mining concentrations of REEs are scarce and (2) refining REEs imposes environmental risks.

Don't investigate this.  The Washington Post reports that "momentum is stalling amid congressional efforts to swiftly investigate the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol."  Good.  The Democrats want to use the riot for political purposes.  They hope, with assistance from the always-obliging media, to present it as the tip of an insurrectionary iceberg spearheaded by hardcore Trump supporters.  To this end, Nancy Pelosi favors a 9/11 style commission.  She would like this small riot, in which only a handful of people died, to live in infamy the way the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, in which thousands of American perished, does.  But comparing Jan. 6 and 9/11 is absurd on many levels.  For purposes of determining the need for a a commission, a key difference is this:  It was clear after 9/11 that the U.S. needed to overhaul its approach to combatting the persistent threat of international terrorism.  We even created a new cabinet level department for this purpose.

Hooray! The Government is Handing out Free Money.  If you and your spouse had income of $150,000 or less last year, you are about to receive another windfall from the Federal government.  It will be $5,600, counting the free money for your two kids, your wife and you.  It doesn't matter that you didn't suffer any income loss this past year.  The money is there for you to spend as you please. [...] In addition to the free money, for those that were hurt by being laid off from their job, last May the Federal Government added up to $600 per week on top of the state unemployment compensation.  That meant about two thirds of the unemployed Americans were bringing in more money not working than if they were working. [...] You may wonder where the government is getting all this money?  It comes from two places:  either they borrow it directly from the public with no intention of ever repaying it, or they simply print the money. [...] For more logical and rational citizens something doesn't seem quite right.

America can only count on freedom.  Watching the childish glee of turn around orders being signed for the sole purpose of reversing successful economic policies is not lost on a now economically educated populace.  They see through the foolish names of these vengeful immature policies.  Unity be damned in the name of toxic revenge.  No mother would let her 5-year-old get away with this slow-motion tantrum we are seeing on the evening news.  The information explosion that has driven the world economy to new heights has also filled the air with debris that has clouded our understanding of what brought us to this level of prosperity. [...] Government is damaging our economy as it doles out trillions in the name of help.  It is not helping anyone except those having their votes bought with government redistribution of the taxes we pay out of our earnings.  We must be reminded that calling this abuse by other names does not change its deadening economic effect.  We are not helped by spending tax dollars and labeling them economic help when in truth they are doing economic harm.  We saw this for eight years of slow growth using this same shell game.  We then saw it reversed for four years when we stopped doing it.  These numbers cannot be denied, but they are by our new political masters and their media peanut gallery.

Prepping for a Two Week Power Outage.  If you're new to preparedness, you may be reading some of the excellent and informative websites out there and feeling quite quite overwhelmed.  While many sites recommend a one year supply of food, manual tools, and a bug out lodge in the forest, it's vital to realize that is a long-term goal, not a starting point.  A great starting point for someone who is just getting started on a preparedness journey is prepping specifically for a two-week power outage.  If you can comfortably survive for two weeks without electricity, you will be in a far better position than most of the people in North America.

Our National Destruction Is a Failure of Boundaries.  Why do the feds usurp authority from the states, and why do the states demand of the feds, and why do people trespass on someone's right to speak?  Why does the Executive Branch make law when the Congress is constitutionally assigned that responsibility?  Why are so many boundaries being invaded, and why is trespassing no longer a crime?  The answer is obvious.  We no longer respect boundaries.  We have become that tribal human animal before religion awoke us to the necessity of morality.  The whole concept of existentialism rides on the concept of organized and lawful conduct.  Some say "social contract."  Pick your terminology; say it how you like.  The ends are the same.  This society is fracturing at an alarming rate.  Nothing can turn the tide until boundaries are once again recognized and respected.  There is no moral code without them.

Time to End the Clock-Changing Madness.  The dreaded time has come for Americans to lose one hour of sleep as we "spring forward" to daylight saving time (DST) and move forward our clocks.  This adds another nuisance, as it is already difficult for Americans to sleep enough with the constant stress of COVID-19, economic woes, and societal unrest throughout the country.  One easy way to improve our sleep is to end this ridiculous ritual, which creates needless headaches and causes the unnecessary aggravation of changing our clocks twice a year.  It may have been a good idea when it was implemented in 1918; however, over one century later, it has lost its usefulness.  In November, it will be time to "fall back" an hour to standard time.  All this clock-changing leads to increased accidents, a higher incidence of heart attacks, a loss of productivity, and pointless confusion for the American people.

Is daylight savings time a health hazard?  Daylight savings time is upon us.  Sunday, March 14 is when we are to turn the clock ahead in order to 'save the daylight.'  No need to go into the genesis of this.  It suffices to say that what may have been useful way back when has dubious value today.  To most people, this fiddling around with the clocks is an inconvenience and an annoyance and leads to a degree of confusion for a day or so.  But did you know that a credible case can be made that it is also a health hazard?  So says Matthew Walker, professor of neuroscience and psychology at UC Berkeley and director of its Center of Human Sleep Science.

Stop Standard Time Madness:  We Should Be Saving Daylight All Year Long.  It's almost our favorite day of the year:  the beginning of Daylight Savings Time, when we can fast-forward our clocks, stop the winter darkness that descends by mid-afternoon, and crawl out of our stuffy homes after dinner into the evening light.  Amid Biden's "dark winter" of COVID hell, the act of "springing forward" out of Standard Time is especially welcomed this year.  That's why a glorious piece of legislation popping up in the Senate is a bright spot this week — not only because it's bipartisan, but also because it would literally grant daylight to weary Americans.  The Sunshine Protection Act would make Daylight Savings Time permanent across the country, putting to bed the absurd practice we continue year after year of switching our clocks around — or not, and accidentally sleeping through church.

The Current Balance Sheet of American Democracy.  [Scroll down]  Now, 85 percent of Americans do not believe their media on political subjects, over 80 percent of Americans disapprove of the performance of the Congress, and approximately 50 percent of Americans believe that the 2020 presidential election was rigged.  Many of the more vocal spokespeople for the current narrow majority in government purport to believe that President Trump's and his supporters' allegations of the questionable integrity of last presidential election constitute part of an attempt to overthrow the government unlawfully; that this attempt exploded in the invasion and vandalization of the Capitol on January 6, and that it continues.  The fact that there are some worrisome irregularities in the voting and counting of votes in a number of the swing states is simply denied.  The fact that the Supreme Court in declining to hear a case from the attorney general of Texas and supported by 16 other states that the swing states in question failed to discharge their constitutional duty to assure a fair presidential election, abdicated the coequal status of the judiciary with the legislative and executive branches of government, is ignored.  National political media uniformly refer to questions of the integrity of the last presidential election as discredited and debunked.  At least 95 percent of the national political media and 100 percent of the social media platforms are opposed to the Republicans, who control most of the states and have half of the Senators and are only a few votes short of half of the Members of the House of Representatives.

Kristi Noem for President?  Not So Fast.  Governor of South Dakota Kristi Noem made headlines in 2020 for keeping her state open during the COVID-19 outbreak and opposing Faucian dictates about masks, stay-at-home orders, and church closures.  To this, conservatives applauded — and rightly so.  But does holding the line during a pandemic in a state with less than 900 thousand people — about the size of Charlotte, North Carolina — now warrant the frenetic swell of support for Noem among conservatives to be the next vice president or even president?  Absolutely not — especially at time when the fight for constitutional conservative values is more important than ever.

I Haven't Used Amazon For Almost 3 Months And I Don't Miss It One Bit.  My husband and I have been Amazon users for about 15 years.  In college, I used it to buy and sell books, rolling the cost of last semester's books I didn't plan to keep into the next semester's set.  We became Prime members in July 2017 and delighted in two- and even one-day shipping of everything from diapers to canned goods to dry erase markers to work boots, eliminating the annoyance of running to the store over one or two items. [...] It seemed fun, easy, and exciting.  And then it wasn't fun, easy, and exciting any more, because Amazon became evil — and I learned how evil they had really been all along.  Using it to indulge my own greed and materialism was one problem.  Amazon's use of its market power is another.  Both are a big deal.

Leftists Start a Pillow Fight with Mike Lindell.  Is there an American who doesn't know Lindell?  A college dropout and serial entrepreneur, he became addicted to crack cocaine.  He lost his home and was divorced.  He credits his sobriety to his Christian faith.  He's passionate about it, as anyone should be after escaping the talons of the devil.  There but for the grace of God goes any of us.  He invented his revolutionary pillow in 2004.  My pillow is a MyPillow.  It costs a lot, but [it does] exactly what it claims.  The typical box-store pillow is shot after a year at most.  MyPillow soldiers on.  Lindell's son is running the company now, though Dad's familiar face still sells the products on TV.  His new ambition is politics. [...] With his highly visible support of the Orange Man, the benevolent bedding-peddler with the cross around his neck quickly earned a place on the Public Enemies List of the mainstream media and the radical left.

The U.S. Economy Is Rigged.  The economy's "rigging" has developed gradually over time and often from the best of intentions.  When politicians, corporate executives, pundits, journalists, academics and activists alike propose ways to make society more just or efficient or globally competitive, they invariably call for some kind of government-corporate cooperation.  Such calls always seem to offer an answer for the public good, but in practice these arrangements inevitably drift into a self-serving collusion among those charged to cooperate.  Economic and financial history over the past few decades offers ample evidence of this building trend.

Is Mulberry Street racist?  You decide.  People of my generation learned to read with Dr. Seuss.  Sure, there were some child-like hijinks in the doctor's prescriptions but to many toddlers the rhyme and rhythm were music to the ears, tonic to the souls and tutors to the unschooled.  Mostly, they were exactly what Dr. Seuss intended them to be — entertaining, mischievous children's literature.  Dr. Seuss succeeded for nearly a century.  In that time, millions of children learned to read and Dr. Seuss was awarded numerous prizes.  President Barack Obama lauded him in 2016:  "March 2 is also the birthday of one of America's revered wordsmiths.  Theodor Seuss Geisel — or Dr. Seuss — used his incredible talent to instill in his most impressionable readers universal values we all hold dear."  Dr. Seuss is the Left's latest victim.  They cancelled him.  eBay has banned many of his books including "And to think that I saw it on Mulberry Street."  (While continuing to sell Mein Kampf).  The company that survives him, Dr. Seuss Enterprises, grovels that, "These books portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong."

What We Know And Don't Know About The Events Of January 6th.  It takes three days after any event to find out what happened, and 30 days to find out what really happened.  The dust storm of information and misinformation takes a while to settle in the perpetually-online United States.  The truth lodges in fewer places now.  Emigres from the 1970's Soviet Union advised us that the only real information in Pravda lay between the lines.  So it is with the bulk of U.S. media, which doesn't even try to hide its role as the propaganda arm of the Democratic Party anymore.  After 60 days, what do we, and don't we, know about the events of January 6th?  What we don't know concerns me.  When information that ought to be public isn't, there's a reason.  It's seldom good.

Mike Pence Discovers the Need for Election Integrity, Jumps into MAGA Ship Before it leaves DeceptiCon Dock.  In an article written by Mike Pence and published today [3/3/2021], the former Vice-President has suddenly found a need to focus on election integrity.  After the timeframe has passed for his actions to bear any significant sunlight upon the 2020 election, Pence now expresses some concerns.

Amazon's Banned Book:  The Full List.  Hate is a one-way street at Amazon, and the class of people protected from it are the self-Chosen.  Hatred toward goyim is not grounds for a ban, obviously.  None of the volumes on the list below are hateful.  They may be right; they may be wrong.  But your right to read them should not be obstructed by the world's largest online book distributor.  These revisionist books are attempts at offering scientific, technical and historical skepticism toward the Holy Writ that is supposed to be the secular history of World War II; that Writ however, is far more sacred than Jesus Christ.  His resurrection can be denied; Bezos is fine with that.  The homicidal gas chambers of Auschwitz cannot be denied.

Coke Goes Woke and Broke.  "Get woke, go broke", is a conservative meme about the cost of political correctness that has it the wrong way around.  Brands don't go broke because they get woke, they go woke because they're going broke, and don't know how to stop the slow but steady collapse of their business.  The big brands that go woke infuriate conservatives because, like Coke, Gillette, or Nike, they have a storied name that seems entwined with America and the success of capitalism.  But it's those old, familiar brands that go woke because their products and business models are dated.  Virtue signaling is their way of adapting to a changing market without really innovating.  Behind every big woke brand is a company slowly going broke and with no clue what to do about it.  The wokeness vocabulary joins the thesaurus of corporate buzzwords used by executives trying to hide from their investors that they don't know what they're doing.  Making headlines for their wokeness changes the conversation from their business model to their politics.

The Federal Reserve Is Taking Us into Uncharted and Deadly Waters.  At the Federal Reserve semi-annual testimony before Congress this week, Chair Jerome Powell should have been asked whether the Fed has become the national Reddit.  The Reddit stock frenzy created a pool of motivated buyers, irrespective of the value of the underlying company.  For more complicated reasons, the federal government is the biggest Redditer of all, Reddit on crack cocaine.  Instead of billions, the government plays in the trillions.  Instead of a handful of small cap stocks, it has hijacked the entire stock market.  But the mechanism is the same.  Flood the market with funds, and for good measure force interest rates to zero, eliminating alternative investments.  The recent congressional Reddit hearings are parody in comparison to the government's role in driving market prices, in particular the Fed.

Is the U.S. Arming an Adversary, China, Intent on Overpowering Us?  China's greatest financial weakness remains its continued dependence on Western capital markets, crucial for a growing economy that, if official statistics are to be believed, is trying to rebound from the COVID-19 pandemic's toll.  To grow, China depends on massive inflows of capital that surge through the capital markets based in the U.S. The Trump administration made several moves during its term to delist Chinese companies that are not forthcoming about who really owns them and what businesses they are really engaged in.  In addition, since 2013, Chinese state-owned enterprises (SEOs) have enjoyed exemptions from Sarbanes-Oxley and other regulatory requirements that also force greater transparency from these companies.  They were the only ones granted these exemptions while still being listed on New York stock markets.  What if those exemptions were removed?

A short primer on the importance of our Second Amendment rights.  There is no greater killer in the world than the government. [...] In 1915 alone, the Turks slaughtered 1.5 million Armenians.  In the 1920s and 1930s, the Soviets murdered around 7 million Ukrainian farmers who resisted socialism, as well as killing another 7 to 20 million people in its various purges.  In the 1960s and 1970s, with its Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, China is estimated to have killed 23 to 50 million people.  Over 12 years, the Nazis killed 6 million Jews, 250,000 gypsies, 220,000 homosexuals, and up to 10 million Slavic people.  Those deaths were just a small part of a world war that is estimated to have led to the deaths of somewhere between 70 million and 85 million people.  In Cambodia, between 1975 and 1979, Pol Pot killed 1.2 to 2.2 million people out of a population of 8 million.  In America, that would have been equivalent to our government killing 66 to 85 million people.

After Action Review:  Texas Winter Storm 2021.  You've now seen our grid under stress.  Cold snaps in 2011, 2018 and the worst cold on record in 2021, along with the boil water order of 2018, provide real world examples of what the local grid will do when it's stressed.  You are now on notice of the grid's limitations.  What if the next emergency isn't in the cold, but in the 105 degree heat of a Texas summer?  And what if the power is off for a week or more?  What if the failure is caused by a cyber attack which not only shuts off the power but causes physical damage to the grid?

Trump Versus Big Tech.  Remember IBM?  Sure, you do.  Are you aware that they lost $95 billion in valuation in the last decade?  Scale does not matter when the ground changes under you.  Actually, scale becomes its own burden, keeping you from adapting to the agile, flexible new entrants who eat your lunch.  IBM missed the PC or failed at it; it also missed the phone, the tablet, the cloud, and it is sure to miss the edge, a new technology being deployed right now.  Just look at that $95 billion haircut.  IBM is not done.  This will continue unless it finds a way to get out of supporting and selling the obsolete current tech stack.  Let's not pick on IBM.  Add Hewlett Packard, Dell, and scores of other formerly high-flyers that are in life-sustain mode rather than hair fluttering growth.  There is no technology behind Twitter or Facebook.  They were simply there first, built the audience, went public, and continued building the audience.

The ERCOT grid is a very complex beast.  [Thread reader]  ERCOT is a 501c3 nonprofit that is charged with managing the market, but above all, reliability (keeping the lights on).  In my experience some of the smartest people I've ever met work there.  Wish I could name some of them because they're absolutely brilliant.  Transmission and Distribution is regulated.  They get a guaranteed rate of return ~10% for every dollar of capital they spend to keep the system reliable.  So they always want to build new projects.  Distribution is where most outages are because 1) there's so much of it and 2) they're smaller lines and substations.  So trees, squirrels, and snakes can cause an outage.  Transmission is 69kV and up.  Generators in Texas and any market since FERC order 888 are independent power producers.  Every plant is its own company.  So a single gas plant is looking at its own profit and loss statement and has its own financiers.  This means that upgrades are paid by the specific owner.

Our Descent Into Collective Madness.  It might have been understandable that trillions of dollars had to be borrowed to keep a suffocating economy breathing.  But it makes little sense to keep borrowing $2 trillion a year to prime an economy now set to roar back with herd-like immunity on the horizon.  Trillions of dollars in stimulus are already priming the economy.  Cabin-feverish Americans are poised to get out of their homes to travel, eat out and socialize as never before.  Meanwhile, the United States will have to start paying down nearly $30 trillion in debt.  But we seem more fixated on raising rather than reducing that astronomical obligation.

What Role Are Big Government Federal Regulations Playing In Texas Freezing In The Dark?  Defenders of green energy and fossil fuels are pointing fingers at each other for the failures that led to dangerous blackouts in Texas — but could both sides be missing the bigger picture?  How big a role did regulations sent from the desk of some faraway bureaucrat play in this catastrophic failure?  Much has already been written about the failure of wind turbines to deliver an adequate load — and whether they should have been winterized.  About failures of natural gas delivery, and even sensors in the nuclear power stations.  Not much has been said about the role federal pollution standards have played on Texas failing to get ahead of the problem by ramping up supply.  Yes, Federal pollution standards.

Rush Limbaugh:  A Tribute to a Master of Words.  Rush Limbaugh, a longtime friend of The Heritage Foundation, was the great popularizer of conservative ideas.  He revolutionized talk radio in the 1980s, when President Ronald Reagan deregulated AM radio, with his unique blend of shrewd analysis and often biting humor.  No progressive idea was safe when Rush took it on.  For more than 30 years, he was No. 1 in the ratings — with 15 to 20 million listeners per week.  No one could talk or think faster than he — for three hours every afternoon five days a week.  He spent hours reading and studying for his program — no one was better prepared than he.  He loved to mock the hypocrisies of the left, like the moralizing of Sen. Ted Kennedy, the "Hero of Chappaquiddick," who savaged Supreme Court Justice nominee Robert Bork on the Senate floor, where he couldn't be sued for libel.  Rush was a deeply rooted conservative whose favorite magazine growing up was National Review. [...] Rush appealed to conservatives of all kinds.  When The Heritage Foundation published Bill Bennett's monograph "The Index of Leading Cultural Indicators," Rush made it a bestseller with one broadcast — 73,000 people contacted Heritage for a copy.

The post-Limbaugh era will be awesome.  President Reagan created Rush Limbaugh.  To be sure, Limbaugh did have talent on loan from God, but he did not have a national audience.  By repealing the Fairness Doctrine, which silenced conservatives, Reagan made Limbaugh's success possible.  And Limbaugh availed himself of that opportunity.  His show created a network of radio stations, mainly in the ghetto of AM radio.  He made money and saved many a radio station.  Before Reagan's action, the conservative side nationally was limited to William F. Buckley's Firing Line and Paul Harvey's daily radio commentary.  Limbaugh's commercial success gave the opportunity to other conservative radio hosts to be aired nationally because station owners saw that conservative radio made money.  Mark Steyn, Sean Hannity, and other radio hosts will carry on the work Limbaugh began.

Limbaugh's finest hour.  My memories of Limbaugh as a broadcaster are limited to his speech to CPAC on February 28, 2009.  His performance was so outstanding that Saturday afternoon that it defined him and the two generations his national radio show spanned.  By the way, he saved AM radio by giving hundreds of stations on that dying medium a 12 pm to 3 pm (Eastern) tentpole whose ads covered the station's expenses.  He closed that CPAC convention in the miserable days of the nascent Obama regime.  Conservatives were devastated by the failure of McCain to keep the Reagan dream alive.  Into this depression, Limbaugh waltzed.  His stirring, extemporaneous speech was his finest hour.  Being Limbaugh, it lasted 90 minutes.  C-Span archived the video.  Real Clear Politics posted a transcript.  Memory recalls how uplifting Limbaugh was that day.  He turned despair into hope.

The 20 Greatest Quotes From Rush Limbaugh.  Rush Limbaugh was one of the greatest figures of the last half-century and he could personally take credit for millions of people becoming conservative.  He was a legend, an icon and he will be missed.  In honor of a great man, here are Rush's 20 greatest quotes. [...] [For example,] [#7] "End results that work that don't involve government threaten liberals."  [#8] "No nation has ever taxed itself into prosperity."

The Indispensable Man.  Usually, in this line of work, if you're lucky, you get a moment — a year or two when you're the in-thing — and you hope to hold enough of that moment as it slowly fades away to keep you going till retirement.  Rush [Limbaugh] did something unprecedented in the history of TV and radio.  Commercial broadcasting began in the United States in 1920:  The Rush Limbaugh Show came along two-thirds of a century later, became the Number One program very quickly, and has stayed at the top all the way to today — for a third of the entire history of the medium.  And throughout all those decades Rush and his show stayed exactly the same: a forensic breakdown of the day's news, punctuated by musical parodies, satirical sketches, and Rush's own optimism and good humor, even through this last terrible year.

Sen. Manchin holds key to Biden's progressive agenda.  U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin's position as a moderate Democrat in the red state of West Virginia has propped him up to be a powerful man in Washington these days.  Even though Manchin has signaled support with Republicans on several issues, the Biden administration is wooing him in order to push progressive ticket items in its economic stimulus package.  Yet, West Virginians are holding out hope that the senator stands firm on opposing items that could be detrimental to some of the state's most important industries and small businesses.

West Virginia's Joe Manchin will keep Senate's 'Byrd rule' flying.  In a Zoom interview from his district office in Charleston, West Virginia, U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin, a Mountain State Democrat, said his deference to the decision of the Senate parliamentarian is no different than his position on the filibuster.  "The Byrd rule and the filibuster are one in the same," the former governor said of the sometimes complicated rule that restricts nonbudgetary provisions from being included in reconciliation legislation in the Senate.  In short, the Byrd rule makes certain no extraneous provisions are snuck into a bill.  The Senate parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough is the nonpartisan official whose position is to interpret which policies comply with the Byrd rule.  The rule was named for West Virginia Sen. Robert Byrd, whom Manchin replaced in a special election when the longest-serving senator in history died at the age of 92 in 2010.  "The Byrd rule makes sure that legislation stays within its guardrails or its lanes, which is basically budget-related," Manchin said in a 44-minute interview with the Washington Examiner.

Who Is In Charge, Anyway?  Finally, the most important question to be raised concerning the Capitol riots on January 6 received a hearing in the New York Times:  "What Trump Did as the Capitol Was Attacked."  The three-quarter page exposé canvassed meticulously all that President Trump was doing, save the single most important thing.  The essay by reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Martin relates details of conversations with officeholders and White House officials, with a timeline of decisions and nondecisions, all to demonstrate that Trump sat on his hands while the riot unfolded.  It failed, however, to ask the obvious follow-up questions the answers to which reveal the likelier truth.  Where was Trump's national security team, and what counsel did they provide?  The gravity of this obvious lacuna should instantly appear to anyone who considers this was a national security event of the greatest significance, equivalent to the firing upon Fort Sumter or the raid on Harpers Ferry more than 150 years ago or the bombing of Pearl Harbor 80 years ago.  That it was a national security event is apparent from the immediate and since daily repeated descriptions of the riot as an attempted "insurrection" or "coup."  It is also apparent what protocols prevail in such an event:  a national security team exists precisely to appraise and respond to such threats.

Given How Flawed Human Nature Is, America Has Been Remarkable Moral Achievement.  Those who acknowledge how flawed human nature is compare America to reality.  Those who do not, compare America to some utopian image:  a country free of inequality, prejudices, intolerance, sexual misbehavior, greed, etc.  This divide helps explain why those who hold a biblical worldview — usually religious Jews and Christians — are more likely to appreciate America than those who do not.  It is fundamental to Judaism and Christianity that "the will of man's heart is evil from his youth" (Genesis 8:21).  I offer a partial list of bad traits inherent to human nature.  When perusing it, one can only marvel at how good a country America became.

How Your Government Really Works.  Some of the harshest critics of government corruption are thoroughly corrupt — and everyone in the upper reaches of government is complicit due to their silence.  I spent over 40 years in government service.  I don't consider myself an expert on the subject but after 40 years you cannot avoid acquiring a more than basic knowledge of a subject.  One of the lessons I learned is that knowledge is power.  There are people in government who keep their ears to the ground in order to gain as much knowledge as possible.  I was not one of them, but I could not avoid learning who was sleeping with whom and other supposedly private matters.

Gina Carano Was Fired by Disney Because Her Popularity Extended the Reach of Conservatism.  Between 10 and 15 million voters in this country decide the outcome of Presidential elections and the partisan makeup of the Congress.  These are the voters who "swing" from one party to the other during election cycles.  Capturing the majority of these voters is the path to winning control of the government. [...] The Presidential election now is won through prevailing by narrow margins in several closely contested states, while each side has significant majorities among the remaining states.  Issues and messages that swing voters in the middle in one direction, and then back in the other direction, are where the keys to victory are found. [...] Hollywood and popular culture have always been a "one-way street" for liberal political views to be force-fed to the broader population, including swing voters.  This goes back to World War II — and before — when there really were Communists in prominent positions in Hollywood working to popularize communist ideology through film and later TV.

Bad week for Democrats of all stripes.  Shouldn't the Democrats be in the catbird seat?  After all, they've "won" the election, including the House, the Senate and the White House.  Apparently, the country was just itching to become another California.  And the courts, the big state, Hollywood, and the press are all on their side.  But somehow, even with President Trump silenced, impeached, and out of power, things aren't going so good for Democrats.  Impeachment is failing.  The verdict will likely come today.  Their aim was "political vengeance" as Trump's attorney said Friday, and the bid fell flat.  Their spin, and lies, and low-grade informercial for themselves in this Senate impeachment trial persuaded no one.  And their bigger aim, which was keeping President Trump from running for office, same as third-world dictators do to their opponents, backfired. [...] It gets worse.  Now two of their fairest-haired boys, their pride and joy, the governors billed as the future of their party, are both going down like the Titanic.

The Icons of the Left Collapse.  You would have to look far and wide to find a person more celebrated by progressives and most of the national media in 2020 than Andrew Cuomo.  You would have to look far and wide to find a political group more celebrated by progressives and like-minded media in 2020 than the Lincoln Project.  And you would have to look far and wide to find a place more celebrated by progressives and like-minded media in 2020 than California.  And in the last 24 hours, all three fell from their high pedestals and landed with a hard "thud."

Firing Actors for Being Conservative Is Another Hollywood Blacklist.  If you think blacklisting is only bad if its targets have sensible views, I have some bad news for you about communism.  While some victims of the McCarthy-era blacklist were liberals or progressives who refused to turn in the names of their colleagues, others were bona fide communists.  Dalton Trumbo — a Hollywood writer who was blacklisted, then wrote under front names, and whose story was told in a recent hagiographic movie starring Bryan Cranston — followed the Communist Party line in the Stalin era.  When many fellow communists dropped out of the movement after Stalin formed an alliance with Hitler, Trumbo followed the new party line.  Trumbo gained some martyrdom when he was hauled to Washington to testify in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee.  "This is the beginning of the American concentration camp," he warned.  (Fortunately for Trumbo, his antagonists, unlike Carano's, were not witless enough to confuse hyperbolic Nazi comparisons with anti-Semitism.)

The China model has come to America.  Far too few Americans grasp the implications of such a view taking root among their own elite.  Though more and more Americans are awakening to the challenges inherent in China's growing economic, technological, and military capabilities, few understand the threat that China's governing philosophy and structures pose to the US.  As David Goldman has explained, though the CPC is nominally Communist, China is what it has been for millennia:  an empire run by oligarchic mandarins.  The appeal to an American elite that sees itself as a worthy meritocracy enamored of governance by bureaucratic experts is obvious.  Americans need to understand that beyond mere appeal and envy, there is a growing convergence of interests between China's entrenched communist oligarchs and America's emerging progressive oligarchs.  Today's China, like all imperial powers, seeks to exploit the resources of anyone and anything outside its central oligarchy to enhance the prosperity, prestige, and power of that center.

China's War With the World.  Americans get to elect their presidents.  Not so in China.  We may have moved from the 45th commander in chief to the 46th, and the attendant changes already are legion, given the dozens of executive orders issued by President Joe Biden.  But our relationship with China, and the man who recently made himself leader for life, hasn't.  Chinese President Xi Jinping is now the functional emperor of the world's largest dictatorship, one we must understand is at war with any nation that has a representative government, or which refuses to kneel before it.  Just ask the residents of Hong Kong.  As such, we should understand the threat that Xi's communist regime comprises.  As the ancient Chinese general Sun Tzu teaches us:  "Know thy enemy."  Well, here are the essentials all Americans should know. [...]

Stop Calling It an 'Insurrection'.  What happened on Capitol Hill was a few dudes dressed like Conan the Fauxbarian acting like fools and occasionally fighting with the cops while a few hundred other dudes took selfies in the Rotunda.  We were in the 3rd Battalion, 160th Infantry, the first combat arms unit on the street during the LA Riot, a riot brought to you by Maxine Waters and other idiots, by the way.  There was burning and looting and dozens we can say with absolute certainty were murdered by the LA rioters, unlike at the Capitol.  It lasted for days.  You wouldn't know it from Rep. Stolen Cower, who seems to claim she suffered PTSD from being at the far end of the same ZIP code as the bruhaha, but what happened on January 6 was no "insurrection," and Republicans need to stop playing along with the Establishment talking point that it was.

If You Think You Can Just be Silent and Obedient and They Will Leave You Alone, You Best Think Again.  The world is laughing at us Americans.  Here we are, armed to the teeth, larger than any army in the world, and we have allowed our country to be stolen from us.  We have allowed the Communist to just do as they please.  And all we do is sit and stew in silence.  People keep asking, "What can we do?  Is there a plan?"  I don't know the answer to those questions.  I would have never imagined that we would have allowed things to get as bad as they are.  It seems as though the real enemy of liberty is the average American.  Our complacency and attitude of just wanting to be left alone has gotten us into this situation we find ourselves in.

What Jeff Bezos Hath Wrought.  If I had to guess who inspired Amazon's founder, Jeff Bezos, to kick himself upstairs and appoint Andy Jassy, a deputy, as his successor as chief executive, I might wager that at least part of the blame can be laid on Lucy McBath, the freshman Georgia congresswoman, and her understated grilling of one of the world's richest men at a July hearing held by the House antitrust subcommittee.  At the hearing, widely regarded as a watershed moment for America's tech giants, most of the subcommittee members — and all the Democrats — had coalesced around a consensus:  The business models of the four biggest tech companies depend on cementing and exploiting their statuses as gatekeepers to the internet, and scheming to bring down anyone who threatens their power to exact ever higher tolls on every minute we spend on the internet.  Only Mr. Bezos, however, had explicitly set out to become a ubiquitous "middleman" of all internet commerce.

The United States Should Follow North Dakota and Florida in Dealing with Unconstitutional Executive Orders and Social Media Censorship.  Florida and North Dakota take the lead in dealing with Joe Biden's unconstitutional executive orders and Big Tech's anti-free speech censorship.  The rest of the states who cherish our Constitution should follow.  The Biden administration, Big Tech, Big Media, Big Pharma, the DOJ, the FBI and the courts joined forces to steal the 2020 election for Joe Biden.  Now they continue their illegal and unconstitutional actions with unconstitutional executive orders and continued censorship of Americans on social media.  Florida and North Dakota have come up with excellent ideas in how to deal with these unconstitutional orders and Big Tech censorship.

Will a Hard-Left Turn Lead to Pushback?  The corruption of the Renaissance Church prompted the Reformation, which in turn sparked a Counter-Reformation of reformist, and more zealous, Catholics.  The cultural excesses and economic recklessness of the Roaring '20s were followed by the bleak, dour and impoverished years of the Great Depression.  The 1960s counterculture led to Richard Nixon's landslide victory in 1972, as "carefree hippies" turned into careerist "yuppies."  So social, cultural, economic and political extremism prompt reactions — and sometimes counterreactions.  The Bush-Clinton-Obama continuum of 24 years cemented the bipartisan fusion administrative state.  Trump and his "Make America Great Again" agenda were its pushback.  The counterreaction to the populism of the Trump reset — or Trump himself — is as of yet unsure.

How Socialism Wiped Out Venezuela's Spectacular Oil Wealth.  Venezuela has the world's largest proven oil reserves and yet the country has run out of gasoline.  The socialist government has lost the capacity to extract oil from the ground or refine it into a usable form.  The industry's gradual deterioration was 18 years in the making, tracing back to then-President Hugo Chávez's 2003 decision to fire the oil industry's most experienced engineers in an act of petty political retribution.  The near-total collapse in the nation's oil output in the ensuing years is a stark reminder that the most valuable commodity isn't a natural resource, but the human expertise to put it to productive use.  "At this moment Venezuela is living through its worst nightmare," said Luis Pedro España, a professor of sociology at Andrés Bello Catholic University in Caracas, who has studied the nation's economic collapse.  "We are witnessing the end of Venezuela as a petro-state."  Gasoline shortages have crippled the economy, made travel within the country prohibitively expensive, and it has increased prices at grocery stores.  Shortages and price restrictions have given rise to a vibrant black market.

The 'Tells' of the Deep State Poker Players.  I've never been much of a poker player, but I understand that expert players can read the "tell" on their opponents' faces. [...] Why would President Biden shovel out a boatload of executive orders in the first week of his presidency advancing climate change and fighting systemic racism?  Why would the Deep State sic the FBI on candidate and then President Trump, and then let Kevin Clinesmith, the guy that falsified a document, off with a tap on the wrist?  Why would the rulers nod and wink through a summer of riots that caused death and destruction in many American cities, and then build fences and call out the National Guard to protect them against a few "far-right" LARPers?  And if that isn't enough, mount an impeachment against a president who has already left office?  Oh, and by the way, How come it was Vice President Pence that ordered up the National Guard to Washington D.C.?  Why not Trump, the commander-in-chief?  Inquiring minds would like to know.  What is going on here?  These "tells" show that the ruling class, for all its power and its domination and hegemony, is terrified by the barbarians at the gates.

Are We In The Winter of America?  Will There Be A Spring?  Civilizations do not last forever.  They go through cycles.  Even in Classical Greek times, historians such as Polybius had noticed this.  As German philosopher Oswald Spengler more recently put it, civilizations experience a Spring; a Summer, marked by youthful vigour and exploration, an Autumn, in which they achieve great things but also start to decay, and a Winter.  Fascinatingly, the turning point — when you know that the civilization is definitely past its best — is when the legislature is invaded by a mob.  This shows that democracy, and the trust and high intelligence that have been shown to be central to it, have broken down.  The good news (sort of):  it's not necessarily the end.

When Resistance Became Sedition and Sedition Became Resistance.  In 2008, "dissent" went from being the "highest form of patriotism", a quote by Communist revisionist historian Howard Zinn that Democrats falsely attributed to Thomas Jefferson, to treason when George W. Bush made way for Barack H. Obama.  The old bumper stickers about the patriotic value of dissent were swiftly replaced with others touting the value of change.  In 2020, resistance just as quickly turned into sedition once the political tables were turned.  In one month, questioning a presidential election went from a commonplace proposition to a shocking attack on our democracy.  And we all know that if President Trump had been inaugurated for a second term, there would be no censorship or censure of the Democrat politicians and pundits claiming that he was only reelected because of Russia or UFOs.  Nor would we be hearing any talk of "sedition" and "insurrection" as if they were bad things.

The Non-Incitement & The Instigators.  In this posting I'll be providing links to video of the event I attended along with a link to the full text of Trump's speech.  It is long, not that exciting, and very much lacking in any "incitement".  Toward the end, many folks were leaving early due to the cold and the lack of anything really exciting.  I'd guess about 10% were sneaking out.  We'd been there from the very start.  About 3 hours before first speaker.  All told, we stood in a cold wind for about 8 hours straight.  At the end, pretty much NOBODY had anything on their mind other than finding a bathroom, getting out of the cold, and finding a place to sit with back support.

The River of Forgetfulness.  Riotous rogue Trump supporters who broke into the Capitol on January 6 were properly and widely condemned by conservatives.  They were somewhat reminiscent of the mobs of fanatic leftists and union members that a decade ago stormed the Wisconsin state capitol at Madison, or the unpunished hundreds of rioters who created havoc on Washington, D.C. streets during the Trump 2016 inauguration.  We expect the Capitol stormers will be punished, and not in the lax fashion of the latter two groups that were not.  Within a few days, the talking points were finalized that all of Donald Trump's supporters deserved blame for the violence.  That riot, the Trump defeat, and the loss of the Senate have greenlighted left-wing talk of "deprogramming," "de-Baathification," "re-educating," and "reprogramming" half the country to ensure they think correctly and act properly from now on — the exact methodology of such brain rinsing apparently to be announced later.

The Editor says...
On January 6, there was a Trump rally in Washington, DC.  Way down the street, there was a riotous break-in at the U.S. Capitol.  The half-million people (more or less) at the Trump rally had nothing to do with the break-in, but now all Trump supporters are getting the blame, thanks to the pernicious news media.  From where I'm sitting, it appears there were no "riotous rogue Trump supporters."

Eviction moratorium is sure to backfire.  On her first day in her role as the new CDC director, Rochelle Walensky announced that the Biden administration would extend Trump's moratorium on evictions through the end of March and perhaps beyond.  To justify this decision, Walensky said, "[Coronavirus] has also triggered a housing affordability crisis that disproportionately affects some communities."  But the real housing crisis is looming just around the corner.  It will come not in spite of this moratorium but because of it.  Eviction bans are decimating small landlords and causing an even larger bubble that will inevitably pop.  Roughly half of rental units in the United States are owned by "mom-and-pop" landlords.  These small landlords typically own only a handful of units, if they even own more than one.  While wealthy real estate firms are getting heaping sums from stimulus packages such as the CARES Act, mom-and-pop landlords get almost nothing.  On top of this, they are now being deprived of one of their main sources of income.

About That Guy Who Can't Access His Bitcoins.  [Scroll down]  Bitcoins are also scarce.  Not just because the underlying protocol is programmed to eventually stop making new ones, but because the ones that are already out there can be lost or stolen.  Bitcoin is the first scarce digital asset in history.  That's really important.  Lack of digital scarcity has ruined the internet.  Just ask any musician whose music streams online.  Since Bitcoins are scarce, and you can't just call Satoshi Inc. to get a replacement if you lose access to yours, then owning them is risky — as it should be.  You can hire someone to help you protect your coins or access them through an intermediary like PayPal, but it's important that someone along the ownership chain is taking the risk of loss or theft.  Without that risk there'd be no value. [...] Bitcoins can be lost or stolen, and that loss hurts, because the coins can't be replaced.  So Bitcoins are scarce, like diamonds, physical cash and vinyl records.  That means Bitcoins are valuable.

The Ominous Meaning of the Keystone Diktat.  We are continuously told by our betters that high voter turnout is to be celebrated because it is a measure of the civic engagement of our citizens.  I hold the opposite view:  high turnout is an indicator of serious civic breakdown.  High turnout in other struggling democracies is usually a sign of things going very wrong.  The point is:  you get high turnouts when people believe everything is at stake in the results of the election.  Middling voter turnout in American elections is a sign of the relative health of our political order, because it means that much of the population doesn't think everything important is up for grabs in the result.  Elections are supposed to determine who rules, and we take turns in ruling and being ruled.  Our presidents are supposed to run the government, not every aspect of our lives.  I've long thought it overwrought to hear people on both sides of the spectrum say, as has become typical over the last couple decades, that the current presidential election is "the most important election of our lifetime."  If every election is now a life-or-death matter for the republic, then the republic is already lost.

What Happened to 'the Storm'?  Despite the hype and expectations for "a storm," Jan. 20 marked another relatively peaceful transition of power, from one presidential administration to the next. [...] Federal prosecutors quietly closed the General Flynn leak investigation, finding no wrongdoing.  This sounds familiar, just like the 2020 presidential election, where former Attorney General Bill Barr found nothing amiss.  This was echoed by state and federal legislators as well as a slew of courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court.  The kraken remained as elusive as Bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster, and JFK Jr, the latter rumored to magically appear as Trump's running mate before the November election.  There were white hats and black hats, although in reality most wore one of the fifty shades of gray, some days looking like good guys, other days like bad guys.  Who really knows?  None have been indicted and none are heading to prison.

Actually, Bojo, There Is EVERYTHING Wrong with Being Woke.  Woke means statues being torn down by historically illiterate mobs; the race-baiting divisiveness of Black Lives Matter and the physical aggression of Antifa; the dumbing down of universities and the indoctrination of college kids with anti-intellectual drivel like 'decolonising the curriculum'; men who have designated themselves female being put in prison with women — and then raping them; turning a blind eye to organised Muslim rape gangs for fear of being racist or Islamophobic.  Almost everything wrong with the world today can be laid at the door of the 'woke' ideology — which is essentially just an updated version of Marxism.  That's why Margaret Thatcher would never have argued — even when caught on the hop by a difficult questioner — that there was 'nothing wrong' with being woke.

After the Fall.  [Scroll down]  As it stands, roughly half the country thinks the election was rigged and that future elections are going to be rigged.  It is pretty much impossible to sell the whole democracy thing when half the voters do not trust the voting process.  Lost in all the excitement is the fact that Congress has an approval rating of just 15%.  The fact that the "people's house" now sits behind layers of razor wire and is patrolled by the army does not help their image, either.  One way the ruling class could rebuild their reputation is to find a way to turn down the temperature in public discourse.  The best way to do that is the old bread-and-circuses approach, mastered by the Romans.  Get people out having fun instead of engaged in politics and things will calm down a notch or two.  Of course, that means people must be able to go outside, and they must have the wherewithal to go have fun.  That is going to mean winding back the Covid panic.

What's Next?  Great Awakening or Great Reset?  While most of the country happily checks their social media feeds and watches TikTok videos, an epic battle is playing out in the nation's capital, one that future historians, if they are allowed to discuss it, will describe as the turning point of western civilization.  On the one hand, we have been promised a great awakening, showing the people the crimes and corruption of the ruling class, as described by Trump before he was elected in 2016 in a little known but epic speech.  Those claiming to be in the know or able to read the stitches on the fast ball, promised "The Storm" and "The Kraken".  Yet so far, it's only a light breeze.  On the other hand, Washington, DC is locked down tighter than post 9/11, with checkpoints in and out of the city, almost like under martial law, all for a mostly virtual Biden inauguration.  That doesn't make sense.  Crimes against humanity were to be revealed and the guilty would not be able to walk down the street.  Except they can and are.

Suppose They Gave an Inauguration and Nobody Came?  The increasingly fascistic American left is setting a trap for the rest of their fellow citizens — often termed "deplorables," but more appropriately dubbed "normals" by Kurt Schlichter — by warning that we intend violence all over the country during Joe Biden's inauguration.  This is nonsense, of course, but any kind of demonstration can be declared violent by a complaisant media or, more ominously, manipulated in that direction by provocateurs, with the slightest incident magnified beyond recognition.  Part of their intent is clearly to undermine the Second Amendment — actually to disarm us.  Another part is to justify yet more censorship and "canceling," furthering their assault on the No. 1 principle that makes America America:  freedom of speech.  Do not fall for it.  There is a much better way to protest the inauguration.  Don't show up!

Autonomous County Project.  The Constitution was written for an overwhelmingly rural people, not considering that at some point the number of people in the cities would outnumber those in the whole rest of the state. [...] The thing to think about in the Autonomous County project is that there are 3,142 counties in the United States of which Joe Biden won either 477 or 504 depending on your source.  We are quickly becoming a republic that functions as a democracy in that the dense population centers in a few counties control everything about state and national politics.  The people in these cities do not have the same concerns as the wider population, but because they have many of the same concerns with others in the dense population centers, they control all legislation.  But, that leaves residents of some 2600 plus counties without a voice, never having their concerns addressed at either the state or national level and many state and national laws override county ordinances.  But, it doesn't have to be that way, because until they actually burn and eradicate the Constitution, it still says what it says and even though a bloated Supreme Court might rule against it in every decision, it still says what it says.  If they choose to do away with it all together, then they can no longer claim its authority and that is the crucial part of the moment.  The minute they disavow the Constitution, they become a body of individuals with no rights and no protections.  Oddly, this is exactly what happened when the Constitution was written to replace the Articles of Confederation and why it was largely done in secret.  So, don't think they won't try something similar.

What Now?  And then the 2020 election was stolen from Trump.  Republican officials in the states affected by the steal sat on their hands.  State legislatures, ditto.  Even the justices he'd named to the Supreme Court refused to hear Texas v. Pennsylvania, absurdly maintaining that a state didn't have standing to challenge the conduct of a presidential election in another state.  Trump's supporters, ever civilized, waited patiently while every possible means of stopping the steal was dutifully exhausted.  When it came down to the final vote certification in Congress, an army of MAGA folk gathered peacefully in Washington to show that they had Trump's back.  Then a tiny percentage of them foolishly entered the Capitol building.  And a tiny percentage of that tiny percentage — at least some of whom seem to have been Antifa goons — caused minor damage.  Most of them appear to have milled harmlessly around the building, leaving paintings and statues untouched.  The contrast with the conduct of Antifa and BLM insurgents during the previous year could hardly have been more striking.

The "Crisis" is Corporate Liberal Authoritarianism.  The mob that barged into the Capitol Building on Wednesday accomplished a few things. [...] It was clear within about ten minutes of the intrusion that the most severe consequences would stem not from the incident itself, but the deliberately-stoked over-reaction.  The bipartisan political and media class, whether cynically or sincerely, is broadcasting their steadfast conviction that this was something like a "MAGA Terrorist Insurrection" — which is literally how it's being described on CNN.  Under such allegedly extreme circumstances, of course extreme remedial action is going to be demanded.  Few entities capitulate to upswells of political hysteria more reliably than the tech companies.  Knowing that there will soon be a Democratic presidential administration and Congress to appease, they launched this week what is the most drastic corporate censorship offensive in modern history.  Not only was Trump banished from Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter — the latter being his primary communications platform (for better or worse) — multiple high-profile Trump allies were likewise purged.  Steve Bannon was nuked from YouTube.  Trump and his supporters are being neutralized online not because he currently poses any kind of bonafide "threat" to the Republic, but because his enemies are desperate for revenge.

Know Justice, Know Peace.  Violence against the U.S. Capital is a crime so heinous that a sitting U.S. President, in 2001, commuted the sentences of two people convicted for it.

An Ascendant Left Silences and Excludes Its Enemies.  The best show on television right now features a major city, the capital of an unsteady government, that is gradually being pulled apart by two competing political parties.  The center can't hold; it's being steadily overwhelmed by a pair of rival Socialist groups who don't hesitate to take their conflicts into the streets as they sweep away their country's past and head into a glorious future.  Meanwhile, the citizens of this increasingly fractured metropolis take refuge in a variety of vices, including transvestitism, casual sex of all permutations, part-time prostitution, blackmail, drug addiction, financial speculation and, when necessary, murder — and these are just the cops trying their best to hold the Republic together.  Meanwhile, outside the elegant halls of authority, armed gangs roam the streets, setting upon each other with abandon in the ultimate game of thrones.  Washington, D.C., in 2021?  No, Berlin in the late 1920s.  "Babylon Berlin," now in its third season on Netflix, isn't only brilliant storytelling for grownups, but a cautionary tale for our times.

I try to avoid posting conspiracy theories, but this one caught my attention.  Because it comes from Lt. General Thomas McInerney:  Following the storming of the Capitol building on Wednesday by what appears to be mostly Antifa members, apparently, there were also some others mingled in with them that General Thomas McInerney claims were Special Forces who seized several laptops from offices of politicians who are engaged in treason against the United States.  [Video clip]

General Thomas McInerney:  Special Forces Grabbed Traitors' Laptops.  [F]ollowing the storming of the Capitol building on Wednesday by what appears to be Antifa members, apparently, there were also some others mingled in with them that General Thomas McInerney claims were special forces who seized several laptops from offices of politicians who are engaged in treason against the United States.  [Video clip]

Gen. McInerny Says Special Ops Got Pelosi's Laptop:  "This is high treason!"  I've been telling you the next 10 days will be unlike anything you have ever witnessed in America.  And now it's not just me telling you.  How about a three star general?  General McInerny just released several videos where he breaks down everything that happened at the Capitol.  And it's NOT what you think!  There were several Special Operations being ran all at the same time.  The guys with heavy military gear that you've heard about?  Those were the white hats.  They went in and seized multiple pieces of evidence, including Nancy Pelosi's laptop.  [Video clip]

Political Amnesia:  Look at All the Democrats Who Boycotted Trump's Inauguration.  Donald Trump announced he will not attend Joe Biden's inauguration on January 20, becoming the fourth American president to choose not to witness his successor taking office.  Joe Biden calls it "a good thing" and said the president was "an embarrassment," which is pretty rich coming from The Big Guy.  It's also rich when you look back at the reaction by Democrats to President Trump four short years ago. [...] Four years ago, Joe Biden didn't call those ditching the inauguration "an embarrassment."  Hardly.  The Democrats boycotting were feted in the media for standing up for their belief that Trump was not really the legitimate president.  Maxine Waters was made Glamour Magazine's Woman of the Year for promising that "by the time I'm done with him he'll wish he had been impeached."  A nationwide effort to "boycott Trump" began.

It's not over yet.  [Scroll down]  So, what comes next? I don't have the particulars but I can give you milestones to watch for as the coming days unfold:
  [#1]   Expect the emergency broadcast system to be activated.  The FCC just recently released a memorandum speaking to the requirements under Federal law to send messages from the president to the public.
  [#2]   Expect confusion.  We are in a battle for our republic against elites that are attempting the very coup that they are accusing Trump of doing.  In battle, there will be disinformation but know that plans are being fulfilled.
  [#3]   Expect high profile arrests to take place over the next 12 days and at any time.  You may wake one morning to find someone in high office is no longer there.
  [#4]   Expect this to be a bumpy ride to the very end.  This is not a television show where things are resolved in 45 minutes.
  [#5]   Expect more bombshell evidence to be released between now and Jan. 20th.
  [#6]   Expect some sort of internet blackout or outage:  Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Gmail are likely going to be affected.  If you don't have alternate forms of communication established now, it would be a good idea to start forming them even if it's just checking on your nextdoor neighbors.
  [#7]   Expect Trump to be inaugurated on Jan 20th!
  [#8]   Expect the executive order from 2018 and/or the Insurrection Act to be enacted.  This DOES NOT mean martial law.  Remember that we have been under a state of emergency since 2018 which gives the president many powers to act.

The Editor says...
The article above means one of two things:  Either there is about to be a tremendous upheaval in this country and a lot of chickens will come home to roost unexpectedly, or there are some prolific and talented fiction writers at work, making baseless yet plausible predictions about the events of the next few weeks.  I would like to see President Trump spring his trap at long last, if indeed it exists.  Maybe there is some basis for all the predictions after all.  Nancy Pelosi, in particular, seems to think the President is holding three aces, judging by the way she's acting:  She's frantically pushing for a last-minute impeachment, and/or removal of the President via the 25th Amendment.  If she thought she was in no danger, she would just keep quiet and let the clock run out.

Only In Your Imagination Was That An Attempted "Coup".  At no point yesterday was the American government at risk of being "overthrown," as members of Congress have laughably suggested.  Per usual, our guardians of consensus can't bring themselves to describe what unfolded with any degree of dispassion or calm.  Instead we're told by the incoming Senate Majority Leader, for example, that January 6, 2021 will now "live in infamy" right alongside December 7, 1941.  Elected officials issued emotional notices that they were "okay," like they had just narrowly avoided being crushed in an earthquake, or escaped the World Trade Center on 9/11.  This is made all the more odd because the only person upon whom lethal force was committed appears to have been a Trump-supporting woman who was shot point-blank in the throat by a Capitol Hill police officer.  She's now dead.  Congress was temporarily inconvenienced.  Journalists and pundits, glorying in their natural state — which is to peddle as much free-flowing hysteria as possible — eagerly invoke all the same rhetoric that they'd abhor in other circumstances on civil libertarian grounds.  "Domestic terrorism," "insurrection," and other such terms now being promoted by the corporate media will nicely advance the upcoming project of "making sure something like this never happens again."  Use your imagination as to what kind of remedial measures that will entail.

The Left Finds Time for One More Big Lie Against Trump.  Donald Trump believes he was robbed.  So do many of his followers.  Indeed, not only the vast majority of Republican voters in America — some 70 percent or more of his 75 million voters, comprising more than 50 million Americans at least — but also between 10 percent and 30 percent of Democrats believe the election was stolen; either figure is remarkably high.  So Trump urged his supporters to come to Washington in the frigid cold of a January Washington winter to demonstrate their support for him and for his insistence.  And they came out.  It was a demonstration — to demonstrate widespread massive support for his insistence that the election was stolen.  There was no Madonna intimating blowing up the White House.  As can happen, and sometimes does — witness the Left's anti-Kavanaugh demonstrations that included confronting and badgering Senators in the Halls of Congress and attempting to bang down the Supreme Court's front doors — the January 6 rally got out of hand and became a riot.  Some of the more-intense people, after a year of watching Antifa and Black Lives Matter gatherings devolve into riots, decided on their own that their turn had come to storm the building that was the object of their scorn and anger.  An important lesson is learned once again: what goes around comes around.  When the Left condones unacceptable behavior from its corner, it often will find that one day it will rue that decision when copied by its adversaries.

The breach of the Capitol was an obvious set-up.  What happened at the Capitol building on Wednesday [1/6/2021] obviously was a stratagem to destroy the President's popularity and support and overshadow the challenges to the Electoral College vote, to my eyes.  The building was breached at the beginning of that process and, of course, riveted the media news feeds.  Members of Congress were evacuated with hoods over their heads as if they were in grave danger.  As a group of protesters approached the building, a policeman removed the barricade and appeared to invite them in.  That group entered the rotunda peacefully and stayed behind the rope line.  Those who observed this noted that there were several instigators embedded among the crowd.  They were using bullhorns to agitate and move people.  A couple of them set off flash bangs.  We now know that several known Antifa activists were among the agitators.  As they broke windows, Trump supporters tried to stop them.  But the distraction worked, frightened the pathetically spineless Republicans who were set to challenge the stolen election.  They quickly capitulated and Biden was certified.  The Republicans, even the ones we thought had grit, got rolled.

A Time for Choosing:  A Test for Our Souls.  The political crisis the United States is now facing brings into the open a contest for the soul of our country.  As important as this recent election is, the stakes transcend particular political arrangements — they go to fundamental issues, about which each of us must make a choice and take a stand.  A peculiarity of our current situation is this:  While every American is intricately familiar with the pandemic and the effect it has had on our lives, this is not the case for voter fraud, despite the evidence being overwhelming.  Some Americans are ignorant of these facts because they have been misinformed by a media that willfully withholds information.  The reason for this might surprise you.  There has been a force quietly at work in our country, in plain sight, that has gradually taken over ideological control of most of our institutions, businesses, and media, and even our culture.  This force is Marxism and communism.  For those who have been following this story, there is no surprise here.  For those who have never heard of this, it may sound far-fetched and unbelievable.

A Capitol Offense.  [Scroll down]  "We're going walk down to the Capitol," Trump said, "and we're going to cheer on our brave senators, and congressmen and women.  We're probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them because you'll never take back our country with weakness.  You have to show strength, and you have to be strong."  What happened next should cause heads to roll among those responsible for securing the Capitol and its grounds.  How on earth, in a city that sees protests every day, could there not have been sufficient security there?  After all, it wasn't as if the event hadn't been planned for weeks.  As Power Line's John Hinderaker writes, "It is outrageous that security was so lax that rioters were allowed to occupy the Senate chamber, sending senators and Vice President Pence, as I understand it, fleeing.  Armed guards should never allow such a thing to happen — that is why they are armed.  The entire country has been embarrassed today, not just Republicans."  As Fox News's Chad Pergram noted, it was the first time that the Capitol building had been breached in such a way since the British, fresh off their victory at the Battle of Bladensburg, did so in 1814.

The tech monopolies have sprung into action.  On Wednesday [1/6/2021], more than half a million peaceful people showed up in D.C. to support President Trump.  A minute percentage of that group ended up in the Capitol and the police killed an unarmed Air Force veteran.  (Defund the Police has been silent about this killing.)  Debate will rage about whether Trump supporters were set up.  For the purposes of this post, the only thing that matters is that it was the justification the tech monopolies needed to start a purge.  The tech companies contend that Trump instigated violence and his supporters can no longer be trusted.  And no, it doesn't matter that for much of 2020, Black Lives Matter and Antifa rioted, burned, looted, and threatened, beat, and murdered people.  Not only did they stay on social media, but they were also lionized on social media and mainstream media for their thrilling, empowering exploits.  Trump did not instigate violence.  The tech tyrants have systematically deleted Trump's words and the search engines will not help you find them, but you can, with difficulty, discover what he said on January 6:  ["]We have come to demand that Congress do the right thing and only count the electors who have been lawfully slated, lawfully slated.  I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.["]

Left's Hypocrisy On Full Display After D.C. 'Insurrection'.  The angry election fraud protest that led to the temporary takeover of the U.S. Capitol Wednesday perfectly illuminates the hypocrisy of the Democratic far left when it comes to political violence.  Republican officials and rank-and-file GOP conservatives immediately and forcefully condemned the pro-Trump rioters.  Nothing unusual about that:  During this riot-torn year, Republicans have consistently, loudly and frequently denounced violence, no matter who did it.  What about the Democrats and their extreme-left supporters?  Tragically, for them, violence is always acceptable when it's in service to their cause.  That's especially true since the riots and mass protests began in late May following the death of George Floyd.  But, as usual, congressional Democrats, the legacy press and social media giants have misreported, distorted and twisted facts to suit their own leftist agenda and inflame public opinion.  Republicans, however, have taken a mature and responsible path.

Capitol Breach 'Stole From The Hundreds Of Thousands' Of Peaceful Protesters Concerned About Election Integrity.  The Federalist Senior Editors Mollie Hemingway and Christopher Bedford, who were on the ground in Washington D.C. on Wednesday during the Capitol breach, told Fox News's Laura Ingraham on Wednesday that, while the destruction of the Capitol was sad and wrong, it also showcased the hypocrisy of the left and in corporate media.  "Over the last year, political violence has been completely condoned.  This has been allowed," Bedford said.  "Groups that attacked police officers and [perpetrated] riots and burned buildings have their own park named after them right in front of the White House.  There was a chorus from media critics and politicians saying that this is justified, that it is in the service of good," he continued.  Both Hemingway and Bedford also noted that while the rallies for President Donald Trump were "massive," many people were simply there to protest, not prepared to riot.

Kamala Harris Called Riots 'a Movement' Last Summer, Said 'They Should Not' Stop.  Violence is never the answer to resolving conflict, but it's hard not to see the hypocrisy of the left when they act surprised or condemn what happened at the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday [1/6/2021].  In June 2020, in the aftermath of the nationwide rioting following the death of George Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer, Kamala Harris even gleefully predicted that the rioting wouldn't end, telling Stephen Colbert, host of "The Late Show," that they shouldn't end.  "They're not going to stop.  They're not going to stop," she told him.  "This is a movement, I'm telling you.  They're not gonna stop.  And everyone beware because they're not gonna stop.  They're not gonna stop before Election Day and they're not going to stop after Election Day.  And everyone should take note of that.  They're not gonna let up and they should not."
[Emphasis in original.]

Congress Is the Real Threat, Not Protests.  Somewhat lost in the chaos of the DC protests was the fact that Democrats won both Georgia Senate runoff races.  That effectively gives the Democrats control of both houses of Congress.  In his podcast, Peter Schiff made the case that Congress is the real threat to America, not the protesters who broke into the Capitol building.  Peter said he thinks that Trump's threat to veto the spending bill unless Congress upped the stimulus checks to $2,000 was a key reason the Democrats won. [...] The bottom line is now the Democrats are going to be able to get a lot of things done that they wouldn't have been able to do had the Senate stayed in Republican hands.  You can almost certainly count on tax increases on corporations and "the rich," and more regulations.  As Peter put it, "Democrats will keep their promises when it comes to making government bigger and more expensive."  None of this is good for the market.

Dan Scavino Relays a Message From President Donald Trump.  Almost everyone around the MAGA community has clear-eyes on the strategies deployed against our assembly.  We are, quite simply, not naive to years of institutional manipulation and gaslighting. [...] President Trump is a non-politician and a risk to the GOP wing of the UniParty congress.  The republican establishment never supported President Trump; he was always adverse to their UniParty interests.  The GOPe needed a cover position now to hide and justify their baseline contempt.  The scripted and coordinated events of the last 24 hours gave them that justification.  However, despite their insufferable attempts to justify their current attacks we are never going back to that time when we did not see the strings on the political marionettes.  President Trump has created a movement and collected the largest factual constituency of voters in the nation.  The indefatigable leader of the MAGA movement gathered 74 million votes for his re-election.  That is the monster vote.

Welcome to a Wilderness of Lies.  [Scroll down]  he structures and institutions of American society have all been in place with little real change for nearing a century.  Nothing lasts forever though, particularly when they are run by grifty idiots.  The disruption caused by the tech revolution has helped speed up inevitable processes of change — you know, the creative destruction we hear about in unwoke economics courses.  The institutions we relied on — our churches, the NFL, the political parties — are now focused entirely upon preventing that inevitable change.  The lackluster losers who inherited their sinecures in these institutions (not literally but by being adopted into the establishment by going to the right schools) want to maintain a status quo that is great for them and poison for the rest of us.

This Is a Coup.  Why Were Experts So Reluctant to See It Coming?  Wednesday morning [1/6/2021], like most mornings, I woke up to the usual round of politics news sites and newsletters:  Politico Playbook, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post.  Most of the day's news concerned Tuesday's runoff elections in Georgia, which apparently delivered control of the Senate to Democrats; other articles concerned the ongoing pandemic and the future of commuting in the post-pandemic world.  One article caught my eye:  a Washington Post article by David Nakamura about whether the protests and petitions against the counting of Electoral College votes added up to a coup attempt.  The piece quoted several liberal commentators and historians as saying that it obviously was, but the thesis was that what we were seeing as of Tuesday did "not yet meet the formal academic definition of an attempted coup."

Are Sen. Josh Hawley, Republicans really a threat to democracy for questioning election?  [Scroll down]  Moreover, the last time some Democrats in Congress didn't officially contest a Republican presidential victory was way back in 1988.  That would be three Republican presidential wins in a row now that have been objected to in Congress (George W. Bush's two wins, and Trump's).  We've somehow managed to make it this far without having our democracy toppled.  And is 2016 such a distant memory?  Where was the left's angst about destroying democracy when there was open talk in their ranks and in the media hoping that electors would switch their votes from Donald Trump to Hillary Clinton — despite no legitimate concerns about voter fraud?  In contrast to the hyperventilating going on today about Republicans not voting to certify some states' electoral results, USA Today ran an objective and dispassionate look at calls to deny Trump his 2016 win.  It's not so academic a question now, for some reason.

Explaining the Twelfth Amendment for Those in the Media Who Seem to Be Reading Impaired.  The Twelfth Amendment was adopted in June 1804 — ahead of the Presidential election of 1804 — and replaced the provision regarding the function of the Electoral College that was set forth in Art. II, Sec. 1, Clause 3 of the Constitution as originally drafted.  The purpose of the Amendment was to address the extraordinarily close outcomes of the Presidential election in 1796 and 1800.  The process set forth in the Constitution had resulted in the election of a President and Vice President from different political parties in 1796 — which turned out to be problematic since the one-party was pro-British and the other was pro-French in the armed hostilities between the two countries at the time.  In 1800, a tie in the Electoral College vote led to 36 ballots in the House of Representatives before it finally elected Thomas Jefferson over Aaron Burr — both from the Democrat-Republican Party.  Both had received the same number of Electoral Votes since under the original system each elector cast 2 votes without distinguishing between a vote for President and a vote for Vice President.

A Time For Choosing:  A Test For Our Souls.  There has been a force quietly at work in our country, in plain sight, that has gradually taken over ideological control of most of our institutions, businesses, media, and even our culture.  This force is Marxism and communism.  For those who have been following this story, there is no surprise here.  For those who have never heard of this, it sounds far-fetched and unbelievable.  This decades-long communist subversion of our nation came to a head in the 2020 election.  While before our major political parties didn't differ that much on a fundamental level, gradually one of the parties was subverted by communist groups.  During past elections, both parties would wave the American flag and sing the national anthem, but now one side genuinely believes America is a fundamentally flawed nation.  Over the summer, Marxist groups such as Black Lives Matter (BLM), which was founded by self-proclaimed Marxists who have hijacked genuine concerns over racism for political purposes, and the far-left Antifa group, were behind riots and violence.  These groups have direct ties to communist groups connected to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

Some Hard Truths We Face as Patriotic Americans as We Near January 6th:  Americans have absorbed the truth that the institutions long depended upon for redress are compromised.  For years we had always suspected this, but in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election this has been confirmed with much dismay and sadness. [...] Here are 25 hard truths Americans can no longer rationalize away:
  [#1]    A presidential election was stolen from President Donald J. Trump in the most brazen and in your face way possible.
  [#2]    The government elites in all three branches, and in both parties, appear to be in on or complicit in the steal either by omission or commission.
  [#3]    The strings of our government are being pulled by China and other global interests that have no qualms about tearing down our time-honored values of freedom of speech, freedom of association, and freedom of religion.
  [#4]    The Supreme Court, except for Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito has allowed partisanship, virtue signaling and cowardice to influence the merits of the cases they have deigned to accept or reject.
  [#5]    There is no Democrat and Republican Party, only a UniParty.  Both parties are merely two sides of the same coin, dedicated to selling out the country to China for power and enrichment.
  [#6]    News is not what the corporate media delivers, only leftist/globalist propaganda that rarely speaks ill of China or George Soros.
  [#7]    China has invaded America without firing a shot, first by exploiting the moral weaknesses of people in the upper echelons of the political, educational, corporate, and entertainment world and second by using the Wuhan Virus as a bioweapon to psychologically place America under siege without an overt military effort.
  [#8]    If Joe Biden is sworn in as president, he will make a mockery of American ideals of honesty, integrity, and fair play.
  [#9]    The police in blue cities have lost the trust of patriotic Americans due to their willingness to blindly follow orders of mayors and governors even if those diktats infringed upon the constitutional rights of the citizenry. [...]
  [#12]   America is becoming a nation of free states and communist satellite states.
  [#13]   The Democrat party has thrown out the constitutional rule of law in favor of socialism/communism.
  [#14]   Unless liberty is vigorously taught and fought for, it will devolve into tyranny. [...]
  [#17]   Our public schools are not dedicated to teaching our children, but to indoctrinating them to leftist ideas.
  [#18]   The Wuhan Virus lockdown demonstrated the eagerness of far too many Americans to surrender liberty for safety.
  [#19]   The Republican elites destroyed the Tea Party and wish to do the same to Trump supporters.  They are doing so by willfully ignoring election fraud evidence and declaring Joe Biden as the president-elect by saying "the electoral college has spoken." [...]

The timing is perfect to decentralize DC.  Much has been written about the pandemic-driven favorable aspects, promise, and implications of virtual working compared to traditional in-person interfaces. [...] Much less has been written about virtual management's implications for decentralizing the federal government and putting the decision-makers physically among the decision-affected — real instead of virtual reality.  How about considering the following departmental tectonic shifts:  Interior to Wyoming, Utah, or Colorado; Agriculture to Iowa, Nebraska, or South Dakota; and Commerce to Florida or Louisiana?  Regulators of the environment could literally step out their back doors and visit a forest, see a farm, soybean, cornfield, or cow; or visit a vibrant multicultural economy on the hemisphere's doorsteps.  Relocating individuals could cash in on D.C.'s inflated housing prices and boost their quality of life with bigger homes and maybe even a back 40, or at least a backyard.

The Etiology of Executive Order 13848.  The fate of Western Civilization, some three thousand years in the making, now hangs by a slender thread.  That thread is Executive Order 13848.  So what is in that Executive Order? [...] It relies heavily on the Attorney General.  The hapless Jeff Sessions was in that role when Executive Order 13848 was signed.  He was replaced on 14th February, 2019, by Bill Barr.  Barr seemed reliable but achieved nothing.  The reason he slow-walked everything, couldn't see corruption in the Hunter Biden laptop etc. became apparent when he recently referred to President Trump as a "deposed king ranting."  Barr outed himself as a Deep State operative too soon, and leaves his position on 23rd December and so won't be involved in drafting the remedies report in response to the report by the Director of National Intelligence.  The fate of Western Civilization hangs on such small matters.

On January 6, we learn whether our Constitution will hold and whether congressional Republicans care.  The 2020 presidential election was, in several targeted battleground states, an unconstitutional electoral exercise.  Even putting aside evidence of significant fraud, virtually none of which received a hearing by our courts, events leading up to and including the November national election constituted a radical and grave departure from the federal electoral system adopted by the framers of the Constitution and the state ratification conventions.  Now, let's be clear:  None of this matters to the Democrat Party, since it and its surrogates perpetrated these unconstitutional acts, as I shall soon explain.  Nor does it matter to the media, which is utterly illiterate on the subject and unequivocally supports the supposed outcome in any event.  But it should be of great moment and concern to the people of this country and especially to congressional Republicans in both Houses, for if the latter do not at least confront and challenge this lawlessness on January 6, when Congress meets to count the electors, it will be the GOP's undoing and, simultaneously, the undoing of our presidential electoral system.  Ultimately, it will be the people of the United States who love our republic who will be the losers.

A Perfect Storm Seeks Destruction of the US.  As 2021 dawns, the war on our culture moves into high gear.  The opportunistic intersection of the resistance to the Trump presidency, the rise of the monopolistic tech giants, the spurious panic over the psychologically weaponized CCP virus in the form of COVID-19 and its concomitant loss of personal freedom, the neo-Marxist hijacking and worsening of race relations, and the legalistic undermining of U.S. laws and institutions have all evolved into a perfect storm of destruction that not only threatens the future of the United States, but actively seeks its destruction.

Is Nothing Happening?  Or is Trump is Channeling Sun Tzu?  I'm impatient, as I expect most American Thinker readers are as well.  We have been promised a coming storm that will be biblical, or a Kraken released on Deep State conspirators. [...] As of yet, there has been no storm, no Kraken.  Trump has followed the Constitution, making legal arguments up to and including the U.S. Supreme Court.  What Vice President Pence does when it is time to again follow the Constitution and certify the Electoral College votes is to be determined.  Will a massive declassification of criminal and seditious activities subdue the Democrats?  Will Trump win without a bloody battle?  Time will tell.  At this point, it's a binary choice.  Either Trump is in over his head and will be dragged out of office.  Or he is executing his plan, on his terms and timing, as he has done since his famous escalator ride at Trump Tower in 2015.  Trump knows the stakes for himself, his family, and America if Kamala Harris and Joe Biden get the keys to the kingdom and promptly hand them over to China.  Want to bet against Trump?  How has that worked out in the past?

It's for Mike Pence to Judge whether a Presidential Election Was Held at All.  On January 6, a joint session of Congress will open with Vice President Pence presiding as president of the Senate.  His power will be plenary and unappealable.  You heard that right.  As president of the Senate, every objection comes directly to him, and he can rule any objection "out of order" or "denied."  His task will be to fulfill his oath of office to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States and to ensure that the laws be faithfully executed.  This is a high standard of performance, and V.P. Pence will have two choices.  He can roll over on "certified" electors, or he can uphold the law.

How Congress Can Give Americans $2K Relief Checks and Cut Omnibus Pork to Pay for It.  President Donald Trump has urged Congress to increase the amount of the direct relief payments to Americans to $2,000 by cutting out the unrelated pork in the coronavirus rescue package and government spending bill.  Breitbart News has calculated how much that increase would cost and what could be cut from the 5,593-page omnibus bill to offset it.  The House and Senate passed the combined $900 billion coronavirus relief package and $1.4 trillion government spending bill on Monday night [12/21/2020], but the massive 5,593-page omnibus bill immediately drew criticism for sending billions of dollars of aid to foreign countries while only allotting $600 relief checks for Americans.

The Editor says...
The voting-age population of the U.S. is approximately 255,200,000.  $1.4 trillion divided equally among us would be $5,485 per capita.  But the money would come from the national debt, so we would all be undertaking an unsecured loan from our grandchildren.  Either that, or the government would be printing money, which would result in inflation.  (And buying votes.)  Either way, it seems nice in the short term, but it's destructive in the long term.  About 90 percent of the omnibus spending is unnecessary, in my opinion.

A Midwestern Explanation of the 2020 Election.  At the start of this year there was not much question President Trump would breeze onto a second term.  The country was on a roll — low gas prices, fat 401k accounts, low unemployment, real minority economic gains and a relatively peaceful planet.  No masks, no shutdown, no worries.  Even Lil' Rocketman had become quiescent and the Arabs started cooperating with Israel.  Then we were infected with it, the Wuhan virus.  We were politically, immunologically, and socially naive to this new Chinese viral monster that lurked on the horizon and was designed to keep on giving.  We shut down the economy and Democrats never shut up blaming management failure of this unique, novel disease on the political party controlling the White House — despite their state governments being responsible for their own brand of deadly mismanagement.  As the economy ground to a halt, the left (including the deprecating mainstream media, academe, virtue-signaling corporate America and the deep state) saw an opportunity to steal the election by putting in place their steal-the-election "Square Dance Initiative."

The Senate:  Throw Them (Almost) All Out.  Every single member of the U.S. Senate deserves to be fired, vilified and run out on the proverbial rail except — alphabetically — Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), Mike Lee (R-Utah), Rand Paul (R-Ky.), and Rick Scott (R-Fla.).  They were the only ones with the honor, the basic morality, not to vote for a wretched, pork-dripping from its mouth, "America-hating" (as Roger Kimball accurately called it on Parler), miserable excuse for a "COVID relief bill" that sends twenty-five million taxpayer dollars to Pakistan for something called "gender programs," millions more for every liberal arts and humanities boondoggle imaginable (most of them shut anyway), but a miserly six hundred bucks to the terminally-masked citizens of this country who have been locked in their houses since the Paleolithic Age.  And while we're riding people out on a rail, we should build a special one of titanium or whatever metal is most permanent for Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer and send them back respectively to the feces and syringe-laden streets of San Francisco and the rat-infested walk-ups of Hunt's Point and East New York.  These same supposed public servants, who have been around since before the aforementioned Paleolithic Age, suddenly — as if discovering shame for the first time in their lives — agreed with Donald Trump that the paltry six hundred should be bumped up to an at least palatable two thousand.

McConnell & Pelosi Jumped the Shark.  If ever two people embodied the idea of Swamp Supremacy, it would be Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.  Stated another way, McConnell and Pelosi are the ruling class, personified.  And though their political philosophies may be marginally different, they are 100% joined at the hip in their desire to rid the world of President Donald Trump.  The so-called covid relief bill they slammed through both houses of Congress in about 12 hours, following closely on the heels of their oh-so-certain pronouncement that "President-elect Joe Biden" is to be honored and accepted, may have just assured the re-election of President Trump to a second term.  'Tone-deaf' doesn't begin to capture the out-of-touchness' represented by the re-enactment in December 2020 of the dead-of-night, backroom dealing, 'pass it to find out what's in it' arrogance that brought Obamacare into the world, against the will of the American people.

Mike Pence is being held out as the potential savior of a fair election.  For the most part, Americans assume that the Vice President lacks power.  The President may assign him responsibilities, but the Constitution does not.  Instead, he's the understudy, there just in case something happens to the president.  Except that, in this strange year of 2020, we may learn that the Vice President is the most powerful man in America.  Ivan Raiklin, a constitutional lawyer, claims that the Constitution grants Mike Pence the power to overturn a manifestly fraudulent election.  On December 22, Raiklin sent out a tweet urging Pence to inform the Secretaries of State in those six contested states that, despite overwhelming evidence of fraud, certified Electors, that he cannot accept those certifications because the electors were not legally appointed.  The tweet has attached a memorandum for President Trump that purports to come from the White House itself, for it's written on what appears to be official White House letterhead.

Concede only that Trump won.  President Trump stands tall amid calls to concede from his enemies and those who want to destroy our constitutional republic and replace it with a banana republic.  Those enemies of America include Mitt Romney and anyone who has defended as free trade Red China's devastation of our economy. [...] Concede nothing to these people who oppose 3.5% unemployment and the 15% increase in household incomes in the first 3 years of the Trump presidency.  The[y] do not want to Make America Great Again.  And that includes all those corporations running pro-BLM ads.  None of them ran MAGA ads because the companies sold out to Red China.  Apple makes most of its junk in Red China, not America.  Ditto Nike and on and on.  These companies also promote covid 19 as if it were the Black Plague.  After nearly a year, 1 in 1,000 Americans have died of it — fewer than die of cancer or heart disease.

Don't Let Biden Kill Trump's Post-COVID Economic Boom.  After growing at a blistering 33.1% pace in the third quarter, the economy is poised for another double-digit leap in Q4.  Now there's talk of a roaring '20s-style revival on the way as two new vaccines start making the rounds and the nation gets back to normal.  None of this was supposed to happen — at least not in this time frame.  And none of it will continue if Democrats gain control of the Senate.  Let's rewind the clocks a few months to understand why.  Once the economy came to a screeching halt amid what turn out to be reckless and largely pointless lockdowns, mainstream economists started predicting another slow recovery, while bashing President Donald Trump for saying otherwise.

Congresswoman-elect: Lawmakers Who Think Elector Challenge Is Futile Should Resign.  Incoming freshman House Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) said Republican senators convinced about the futility of the plan to challenge electors in Congress on Jan. 6 should resign.  "It is absolutely not futile," Taylor Greene told The Epoch Times on Dec. 22.  "Anyone holding office who doesn't think they can give the effort to stop our country from plunging into socialism with a stolen election should really resign.  They shouldn't hold office if they don't think this effort is worth trying."  The congresswoman-elect made the remarks in response to a question about some of the rationale floated by Republican senators who oppose the idea of challenging the electors.  Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) told Newsmax on Dec. 21 that the challenge will go down like a "shot dog."  "The thing they've got to remember is, it's just not going anywhere.  I mean, in the Senate it would go down like a shot dog," Thune told reporters.  "And I just don't think it makes a lot of sense to put everybody through this when you know what the ultimate outcome is going to be."

Face It, Nordic Countries Aren't Socialist.  One of the most common fallacies of the new populists is to say that their model is the "Nordic" one and that those countries are successful examples of how "socialism works".  When I mentioned it to the Finnish Finance Minister Petteri Orpo at a recent ECR dinner, he could not believe it.  Expropriations, massive tax increases, appropriation of savings and subordinating the growth model to political control is what populists defend.  The same as Venezuela, which all of them praised — from Bernie Sanders to Owen Jones or Corbyn and Chomsky — until it collapsed.  Then they moved on to the fallacy of "the Nordic model".  Do you know what interventionists forget about the Nordic nations?  They are leaders in the economic freedom index (Heritage) and ease of doing business according to the World Bank.

Trump as a One-Term President Would Become DC's Nightmare.  What it failed to accomplish through four years of Deep State sabotage and bipartisan efforts at thwarting the MAGA agenda, the D.C. Club may have finally succeeded through good old-fashioned vote fraud.  The District of Corruption is salivating over the possibility of freeing itself from a foe who has singlehandedly damaged the Swamp forever.  No victory could be more pyrrhic.  Forcing Donald Trump from the presidency while half of all likely voters believe the election was stolen from him (including a stunning one-third of Democrats) would backfire on Washington spectacularly.  Trump is too ferocious a competitor and too powerful a cultural force to ever disappear into a retirement not of his choosing.  At least 75 million Americans voted for the president because, among other reasons, he is seen as an "outsider."  Now Washington insists on making him a martyr, as well.  What will happen if President Trump leaves office in January?  He will instantly become the most consequential and powerful ex-president Americans have seen.

It's time for the 'Deplorables' to become the Unconquerables.  Democrats won the election, but they don't seem very happy about it.  And with reason:  The election failed in its main purpose, which was to shut down the Deplorables.  The Deplorables, in Hillary Clinton's infamous term, are working- and middle-class people who haven't bought into the progressive agenda.  They're people who don't see the rise of the tech oligarchy as a plus, who don't think "woke" politics makes sense, who have jobs that produce tangible outputs.  They're nearly half the country.  This election was supposed to demoralize them, crushing President Trump and his supporters in a double-digit landslide that would give the Democrats solid control of the White House and Congress — and, with a little judicious court-packing, of the judicial branch, too.  The Deplorables would be made to realize that they aren't in charge, that if they want to ride, they'll have to (in Barack Obama's famous words) ride in the back.

Fighting back against government-imposed victimhood.  Conservatives in Democrat enclaves tend to feel especially helpless.  We spin our wheels and don't complain too loudly because somebody might shut us down.  Our neighborhoods still spout Biden signs on lawns but we keep the "Stop the Steal" signs in a closet for fear that, if they show up on our lawns, our houses could be firebombed.  Moreover, when you're surrounded by leftists celebrating a stolen election (thanks, often, to help from a weak and corrupt local GOP), it's hard to imagine that anything you do could make a difference.  Everyone around you hates Trump and what he represents:  The individual, freedom, hope, patriotism.

Gaming Out a MAGA Party.  The modern Republican Party was founded in 1854 as an anti-slavery party.  Its first nominee, Abraham Lincoln, managed to thread the needle through a hopelessly split Democratic Party to win the Presidency in 1860.  Some of these conditions are present today.  Both of our major parties are splitting into factions, as the Democrats had in 1860.  And there is a candidate available to lead a new party who not only came close to winning, but has served as the President of the United States.  President Trump must have at least toyed with the idea of forming a new party.  Although the Republican Party's voters nominated Trump in 2016 and elected him President, the party's establishment figures never accepted Trump, or his agenda.

Georgia Rep. Vernon Jones Says Election Allegations Have 'Awakened a Sleeping Giant'.  Like tens of thousands of other supporters of President Donald Trump, Georgia state Rep. Vernon Jones was in Washington, D.C., this weekend showing support for him amid swirling allegations of vote fraud and election irregularities.  And he also had a warning of sorts for the president's political (and real?) enemies:  You have just stepped in it big time.

After SCOTUS's knife in the back, what Trump must do now.  [Scroll down]  The question now is, will he muster the energy to do the right thing?  The right thing is to somehow swallow this absurd and evil election result and soldier on to Georgia once again to try to salvage the Republic by supporting two Republican senators hardly worthy of mention.  Donald Trump deserves better.  We all deserve better.  And it is the fact that we all deserve better, and the fact that Trump seems to care about such things, that gives me hope.  As we know, 50 thousand Trump voters can fill a stadium or a huge field — whereas Biden can't draw a baker's dozen with free ice cream.  However, 400 thousand Biden voters can fit in a small mail truck, or perhaps an even smaller thumb drive.  It is this unsettling knowledge that threatens the upcoming Georgia Senate races, and with it, the future of the Republic.  There's no doubt that Georgia conservatives would defeat the Dems probably 60-40 in a fair fight.  But what are the odds of that?

China's leaders understand all too well from their own historical experience how to control America: use compradors.  There is a very large, rich, and influential class of Americans who owe their wealth and standing to China, having mightily prospered through business ties to the Middle Kingdom.  Every educated person in China understands the way such ties linking a wealthy elite beholden to foreign interests can be used to bring down even the mightiest of nations.  The word "comprador", referring to the Chinese businessmen that allied themselves with Western imperialists, becoming wealthy, and, in the view of the Chinese Communist Party betraying the nation, is a curse word among Communists.

Republicans Are Blowing It in Georgia, and We May All Pay the Price.  It's not alarmist to state that the future of our country could be defined by the two Georgia Senate races. [...] Regardless of the merits leading to this perceived case of injustice, it's a fact that many Democrats are out for revenge.  If they have the White House, the House and the Senate, the pressure on President-elect Joe Biden to enact a pretty extreme agenda is going to be immense.  Will Biden have the strength to push back against this?  Will he even want to push back?  The games he played during the campaign on the question of packing the Supreme Court and the fact that his own vice president is all for a more radical agenda do not bode well for those hoping Biden will stand in the way of the radical elements who have all the energy in his party today.  A Democratic Senate looking to change America would start by killing the Senate filibuster so they no longer need 60 votes to pass a bill.  They don't need any Republican votes to do that, and once it's done, the Republicans won't be able to stop anything.

Joe Biden, the Manchurian President.  [Scroll down]  China, not Russia, clearly interfered with the 2020 elections.  The only question about this interference is whether the release of COVID-19 was accidental or on purpose.  Before the pandemic crippled the U.S., Trump was headed to reelection by a historic landslide.  The economy was roaring, and a record number Americans were enjoying prosperity and freedom.  In spite of Democrat efforts to remove Trump from office by impeachment and the economic shutdown because of the virus, the president still earned ten million more votes than 2016 and in any other election would have crushed his political opponent.  The virus not only had a horrific detrimental impact on our economy, it was used as an excuse for making substantive changes to the electoral process through unprecedented millions of mail-in votes.  Even if it was an accidental release from a Wuhan lab, the Chinese are responsible for the criminally negligent deaths of U.S. citizens and the economic damage caused by the virus.  If the virus was deliberately released, it was an act of war.  So, are we at war with China?

George Orwell, Our Contemporary — Almost.  In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell divides the world into two conflicting superpowers perpetually at war with one another.  Much of the action of the novel takes place in Oceania, whose capital is London.  Authority is exercised by the Ministry of Truth, which instructs people what to think and also invents most of the country's art; the Ministry of Peace, which runs the military; the Ministry of Plenty, which runs the economy; and the Ministry of Love, which runs the prisons.  Endless wars keep the people busy and focussed, and the thought police aggressively pursue people who commit, or are alleged to commit, thought crimes.  In Oceania, words lose their conventional meanings, or rather, they assume their opposite meanings.  For example, war is peace, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength.  A faceless enemy is constantly held up for repudiation.  Periodically the regime orders two minutes of hate, or even a hate week.  Nowadays, we have more up to date perversions of the truth, such as, for example, the alleged non-existence of sexual differences or the inversion of racial superiority.  Still, the similarities are too obvious not to strike a responsive chord.

One Thing That Astoundingly Got Twice as Good During the Titanically Stupid Government Lockdowns?  [Scroll down]  US ISPs were met with orders-of-magnitude more demand for their services.  Not only did our Internet networks not collapse in a smoldering heap — the speeds thereon almost doubled.  This is an astounding private sector success.  The result of less government from the Trump Administration — allowing for more investment and thus more expansion of the private sector networks.  To not just handle the lockdowns — but to manhandle them.  Thanks to anti-Status Quo Government President Trump.

Woke Corps Lobby D.C. to Keep Their Slaves.  When most people think of Nike, they think of Colin Kaepernick, the disgraced racist ex-NFL player advocating for a cop killer who became the public face of the company, but a more accurate picture would be one of its lobbyists like Michael McSwain or Jesse McCollum.  McSwain worked as Obama's Senior Associate Director of Scheduling before joining Nike and is now its manager of Government and Public Affairs, which is to say, top lobbyist.  These days he divides his time between cheering Democrats and booing Republicans on Twitter, while denouncing tariffs on Communist China, but also his quieter work behind the scenes for Nike.  Slave labor is the lifeblood of Nike.  And it's not only tariffs, but human rights legislation, that threaten its survival.  Even while Nike spends millions lecturing Americans about racism, it's desperately fighting to keep its slaves working on their plastic plantations in Communist China.  It's one of the reasons why the sportswear company spends over $1 million a year on lobbyists.

Time to take steps to preserve our history.  Last Thursday night, I watched President Trump deliver an astonishing speech concerning the 2020 election and the fraudulent activities of the Democrats in the key swing states.  After the speech ended, I had the thought to download the YouTube video of Trump's speech onto a thumb drive so it would be preserved for my four-month-old grandchild.  Yes, preserved.  If Biden prevails, all pre-January 20, 2021 downloadable internet videos and news broadcasts about the Trump administration successes will not so slowly disappear, or worse, they will be edited by the new Ministry of Truth.  No socialist nation has ever allowed the free flow of information, history, and national culture.  A Harris/Biden administration will surely be no exception.  So, thinking forward a bit more, I'd like to suggest to all those reading this article that we begin to preserve our internet history, in fact our entire cultural history for future generations.

Our approach to election fraud is lunacy.  Tens of millions of Americans feel with good reason that the election is tainted.  There are hundreds of well documented anomalies including over a thousand affidavits stating under the penalty of perjury that significant irregularities occurred.  But we are relying on a skeleton crew of privately funded lawyers to try to get to the bottom of what by all accounts appears to be a massive fraud.  Why is this all-important effort left to a few brave souls and not the main focus of our government's efforts?  Where is the Justice Department?  The FBI?  Why doesn't the Defense Department do a review of military mail-in ballots that inexplicably went 100% for Joe Biden?  How about a forensic analysis of the tens of thousands of Biden-only mail-in ballots that weren't folded and appeared to be on different paper?  Who rented the P.O. boxes used for tens of thousands of illegal voters in Georgia and other states?  Where is the investigation of postal officials who ordered carriers to throw away Trump mailings?  Why aren't the poll workers who sent observers home and then illegally continued counting in the dark of the night arrested and charged?

Is Lin Wood trying to destroy Republican control over the Senate?  Lin Wood, who seems to support Trump, is beginning to show all the signs of a loose cannon or even a spoiler.  I'm really not sure what's going on, so I thought I'd just give you a brief history of the man and what he's been saying recently, so you can draw your own conclusions. [...] More recently, Wood became well known to conservatives when he represented Nick Sandmann, whom the media horribly slandered for smiling at a threatening drummer.  We don't know how much money CNN and The Washington Post agreed to pay Sandmann, but most people are reasonably sure that it was a lot.  According to Breitbart, though, Wood has been a longtime Democrat voter and a consistent Democrat donor.

The Supreme Court and the Electoral Coup.  [Scroll down]  And today, it's quite obvious — for Supreme Court justices and all Americans to see — that we are in the last stage of the takedown and final usurpation of the Constitution of the United States.  With distrust, division, and corruption being so prevalent in the big cities and lower courts of many of the contested states — as to nullify the seriousness of over 400 affidavits documenting vote fraud and polling place irregularities, documenting that there were more votes cast than registered voters in quite a number of jurisdictions, and overwhelming evidence of massive computer driven vote manipulation associated with key states' use of Dominion Voting Systems, and pay-to-play corruption at the highest level of Republican Party-led Georgia government to contract with Dominion to use their voting machines — the Supreme Court is compelled to adjudicate. [...] The Supreme Court needs to do its job of adjudication and protect and save the Constitution at this critical time.

To Vote or Not to Vote, in Georgia.  I am going to say something that seems extreme, but only three times in my fairly long life have I seen political figures who absolutely exude charisma — one was Bobby Kennedy, whom I watched address a crowd of Chicanos in East Los Angeles two days before he was shot, the second is Donald Trump, whom I have seen speak more than a dozen times from Anaheim, Calif. to Manchester, N.H. while covering the 2016 campaign, and Sidney Powell on Dec. 2, 2020 in Alpharetta, Georgia.  The crowd was shouting "We love you" in the same way they do with Trump and it seemed equally heartfelt.  This was both moving and slightly unnerving, but it was real.  Sidney has a way of just standing straight up and speaking truths in simple declarative sentences that has immense impact.

Is the Democrats' Election Heist 'Too Big to Fail'?  President Trump and Fox News enjoyed a mutually beneficial relationship, until, loyalty already fraying, Fox betrayed Trump on election evening by prematurely calling Arizona for Biden.  Only stalwart reporters such as Mark Levin, Judge Jeanine Pirro, Lou Dobbs, and Sean Hannity remain by Trump's side.  Republican elected officials who retained power are mostly mute.  Although the predicted Blue Wave never materialized as Republicans flipped House seats and Senate control is so close it will only be decided after the results of a Georgia runoff election are known, feckless state governors and attorneys general overseeing election preparations stood idly by as Democrats set up the apparatus for the big election steal.  Republicans in the commonwealth of Pennsylvania were the exception.  Resisting the illegal power grab the Democrats had implemented by a massive mail-in-ballot scheme and extending, by three days, the deadline to vote, Republican state officials appealed to the Supreme Court.

Yes, They Cheat.  We Have to Win Georgia Anyway.  The good news is, Republicans are finally talking about vote fraud!  Going forward, the GOP's sole objectives should be:  1) End mail-in ballots;  2) End early voting;  3) Ensure that the Democrats don't steal the two runoff elections in Georgia on Jan. 5, 2021.

Confused About the Election?  You're Not Alone.  What exactly happened on Nov. 3 may never be determined.  There is zero appetite on either side to really figure this election out for many reasons.  First off, putting doubts in American's heads about a fair election is incredibly poisonous to society.  Second, if our elections look shady, imagine what happens to our standing in the world, and the world's comfort levels with respect to investing in our country.  Third, most traditional politicians on both sides are happy to get Donald Trump out of Washington, and get back to the good old days.  And fourth, the media got the outcome it wanted, Biden won.  For these reasons, anyone who thinks this election was suspicious is labeled a psychopathic, conspiracy-theorist MAGA hillbilly.  So at least we know who we are.

Why traditional masculine attributes still matter on the battlefield.  [Scroll down]  Indeed, just 70 years ago this week, the First Marine Division fought its way into the pages of history with their gallant stand at the Chosin Reservoir in North Korea.  In temperatures as low as minus-30 degrees, the Marines held off some 100,000 Chinese attackers and fought their way in hellish conditions back to the allied lines.  Today, however, we live in a decidedly unheroic age, one in which the traditional masculine attributes of courage, physical strength, and moral fortitude have been disparaged by feminists and soy boys nearly into oblivion.  Dismissed as outdated and derided as "toxic," masculinity and the martial virtues so vital to the maintenance of society and social order have been stuffed into the cultural closet in favor of wishful thinking, politically correct fantasy, and dangerous good intentions.  It seems we're too rational, too sophisticated, too civilized for definitive brutality anymore.

Seven Quotes to Lay Out a Totalitarian America.  [Scroll down]  We have lived through the decades of gradual transition of socialist sentiments and actions in our country, becoming more socialist every day through the transition.  We have seen universities, K-12 school systems, the media, large companies, philanthropic organizations, and other entities transition from idealistic to socialist, largely unnoticed — until now.  Would Biden's administration be a massive socialist revolution into a totalitarian state?  No.  But given what has happened already, it could be the straw that breaks democracy's back.  Our transformation to a totalitarian state must be resisted.  Buckle up and stand tall.  Do not fear Black Lives Matter, Antifa, social media, the press, your school's curricula, your employer, or any of these forces.

The Cunning Plot to Kill Kennedy.  [Scroll down]  The assassination itself had all the earmarks of a classic military ambush, one in which shooters were firing from both the front and back of the president.  It is a virtual certainty that responsibility for the ambush lay with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who had been waging a vicious war against Kennedy practically since the time he assumed office.  While the JCS were experts at preparing military-style ambushes, they lacked the intellectual capability of devising the overall plot and cover-up, given its high level of cunning and sophistication.  That responsibility undoubtedly lay with the CIA, whose top officials were brilliant graduates of Ivy League Schools.  Moreover, practically from its inception the CIA was specializing in the art of state-sponsored assassinations and in how to conceal the CIA's role in them.  To ensure that the role of the Pentagon and the CIA in the Kennedy assassination would be kept secret, they had to figure out a way to shut down the investigation from the start.

Multilateral Dreamin'.  The American people strongly approve of President Trump's emphasis on an "America First" foreign policy, and will not look kindly on re-subordinating America to the establishment's hobby horses.  Trump was elected to end pointless military adventures abroad.  Whatever the establishment might prefer, nobody now is going to send U.S. troops to fight overseas, especially not in the Middle East.  He was elected to be "tough on China."  Returning to business as usual with China is the establishment's top international priority.  But public opinion has so shifted that candidate Biden promised to be even tougher on China.  His administration will have to pretend.

3 things to prepare for when President Trump is declared the winner.  As more evidence floods in that the 2020 elections were rife with an obvious mountain of voter fraud, it's becoming increasingly clear that President Trump is going to be reelected.  The last two weeks we've seen patriots losing hope and progressives celebrating, but we've witnessed many turns of events as momentum now appears to be siding with the President, his legal team, independent attorneys, and the mounting evidence.  There are three things we need to prepare for when President Trump is announced the winner.  That's not to say we need to take it for granted or get complacent, but if we believe truth will prevail, then we know President Trump will prevail.

Republican Business Interests Separate From Sidney Powell.  Within the business part of the GOP there are massive territorial fights amid those who live on the donations from within political campaigns.  The Trump MAGA file is being exploited like a bloody carcass dropped into a pool of piranha.  Once you know how the business end works, then a lot of other stuff makes sense. [...] This is all about who is getting paid by the campaign and RNC.  The Trump campaign isn't going to reimburse Sidney Powell for any expenses, nor is she allowed to make offers of financial payment from the GOP or Trump campaign.  The vultures assembling and protecting their paychecks do not want Powell getting paid, nor do they want any financial liability.  That's all this statement is.  This statement by the Trump Campaign has nothing to do with Donald Trump, it is directly related to those interests who derive financial benefit from the Trump campaign.

'Very strange': Devin Nunes says Democrats lack confidence in Biden victory.  There is something "very strange" about the way Democrats are treating the 2020 election, according to Rep. Devin Nunes.  The California Republican, who is the ranking member on the House Intelligence Committee, said even President-elect Joe Biden and his team are not acting like winners, although they are putting up "a facade" of victory.  "There's a false media narrative that's been created to move us past the election that started essentially election night," he said to the Epoch Times in a recent interview, insisting that House and local races would not have been called if they were so close.

Q Was Right.  After exhaustive meetings with sources in Ukraine, who provided reams of documentary evidence for hours, CDMedia has been exposed to a massive international criminal conspiracy which spans continents and decades.  Q was right.  Our wold is run by a criminal syndicate unlike mankind has ever known.  Global financiers are involved.  Former Presidents of the United States are involved, on both sides of the political aisle.  The uni-party exists.  Media titans are involved.  Silicon Valley is involved.  Our security agencies and most politicians are compromised. [...] This is what President Trump and the Deplorables are up against.  The cabal pulled out all the stops to unseat the Trump presidency which was the only thing standing in the way of their complete power.

Cucker Tarlson sells out.  [Scroll down]  According to Carlson, the country won't heal unless Sidney Powell goes on his show.  [Indeed], even Bill O'Reilly at his zenith was not this insufferable. [...] Powell has better things to do, such as prepare a Supreme Court case.  This is why people give press conferences: so they don't have to explain the same thing over and over again in 10 different interviews.  Carlson knows this.  He is using this refusal to answer His Summons as an excuse to distance himself from the president and his supporters.  You know what would be refreshing?  Having Democrats come on Carlson's show where he would grill them about the living dead voters and 3 AM dumps of 100,000 ballots all marked for Biden.  But booking a Democrat on his show would be difficult because Democrats prefer to work behind the scenes at Fox.  And face it, he is scared.  If Fox dumped O'Reilly who built that time slot, Fox will not hesitate to dump Carlson.  Which explains why Carlson who stood up to the Conservative Establishment 4 years ago has hopped off the Trump Train.

What the Fake News Media Still Hides About Lee Harvey Oswald.  [Scroll down]  For 34 years Markus Wolf was the chief of East Germany's foreign intelligence service, a branch of the STASI with many contacts and operations in Castro's Cuba.  It was the STASI rather than the KGB that undertook the training of Castro's police and intelligence services.  Wolf's autobiography is titled, "Man Without a Face" and subtitled, "The Autobiography of Communism's Greatest Spymaster."  Most intelligence experts agree that the subtitle fits.  Wolf was once asked about the Kennedy assassination and quickly replied.  "Don't ask me — ask Fidel Castro."

Shamalot.  Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what the Kennedys ever did for your country.  Bring the monkey's paw of being telegenic into politics?  Of all the things that the American political system needed, this was the last.  And whatever it was that the Kennedys did, they did most of it a long time ago.  The assassination of John F. Kennedy is almost as distant in time as the assassination of William McKinley was when Kennedy took office.  McKinley, by the way, also had great personal popularity.  And greater political support, having won reelection in 1900 by a margin of almost a million votes out of some 14 million cast.  McKinley's murder by anarchist Leon Czolgosz grieved and shocked the nation (and gave rise to conspiracy theories) the same way Kennedy's murder did.  And yet we didn't endure six subsequent decades of public figures deemed "McKinleyesque."

2020 Election Fraud vs. 2016 Russia Collusion.  [Scroll down]  Robert Mueller did not charge any Americans with collusion or criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia.  The special counsel also considered whether members of the Trump campaign "coordinated," a much lower standard defined as an "agreement, tacit or express," with Russian election interference activities.  They did not.  Everything — everything — else we have been told since the summer of 2016 falls, depending on your conscience and view of humanity, into the realm of lies, falsehoods, propaganda, exaggerations, political manipulation, stupid reporting, fake news, bad judgment, simple bull, or, in the best light, hasty conclusions.  Undeterred by the facts, many in the media — and thus, many like-minded Americans — still insist that Trump-Russia collusion was a real thing.

The Biblical Book of Esther Playing Out Again Today.  [Scroll down]  America is at a crossroads.  Sidney Powell has rightly characterized the next two months as the most important in the history of America.  The context of Queen Esther's "trial" of courage was really the age-old but simple struggle between good and evil.  So is this one.  It is the good of preserving the American constitutional structure and heritage of individual freedom and responsibility under God versus the evil of a Deep State ruling class determined to impose godless, tyrannical socialism on America.  Here's to American Esthers everywhere, and to the judges who will hear the cries of the American people that are not really about legal arguments per se; they are about heartfelt anguish as to whether the American rule of law can still stand as a bulwark for preservation of their exceptional nation from the evil that seeks to destroy it.  And they are pleas to see the Hamans of today outed and appropriately dealt with.

Transition marks precarious period for Russia and Hunter Biden probes.  With the conclusion of the election, Washington is now in that precarious period known as the lame duck.  Unlike the wounded waterfowl, lame duck presidents tend to be more active in the waning days of their terms.  From those midnight judicial appointments of John Adams to those last minute executive orders from Barack Obama, presidents often cement policies or officials before the chiming of the constitutional clock.  This year, however, it could be prosecutors who feel the greatest pressure to move.  Months before the election, many Democrats demanded that the Justice Department refrain from bringing additional indictments or releasing new information in either the Russia investigation or the Hunter Biden scandal.  Andrew Weissmann, who worked for special counsel Robert Mueller, told prosecutors not to assist the Justice Department to prevent some harmful disclosures for then candidate Joe Biden.  However, despite pressure from President Trump, the Justice Department under Attorney General William Barr did appear to hold the line before the election as is tradition.

Pardon My Perplexity, But Why Should We Be Gracious?  It is for me truly mind-boggling that after the Democrats and their allies behaved maliciously to undermine Trump's presidency, his devotees are expected to act like kindly losers.  I've heard from Republican leaders that Trump should "graciously concede," although in the meantime, he may be allowed to investigate the election results with his lawyers pro forma.  One might also infer that Trump lost in what is imagined to have been a fraud-free election.  Somehow the fact that until now not nearly enough patently false ballots have turned up to change the election results means that the electoral process was entirely on the up and up.  Unfortunately, too many irregularities occurred, which this website has documented, to permit such confidence.  Perhaps our congratulators are scared that the new administration will follow Alexandria Ocasio Cortez's exhortation, quickly seconded by neoconservative columnist Jennifer Rubin at the Washington Post, that those who openly supported Trump should be ridiculed and professionally isolated.  In Germany, such a fate awaits anyone in public life who is known to have voted for the Alternative für Deutschland, the only significant non-leftist party in the German parliamentary spectrum.

Republicans, You Better Be Ready For What's Coming In Georgia.  The left has a history of attacking Republicans, but just because President Donald J. Trump may not win re-election doesn't mean the lies about the GOP are going to stop.  Republican leaders around the nation, especially in Georgia, need to step up to the plate, stand up to defend the GOP from Democrat shenanigans, and stand for the integrity of U.S. elections.  The upcoming Senate runoffs between incumbent Republican Sen. David Perdue and his challenger Democrat Jon Ossoff, as well as GOP Sen. Kelly Loeffler and Democratic candidate Raphael Warnock in Georgia, are critical to the GOP's ability to keep the Senate majority.  Democrats are coming for them, with every trick in the book and a whole lot of campaign cash.  Millions of dollars were already poured into the Democrat candidates' campaigns to challenge the Republican incumbents for Georgia's two Senate seats.  Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has already signaled Democrats' intentions to use these challengers in Georgia to "change the world" with their leftist policies.

Why Scott Adams of Dilbert Fame And I Say Trump Wins This Thing - Bigly.  [Scroll down]  The 290 Electoral vote total includes 20 from Pennsylvania.  There is a ton of fraud in that state and you are seeing all kinds of reports of ballots coming in at 4:00 AM and all that.  Skip it.  That does not matter.  Focus people on the Justice Alito Supreme Court Order.  Justice Alito, not a man with whom to trifle, is in charge of day-to-day activities for a group of states and Pennsylvania is one of them.  The Justice told Pennsylvania to "segregate" any vote that came in after 8:00 PM on election night.  You will recall, DJ was winning bigly (a Scott Adams word) at that point.  Around midnight, Texas time, the Pennsylvania vote counters stopped counting.  Then the truckloads of new ballots came in, reportedly voting for Biden and no other candidate for any lower office.  The Supreme Court ruled, sort of, in this case already.  They said, with 4 Justices led by Justice Alito that ONLY the Pennsylvania legislature can make or modify voting rules.  Read the opinions — this thing is NOT going to go to Biden.

Does Anyone Care about the Truth Anymore?  Ferreting out political and historical truth from the welter of partisan voices and official disinformation, so far as this is possible, is no easy task.  Not many of us are capable or desirous of doing so.  This is perhaps the major debit in a prosperous democratic polity, many of whose citizens, like pampered children, have grown spoiled and lazy.  Common sense is needed, along with moral fortitude and the willingness to dig for documentary sources and artifacts that are not easily falsified.  One cannot allow the media to do one's homework for one but must instead subject what one is told to believe to hard scrutiny and diligent research.  This process is not only an epistemic necessity but also a moral demand.

12 Ways For Trump To Bomb The Battlefield While Biden Claims The Presidency.  President Trump is right to refuse to concede the 2020 election until every legal vote has been counted and allegations of significant fraud have been fairly investigated.  His voters deserve and need to know if we were beaten fair and square.  Otherwise, Democrats are poisoning the nation's political well and ensuring Republicans never wield power at the federal level again after having established that Republicans will not fight fraud.  Since the president's team has begun releasing increasingly good evidence of large-scale voter fraud in key states, the tide may yet turn again.  At the same time, the same media-Democrat complex whose lies have been running the country for four years — think Russian collusion, impeachment, and now endless COVID lockdowns unhinged from science and prudence — typically prevail through their well-amplified echo chamber of lies that operates key institutions Republicans have conceded for the last century.

American Pravda: the JFK Assassination, Part I - What Happened?  Summarizing a half-century of conspiracy research, the [David] Talbot and [James W.] Douglass books together provide a wealth of persuasive evidence that elements of organized crime, individuals with CIA connections, and anti-Castro Cubans were probably participants in the assassination plot.  Oswald seems to have been working with various anti-Communist groups and also had significant connections to U.S. intelligence, while his purported Marxism was merely a very thin disguise.  With regard to the assassination itself, he was exactly the "patsy" he publicly claimed to be, and very likely never fired a single shot.  Meanwhile, Jack Ruby had a long history of ties to organized crime, and surely killed Oswald to shut his mouth.  Many others may have suffered a similar fate. [...] Dorothy Kilgallen was a nationally-syndicated newspaper columnist and television personality, and she managed to wrangle an exclusive interview with Jack Ruby, later boasting to her friends that she would break the JFK assassination case wide open in her new book, producing the biggest scoop of her career.  Instead, she was found dead in her Upper East Side townhouse, having apparently succumbed to an overdose of alcohol and sleeping pills, with both the draft text and the notes to her Jack Ruby chapter missing.

Fox News pays the price for betraying its viewership.  Under Roger Ailes, Fox News was reliably conservative.  When he left, and when Rupert Murdoch handed the reins over to his sons James and Lachlan, things started getting shaky.  James, the fiery leftist, only left Fox this July.  Now Lachlan, who is married to a fiery leftist, is at the helm, helped by Paul Ryan, the RINO rodent, among others on the Board.  With this leadership, while voters have rightly suspected creeping NeverTrumperism in the newsroom for some time now, it all came to a head with this election.  Things went pretty sour for viewers when Chris Wallace turned the first presidential debate into a three-way affair, with Wallace siding with Biden.  Nevertheless, viewers were willing to give Fox another chance on election night.  Fox failed that test.  The kill switch for many viewers was that Fox News hired a hard leftist to run its election desk on Election Night.  Predictably, Arnon Mishkin called the race in ways only a leftist could love.  With hundreds of thousands of votes outstanding, he called Arizona for Biden.  Meanwhile, he refused to call obviously pro-Trump states such as Texas and Alaska.  Things have gotten worse since then.

The collapse of American progressivism.  Had it not been for the polls predicting a landslide, Joe Biden's victory would look very respectable — both in terms of the popular vote and Electoral College margin.  At the start of the year, when the economy was strong and Trump's favorability was rising, most Democratic strategists would have bitten their hand off for such a result.  They view their results in Congress, however, as a great disappointment.  Countless Democratic incumbents fell in the House where they had expected to gain seats and the party may only make a net gain of one seat in the Senate.  Biden's victory on a centrist platform and his refusal to accept the more extreme parts of the progressive agenda has left organizations like Justice Democrats in a bind.  Many had predicted that only the likes of Bernie Sanders could mobilize enough voters to achieve victory.

SD Gov. Noem: 'We Gave Al Gore 37 Days to Run the Process' — Trump Voter Deserve Same Consideration.  Governor Kristi Noem (R-SD) noted Sunday [11/8/2020] on ABC's "This Week" that during the 2000 election, former Vice President Al Gore was given 37 days to run the process of legal challenges to the election.  Therefore, she said we should "afford the 70.6 million Americans that voted for President Trump the same consideration."  [Video clip]

Meet the New Consensus Coalition That Wants to Rule Your Life.  What will life be like when Trump, that bright orange "Sun King" around which all social and cultural commentary revolves, finally goes out?  His legacy will be examined by historians, and for all the talk of hyperpolarization and harsh rhetoric surrounding him, perhaps he ought to be best remembered as a unifier — unifying his most loyal partisans, certainly, but also bringing together a motley anti-Trump coalition comprising the FBI, the CIA, Wall Street firms such as Goldman Sachs, Amazon, Google, China, nonprofits and nongovernmental organizations and their Bill Gates-tier sugar daddies, the NBA, Bill Kristol and fellow Bush-adjacent NeverTrump Republicans, and every other company or public figure looking to set aside their differences to #Resist Trump.  Talk about strange bedfellows!  Even if one can't stomach Trump, the alternative entails aligning oneself alongside these variegated, surplus value-appropriating creatures of neoliberal capitalism.

Lincoln Project's delusional Never-Trumpers think they can lead the GOP in post-Trump resurrection.  It was highly predictable that the Never-Trump grifters at the Lincoln Project would look to come back into the fold should President Trump be defeated, though they may have miscalculated how conservatives would respond to members who sold out to cash in on the left's quest for Trump-hating Republicans.  That assessment taking the huge leap to assume they had principles to begin with.  Former Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele, who was quick to turn on the party and the president after vacating his seat, said in an appearance on MSNBC that the Lincoln Project "and other Republicans and former Republicans out there will continue the work of trying to resolve internally and resurrect the party in a way that it can become a governing majority in the future."

How Far Should the Republican Senate Go in Supporting Biden's Agenda?  The calls for Donald Trump to accept his election defeat grow louder with each passing hour.  But Trump still has some legal cards to play and we shouldn't expect him to concede until every pathway to victory has been blocked — no matter how dubious his claims.  But there are calls for Republicans to submit on all fronts — bow to Biden's triumph and, "for the good of the country," swear fealty to the new president by giving him what he wants in Congress.  Biden will have no trouble getting most of his agenda items through the House, but what about the Senate?  Republicans probably won't know if they've maintained their Senate majority until the two Senate races in Georgia that are headed to a January 5 runoff have been decided.

The Editor says...
That's soon enough, since Biden won't be the POTUS until January 20 — if he is sworn in at all.

The Presidential Election, Corruption, and Deception.  We are living in an unprecedented season in American history, one of massive consequence for the nation as a whole and for conservative Christians in particular.  (All the more does this hold true for charismatic Christians, as I'll explain shortly.)  Please allow me to lay out the stark, contrasting possibilities.  I've written about this briefly in the last few days, but I'll expand on things more fully here.  On the natural, non-spiritual side, either Donald Trump has pulled off the political feat of a lifetime, convincing tens of millions of Americans to reject the results of a fairly contested election.  Or Trump is the victim of the most massive electoral fraud in our history, the exposing of which will shake our nation to its foundations.  On the spiritual side, either a multitude of prophetic voices have been jointly misled, prophesying in total unison that Trump will serve a second term.  Or the words of these prophetic voices will prove true, shocking the nation with the reality of God.  Are these not very high stakes?

The Last Bush Betrayal.  Republicans fought Gore's attempt to steal an election by supporting this drunk brain-damaged cokehead.  How does he repay us?  By calling Biden "President-elect" and congratulating him.  No Bush can be permitted to ever win office again.

This Isn't Just the Theft of an Election, This Is a Message to All of Us.  Over the past week, we've witnessed the theft of an election.  Not merely the sneaking theft of an election that is the stock-in-trade of the Democrat party.  The kind of election that we are used to seeing in Democrat strongholds where there just "happens" to be more votes cast in a precinct than there are registered voters.  Or the "finding" of missing votes that propels a mouth-breathing, room-temperature-IQ has-been performer into the Senate.  Or the underhanded spreading about of cash that carried a key jurisdiction in a presidential race; here what we've witnessed is a blatant, above-board, in-your-face theft of an election.  It is cheating that is designed to be seen.  It is cheating that is intended to send a message.  What purpose would this serve, you ask.  Why would anyone openly cheat?  Isn't the purpose of cheating to win but let the other rube think you did so legitimately?  Easy.  They want to show you that they can make you do what they want, based upon arguments they don't even believe, and there is [nothing] you can do about it.

Deplorables Don't Riot.  For months, the media has warned us that a narrow Joe Biden victory in the presidential election could lead to civil war.  President Donald Trump would refuse to accept the result and his supporters would resort to violence.  Well, the first part seems right; Trump is clinging on to the bitterest of ends.  The second part, however, is wrong — so far, at least.  There have been no outbreaks of Trumpist violence.  The Proud Boys are not marauding the suburbs and 'pivot counties' with AR-15s.  Buildings are not being set on fire.  Yes, there have been entirely (not just 'largely') peaceful protests.  In Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, a 'Stop the Steal' rally was held to demand an 'audit' of the vote.  'We're not asking for much,' Rep. Scott Perry told the crowd.  'We want the ballots and the votes that are counted to be legal, to be valid.  We want to have a postmark on them either on or before election, not after Election Day.'

Went to Bed in America, Woke Up in a Banana Republic.  On November 3, we all went to bed looking at those red-or-blue maps of the states, more or less secure in the knowledge that President Trump was on course to win a historic victory.  A massive Republican wave was giving Trump a 3.6 point lead in Florida — by Florida standards, a landslide.  Other states were coming along — could Trump really do much worse in Arizona, or Pennsylvania, or Michigan?  And so, on Tuesday night, we fell asleep in America.  The next morning, we woke up in a banana republic.  Take it from someone who grew up in the Soviet Union, and who knows what democracy is and isn't.  Watching democracy shrivel and die right in front of our eyes is a surreal experience.

Election post-mortem.  First, most of the media and pollsters are both biased and incompetent.  This is a very serious problem.  If people don't trust the media, and they don't, for good reasons, where are they supposed to get the news?  If they don't get the news, on what basis are they supposed to vote?  Second, assuming the current results hold after court challenges, Joe Biden will be a weak president because he's a weak man.  He's incompetent, unprincipled, inane, slightly senile, spineless and pretty shady. [...] Fourth, in the same vein, censoring, silencing and cancelling people for political incorrectness is not persuasive.  It instead illustrates the weakness of your position.  Fifth, street violence also isn't persuasive.  It may feel good to vent your anger, but recognize that the cost is to discredit your position.  "Burn it all down" is not a political position.

2020: This is Why Truth Matters.  Many have observed the steady deterioration over time of our moral underpinnings.  If we assess the so-called seven cultural mountains, we are not encouraged.  Schools do not teach kids how to think but what to think and chastise those who get out of line.  Our arts and entertainment encourages hedonism over honor, our media chooses propaganda over truth, social media businesses entrusted with promoting our First Amendment rights censor them, and the evidence of government corruption within our agencies to include our FBI and Justice Department is stunning.  It is quite possible [...] that we've slipped below the minimum threshold of integrity to keep our nation intact.  The danger of this is far greater than any virus.  We know in various degrees about the corrupt intent to disrupt this administration.  Attorney General William Barr may be a good man, but his lack of production in addressing this threat may be the greatest failure of our government.  The wheels of justice may move slowly, but not necessarily so.  This cancerous threat of treason has now metastasized.  The integrity of our election is now infected.  There has always been voter fraud, but evidence suggests that it has never been close to this level.  The vital connection between the will of the people and their desired representatives is now in jeopardy.

You've Got to Keep the Faith.  You know, Biden's out there running around talking about he's gonna be president for everybody.  No, he won't.  This is the most partisan political party I have ever seen it constituted as in my lifetime, the Democrat Party.  They are not a party for all the people.  What's happening in these vote recounts, what's happening in the resolution of this election is proof that they are not what they claim and that Biden isn't what he claims.  He will not be president of all the people.  Nancy Pelosi is not Speaker of the House for all people, and they never intend to be.

Trump Wins Re-election! Now, the Hard Part.  At this point in the chaos, we know one thing for sure:  President Trump is still the president, and that he won re-election.  Any number of warnings from Twitter or claims to the contrary from "official sources" in the media can't undermine his claims.  In the final analysis, according to the Constitution, electors in the Electoral College vote for the president.  This fact is critical in the days and weeks ahead.  In short, the president is not elected by Twitter or the media.  He is not even elected by "the people."  He is elected by electors picked by state legislators.  Faced with evidence of election fraud, the states can pick electors who will vote for Trump, the legitimate president and legitimate winner.  None of this is a mystery.  This is the way the system works.

The Party of Russia Hysteria Can Shut Up About 'Delegitimizing' Elections.  The media and Democrats are really, really mad.  I know that's not necessarily unusual, but this time it's because they believe Donald Trump is "delegitimizing" the results of the 2020 election.  Of course, we don't even have all the results, nor do we know that Trump has lost at this point.  Arizona continues to surprise, with the President keeping pace for what he would need to flip the state.  Regardless, seeing the consternation among the pundit class this evening over Trump's most recent presser, where he complained about possible fraud, I was struck by the lack of self-awareness.  I'm old enough to remember, because I'm more than four years old, when the left and their media allies spent the entire Trump first term proclaiming that Russia stole the 2016 election with magical Facebook memes.  If there was ever a group that should sit this discussion out, it's these conspiratorial partisans.

A Defunct Republic.  [James] Burnham defined managerialism as the centralization of society in which the distinction between the state and the economy is eliminated, the separation of ownership and control is effected, and, most importantly, power — real power — rests in the hands of "managers."  If it seems there is little room for republicanism or constitutionalism in this scheme, that's because there isn't.  "America still has a written constitution, but it is nearly impossible, theoretically or politically, to comprehend the distinction between the government and the Constitution," John Marini writes.  "The theoretical foundations of social compact theory have been so undermined as to make constitutionalism obsolete as a political theory."  Demystified, the "managers" of our post-constitutional cruise through the truculent waters at the end of history are business executives, technicians, bureaucrats, journalists, administrators; the whole host of technically trained experts who constitute the credentialed class which produces nothing and owns little but without whom mass society would not function.

Why shouldn't conservatives be enraged by Biden's win?  One big difference from four years ago is that the GOP will probably control the Senate.  The 2016 election left Democrats on the outs in both chambers of Congress.  But the president exercises enormous power even when his party doesn't control the Senate.  He runs foreign policy and can direct important aspects of domestic policy through fiat.  He can populate the executive branch with leftists who will undo the good, conservative work of Trump's appointees and create new left-liberal mischief on a large scale.  I hope and expect the Senate to obstruct the confirmation of many of these nominees, as the Dems did after 2016, even though they lacked a Senate majority.

With Diversity Gains, the Grand Old Party is Becoming the New Face Party.  House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) visited Lou Dobbs' Fox Business show on Wednesday, praising the gains that have been made by Republicans in the House and the Senate.  Without fanfare, posturing or virtue signaling, the GOP is showing itself to be more diverse and inclusive than the other side.  Here is the list of new additions to the Republican House that have increased our minority, other-abled, and female representation: [...]

What you can do to stop the electoral coup.  It seems that virtually all the battleground states — Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, Nevada, and Arizona, have GOP legislatures.  This is a factor that has escaped most other commentators, and certainly seems like a game changer.  These worthies have, up until this point "been sitting on their butts," as Morris puts it.  Most of them are out of session and doing whatever it is politicians do when they aren't busy spending the people's money.  But it seems that this emergency, in which the standard model of the American republic is in danger of being undermined by what amounts to a criminal gang, is the kind of challenge that legislatures exist to deal with, no less than a flood or a hurricane.  Some of them (though not all — PA doesn't) in fact appoint the electors, which may be of crucial importance.  Morris points out that most state legislators get a handful of calls a session, so getting twenty in a single day would have an impact.  And what of a hundred or two in a single day?  This is something that is easily possible, particularly as involves enraged, and determined Trumpers.

A New Correlation of Forces.  The 2016 loss might have been accounted as a lucky punch, but 2020 was a set-piece maximum effort by progressives backed by money, gangs, social censorship, and deep state support on a massive scale; yet it didn't move the needle.  It should have impressed, rather it showed the limits to the power of the American elite.  It was the most anticipated, polled, forecasted, and analyzed U.S. presidential election in history and yet the expensive estimates proved to be worthless, a massive intelligence failure that paralleled Neil Ferguson's ill-fated projections of the coronavirus pandemic.  The limits of elite prescience of over complex phenomena were demonstrated for all to see.  The embarrassing surprise cast doubt over ambitious progressive projects based on social, biological, or climate engineering since the requisite degree of "scientific" certitude simply did not exist to predict even in a mundane election.

Why is anyone surprised at the Democrats cheating on the vote count?  This catastrophe didn't sneak up on us.  Just one example: there were huge red flags on ballot harvesting 2 years ago in California when so many red districts flipped to blue.  Did anyone do anything about that?  Did no one anticipate loosey-goosey rules for voting to enable cheating with a wink and a nod?  No one saw that coming?  Really?  Did anyone do anything to forestall this?  Here's a bulletin: it's easier to prevent cheating and illegality than it is to correct it once the damage is done.  The Supreme Court isn't likely to come to Trump's aid.  Originalist justices, whom we now are blessed with in abundance, will defer to the states when it comes to enforcing laws written by the states.  No ballots are likely to be tossed or added.  It's over, folks.

2020 election is not really about a choice between Trump vs.  Biden.  In traditional presidential campaigns, the two major parties offer contrasting ideas and policies.  The Democratic and Republican candidates barnstorm the nation to make their cases.  Not this year.  Democratic nominee Joe Biden is more or less a virtual candidate, mostly communicating from home via Zoom.  He offers few detailed alternatives to the first four years of the Trump administration.  Instead, Biden is running on the idea that Donald Trump caused the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting economic recession, and that he's responsible for violence in the streets.

Election night reveals three disturbing facts.  Election night revealed a few disturbing items that should trouble freedom-loving Americans.  First that the race is even this tight speaks to disturbing number of Americans who are woefully uninformed.  Second, Fox News has gone over to the dark side, or, rather, the left.  And third, the level of coordination to make this race close is stunning.  That the senile and corrupt Joe Biden could finish so strong speaks to either the gullibility or unseriousness of far too many Americans.  Biden obviously has mental acuity issues and has a history of corruption, but that did not seem to be a big deal to the Americans who voted for him.  I guess the probability of more lockdowns are lost on a number of Americans who are more frightened by the Wuhan virus than the probability of America becoming a socialist, if not communist, nation under a Biden presidency.  Speaking of a Biden presidency, if he were to win, odds are he would not finish out his first term.  Vice President Kamala Harris would become president, a person who dropped out of the Democrat primaries before a single vote was cast based on her lack of voter support, and a politician who is one of the most leftist senators.

This Is Not the End.  [Scroll down]  The Trump Administration accomplished many things, but perhaps most importantly it revealed how deep the rabbit hole now goes:  the fight is both within the federal government and without, and a cancerous corruption has penetrated the core of many of our political and cultural institutions.  What we are up against now is not just a 24/7 propaganda machine dedicated to enforcing recondite woke doctrines inside and outside of our hearts and minds.  Our enemies have moved beyond that to visions of a virtualized world in which good jobs, big families, and strong churches are zapped away, where peons crowd into pods and hook up to holograms of censored news and uncensored porn.  We are going to have to resist all that with everything we have, and fast.

Red Mirage?  [Scroll down]  We are aware that Democrats have already cut television ads they are prepared to deploy to further cement the 'Red Mirage' misinformation, seeking to convince people that all Joe Biden would need for victory is more time, extending well beyond Election Day.  At the same time, we fully anticipate that Democrats will be in court arguing to extend deadlines for accepting and counting votes mailed and received well past deadlines enacted by individual state laws.  Americans should remember that Biden has assembled a massive team of lawyers who will try to loosen election integrity so they can steal this election, and also recall that Hillary Clinton advised Biden not to concede defeat 'under any circumstances.'  The last gasp of the Biden campaign will be ugly and it will be ruthless.

October Surprise:  This Race Is Over.  [Scroll down]  In fact, there's no better source of actionable data than a Trump rally, because everyone who wants to attend has to provide contact information to get a free ticket.  The campaign then uses this data to turn every event into a force-multiplier.  First, each rally reaches millions of voters live at the venue, on cable TV, and on YouTube.  Then millions more engage on Facebook and Twitter.  After the rally, a campaign team targets those who attended with digital ads that recipients can retarget to their contacts as look-alike campaigns on social media.  The party also mines the same data for useful insights and information it can convert into turnout.  Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel noted that 45 percent of the attendees at an October New Hampshire rally were not registered Republicans and 20 percent did not vote in 2016.  Who would wait in line for hours to see a Trump rally in October and then not vote for Trump in November?

High Noon in America:  Will You Fight or Hide?  [Scroll down]  President Trump faces the same overwhelming odds.  The political establishment, the Deep State, practically the entire media, academe, unions, minorities, environmentalists, foreign nations, and special interests of all stripes have piled on, outraged that the president would actually stand up for ordinary Americans.  They thought Trump's promise to "drain the swamp" was just words — the usual political rhetoric that would be forgotten as soon as the candidate took office.  That's what Joe Biden — "friend of the working man" — has been doing for 47 years.  But President Trump is not a typical politician, and the establishment hate him for it because he exposes what they are.  The question is whether the American people will back the president by getting out to vote.

America Waking Up to Vaccine Dangers.  The fight to expose the dangers and controversies surrounding vaccines, and to protect health freedom, is being won, HighWire chief Del Bigtree told The New American magazine's Alex Newman at the Red Pill Expo.  The tide of public opinion is shifting dramatically, Bigtree said.  Even the establishment media is reluctantly being forced to admit this.  And the ongoing scandals around the coronavirus COVID19 vaccine are adding even more scrutiny to the industry.  "Now the world is watching the sausage being made," Bigtree said.  [Video clip]

In Pennsylvania, Undecided Voters Are Torn Between Faith And A Party That Was Once A Way Of Life.  It's common for American families to transmit political values from generation to generation, alongside religion, eye color, and heart disease.  In eastern Pennsylvania, it's not that simple.  When working out how to vote, the issues and platform are important, but so is how dad voted, how grandma would have voted.  All of this comes into the booth with the people we spoke to, and for them, the Democratic Party isn't just a choice, it's the working-class, it's the union, it's the grandparents, and until some time recently they can't quite put their fingers on, it was Catholic and it was pro-life.  In 2020, they see full well that something is very wrong.

Liberty is the Key Issue of the US 2020 Election.  Over many decades, the United States has become an oligarchy, a government in which a small group exercises control especially for corrupt and selfish purposes.  The oligarchy is primarily composed of the Democrat Party, the media, academia, the permanent federal bureaucracy, and the multinational interests that provide its financial support.  Republicans like Mitt Romney are also members of the oligarchy as well as the greedy political operatives, who profit from candidates like him.  Such Republicans falsely claim to be putting "country over party," but are actually putting oligarchy over democracy.  They do so because of their private dislike for Donald Trump or simply for their own power and profit, often both.

Logically indisputable reasons why President Trump should be reelected.  Reelection is the only way of restoring the conditions that Trump created that eliminated unemployment prior to the onset of the COVID-19 crisis.  This, coupled to his near-elimination of illegal immigration (against fierce Democratic resistance), generated greater percentage income growth amongst the lowest 20 percent of income-earners than among the top 10 percent — a noteworthy start on addressing the universal income-disparity problem.  Only a Trump victory will ensure retention of the present relatively low personal and corporate income-tax rates and the avoidance of insane, highly damaging, and counterproductive shutdowns in cowardly terror of the coronavirus, which only mortally threatens 1 percent of the population, who can be isolated and protected.

The Justified Shooting of Walter Wallace Jr..  [Scroll down]  "We cannot accept that in this country a mental health crisis ends in death," said the Biden-Harris campaign in a statement.  We disagree, as should any decent citizen who expects law enforcement officers to leave their families every day knowing that they might not come back.  That job, however, mandates only that they accept the risk of death, not that they forfeit the right to defend their lives.  Was Wallace in the throes of a mental health crisis?  Video of the shooting leaves little doubt.  Only a deranged person would charge, knife in hand, at two gun-wielding police officers yelling at him to drop his weapon.  Sane people know what the outcome of such an attack will be: an entirely inevitable and justifiable hail of bullets.  But mental illness is not a defense for violence.  It does not excuse killing police, or beating spouses, or any of the crimes for which presumably mentally ill individuals like Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein are rightly condemned.  Mental illness may mitigate the sentence for a crime, but this was an exercise in the right to self-defense, not due process.

Please Stop Telling Cops to Shoot Suspects in the Leg.  [Scroll down]  As a matter of law, discharging a firearm is the police's absolute last resort.  Employing a lethal weapon constitutes the use of deadly force, irrespective of outcome or intent.  The only valid reason to do so is when officers reasonably believe there is imminent danger of serious physical injury or death.  Despite Hollywood depictions to the contrary, tactics such as warning shots, vehicle disabling fire, and targeting fleeing subjects who pose no active threat are not an ordinary part of law enforcement's repertoire.

Rush Limbaugh Sends Stirring Appeal to America as Amy Coney Barrett Is Confirmed.  Rush Limbaugh has been delivering a consistent, convincing conservative message to Americans for more than 30 years — but his pitch Monday night was in a class by itself. [...] Every American election boils down to divergent views of the country's future, of course.  That's what living in a democratic republic is all about.  But the 2020 election is different, Limbaugh said.  "We're not going to have the kind of country everybody thinks we're going to have.  This is not the old 'Republicans versus Democrats,' where we all have the same objectives, just different philosophies on how to get there.  "They do not have those objectives anymore.  Their purpose is to erase the Constitution, start over rewriting it, eliminating the concept of 'the citizen has rights which prevail over government.'  "It's serious, and it's scary, and we don't have a choice.  You have to get out there and vote Trump."

Sorry, there will be no return to normalcy under Joe Biden.  As the presidential campaign enters its final phase, one of the messages of the Biden campaign is that putting him, a 47-year veteran of national politics, into the White House will return us to something approaching normal.  With Biden in charge, all the Trump craziness will expire, and things will be safe, sane and familiar.  In fact, there's no chance of this happening.  If Biden wins, things won't go back to "normal."  You probably won't even hear less from Donald Trump.  And in a lot of areas, like foreign policy, it turns out the establishment's version of normal wasn't all that normal anyway.  Many of my lefty friends want Biden to win not so much over policy as because they have a visceral reaction to President Donald Trump.  They hate the sight of his face, the sound of his voice, even the mention of his name.  Electing Biden, they expect, will sweep Trump off the national stage.  But will it?

The Editor says...
Donald Trump won't disappear from the newspapers at the end of his second term.  He will continue to tweet as long as Twitter lets him.  He's good for the news business.  They can't ignore him.

China is America's enemy but Joe Biden's friend.  The China Virus is reported to have killed over 230,000 Americans.  China fentanyl, a synthetic opioid, is a major cause of the drug overdose deaths of over 70,000 Americans each year.  Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid that is 80 [to] 100 times stronger than morphine.  But Democrats and their media lapdogs do not blame China.  Instead, the Democrats and the media blame President Trump for his efforts to combat the China virus and China fentanyl, and worse, the media protect Joe Biden by refusing to report and cover the New York Post stories that reveal China's payments to the Bidens.  China failed to notify the world in December 2019, and specifically our country, that the coronavirus (China virus), which started in Wuhan, had spread.  China failed to stop travel from Wuhan to Europe and other parts of the world.

Will Changes to American Life Become Permanent?  The coronavirus, widespread quarantines, an unprecedented self-induced recession, and unchecked rioting, looting, and protesting — all in a presidential election year — are radically disrupting American habits and behavior.  Rents, home prices, and office occupancy rates in major cities, especially on the two coasts, are dropping fast.  Techies and young professionals have discovered that they can work from home without paying sky-high housing costs in order to be close to the office.  Those more fortunate wonder why they should get bogged down with commutes and urban traffic — or navigate city sidewalks amid homelessness, crime, racial tensions, and urban unrest — when they can make as much money while staying distant in quieter landscapes. [...] Why are Amazon and Walmart booming while smaller businesses are going broke?  Largely because home delivery better serves those who are barricaded at home, terrified both of the virus and government reaction to it.

Do the Chinese Own Joe Biden?  Americans will need to come to grips with a mounting, deadly serious crisis.  The Democrat nominee for the presidency appears saturated with corruption, and worse — yes, there's a worse here — he's compromised himself to foreign powers, one of which — the People's Republic of China (PRC) — is rightly regarded as an enemy of the U.S.  Sly Vlad Putin and whoever runs the Ukraine owns Joe Biden, too.  Russia and the Ukraine having the goods on Biden is bad enough, but China is the U.S.'s principal rival for global dominance.  The blackmailing of a President Joe Biden is a chilling prospect.  Biden as president imperils the nation in ways never experienced before.  What does this mean to the Sino-American rivalry?  It means that with Biden blackmailed and in the White House, the Chinese may never fire a shot to gain hegemony over the U.S. — the domination that tyrant Xi Jingping dreams about.

It's starting to look ugly for Democrats.  How long before their candidate goes completely off the wall and is no longer able to be protected by the accommodating media?  Biden has already twice repeatedly claimed to nationwide audiences that he's running for a Senate seat.  His behavior to both fans and interviewers has increasingly shown his mean side.  He's ready to implode under the pressure.  In addition, Trump's almost miraculous recovery from the coronavirus and the massive crowds cheering him on at his open-air rallies indicate another 2016-like disaster for the left.  Leftists know it.  And this frightens them.  Throw in the exposure of Hunter's exploits that have his dad's fingerprints all over the scandals that are slowly leaking out and raising the awareness to those who have yet to cast their ballots.  The laughably rigged "polls" reminiscent of those in 2016 are fading in relevance.

The Libertarian Betrayal.  Back in the day when some of us were uneasy both with GOP preaching on social issues and with Democrat statism, the libertarians seemed to offer a sensible place in between.  I also remember having the impression that, even if you disagreed with them on some issues, at least they were ideologically consistent, which meant that they were principled.  But then I met some libertarians.  I liked and respected a few.  But others proved to be world-class oddballs, misfits, potheads, and crackpots.  If they weren't hatching plans for independent countries built on abandoned oil rigs, they were writing mad, elaborate political manifestos that seemed to have zero to do with liberty.

Trump Is the Integrity Candidate.  It is now clear from intelligence declassifications — now temporarily taking the place of indictments by the special counsel on the origins of the Trump-Russia investigation — that the 2016 Democratic presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton, knew that she was transmitting reports compiled by Russian intelligence agents and transmitted via former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele.  These were presented to the U.S. intelligence and justice communities and ultimately to the public through the media as hard intelligence evidence of treasonable conduct by her opponent Donald Trump.  The solid evidence of these facts is now in the public domain.  Yet the Trump-hating media dismiss it all as an insane conspiracy theory.  The special prosecutor, John Durham, was supposed to enable the voters to make an informed decision this autumn.  Instead, he is dawdling along at his own pace — enhancing the possibility of the election of a regime that will as a first priority try to sweep the whole ghastly outrage under the rug yet again.  This administration was hobbled for the first 60 percent of its term with an investigation that should never have taken place, [...]

Do you want a Trump or Biden economy?  When you strip away the media noise, the fundamental question is: do you want a Trump or Biden economy in 2021 and beyond?  Thankfully, both men have records in leading the country so the question isn't a speculative one.  Additionally, given that the states are experiencing dramatically different post-pandemic economic recoveries, we can see what a Trump economy is doing under conservative leadership and policies compared to what a Biden economy is doing under progressive leadership and policies.  As the accompanying chart vividly shows, 14 out of the top 16 strongest economic recoveries are occurring in Republican-led states with conservative policies, whereas 12 out of the bottom 16 weakest economic recoveries are occurring in Democratic-led states with progressive policies.

Yelp Cannot Help Itself.  [Scroll down]  It's no secret that Silicon Valley is doing all it can to make sure Donald Trump loses on November 3.  They feel they did not do enough to prevent his victory in 2016, and they won't make the same mistake this time.  It is not only plausible, but nearly a mathematical certainty, that Yelp's BARBA will be abused to accuse any Trump-supporting business owners of being "racist," however this is defined.  Given BLM's close relationship with Antifa, an idea that is somehow capable of burning stuff to the ground, it's not a stretch to see Yelp as another front in the radical Left's war on everything that stands in its way.

Nobel Peace Prize is beyond a joke and now a mark of shame.  This year's winner of the Nobel Peace Prize is a notorious scandal-ridden organization, guilty of heinous crimes for many years.  Instead of recognizing the magnificent achievement of President Trump and Jared Kushner in bringing together leading Arab states and Israel, which is the very obvious thing to do if peace-making is to be recognized, the 5 members of the Nobel peace Prize Committee — Norwegian politicians appointed by that country's parliament, the Storing — have disgraced themselves and killed any remaining credibility and prestige the prize once carried.

Russiagate Hoax Mastermind Must Be Exposed.  In the bureaucratic struggle to declassify Russiagate-related documents before the Nov. 3 elections and help ensure they aren't buried forever, some valuable nuggets have just been partially unearthed by the Director of National Intelligence, John Ratcliffe.  Like handwritten notes by then-CIA Director John Brennan.  During the summer of 2016, he briefed President Obama and top advisers that the agency learned of startling intelligence about the Clinton campaign and Russia. [...] Yet many questions remain — such as who was the Russiagate Hoax Mastermind alluded to by Brennan?  Americans need to know.  The smear campaign wasn't just a political dirty trick.  Nor was it proportionate to combat Trump supporters chanting "lock her up."  No, the malicious lie was the acorn from which the mighty oak grew — one that launched the crime wave of the century.  Unprecedented and wrongful surveillance of a presidential campaign.  Then a prolonged stealth coup to overturn the election.  President Trump and over 50 associates were subjected to seemingly limitless investigations, Privacy Act violations, criminal leaks, defamation and ruthlessly pursued by overzealous prosecutors, including numerous Obama and Clinton political donors.

Will America Survive the Democrats' Arrows in Their Quiver?  Events are hurtling towards the election with strange and disturbing developments every day.  Writers are openly discussing the possibility of a violent coup and civil war. 2020 feels like an unprecedented year, and in this context, a recent threat by Nancy Pelosi sounds particularly ominous.  Asked about the possibility of President Trump placing Amy Coney Barrett on the Supreme Court, Pelosi replied, "We have arrows in our quiver that I'm not about to discuss right now."  What might those arrows be?  How much damage will they do?  Let's examine some recent events, in light of her remark.

Will Joe Biden Go Peacefully If He Loses?  Democrats and the media have repeatedly raised the question in the last several weeks of whether President Donald Trump would leave office peacefully if he loses the election in November.  Some may actually believe their own propaganda about Trump being a "tyrant" — a point on which they agree with the knuckleheads arrested for a kidnapping plot in Michigan.  Others know they are preparing a justification for pushing Trump out of office if the result is too close to call, if vote-by-mail is as messy as expected.  But the real question ought to be whether Joe Biden, the Democrats, and the media would accept a Trump victory.  They rejected it last time, and spent the last four years spinning bizarre conspiracy theories about Russian "collusion."  Biden himself was involved, to an unknown extent in that effort.

Evidence Surfaces of John Durham Grand Jury.  [Scroll down]  Within the article — which everyone should read — some names are very important.  The article is framed around defending the New Yorker's previous reporting on the Alfa Bank conspiracy theory, so the intent of the article is defensive.  However, the events being described in the article, and more importantly the people being outlined in the article, are accurate.  Especially Daniel Jones and his lawyer William Taylor; and the connection of both to Fusion GPS and Glenn Simpson.  According to the article there are two parallel efforts underway to untangle the background of how the false Alfa Bank story was originated.  One effort is a set of civil lawsuits by the owners of Alfa bank against those who created the fraudulent story that flowed through Fusion GPS, into Chris Steele's dossier, into the FBI, and ultimately into the Buzzfeed reporting therein.  The owners of the bank are taking all of these entities into court and demanding discovery of sources who framed/created the false impression.

7 Quick Takeaways On The 2020 Vice Presidential Debate.  [#1] Pence's Superpower Is Debating:  Mike Pence, a former congressman and talk radio host, started off strong and just kept getting stronger.  He clearly came prepared for the debate.  He had a ready recall of facts and figures to bolster his points.  He nailed the questions he wanted to answer and deflected on the questions he preferred not to answer.  While he let several zingers fly, he stayed calm and steady, pushing back at what he perceived as unduly false statements but without the constant interruptions of the Trump-Biden debate.  He spoke slowly and left few cards on the table unplayed.  He was nice, firm, decent, and likable.  Pence's weakest points were when he was on defense about the global pandemic gripping the country.  However, he came into the debate prepared to lay out how a Trump-Pence vision for America is better than the one put forth by Biden and Harris and he accomplished that consistently throughout the debate.

Are Americans Tired of Being Called 'Racist' Yet?  [Scroll down]  How is it that America, which twice elected Obama president, has apparently regressed so far so fast as to deserve these repeated denunciations as irrefutably guilty of "systemic" injustice?  Two words:  Hillary lost.  For three years, we were dragged through the "Russian collusion" hoax as a way of explaining what, to Democrats, was the electorate's otherwise inexplicable rejection of Hillary Rodham Clinton's presidential bid.  Democrats believe it is always wrong for Republicans to win elections; they had convinced themselves in 2016 that they were "on the right side of history"; and America was poised to take the historic step of electing Mrs. Clinton as the nation's first female president.  When that didn't happen, Democrats immediately denounced Trump's presidency as illegitimate, the product of a Kremlin conspiracy, and declared themselves the "resistance" to this incipient authoritarian regime that had stolen the election.  All of that was a vast pile of lies, or perhaps a hallucinatory delusion insofar as anyone ever believed it.

Chip Roy and Wendy Davis agree that the other's views are dangerous.  Wendy Davis and Chip Roy agreed on one thing at the first and maybe only debate of their marquee congressional contest Tuesday night:  the other candidate holds views that are dangerous.  "As anyone can see from photos from Congressman Roy's own social media feed as recently as yesterday, he refuses to take basic safety precautions, such as consistently wearing a mask and social distancing," said Davis, an Austin Democrat seeking to deprive Roy of a second term representing the 21st Congressional District, which runs from Austin to San Antonio and includes six Hill Country counties.

The Editor says...
Refusal to wear a mask in October, when the virus peaked in July, is a resumé enhancement, in my opinion.  It shows the world that Chip Roy doesn't buy the media hype, and isn't afraid of the germs in the air.  Ordinarily, Wendy Davis, a/k/a Abortion Barbie is a single-issue politician:  Abortion supersedes all other concerns.  At least that's the only thing for which she's famous.

Who targeted the president?  Obviously, I don't have any proof that the recent COVID-19 infections of POTUS and FLOTUS, several Republican senators, and people working on his campaign and in his administration, are truly random events or something planned, but it doesn't pass the "random cluster of infections" smell test.  Come on, admit it.  You are all thinking it, too.  I'm sure like me, you spent the weekend texting friends about your suspicions.  The virus appears to have targeted Republicans only and left Democrats unscathed. [...] It is odd that in a town as small as Washington, D.C., only Republicans took the hit.  The timing is a second factor.  Key Republicans fell ill after the Barrett announcement, the debate, and Comey's flaccid testimony, and now we are full-blown into October — the final leg of the campaign. [...] They've tried to impeach and remove him, force him to resign, discredit him, undermine his accomplishments, embarrass and ridicule him; they've wished him dead umpteen times; they've relentlessly threatened his life; and they've been clear they don't care about his family or his health.  Why not use the virus further to their advantage?

Learning from Breonna Taylor.  Not every police shooting is avoidable.  Sometimes police do everything right and still end up taking a life.  Other times, police shootings are the result of policy failures, individual missteps, and even malevolence.  Into what category should we place Breonna Taylor's death?  Some key factual questions remain in dispute, and not all the relevant evidence is publicly available.

It is worthwhile remembering what all of this opposition is about.  Most people think when they vote for a federal politician — a House or Senate representative — they are voting for a person who will go to Washington DC and write or enact legislation.  This is the old-fashioned "schoolhouse rock" perspective based on decades past.  There is not a single person in congress writing legislation or laws.  In modern politics not a single member of the House of Representatives or Senator writes a law, or puts pen to paper to write out a legislative construct.  This simply doesn't happen.  Over the past several decades a system of constructing legislation has taken over Washington DC that more resembles a business operation than a legislative body.

Is the United States in the Midst of an Insurgency?  Insurgency is an organized rebellion to overthrow a constituted government by undermining its legitimacy through protest and disinformation, and ultimately through armed conflict. [...] Initially, when the insurgents are still weak, they organize around a group that is actively dissatisfied with political and social conditions and desires ideological or other changes.  In America, who better to target than the poorest and least educated black Americans, for they already believe they have a legitimate grievance?  Insurgents use propaganda and political efforts to exploit this atmosphere, creating more significant discontent that discredits the government. [...] Leftists are adept at vilifying anyone who defends the current system, even if they acknowledge its flaws and signal a willingness to improve it.  After all, who wouldn't support racial justice?  Nonetheless, if you are not absolutely for the cause as presented, leftists will accuse you of being absolutely against it.  Hence, saying "All Lives Matter" is synonymous with "I'm a racist."

Escape from 2020.  [Scroll down]  But if 2020 happened not from bad luck but the result of trends, then 2021 might be even stranger than 2020.  The cherished establishment goal of a "return to normalcy" may prove unattainable.  With the old world gone and the new one disconcertingly strange, one can only do what circumstances permit instead of waiting on a rollback that will never come.  American anthropologist Joseph Tainter in his book The Collapse of Complex Societies (1988), "examines the collapse of Maya and Chacoan civilizations, and of the Western Roman Empire, in terms of network theory, energy economics, and complexity theory."  He concludes that civilizations fall when they have too many spinning plates to keep in the air.  At some point, they start to fall.

There's too much gold in the universe.  No one knows where it came from.  Gold is an element, which means you can't make it through ordinary chemical reactions — though alchemists tried for centuries.  To make the sparkly metal, you have to bind 79 protons and 118 neutrons together to form a single atomic nucleus.  That's an intense nuclear fusion reaction.  But such intense fusion doesn't happen frequently enough, at least not nearby, to make the giant trove of gold we find on Earth and elsewhere in the solar system.  And a new study has found the most commonly-theorized origin of gold — collisions between neutron stars — can't explain gold's abundance either.  So where's the gold coming from?

The Editor says...
Life is very complicated for those who don't believe the Bible.  Gold is much too complex to have formed and distributed itself, and could not have evolved.  There is no reason for gold to exist at all, except as a gift to mankind from its Creator.  When you hear someone say, "no one knows where it came from," that's a person who doesn't believe in creation and spends his or her life puzzled and confused.

Are You Not Entertained?  I have been trying to wrap my head around why so many people disliked the first presidential debate when I enjoyed it so thoroughly. [...] As the American Mind's Matthew Peterson commented on social media, it was like a scene from "Gladiator."  That's what I wanted.  Maybe that's it.  Other people wanted something else — something like a sophisticated, polite, clear-eyed debate about policy.  That seems silly to me at this point.  It seems obvious we are in the midst of Revolution 2020.  We are not arguing about policy.  War is neither polite nor sophisticated.  You get to the objective any way you can: over, under, or through.  But that won't help explain things to someone who doesn't see this as war.  So why should we embrace the entertainment of a fight and leave behind the hopes for polite political discourse?  Because the debate of our dreams — the reasoned discourse, the lengthy responses, the political decorum — is not the alternative to the combat we saw.  It's either a fight in the open or an assassination.  It was never going to be polite or about policy.

Comey's testimony [was a] 'vivid reminder' election won't hinge only on the issues.  The political elite remain puzzled — and in agony — over how Donald Trump could still be in the race.  A bullying debater!  A purveyor of mistruths!  A would-be autocrat!  How has our country come to this?  The answer sat staring at them on a videolink this Wednesday, in the smug countenance of James Comey.  This obvious truth will be missed by the left and the media, which continue to comfort themselves with the fiction that Trump won in 2016 by preying on the weak and ill-informed.  The opposite is true.

A 45-Gun Salvo in the Battle for America's Past — and Present.  In Rating America's Presidents:  An America-First Look at Who Is Best, Who Is Overrated, and Who Was An Absolute Disaster, Robert Spencer gives us a strong defense of the greatness, and goodness, of America, through an evaluation of each of the 45 presidential administrations based on the simple criteria of Were Americans safer and more prosperous at the end of this administration than they were at its beginning?  It's a simple and common-sense standard, but one that has been lost amid the prevailing bipartisan commitment to a utopian and messianic internationalism that has had the not-so-paradoxical effect of weakening, rather than strengthening, America's position in the world.  Under both Republican and Democrat Presidents, we have been so busy saving the world that we have scarcely noticed that our jobs are flowing out of the country as well as our troops, while our infrastructure is crumbling and our standard of living is progressively declining.  We have scarcely noticed, that is, until the presidency of Donald Trump.  Spencer here makes a compelling case for Trump, even after just three years in office, being ranked with the greatest of Presidents, in large part because he has put the welfare of America and Americans first.

The pundit class really wants the presidential debates to be canceled.  The pundit class really, really hated the first presidential debate of the 2020 election.  They hated it so much, in fact, that many of them don't want to see another one for the remainder of the election cycle. [...] But more information is almost always preferable to less, even if it means watching two septuagenarians scream at each other for a couple of hours.

The Editor says...
As a public service, here is a handy tip: You don't have to watch the debates, unless you work in the news media.  If the most recent debate annoyed you, don't watch another one.  In fact, you don't have to watch television at all.  Ever.  You would probably be better off and live a lot longer if you removed all the televisions from your house.

Actually, The Debate Was About Issues.  A lot of folks are saying the debate was an ugly, insult-filled shouting match that barely got down to cases.  Actually, I thought it was a highly entertaining exchange that helpfully spotlighted the candidates' differences on issues.  An ugly, angry exchange?  Well, at least it looked like America.  If you took all the people who bite their tongues instead of saying what they really think of folks on the other side, put them in a room together and let them loose, this is what we would sound like.  Pretty?  No.  Honest.  Yes.  The debate's decorum was a snapshot of where we are as a country.

Trump-Biden I: Reality Is Reality.  [Scroll down]  Get this: in a single debate, the Democratic candidate told the president of the United States, on national television, to "shut up, man."  Called him a clown and a racist.  And termed him the worst president in history (an especially ludicrous statement given that Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama held the office in this commentator's lifetime).  The moderator's response to such extraordinary breaks in decorum?  Calling the president out for breaking debate rules, when both men were guilty at various times.  [Chris] Wallace let Biden get away not only with disrespect for the office of president and the conventions of political debate, but also with an approach of slipping, sliding, prevaricating and outright running from his record and his party's positions — for example, repeatedly and simply responding "that isn't true" to charges that were in fact well-grounded.

Debate Recap:  Trump Wins, Biden Doesn't Faint, Chris Wallace Goes Down Hard.  President Donald Trump and Democratic nominee Joe Biden went head-to-head on Tuesday night, and moderator Chris Wallace got knocked out.  Wallace seemed to push left-wing talking points to help Trump and hurt Biden, but both candidates talked over him.  Trump and Biden brought out the fisticuffs and both got in a few good hits.  Biden stumbled but he did not come across as a bumbling fool. [...] President Trump got in more good jabs at Biden than the Democrat got in at him, but Biden did not prove the stuttering fool that many on the Right expected.  I would say Trump won the debate, but it was grating to hear three people talk at once so many times.

Two crucial things emerged from the first presidential debate.  The short version of the debate is that Biden did well if one ignored that almost every other statement he made was a lie or fantasy; Trump dominated him, almost too aggressively; and Chris Wallace may have been the worst and most obviously biased moderator since Candy Crowley.  Most significantly, though, Biden and Trump each made a critical point.  Biden's was a tacit admission that, if he is elected president, he will preside over the end of the filibuster, allowing Democrats to pack the courts and add two new Democrat-majority states.  Trump's point was that he's holding damning evidence about the Democrats' coup attempt.

Trump slaughtered Biden in the first debate.  [Video clip]

The Cleveland Brawl:  First Presidential Debate Was a Cage Fight.  Trump needed to defend his record and show strength; he did that.  Biden needed to show that he had the mental ability to make sense and stand up for 90 minutes; he did that.  In that sense, the debate was a draw.  But Trump succeeded in keeping Biden off balance; clearly, Biden got rattled and flustered.  Biden has a reputation for nasty responses when he's challenged.  He certainly cemented that reputation in the first debate. [...] In terms of substance, Biden echoed the old-fashioned political rhetoric full of generalities, empathetic sentiments, and talk about needing to "bring everybody together."  He was well coached and able to repeat the memorized lines.  Trump was a free-wheeling force of nature and was on the offense throughout the whole debate.  His goal seemed to be getting Biden angry and off-script.  He succeeded.

MSM inadvertently declare Trump the winner last night — by urging Biden to boycott next 2 scheduled debates.  It's crystal clear that the media branch of the Democrat party thinks that Joe Biden blew it last night and damaged his electoral prospects in the first of 3 scheduled debates with President Trump.  There seems to be pretty widespread consensus on the left that when it comes to Biden, the less voters know about him by watching him in a presidential spotlight, the better.  Fox News has assembled a large number of calls on Biden to go back to his basement on the next two debate nights, October 15 and 22. [...] My own take is that Biden has almost no enthusiastic supporters.  His support comes from people who hate Trump, many of them because of his abrasive style.  They are not highly motivated, to say the least.  Last night, Biden demonstrated that when it comes to rudeness, he is at least the equal of Donald Trump.  So, if getting rid of rudeness is the motivation, there is no reason to bother voting for Biden.

The Fox News Staged Presidential 'Debate'.  Debate monitor Fox News anchor Chris Wallace is making the pretence of being "invisible"; the Commission on Presidential Debates just like Michelle Obama in her 'When we all Vote," role, full tilt media-described as "non-partisan".  It's a complete setup!  More than anything else, tonight's debate is a complete concession to Covid-19.  [...] "The two candidates and moderator Chris Wallace will not wear masks at Tuesday's debate, per final negotiations between the campaigns.  Since none of the above really wanted to wear a mask anyway, how much negotiation would have been required?

Trump Must Confront Biden on Democrats' Election Interference Plans.  President Trump on Tuesday night [9/29/2020] will confront the leader of the party currently plotting to rig the outcome of the 2020 presidential election and make sure their candidate enters the White House next year, no matter what.  Joe Biden not only is the ultimate victor in the dry run of the post-election civil war Democratic Party leaders and donors plan to launch after November 3, the former vice president is an old hand at thwarting the so-called "peaceful transfer of power" they now insist the president will frustrate.  Hyperventilating by the media and Democrats aside, the fact is that Barack Obama and Joe Biden have done more to tarnish the historical precedent of ensuring the smooth transition from one president to another than any other previous administration.

How the 2014 Midterms Wrecked the Democrats' Supreme Court Hopes.  The 2014 midterms saw historically low turnout.  Only about a third of the registered public voted.  Barack Obama couldn't close the enthusiasm gap, despite telling supporters he was on the ballot in all but name.  Democratic voters didn't see the value in keeping the Senate in their hands; the House was then John Boehner territory, with no significant legislation forthcoming.  A year and a half later, that lazy calculation proved shortsighted.  Democrats didn't envision why upper chamber control would matter in a Supreme Court struggle.  They couldn't see beyond the immediacy of Obama's last yawn-filled term.  And the White House and three Supreme Court seats ended up being the price.

Time to take a closer look at AARP.  If AARP has abandoned its original mission in favor of becoming a tax-exempt subsidiary of a major health insurer, Congress, the IRS, and the people should probably be told.  Someone in a position of authority ought to ask.

Republicans are knocking it out of the park with political ads and memes.  It was already obvious comparing the two conventions:  Even though the Democrats own the actors, they don't own the true creative talent in Hollywood.  That all seems to have crossed to the Republican side of the aisle.  The Democrat convention was drab and oppressive; the Republican convention was bright and open.  It's the same thing with ads and memes.  As far as I know, there are no incredible, knock-it-out of the park Democrat videos.  The Republicans, though, are killing it.  Here are four of the best.

Nothing is Off the Table.  [Scroll down]  McConnell is a man about to meet a big moment.  He's about to lead Senate Republicans in a vote that probably forecloses Democrat thievery as a route to a Biden victory.  On such a moment history pivots.  Democrats get it.  A reelected Donald Trump is a scourge.  They know that this lame duck has no intention of golfing his way through the next four years.  Trump will not only push a bolder agenda but move to right wrongs.  He and Bill Barr have begun laying the groundwork.  The Durham investigation has yet to disclose its findings, meaning, more than one indictment.  If indictments come, they promise to bring justice, redressing an unprecedented conspiracy to destroy a president.  A conspiracy hatched by Hillary Clinton and first orchestrated inside the Obama White House, and then, most notably, continued in the FBI, CIA, and Department of Justice. [...] 2020 is a bad year for Democrats, and it's about to get worse.

Lefties at The Nation discover that (non-FBI) feds have been tracing the puppet masters behind Antifa and BLM.  I have been saying for years that President Trump understands better than anyone else that in this age, politics is a reality TV show for most people and that a three-act structure has the greatest impact.  Well, we are in Act Three, folks, when questions and conflicts raised in Acts One and Two are answered and dramatic conflicts start to be resolved.  To put it differently, Rush Limbaugh correctly predicted some weeks ago that the real issues that would affect the election were not yet on the table.  The death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the media obsession with her successor may be considered the first of such issues and the beginning of Act Three.  The activities of John Durham and the other federal prosecutors may also figure in the act.  But if the activities of the DHS and U.S. Marshals Service lead to indictments or at least the exposure of the ties behind the rioters, that could provide even more factual basis for voters to reconsider assumptions that the media have foisted on the public.

China is Spying on Millions of People.  And They Aren't in China.  After years of constant media fear-mongering, a sizeable number of Americans continue to believe in the disproven "Russiagate" conspiracy theory.  Putin, the story goes, owns Donald Trump and engaged in a massive propaganda campaign via social media, hacking elections, and other collusion forms to ensure that Trump was elected.  Now, Putin sits like Cobra Commander in the Kremlin, directed Trump's actions, and Trump does what he is told.  Yet these same Americans harbor little fear of China, the nation to which America's economy was sold decades ago (and the one who threatened to withhold all medical exports during a pandemic) and the only real aggressive empire (though admittedly the Russian bear is beginning to wake up) outside of the United States.

Knowing what's at stake, Trump-supporters increasingly refuse to hide in the shadows.  A curious thing is happening in America, and you'd have to work pretty hard to ignore it.  Trump-supporters are emerging from the shadows in large numbers, even in places you might not expect.  One might not be incredibly surprised to hear about masses of Trump-supporters rallying and taking part in patriotic parades in red states like Texas and even swing states like Florida, but eyebrows tend to rise when they begin happening in the capital city of the most important political stronghold of the Democratic Party.

You Don't Have Enough Ammo for the Post-Ginsburg 2020 Apocalypse.  The civil unrest that we've been dealing with since May got out of hand because it was being aided and abetted by elected Democratic officials in each of the riot cities.  Democrats were perfectly OK with looking the other way and pretending that the riots weren't happening.  It wasn't until last week that Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi got around to condemning the violence, and that was only after new polling revealed that voter sentiment in the riot zones was shifting to Trump.  D.C. Democrats are already caterwauling about what they will do if the Senate votes to replace Ginsburg before the election and they happen to win control of the White House and Senate in November.

There's a formula to writing a blockbuster White House insider account.  First, leave.  Ideally, be fired in a storm of tweets and a cloud of controversy.  Second, deliver a killer new anecdote, preferably one that mixes proximity to power with mind-wilting triviality.  Three, explain that mistakes were made, but not by you.  Four, sit back and count the cash.  The art of the insider book deal has been perfected by a string of former White House officials amid an apparently insatiable demand from readers.

Attorney General Says BLM Uses Black Americans As 'Props,' Calls Out DOJ's 'Permanent Bureaucracy'.  U.S. Attorney General William Barr said the "law has broken down" in the hands of prosecutors and that DOJ heads, checked by the American people, should oversee these unelected prosecutors to uphold law and order in the nation.  The executive branch has virtually unchecked power in bringing charges, Barr noted.  "That means discretion is vested in the executive to determine when to exercise prosecution power," Barr said to a "legal-sized" crowd at Hillsdale College's Constitution Day Celebration on Wednesday evening [9/16/2020][.]  The only question is:  When should the branch use its prosecutorial power?  The answer is left in the hands of prosecutors who, according to Barr, prioritize cases that they "can get," meaning win, instead of the most important ones to prosecute.

Dan Bongino's Plan To Block A Democrat Coup Attempt Is Elegant In Its Simplicity.  The proactive response comes down to two action points.  [#1] Get every right-of-center outlet you can find to put these Leftist on the record before the election (because afterward will be too late) committing to renounce:  [A] any and all use of 'alternative electors' to sow chaos into the electoral process.  [B] any and all use of secession threats that Governors might be encouraged to use as a cudgel to enforce their will in the election.  [#2] Get everyone (Democrats especially) on record:  will you pledge not to appoint electors contrary to the vote of the people of your state?  Email all of your local and federal officials on those points.  If we get out ahead of this before the election, they can't spring it on us in the Chaos that is likely to follow.

Let's take a moment to applaud that unnamed female deputy's courage.  Within a very short time, we knew a lot about the Compton shooting of two deputies.  We knew that witnesses to the shooting celebrated and did nothing to help; that Black Lives Matter descended on the hospital, hoped for the deputies' deaths, tried to storm the Emergency Department, and blocked ambulances; and that no one in the Democrat party, from Biden down, called out Black Lives Matter for fomenting this anti-police terrorism, with some actually supporting it.  What we did not know until today was that the female deputy showed extraordinary presence of mind, competence, and courage.

It's time to end the lie that a person with a knife is basically 'unarmed'.  Part of what kept the Jacob Blake frenzy alive on the left was the fact that he did not have a gun.  The media and their paramilitary fighters on the street imply that the fact that Blake had a knife was inconsequential.  To them, he was unarmed.  The same thing is happening with Ricardo Munoz's death in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.  A police officer shot Munoz when the latter came after him with a knife.  In reality, close-contact knife attacks are horrific and are just as deadly as bullets from afar.  The facts are uncontested:  the police got a call from Munoz's family that he was off his schizophrenia medicines.  They tried calling Crisis Intervention (i.e., the people leftists insist will take over future policing), only to have the Crisis Intervention people direct them to the police.  Within seconds of the first police officer to arrive coming to the front door, Munoz, who had stabbed four people in 2019, rushed at him with a large knife.  The police officer, while fleeing, shot him.

Trump's victory must be a rout.  While benevolence is a wonderful and aspiring trait, it cannot be extended to the ideas of the left.  The field is not fair, and the umpires in the media are one-sided.  Although many may not have the stomach for such defeat, it nevertheless remains the only path to save the country.  Trump simply winning the election cannot be the goal — demolishing and demoralizing the left must remain paramount.  All evidence supports America's existence requiring the 2020 election to be irrefutable rather than a "squeaker."

What happened to Bob Woodward?  Famed reporter Bob Woodward is dropping his new book about President Trump, Rage, next week.  Woodward has already leaked the book's juiciest excerpts to the media, such as the the President telling him during an interview on March 19 that he wanted to 'play down' the severity of the coronavirus in order to avoid a panic among the American people.  This comment has led Trump's critics to call for his resignation or for him to be impeached a second time.  Rage, however, is perhaps more revelatory about its author than its subject.  Let's assume that the critics are right, and that Trump's decision to portray calm in the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic was wrong and cost thousands of lives.  Didn't Woodward have an obligation to tell the public that the President said the virus was 'deadly' in February and that he admitted to 'playing it down' in March?  Isn't it rather sociopathic to hang on to a potentially life-saving piece of information for five months so that you can sell a few more copies of a book?

Disney, China, & the Ruling Class vs. America.  These days, even Disney movies reveal the deepening divide between Americans that threatens to tear our country apart.  Disney has spent years affixing content warnings to old material, revising and remaking it to conform with contemporary racial and gender standards.  Mulan seems like a perfect fit for this project — the headstrong young heroine who defies "traditional gender roles" to fight for her country (while wearing a binder, no less).  Except that the new version of the film, if you follow its logic, is so nakedly imperialist it would have made Napoleon blush.  The behemoth military complex of the Chinese state is leveraged en masse to defeat an uprising of nomadic tribes whose territory was stolen a generation ago by the current emperor, now an old warlord who demands tribute in blood and treasure from the several diverse regions of his sprawling fiefdom.  The independent nomadic powers are crushed and broken forever, but this time, their oppressor is a girlboss!  Hooray!

Stealing the election.  [Scroll down]  The election itself does not matter to Democrats.  They simply will litigate the election because they know they cannot win it because they screwed around for the last 4 years with witch hunts and impeachment, instead of seeking to flip President Trump's voters.  Without a nice slice of President Trump's voters (about 10% of whom voted for Obama at least once), Democrats are as dead as Biden's brain.  The Democrat riots in city after city are perhaps a training exercise for post-election violence.  Perhaps they believe the Antifa soy boys will intimidate the president's supporters.  Democrats are not exactly rocket scientists.  But I believe the courts are where the Democrats believe they can win the prize they covet most.  The Senate.

China Threatens Total Economic War by Dumping Treasuries.  On September 3, the Global Times, the Communist Party tabloid, reported that Beijing was "likely" to sell some or all of its U.S. Treasury holdings.  More important, the paper suggested the United States might for the first time ever default on its debt obligations.  China is certainly trying to destabilize the United States, and it looks as if it's about to declare total economic war on America.  Beijing has tipped its hand.  The question for the Trump administration, therefore, is whether America should strike first.  Yes, it should, and Washington should hit Beijing as hard as it can.  A vicious attack merits an overwhelming response.

What's going on with the Durham investigation, if anything?  Ever since Attorney General Barr appointed U.S. Attorney John Durham to investigate the origins of the Russia collusion probe, Trump supporters have been waiting for the bomb to drop.  And waiting.  And waiting.  But nothing ever happens.  Judicial Watch's founder Tom Fitton thinks that conservatives are being scammed.  Instead of an investigation, it's just another Washington cover-up.  I suspect (or, maybe, hope), though, that Barr and Durham are holding their fire because of the election.

Catholic priest says Democrats are going to hell — and Texas bishop backs him up.  A Wisconsin priest who condemned Catholic Democrats has the support of a Texas bishop.  Father James Altman, pastor of St.  James the Less Catholic Church, lashed out at Father James Martin, who participated in the Democratic National Convention.  In a 10-minute video posted to YouTube, Altman called the priest a "hyper, confusing spreading heretic" and had harsh words toward Democrats.  "Here is a memo to clueless baptized Catholics out there:  You cannot be Catholic and be a Democrat.  Period," Altman said in the video posted Aug. 30.  "The party platform absolutely is against everything the Catholic Church teaches, so just quit pretending that you're Catholic and vote Democrat.  Repent of your support of that party and its platform or face the fires of hell."

Hey BLM/AntiFa:  What About the Workers?  [Scroll down]  May I propose a universal principle here?  Governments and politicians and activists and nice liberal ladies have no clue how to help the workers.  And the reason is simple.  You can propose all kinds of pro-labor legislation and unions and benefits and Diversity and Inclusion, and we'll assume that the union leaders and government tax-gatherers and race-card players don't loot the businesses right off the bat.  But what happens to the workers when the next technological revolution comes along and the workers find themselves working for a corporation that is on the skids?  Exactly.  Because the union leaders and politicians and activists have no clue what to do other than tax and bully and regulate.

The Stephen King Election.  Voters start mailing in absentee ballots.  Potential pluralities are cast before the first debate[.]  The debates are alarmingly weighted against the challenger.  A president, at full capacity, confronting each day, every hour, the horsemen of a Communist virus, insurrection, Never-Trump calumny, and Deep State hatred.  Mr. Biden, at the doorstep of his own private Delaware, rolled forth in his dotage, an empty icon representing one of the most corrupt and lawless administrations since the founding.  Trump's retort to Hillary Clinton, "Because you'd be in jail," seems in retrospect like a relative kindness.  At least the former first lady knew what was happening to her.

Q names pedophile politicians vulnerable to blackmail.  You are not supposed to pay attention to anything published on the website QAnon.  Avert your eyes!  Democrat politicians and their media allies are sharpening their attacks against Q, to make sure as few people as possible read what is published there.  Joe Biden, a man fond of touching little girls, recently opined that Q followers should seek counseling for their mental health. [...] Maybe Q is all wrong.  But when the combined forces of the mainstream media and Democrats tell us to avert our eyes, absolute obedience may be a mistake. [...] I've followed Q since the first drop, and I've grown increasingly impressed by the accuracy, breadth and depth of Q's messages.  Q followers were prepared long in advance for the easing of hostilities with North Korea, the deflation of the mullahs of Iran, and the discovery of Ukraine as a hotbed of corruption for American politicians.  They knew a great deal about Jeffrey Epstein's activities before the public did and anticipate even more shocking revelations to come.  As Q likes to say, "Future proves past."  As Q's predictions come true, they lend retroactive credibility to the entire enterprise.

What are the Stakes?  This is an election like no other.  To treat it otherwise would be a grievous and perhaps irreparable misstep. [...] Currently, the ruling classes mostly disenfranchise undesirables through social opprobrium, labeling them "deplorable" and letting their attack dogs in the media do the rest.  But in the Obama era, they began to belligerently "weaponize" the federal government, using the IRS and intelligence agencies to thwart their political opponents.  If granted control of the White House again, the lesson they will draw from defeating Trump is not only that they will not be held accountable for such tactics, but that such tactics work.  They will use government agencies to kneecap their enemies in every conceivable fashion.  Those are the stakes.

What You Need to Know About Jacob Blake, Kyle Rittenhouse, and the Kenosha Violence.  [Scroll down]  ["] It would have been helpful if there [were] body camera images, something where we could see from the officer's perspective sort of what the officer saw that made him believe he needed to use lethal force at that moment against Jacob Blake, whether he saw Blake reaching for a weapon or reaching for something, that there is a sense in which if Blake is reaching for a weapon, if Blake had made threats to the officers.  I've seen some reports saying he had threatened to shoot the officers, but again, none of that has been confirmed.  It's just sort of up in the air, this idea of what initiated, what prompted that officer to believe lethal force was necessary.  That belief may be reasonable.  It may be unreasonable.  We just don't know, but the facts are going to affect that belief.["]

The Democrat Lurch Back to the Primitive.  [Scroll down]  Compare the presidential tickets for 2020: Biden is an old New Deal era carthorse; a Budweiser Clydesdale that ought to be spending his last years sniffing the grass in a nice clovered paddock.  Harris is a total fake: the privileged daughter of two Berkeley academics masquerading as an oppressed First Woman of Color.  Are the Democrats dumb or something?  President Trump is a force of nature, that turned millions into billions when he took his dad's modest outer-borough apartment business downtown.  Then he learned, with his reality-show gig, how to relate to ordinary Commoners.  Vice President Pence is the epitome of a decent Christian man.  On top of that the Democratic National Convention was a celebration of youthful activists and helpless victims while the Republican Convention was a celebration of middle-class Strivers and Commoners.  And especially Black Strivers.  I wonder why?

Why Kenosha Police Officers' Use Of Force On Jacob Blake Was Justified.  Well-established legal principles govern the use of "deadly force" by law enforcement officers.  Initially, it is important to stress that the law is clear that an officer cannot use deadly force "merely to prevent a felon's escape."  Thus, shooting Blake would not be justified based solely on the fact that there was an outstanding felony charge against Blake and the officers were attempting to arrest him.  However, while generally police may not use deadly force to effectuate an arrest, the Supreme Court has made clear that deadly force may be used if "the officer has probable cause to believe that the suspect poses a threat of serious physical harm, either to the officer or others."  In the videos, Blake appeared to be armed with a knife.  It has been established that a knife was found in the car he was reaching into, although whether he possessed it during his altercation with police is unclear.  The mere fact that Blake may have been armed with a knife, though, also does not justify the shooting.  Rather, objective reasonableness is determined based on "whether the totality of the circumstances justified the use of force."

Jacob Blake's Family Attorney Says President Trump Hasn't Called Them; We Should Hope He Never Does.  [Scroll down]  Blake was not at the house to stop a fight.  He was under a restraining order.  He entered the house without permission.  He sexually assaulted his sometime girlfriend.  The car he was trying to get into was not his.  He had an outstanding arrest warrant, and the police knew it.  With this new and improved version of events out there, Jacob Blake is not going to get a multimillion-dollar settlement.  He's going to prison.  The riots and deaths in Kenosha have been caused by a false narrative perpetrated, in no small smart, by Blake's partisans with the assistance of [Benjamin] Crump.  Crump is trying to keep attention on this case by causing a controversy involving President Trump because he sees the gravy train ending.  President Trump did the right thing in calling Blake's mother when he did.  That was then; this is now.  Knowing the facts as we know them now, President Trump calling Blake's family would look like a cheap pander because it would be.

It is the Party of Biden that must lose big in November.  With the upcoming November presidential election, only two months away, the major focus continues to be on Trump and Biden.  Who should win?  Who is better?  Do we want four more years of Trump or another four years of a Obama-type rule?  My readers will know immediately where I stand.  Biden would be major disaster for the country, especially because it appears he is declining both physically and mentally and seems owned by the most radical leftist elements of his Democratic Party.  This essay, however, is a call for voters to not just vote for Trump.  It is a desperate call for voters from both parties and from all ethnic, religious, and racial cohorts to vote for Republicans in every election and at every level of government.  Biden is only the figurehead.  It is the body of the now very corrupt, anti-American, and radical Democratic Party that must be killed, thoroughly and at all levels, including the House, the Senate, and in every state, city, and local council election.

Trump for the Win.  The Democratic National Convention was essentially centered in a Wilmington catacomb and featured an unexciting procession of former officeholders, incanting that Donald Trump had completely failed in the coronavirus crisis and was personally responsible for 180,000 unnecessary deaths and massive unemployment. [...] This will be exposed as the most mistakenly overconfident launch of a major party campaign for the White House since the renomination of Governor Thomas Dewey of New York against President Harry Truman in 1948.  The combination of the two sequential conventions and the performance of the Democratic media in covering them will be a shattering blow to the Democratic strategists who retrieved Joe Biden and Kamala Harris from the prenomination ash heap and put them forward as a respectable camouflage for the party's outright Marxist program.  Whatever possessed them to imagine that they could avoid any comment on the most widespread and most destructive urban rioting in America in over 50 years, could lay the public health crisis entirely upon the president, could maintain their advocacy of an immigration policy that would ultimately result in every poverty-stricken person in the world moving to the United States, while ignoring this administration's reduction of illegal immigration by 90 percent; all of this and many other issues will be as much a matter of interest to psychiatrists as to historians.

David Dorn's Wife Gave the Most Powerful Speech of the RNC, CNN Smeared Her.  David Dorn's widow, Ann Dorn, took the stage at the RNC last night to deliver one of the most powerful speeches in the history of political conventions.  Her husband was murdered by looters in St. Louis after riots broke out following the death of George Floyd.  He was simply trying to protect his friend's shop from lawless thugs.  When I say that every American, regardless of political persuasion, should sit down and watch this speech, I mean it.  It was that important and no one should look away based on their partisan views.

Chaos v.  Order on the Ballot — Again.  Richard J. Daley, the old-school mayor of Chicago, told the city's superintendent during the riots that followed Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination to "shoot to kill any arsonists" and "shoot to maim or cripple anyone looting." [...] They don't make Democrats like they used to.  But occasionally years, and usually not the good ones, reincarnate.  Vice President Mike Pence summed up 2020 as "this year like no other" during his Republican National Convention speech this week.  But a 1968 vibe, when riots challenged a shared ethos of law, order, and patriotism, reverberates in the 2020 campaign.

Jacob Blake Had An Outstanding Warrant and a Knife — Two are Dead and Kenosha Burned Down For Nothing.  Yesterday [8/26/2020] late in the afternoon the Wisconsin Department of Justice released some preliminary findings with regard to its investigation into the officer-involved shooting of Jacob Blake.  Remember that the initial reports were that Blake had come to the location where his car was parked in order to help break-up an alternation between two women.  Blake had his three sons in the car, but it is uncertain whether he had them when he arrived, or if he picked them up at the location of the incident. [...] So, at the very outset we learn that Blake had not been asked to come to the location to help break up an altercation between two females, we learn that his presence at the location wasn't welcome by his girlfriend, and there may have been legal process outstanding against him that made it illegal for him to be there, such as a Protective Order.  Next we learn that the officers were attempting to place Blake under arrest.  Radio dispatch had advised the officers prior to the effort to arrest him that Blake had an outstanding warrant for his arrest.

No Lives Matter.  With many minority groups claiming historical injustices against them and demanding remedial recognition and reparation, with official endorsement by many institutions of those claims and demands, and with their propagation via all major channels of communication, no voices have been raised in support of the indisputably smallest and most persecuted minority group — the individual.  "Individual" and "individual rights" are words that must not be spoken.  Any recognition of the individual draws attention to the fundamental and massive violation of individual rights stemming from coronavirus totalitarianism and governments' encouragement of riots, vandalism, and violence. [...] The game is always the same.  In the name of some collective greater good — safety, anti-racism, fill in the blank — the wealth, property, work, rights, freedom, and lives of individuals are stolen.  Of course the alleged greater good is never realized, but that was never the point.

Jack Cashill's Unmasking Obama.  If journalism is the "first draft of history," Unmasking Obama is a well considered second draft, adding crucial perspective and assessment of the consequences of the real-time reports.  You don't have to wait that long, though.  It went on sale last week, and is well worth your time.

The Mirror-Image Convention.  The first night of the 2020 Republican National Convention was a mirror image of last week's Democratic telethon.  The issues that the Democrats ignored — violence in the cities and China — were mentioned again and again.  Where the Democrats showcased elected officials and celebrities, some of the most effective speeches on night one of the RNC came from lesser-known individuals such as activist Andrew Pollack, Cuban immigrant Maximo Alvarez, and nurse Amy Ford.  The phrase "systemic racism" wasn't heard.  But paeans to American greatness and American exceptionalism limned each address.  Last week, President Obama said that democracy was on the line in this election.  The speakers at the RNC agreed — but for reasons that were the direct opposite of Obama's.

The Things Not Said:  What Do Democrats Have to Hide?  In the case of the Democrats, a kind of poetic justice was achieved last week when a virtual convention nominated a virtual candidate for what promises to be a virtual presidency.  COVID-19 made both major parties opt for political conventions that don't put delegates and others at risk with large in-person gatherings, but for Democrats, lessening the risk of disease also meant lessening the risk of the public finding out that there is less than meets the eye to Joe Biden and his candidacy.  What was obvious from start to finish was that a pre-recorded, pre-scripted, pre-ordained infomercial gave Democrats the perfect opportunity to divert the attention of America away from their doddering candidate and their socialist policies into a fawning celebration of phony feel-good sloganeering and Trump hatred.

America Is Polarized.  One Thing Can Still Unite Us:  Rooting for Joe Kennedy to Fail.  Election Day is fast approaching and the country remains as polarized as ever.  Political meaning has been grafted onto every decision we make in our daily lives.  To have the wrong opinion is to commit an act of violence.  Refusing to take sides is just as harmful, if not more so, than picking the bad side.  There is still, however, at least one upcoming event that can unite our fractured nation and bring joy to the hearts of all Americans, regardless of political persuasion.  On September 1, the Democratic Party will hold its Senate primary in the state of Massachusetts.  The incumbent, Sen. Ed Markey (D.), is being challenged by Rep. Joe Kennedy III (D.), a ginger-haired pipsqueak.  Kennedy is also, of course, a member of the degenerate political dynasty whose legacy is defined by death, addiction, sexual assault, and sympathy for the Nazi regime.

'Plot to Change America' Driven by Identity Politics.  America always has been a dynamic country of constant change, with its people looking ahead.  But an elite-driven ethos, which has become the dominant ideology of the country's most powerful institutions, threatens to overwhelm the ideas and traits that made America what it is.  [Video clip]

Democratic Convention Ignores the Elephant in the Virtual Room:  Big-City Violence.  As I keep telling you, when you hear politicians talking, pay attention to what isn't said.  Train your eye to see the negative space between the dancers, because that, too, is often the story.  Urban violence threatens the peace of targeted Democratic suburban voters, like those soccer moms who've just installed police scanner apps on their cellphones.  Trump is taking advantage of this, but he didn't create it.  What America is witnessing in cities like Portland, Seattle, Chicago and New York is a clash between the hard left and the liberal Democratic mayors who lead those cities.  And this Democratic infomercial is all about the swing vote, if there is such a thing, in battleground states, like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.  Naturally, Democrats accentuate the positive.  Yet as the DNC infomercial makes plain, this new left Democratic Party of 2020 sees only two types:  The Oppressed and The Oppressors, a formula that invariably leads to rising conflict and anger that can't be covered over with virtual kindness and virtual empathy.

Democrats Killed Cannon Hinnant and George Floyd.  The deaths of George Floyd, a 46-year-old Minneapolis black ex-con strung out on drugs, and Cannon Hinnant, a 5-year-old white boy from a small city in North Carolina, are both symbols.  Floyd's death during a struggle with police led to nationwide race riots, the destruction of statues and stores, hundreds of millions in damage, severe injuries and deaths, and a political inquisition.  Hinnant's death has been ignored outside the local and conservative media.  The out-of-context video of Floyd dying of cardiac arrest while high on Fentanyl became evidence of police racism, not just by the white officer restraining him, but across the country.  And Cannon Hinnant's murder at the hands of a black felon while riding his bike on a grassy winding street became evidence of a racist double standard and out of control crime.  The truth is that Floyd and Hinnant's deaths were symptoms of the same crisis.

When Half of NYC's Tax Base Leaves and Never Comes Back.  The separateness in New York, and by extension much of the nation curled around it from America's eastern edge, stands out.  There are the hyper-wealthy and there are the multi-generational poor.  They depend on each other, but with COVID who needs who more has changed.  It's easy to stress how far apart the rich and the poor live, even though the mansions of the Upper West Side are less than a mile from the crack dealers uptown.  The rich don't ride public transportation, they don't send their kids to public schools, they shop and dine in very different places with private security to ensure everything stays far enough apart to keep it all together.  But that misses the dependencies which until now have simply been a given in the ecosystem.

What Difference Does It Make?  I've been railing for years against out of control government spending; undeclared never-ending wars across the globe provoked by the military industrial complex; un-Constitutional surveillance of Americans by our Deep State government overseers; the extreme greed and criminality exhibited by Wall Street bankers as they pillage the national treasure; corrupt politicians of both parties paid off to do the bidding of their corporate sponsors; propaganda spewing fake news media corporations; the Deep State running things behind the curtain; and the destroyer of worlds — the Federal Reserve — debasing our currency as they enrich the few at the expense of the many. [...] When I was censored on sites like Seeking Alpha and Financial Sense because they had sold out to the Wall Street cabal, I stumbled into blogging, with partner dust-ups, server issues, denial of service attacks and ad company censorship along the way.  But I'm still slogging and blogging away twelve years later, through presidential coup attempts, market crashes, the Federal Reserve rescuing the .1% once again, the most overhyped flu in the history of mankind used as a means to destroy our last vestiges of liberty and freedom, and the evil oligarchs attempting to seize complete and final control over all the economic, social, political and military levers of our society.  I'm convinced there will be no consensus regarding an agreed upon presidential victor on November 4th, or possibly weeks after, or possibly ever.  The amount of incompetence in handling mail-in-ballots by the USPO and those tasked with counting them will be off the charts.  The level of fraud in attempting to win this election will be on a level never seen before, making Daley's shenanigans to get Kennedy the necessary votes in 1960 seem like child's play.

The Democratic National Convention's virtual production is awful TV.  The Democratic Party kicked off its presidential convention on Monday — with one caveat.  Instead of meeting in person in Milwaukee as they had originally planned, Democrats opted for a virtual, four-night event due to concerns about the coronavirus pandemic.  Given the significant risks associated with large gatherings right now, the Democratic National Committee made the right call.  But it could have at least prepared a better production than what we're seeing right now.  Because it's difficult to imagine voters lasting through two hours of this stuff, let alone eight hours over four nights.

The Twilight Of Great American Cities Is Here.  Can We Stop It?  The dreadful death of George Floyd lit a fire that threatens to burn down America's cities.  Already losing population before the pandemic, our major urban centers have provided ideal kindling for conflagration with massive unemployment, closed businesses and already rising crime rates.  The forms of disintegration vary.  In overwhelmingly white cities like Portland, Seattle, San Francisco and Minneapolis, violence has featured white radicals endorsing the extreme agenda of the neo-Marxist Black Lives Matter.  In more diverse cities, such as Chicago and New York, protests have devolved into basic thuggery as law enforcement has been curtailed and large portions of the prison population have been released.  The pandemic has shaken the once confident ranks of new urbanists.  At a time when even The New York Times is suggesting that density and packed transit lines worsened the contagion, some still embrace theology over data, with some advocating ever greater density, more crowding in cities, and mass transit.  Fortunately, people tend to be less theological about their locational choices.  According to The New York Times, 420,000 people left New York City between March 1 and May 1.  This nearly equals the city's total population increase from 1950 to 2019, according to demographer Wendell Cox.

Get Your Kids Out of Public School.  We are standing on the precipice of the biggest education revolution in generations.  As schools refuse at union behest to reopen full-time instruction in the fall, parents are flooding into alternative options like homeschooling and pandemic "pods."  For the first time in modern political memory, there is likely to be an exodus from public schools.  It will not just be the worst-served in poorer neighborhoods, to whom most school choice programs are geared, that leave.  It will also be middle-class and wealthier families.  This presents the biggest opportunity for domestic victory the Right has had in 70 years — if the Republican Party does not squander it.

Let's Clear up a Misconception — There Is NO DOJ Policy Preventing Indictments Prior to an Election.  This is one of those subjects where everyone is confident that a policy exists, and they know what the policy is, but no one can formulate in precise terms exactly what the policy says or means.  That's because there is no policy at DOJ which prevents the taking of enforcement action — whether that is an overt investigative step or seeking the return of an indictment — which is linked to the number of days remaining before a scheduled election.  None.  No policy.  Not written down anywhere.  Never cited.  Never quoted.  Never enforced.  There is a policy that prohibits the taking of any overt enforcement action for the purpose of affecting an election.  That is prohibited.  But that policy doesn't prohibit taking the same enforcement action when there is no such nefarious intention.

9 Things Every American Should Know About the Navajo Code Talkers.  Navajo code talkers, once unable to even talk about the role they played in World War II, are now lauded as heroes.[...] The idea of using Navajo as a way to create unbreakable codes against the Axis Powers — Nazi Germany, Japan, and Italy — in WWII came from a veteran of WWI.  Phillip Johnson, the white son of a Christian missionary, had grown up on a Navajo Reservation and had learned the language in his youth.  It is possible that he came across the idea of indigenous languages being used as code during his service in WWI.  After Pearl Harbor, he proposed using Navajo, specifically, as a code to the Marines.  There were 29 original code talkers.  By the end of the war, there were more than 400.  Native Americans from at least 14 other nations and tribes were among those 400, working to keep the Axis from breaking encrypted, vitally important information.

The Case for Trump.  Americans who want to remain citizens of a united country that at least makes some desultory attempt to protect them and further their interests have no choice but to stay the course.  As the saying goes, the only way out is through. [...] [T]here's little wrong with President Trump that more Trump couldn't solve.  More populism.  More nationalism.  More patriotism.  More law and order. [...] In short, more adherence to the 2016 agenda.  The only way to get more Trump is, literally, to get more Trump.  Which means the president being reelected and implementing his core agenda in a second term.  But that alone will not be enough.  Saving America as a unified, self-governing republic is a long-term — possibly generational — project.

War Chief Republicans or Reservation Chief Republicans?  [Scroll down]  As a rule, war chiefs were American Indians who refused to submit to displaced from their tribal lands — whether by other Amerindians or by Americans.  The war chief chose war and its attendant ills over submission.  The reservation chiefs, often without being prompted, sold off tribal lands that were not theirs to sell for cheap trinkets: beads, whiskey, and buttons rather than risking conflict.  When I think of the reservation chiefs, I think of those who sold Manhattan to the Dutch for $24 worth of beads, or men like John Ross or Elias Boudinot who just accepted the idea that their people, the Cherokee, should passively submit to being removed from the Southeast to Oklahoma.  I think of the Chiefs Black Kettle and Little Raven who bowed their heads and passively submitted to being removed to reservations chosen not by them but for them.  I'm sure many of these men thought that what they were doing on behalf of their people was necessary, even praiseworthy.  When I think of the war chiefs, I think of those proud American Indians who fought back against their displacement, who refused to give up their traditions, who attacked despite overwhelming odds.

2020: The Year That Boiled the Frog.  Think of what we've lost:
  •   Professional, amateur, college, and high-school sports, as well as youth athletic leagues:  gone.  (Yes, there is some baseball now, but in empty stadiums — and the prospects for football, basketball, etc. are dim.)
  •   The schools are all closed.  Parents who depend on the schools to look after their children during working hours cannot return to the workforce
  •   The entire movie industry:  gone.
  •   Theater:  gone
  •   Concerts:  gone
  •   Summer camps:  gone
  •   Bars:  gone.  (Here in Massachusetts, they will be closed until there is a vaccine, which for many businesses, if not most, is a death sentence.
  •   Restaurants:  either closed, or operating under draconian restrictions.  Many places still do not allow indoor dining, and those that do permit it only at reduced capacity.  The restaurant business has thin margins under the best of circumstances, and you can be quite sure that nearly all restaurants are currently losing money
  •   Travel:  decimated.  (This includes hotels, car rentals, etc.
  •   Public gatherings:  churches, parties, funerals, weddings, reunions, school commencements, club meetings, cookouts, marathons, and so on: gone.
  •   Gyms and fitness studios, closed—many permanently.
That's only a partial reckoning — but what a list it is!  If one were asked, a year ago, to name the things that make up ordinary civic life in America, it would have been, more or less, the same list.  All of it is gone.

The Editor says...
I guess I'm a wet blanket, because I couldn't care less about professional sports, movies, bars, theaters, concerts, summer camps, fitness studios, or most social gatherings.  And America is better off, in the long run, without public schools, i.e., socialist indoctrination centers.  As soon as the face mask mandates disappear, I'll be back to normal!

Chauvin, Lane, Kueng, and Thao:  The George Floyd Fall Guys.  This is an illustration from the Minneapolis Police Department's official training materials on how to safely and properly subdue a suspect suffering from "excited delirium," a potentially lethal medical condition which, due to the rising use and abuse of illicit drugs, has grown to epidemic proportions on the streets of America.  Look closely.  The depicted suspect is flat on the ground with his head turned to the side in what the illustration calls "the recovery position to alleviate positional asphyxia."  The officer on the left is kneeling on the side of the suspect's neck.  Look familiar?  Could this and related parts of the officially approved and mandated Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) training curriculum be why former Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin saw fit to kneel on the side of George Floyd's neck?  And could it be the reason why former officers Thomas Lane, J. Alexander Kueng, and Tou Thao assisted Chauvin as he knelt on the side of Floyd's neck?

Have Conservatives Gone Dark?  Going dark in a general sense means to cease communications or activities. [...] Judging from the results of recent political polls, one could argue that a significant percentage of conservative voters and perhaps even moderates have gone dark. [...] It is not difficult to understand why conservatives feel this way.  They watch night after night as a slow-motion liberal version of Kristallnacht rolls on in many American cities.  Police are attacked, businesses are looted and burned, statues are pulled down, and innocent bystanders or motorists in their cars are harassed or worse.  They know that wearing a MAGA hat or shirt in the wrong neighborhood may get them attacked and beaten.  They know that a Trump yard sign or bumper sticker may get their house or vehicle vandalized.  They know that if they say or post the wrong thing on social media, they may be tarred as a racist, misogynist, homophobe, xenophobe, etc., and could possibly lose their job or career.

Washington's dubious — and pricey — 'stimulus'.  With negotiations over a (yes!) fifth COVID-19 rescue package at an impasse, President Trump took action on his own Saturday [8/8/2020], signing executive orders on a number of "stimulus" measures.  Whether his actions or Congress' ultimately prevail, expect a pretty hefty price tag — and dubious economic benefits.  For starters, unilateral steps by a president, especially regarding the budget, are often legally and politically fraught.  The Constitution gives Congress the power over the purse, and if there isn't enough political will to act, it can be a stretch for presidents to simply use their "phone and pen" (as President Barack Obama put it when he issued his own EOs) and sidestep lawmakers.  Democrats have already questioned the legality of Trump's move, and even he says he expects a lawsuit.

Election 2020: A Republic, if You Can Keep It.  [Scroll down]  Now, connect the dots on a very plausible scenario.  On Election Night, President Trump is ahead and winning in the Electoral College.  Trump and Republicans are elated.  Democrats and the media pundits who have made it clear they are for Biden caution that votes which have not been counted — mail-in and absentees — could well change things.  Late on Election Night, President Trump declares victory, asks Biden to concede victory in the interests of bringing the country together.  Biden refuses.  Days turn into weeks, and the 600 lawyers already hired by the Biden campaign are in courts doing whatever it takes to advantage his candidacy.  Biden slowly crawls from his deficit and starts to take over states, mostly ones run by Democrats.  At some point, Biden decides he has won and demands President Trump concede.  This leaves America with the nine Justices of the Supreme Court deciding which ballots are counted and which are not.  There is only one conclusion to be reached here.  The 2020 election will put a strain on the very foundations of our democracy.

This Election Is a Choice between Freedom and Slavery, Good and Evil.  Ronald Reagan famously observed nearly sixty years ago:  "Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.  We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream.  It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same[.]" [...] Before the Chinese coronavirus turned into a weapon for destroying freedom, we were already under attack.  For years, hate speech laws have been used to censor points of view and silence critics.  Public schools have replaced education with "politically correct" Marxist narratives, while Christianity is banned from public life and public squares.  Socialists attack words as violence so they may use violence against our words.  Wherever we look, the left has been nibbling away at liberty and pushing us toward gilded cages under their control.  Now the Democrats' push to "fundamentally change America" is in overdrive.  A combination of their awareness that they have lost ground since President Trump's election and a growing sense of urgency to speed up their revolution before his looming re-election has led them to throw all caution to the wind.

The Disappearing National Political Convention.  The original Democratic National Convention planned for Milwaukee this summer was postponed and then shrunk thanks to the coronavirus pandemic.  And now it's all but disappearing into a virtual haze, as the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports: [...] I'm just old enough to remember conventions that were interesting and spontaneous enough to justify TV-network "gavel-to-gavel coverage," before nominees selected in primaries much earlier crushed the life out of them.  And now they may finally be giving up the ghost.

This is not news.  This is somebody stating the obvious.
Counterintelligence Report:  China Prefers that Trump Loses Election.  William Evanina, Director of National Counterintelligence and Security Center (NCSC), issued a report on Friday which concluded his agency believes the communist Chinese government prefers that President Donald Trump does not win reelection in November.  "We assess that China prefers that President Trump — whom Beijing sees as unpredictable — does not win reelection.  China has been expanding its influence efforts ahead of November 2020 to shape the policy environment in the United States, pressure political figures it views as opposed to China's interests, and deflect and counter criticism of China," the report reads.  The report also found that Russia is attempting to "denigrate" presumptive Democrat nominee Joe Biden.

Democrat Domestic Terrorism Can No Longer Be Ignored.  Section 802 of the USA PATRIOT Act defines "domestic terrorism" as activities involving acts in violation of state or federal criminal laws that are "dangerous to human life" and "appear to be intended" either to (i) "intimidate or coerce a civilian population," (ii) "influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion," or (iii) "affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping."  Intimidating a civilian population?  Coercing government officials?  Engaging in mass destruction and assassination of police?  Ding-ding-ding! [...] Democrat domestic terrorists light fires everywhere they go, egg on violence against police and civilians, and threaten businesses who refuse to pay into their protection rackets by "donating" to their favorite money-laundering 501(c)(3)s; and our criminal justice system looks the other way or even actively abets the terrorists by releasing them from jail cells just as soon as they arrive, while leaving Americans to fend for themselves.

75 Years Later, It's Clear Truman Was Right To Drop The Atomic Bomb.  On August 6, 1945, 30-year-old U.S. Air Force pilot Col. Paul W. Tibbets Jr. took to the sky in the Enola Gay, his Boeing B-29 Superfortress heavy bomber. [...] Eleven days before Tibbets's fateful flight, on July 26, 1945, U.S. President Harry S. Truman's "Potsdam Declaration" gave the Empire of Japan one final chance to surrender unconditionally after more than three years of war in the Pacific.  If they persisted in fighting, the Potsdam text promised "the full application" of U.S. military power, culminating in "the inevitable and complete destruction of the Japanese armed forces and just as inevitably the utter devastation of the Japanese homeland."  The closing of the ultimatum rings all the more forebodingly in hindsight:  if the Japanese refused the terms, the alternative was "prompt and utter destruction."

Durham's investigation drags on.  The Washington Examiner reported, "U.S. Attorney John Durham will soon interview former CIA Director John Brennan, another sign that the investigation of the Trump-Russia investigators is ready to wrap up by the end of the summer."  Notice the story did not say which summer. [...] This looks more like investigation theater than holding anyone accountable for the FBI spying on Obama's political opponents.  This case is being slow walked.

Democrats [are] paying for the Mueller Report.  The media is in denial that it matters that there is a gap in enthusiasm between the deplorable dregs of society behind President Donald John Trump and those social justice warriors backing Basement Biden.  CBS reported the other day, "While much has been made of enthusiasm, it may not be the most important measure this year.  An unenthusiastic vote, of course, counts just the same as an enthusiastic one, so this is a useful measure insofar as it indicates who's firmly behind their candidate and who will actually turn out this fall."  The Hill even went so far as to say, "Biden benefits from an enthusiasm gap, not the other way around."  That argument was made by Jessica Tarlov, who argues the Democrat platform matters more than the candidate.

The West is One Vast Social Engineering Experiment.  Many decades ago, I worked for a while in one of the old Victorian lunatic asylums in England.  They were by then called 'long-stay mental hospitals' and the patients were all highly institutionalized, conditioned by years of dull routine to an existence of passive compliance. [...] What is happening today in the West increasingly reminds me of what I saw in that long-stay mental hospital many decades ago, but is less humane.  Today, when a person displays signs of deviating from political correctness, the cultural overseers leap into action and denounce the behavior and the culprit, whose guilt is incontestable.  If confession, contrition, and penance are not instantly forthcoming, the only sentence is to be declared a 'far-right bigot', with the likely result that the mainstream news media will then pick up the story and try to ruin what is left of the pitiful target's life.

Seven Major October Surprises Awaiting Democrats.  [#3] China, China, China.  Trump keeps this simmering on the back burner, but it won't go away.  This week he suggested he would ban the Chinese-controlled TikTok app in the United States.  Supposedly, this was the instrument by which Democrats artificially beefed up the Tulsa rally numbers — perhaps tipping their hand too soon.  Trump has the winning hand on this and anything China.  The virus is, after all, the China Virus.  The Chicoms lied and people died.  Their tech recently has developed mysterious troubles (fires on ships, etc.).  Trump has made it clear to Xi that he can be a trading partner or an enemy, but there is no such thing as a "friendly adversary".  To the degree that the American public hears about Chinese mischief, it works to Trump's advantage.  After all, Democrat Joe Biden practically has "Made/Paid in China" tattooed on his chest.  Any new Chinese shenanigans both enhance Trump's status and damage Biden.

Save Taiwan.  The fate of Hong Kong should make us worried about Taiwan.  China's introduction of a new security law for Hong Kong — which hollowed out the spirit of the 'one country, two systems' notion — is a powerful reminder of the importance of sovereignty for the Chinese Communist party.  We should ask whether Taiwan is next on the list.  In the past few months, as the world battled to control the COVID-19 pandemic, Beijing indulged in increased military activity across the Taiwan Strait.  The purpose was to remind the newly re-elected Taiwanese president, Tsai Ing-wen, that Taiwan is an inherent part of China and that there is no alternative to reunification with the mainland by 2049.  Westerners may find it difficult to comprehend the definitive nature of such a message.  But events in Hong Kong suggest that Beijing takes it very seriously.

Rich Lowry outs himself as a fraud.  As editor of National Review, Rich Lowry has advocated fewer regulations, lower taxes, and the appointment of conservative judges.  In his latest column, Lowry showed it was all a pack of lies meant to peddle subscriptions and draw donations to his magazine.  As president, Donald John Trump has delivered on all three as no president has.  Even Ronald Wilson Reagan did not cut regulations as severely as The Donald.  It is a tossup as to the better of the two.  President Reagan fought two communist powers — Russia and Red China.  President Trump fights two communist powers — Red China and the Democrat Party.  Lowry showed little appreciation for President Trump's accomplishments in his column on his Never Trump buddies turning into a cancel culture that wants to destroy any and all Republicans.

The Choice Before Us.  Back at home, left-wing radicals burn Bibles, assault and murder policemen and civilians, set fire to courthouses, vandalize and loot all manner of businesses.  On Friday [7/30/2020], thugs in Portland placed a pig's head on an American flag outside the city's Justice Center.  They put a policeman's cap atop it, doused it with a firestarter, and set it aflame.  The name of George Floyd, the career criminal who died in police custody at the end of May, was at first invoked mantra-like to justify or at least to explain this explosion of savagery.  Now, a couple of months later, there are still ritual invocations of his name but, really, you don't hear too much about Floyd.  The real agenda has come more and more to the fore.  Barack Obama summed it up when he said, in 2008, that he was after the fundamental transformation of the United States of America.  Cities like Portland give us a glimpse of what that transformation would entail.  The clips of the savages burning Bibles put me in mind of Heinrich Heine's solemn observation that Dort wo man Búcher verbrennt, verbrennt man auch am Ende Menschen:  "Wherever people burn books, they also end up burning men."  It may seem melodramatic, but here is the awful choice we face: the choice between the spirit of mayhem, burning pigs' heads, and burning Bibles, on the one side, and the traditional American spirit that cherishes the rule of law, free expression, and fructifying engines of prosperity, on the other.

AG Bill Barr Inadvertently Exposes Real Reason for House Democratic Hearing in Under Five Seconds.  [Scroll down]  In under five seconds, Barr exposed the "hearing" for what it was:  a pathetic show trial designed to give cover for the failed leadership shown by Democrats including the governors and mayors in the impacted states at the expense of Barr and President Trump.  Their hope was that by repeatedly cutting Barr off after their "gotcha" questions, many of which had absolutely nothing to do with a hearing about the federal response to the riots, they could make Barr look incompetent and overreaching and, via extension, Trump.  Barr clearly was not going to have any of that.

What happened to an America where you could freely speak your mind?  Last week, with violence spiking around the country, I wrote a column on the growing sense of lawlessness in America's urban areas.  In response, the Tribune newspaper union, the Chicago Tribune Guild, which I have repeatedly and politely declined to join, wrote an open letter to management defaming me, by falsely accusing me of religious bigotry and fomenting conspiracy theories.  Newspaper management has decided not to engage publicly with the union.  So I will.  For right now, let's deal with facts.  My July 22 column was titled "Something grows in the big cities run by Democrats:  An overwhelming sense of lawlessness."  It explored the connections between soft-on-crime prosecutors and increases in violence along with the political donations of left-wing billionaire George Soros, who in several states has funded liberal candidates for prosecutor, including Cook County State's Attorney Kim Foxx.  Soros' influence on these races is undeniable and has been widely reported.  But in that column, I did not mention Soros' ethnicity or religion.

They come for John Kass.  Last week I missed the excellent John Kass's Chicago Tribune column on "The Soros-funded prosecutors."  The column was published in the Tribune on July 22 under the headline "Something grows in the big cities run by Democrats:  An overwhelming sense of lawlessness." [...] For calling out [George] Soros, Kass has been accused of promoting an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory.  In his column today he cites a few articles supporting the Soros connection in positive terms.  Apparently Soros can only be named if he is to be praised.

Good Riddance To Drudge.  Whatever Drudge was, it's not anymore.  You'd be hard-pressed to spot the difference between the Drudge Report and the Huffington Post.  Aside from his love of weather porn, Tom Brady, and anything Oprah or transgender-related, you might as well go to CNN.  At least with CNN you're getting it from the primary source.

No Holds Barred at the House Lynch Session.  [Attorney General William Barr] is strong and fierce, does not give an inch, does not get thrown off message, sticks to his guns, and sticks it to those who would take him down. [...] For the Democrats the hearing [7/28/2020] was "no holds barred."  No lie was off the table.  No insult was beneath them.  Under the guise of asking the Attorney General to answer questions, they rather used their allotted time to berate him, to berate President Trump, and to lie about the Antifa and other anarchist-driven riots that seek to undermine our Republic and to tear away our freedom.  They were not asking questions, and they did not allow Barr to answer them or speak when he tried.  Rather, they were like a parent on a tear against a child in big trouble, or a boss on a rampage about to fire his or her employee.

Tick, Tick, Boom, Boom, Time's Up, Obama Goons?  Three fuses have been set and are now burning: (1) the explosive origin story of the Russia hoax, (2) the growing backlash against Democratic Party-endorsed Antifa domestic terrorism, and (3) the bottled up economy being shaken right now with one little thumb preventing a carbonated eruption.  They have the potential to redefine the final hundred days of this race in a way that the Democrats' electoral fraud cannot overcome.  It's a contest between a news media establishment that has gaslighted the American people regarding a Russia hoax of the Democrats' creation and all the Americans who have felt that their votes have been taken hostage since 2016. It's a contest between Democrat mayors turning American cities into war zones where Antifa insurrectionists can throw Molotov cocktails and bricks at police officers free from consequences and a growing number of Americans who finally understand that the socialists running the Democratic Party mean to keep going until the whole nation burns.

Don't Lecture Me.  Hardcore liberals are far more apt to engage in public criticism and protest to support their views than conservatives.  A recent poll has just confirmed what we've all known in our gut for a long time:  While conservatives are hesitant to express their political views in public — whether it be at school, the workplace or at social gatherings, for fear of damaging reprisals — extreme liberals have no such reservations.  Emboldened by supportive social media platforms and major media outlets that are unabashedly liberal and decidedly anti-Trump, the far Left has no fear of repercussions as a result of expressing their political opinions.  According to a Cato Institute study conducted in July 2020 of 2000 Americans age 18 and older, "Strong liberals are the only political group who feels they can express themselves without fear of repercussions."  And express themselves they do.

The Establishment Has No Clothes.  America's elite — the world's elite, for that matter — is deeply corrupt.  So much so that it's becoming difficult to understand what makes them elite anymore.

It Is the Resistance, Not Trump, That Needs To Learn To Accept Election Results.  The final 2016 debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump gave voters much to think about.  That was the night Clinton admitted that she was willing to engage in a proxy war with Russia in Syria.  For his part, Trump highlighted Clinton's radical support of abortion through all nine months of pregnancy, a charge she could not deny.  But media coverage in the days that followed focused almost exclusively on Trump's response to a question posed by moderator Chris Wallace, a Fox News host.  Asked if he would "absolutely accept the result of this election," Trump said — and you may want to sit down for this one — "I will look at it at the time."  For context, Trump had been talking about election-rigging for months, made easier by the confirmation that Democrats had rigged their primary election against Bernie Sanders for Clinton.  During the GOP primary, Trump tended to complain about rigging in contests he lost.

What to Leave Out of the COVID Relief Bill.  Congressional Republicans and the Trump administration have spent the past few months putting off another round of coronavirus relief.  Watching and waiting made some sense, given the fluidity of our condition, but it now leaves them with little time to reach a common position and then negotiate an acceptable outcome with the Democrats.  Senate Republicans have made a good start by ditching two bad ideas.  One is President Trump's demand for a big reduction in the payroll tax.  Under the right circumstances, cutting that tax would be a very good idea.  It does not, however, fit the needs of the moment very well.  The millions who are out of work would not receive any direct benefit from it, while many people who don't need help would.  Federal revenue, meanwhile, would drop.  Deficits will unfortunately have to rise over the short term, but they should do so only for good reasons.

Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia is on the right track with activist investor reform.  Should people be able to invest in ventures that aim to have a social or environmental impact?  The answer is yes.  In fact, people should be able to invest in, buy stock in, and even bet on anything they want.  However, fiduciaries (those that manage other people's investments) must follow some rules.  The first rule of a fiduciary should be to put the economic interests of its clients first.  Some haven't exactly followed that rule and have let personal politics and beliefs get in the way, investing in assets that sacrifice returns for environmental, social, and governance activism — also known as ESG.  On the individual level, this is not an issue, but someone else making a political point with your 401(k) money should be a choice that is off the table.  Fortunately, the Trump administration is looking to codify this simple idea and help refocus fiduciaries on their jobs:  making money for their clients.

Communist China:  A History Lesson for Mark Cuban.  After [Dallas Mavericks owner Mark] Cuban affirmed his support for Black Lives Matter, claimed America is systemically racist, and accused [U.S. Senator Ted] Cruz of not doing enough to stop the COVID-19 pandemic (which Cuban failed to note originated in Communist China), he espoused the amoral canard corporate titans have long used to justify their complicit silence about oppression in the face of massive profits:  "But I have never gotten involved in the domestic policies of ANY foreign country.  We have too much to do here."  Cuban and his fellow corporate titans find Communist China's predatory trade practices offensive because they adversely impact American corporations' ability to make a buck.  What does not offend Cuban and his fellow corporate titans is Communist China's systematic crushing of the Hong Kong people's liberty and its relocating of Uyghurs by the trainload into concentration camps in order to exterminate their culture and their persons.  All that has no impact on these American corporations' ability to make a buck from this evil regime.

Election Turns On Five Questions, Such as Marxism.  The presidential election result is now down to five questions.
  •   Can the President override the Democratic press's thunderous campaign to terrorize the country over the coronavirus?
  •   Can the president successfully connect Vice President Biden's campaign to the hooligans, anti-white racists, and urban guerrillas who effectively are being encouraged by the corrupt Democratic mayors of many of the nation's largest cities?
  •   Will the economic recovery and the decline in the unemployment generated by the COVID-19 shutdown continue at its recent pace and strengthen the economy as a pro-Trump electoral argument?
  •   Will the Republicans make adequately clear to the country the authoritarian and Marxist implications of the Biden-Sanders unity document?
  •   Will special counsel John Durham indict senior members of the Obama Administration over their handling of the spurious allegation of collusion between Donald Trump and the Russian government in the 2016 election and Justice Department violations of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), and how will Mr. Biden himself come through it?
Apart from the Durham question, the president has it in his power to produce answers favorable to himself on the other four questions.

Bobby Jindal slams 'short-sightedness' of never-Trumpers: 'They should admit they are Democrats'.  Former 2016 presidential candidate Bobby Jindal warned "never-Trump" Republicans that their election-season opposition to the incumbent of their own party will not help return the GOP platform to one they closer align with — but instead "elevate" the Democratic forces they claim to similarly oppose.  Writing in the "Washington Examiner" on Friday, Jindal — a former two-term Louisiana governor — said that while many never-Trump Republicans have some policy differences with the president, they instead often target Senate Republicans and the entire contemporary GOP for scorn simply because of their alliance with or acceptance of the commander in chief.

China consulate to State Dept:  You can't make us leave.  What happens when a consulate refuses to close after it loses its diplomatic status?  Likely nothing good, but China's Houston consul apparently wants to find out.  Cai Wei told Politico last night that the State Department order to close the consulate violated international protocol, and he has no intention of closing the facility.

The Editor says...
Turn off the electricity, cut off the water, disconnect the phone lines, surround the building with Wave Bubbles, and bombard the building with Hong Kong radio stations 24/7.  They'll leave.

Why are federal agents in Portland?  Rioters and criminals have been attacking federal law enforcement officers and the Mark O. Hatfield U.S. Courthouse in Portland for over 55 consecutive days.  The mission of the Department of Homeland Security's Federal Protective Service is to protect federal buildings, and the fellow officers and civilians inside.  The Federal Protective Service has protected the Hatfield Courthouse since it was erected in 1997.  The Department of Homeland Security has sent cross-designated law enforcement officers from U.S. Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement to support the Federal Protective Service officers in protecting the federal courthouse and the federal officers inside it from violent rioters.  The Department of Justice's U.S. Marshals Service also is supporting the Federal Protective Service at the courthouse.  Every federal officer protecting the courthouse and staff in Portland have received the service's specific training for that role.

Do Global Elites Commit Crimes Against Children?  The issue of how some of the most privileged people in the world treat children is getting more traction.  After the arrests of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, millions of ordinary people are critically examining the actions of Hollywood celebrities, titans of business, powerful politicians, media corporations, and other elite groups.  Scenarios that previously seemed unthinkable are becoming more thinkable by the day.

Let's stop the nonsense about federal agents in Portland.  There have been conflicting reports about federal agents in camouflage and unmarked vehicles detaining protesters in Portland, Ore., without cause.  This comes on the heels of scenes of federal officers, outfitted in blue shirts and tactical vests but no official patches or badges, protecting facilities in Washington, D.C., in June.  The events have called into question the role of federal law enforcement and how it intersects with traditional policing.  While many federal law enforcement agencies are investigative in nature and have special agents, not police officers, some do have a more traditional police role.  The Secret Service Uniformed Division has been in operation since 1922 and provides traditional law enforcement services around the White House and foreign embassies in the U.S.  Its agents conduct operations around the president and other dignitaries, including K-9, explosive ordnance disposal, and counter-assault teams.  The Capitol Police is approximately 1,500 police officers strong and functions much like a traditional police department.  Many other agencies have uniformed police officers as well, including the FBI, whose police officers protect the agency's headquarters, FBI Academy in Quantico, Va., and its enormous field offices in Washington and New York.

The Threat That Tucker Carlson Poses to the Media.  On Monday night [7/20/2020], Tucker Carlson blasted the New York Times for preparing to publicly reveal his new home — a home he had to move to when progressive activists vandalized his previous home and repeatedly threatened his family. [...] I want to explain exactly what it is that Carlson is doing and why they find it so dangerous.  Carlson approaches the news as someone who understands and feels the populist ideas that have long been ignored in the United States, but he does so as someone uniquely gifted to give an intelligent voice on them.  He has gained a following by explaining the very things that led to President Donald Trump being elected, and he has done so without swearing absolute fealty to Trump.  In fact, the relationship is rumored to be somewhat reversed:  Trump himself pays close attention to what Carlson is saying because he recognizes that those views are largely the views of his base.  So when Trump does something that Carlson disagrees with, and Carlson voices his disagreement, you can bet the President has heard him and is seriously considering a change of course.  This is also what makes Carlson so unique on his own network.

Unraveling "The Golden Thread": The Suspicious Cold War Death of Dag Hammarskjöld.  In 1961, Cold War tensions and the legacy of colonialism came to a head in the nation known today as the Democratic Republic of the Congo.  Early that year, Patrice Lumumba — who had played a crucial role in Congolese independence — was assassinated as part of an ongoing civil war in the country.  Lumumba wasn't the last statesman whose life was claimed by this conflict, either.  On September 18, United Nations Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld died in a plane crash while attempting to negotiate peace among the conflicting factions.  In the nearly 60 years since then, Hammarskjöld's death has been analyzed from a host of vantage points.  Was the crash a tragic accident, or were more sinister forces at work?  It didn't help matters that the initial investigation was marred by imperialist, racist attitudes that led to information from several Black eyewitnesses being discounted.

Spending As If There Is No Tomorrow.  Perhaps now is not the time in the middle of a pandemic, job losses and threats of even higher unemployment, to mention the national debt.  Or, perhaps it is.  One of the common characteristics of the fall of past empires and superpowers is massive national debt.  Ours is currently at $26.5 trillion and growing by the second.  Americans should regularly consult the real-time debt clock and ponder the future.  The interest on the debt, which also grows daily, is higher than the nation's gross domestic product for the first time since World War II.  With more borrowed money going out the Treasury Department's door because of the pandemic and Joe Biden promising to spend additional trillions should he become president the debt will become an even greater economic albatross.

Trump has been right about China for years.  Back in the summer of 2015, all the cleverest people made fun of Donald Trump for obsessing about China. [...] It seems distinctly less funny now.  There is a reason that the novel coronavirus is popularly denominated the Wuhan flu or CCP virus.  As Bill Gertz observed in How China's Communist Party Made the World Sick, 'the world does not need to prove that the communist regime in Beijing was responsible for the escape of the coronavirus from a lab' in order to cast a jaundiced eye upon its many malefactions. 'It is now clear,' he writes, 'that decades of international engagement and cooperation with communist China was a mistake that seriously undermined fundamental American values of freedom, democracy, openness, honesty, and free markets.

How to Cancel 'Cancel Culture'.  The woke left has awakened to the fact that it can destroy almost anybody's career and livelihood by just surrounding him or her with controversy and bad press, which convinces the person's employer that the simplest way to avoid the controversy is to fire the person in question.  The same techniques can and should be used against the enemy's own livelihoods and careers.

Democrats get ready for a Wellstone funeral for John Lewis.  Rep. John Lewis, a notable ally of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s during the days when civil rights work was dangerous, died Friday, and already the thumping can be heard from the Democrats for a Wellstone-style funeral.  As in that sorry 2002 episode, the funeral for Lewis won't be about honoring Lewis, it will be about Getting Trump.  From there, it won't take long for it to become a foot-stomping political rally, as happened in the case of the late Sen. Paul Wellstone, who died in a plane crash.

For America to function, Americans must have a healthy fear of police.  The emotion-based group consensus that supports police use of authority and force becomes strained and fragile during times of intense political campaigns and ideological divisions accompanied by large group demonstrations that can shift quickly toward aggressive mob mentality, anarchic behavior, and chaos.  One elemental aspect of the normal dynamics of police power and authority is fear of arrest, detention, and possible citation or fine.  Policemen can be kind and helpful and embrace the best in community police values, but at a certain tipping point, their authority and exercise of it demand respect and submission.  Period!  Resisting arrest or assault of a police officer is and must be verboten in our society.

About That George Floyd Judge Judy Video.  One of the bits of fake news currently making the rounds on the geriatric circuit purports to show George Floyd, at age 17, on the Judge Judy show, where he admits to being a carjacker.  The message — that he was a rotten [person] and more or less deserved what happened to him at the hands of Minneapolis police — is impossible to miss.

A Silent Majority Isn't Good Enough In The Culture War.  The "Silent Majority" comes up a lot these days, often in the context of a warning to Democrats about an electrified coalition of under-the-radar voters motivated to support President Trump by the left's culture war.  It's true Democrats aren't helped politically by their proximity to radical leftism, although I'm not sure I buy the argument it'll cost them the Oval Office in 2020.  Whether the Silent Majority is enough to swing an election, it's certainly no longer enough to swing the culture.  If such a group exists, it needs to speak up.

Who Funds The Lincoln Project?  Exactly Whom You Expect.  If the Lincoln Project was exclusively campaigning against Donald Trump, one might be tempted to believe it wasn't merely an arm of the Democratic Party.  If one of its co-founders, John Weaver, hadn't been registered as a foreign agent lobbying for a Russia-owned nuclear-energy company against U.S. sanctions not long ago, one might accept that the group believed the conspiracy theories it spreads.  If the group wasn't working against the moderate Republicans senators for the sin of supporting originalist Supreme Court justices, who will transcend the Trump presidency and help preserve the traditional constitutional order, one might believe that its mission was to preserve the system.

Will the Federal Reserve Cause the Next Riots?  The Federal Reserve manipulates the money supply by buying and selling government securities.  This means that when the Fed decides to pump money into the economy, it does so by putting it in the pockets of wealthy, and oftentimes politically-connected, investors who are able to spend the new money before the Fed's actions result in widespread inflation.  Wealthy individuals also tend to be among the first to invest in the bubbles that form when the Fed distorts interest rates, which are the price of money. [...] In response to the government-caused economic collapse, the Federal Reserve increased the money supply by about a trillion dollars from mid-April to early June.  In contrast, it took the Fed all of 2019 to grow the money supply by 921 billion dollars.  Even before the lockdown, the Fed was massively intervening in the economy in a futile attempt to prevent economic crisis.  A coming crisis will likely be triggered by a collapse in the dollar's value and a rejection of the dollar's world reserve currency status.  The economic collapse will be worse than the Great Depression.  This will result in widespread violence along with government crackdowns on liberties, accelerating the US slide into authoritarianism.

McGruff The Crime Dog Put Down.  In response to a growing anti-police sentiment, McGruff the Crime Dog has been taken to the vet and put down.  "We just didn't feel safe with him around," said activist Ray Clarke, one of the people who demanded McGruff be euthanized.  "He was always urging people to 'Take a bite out of crime,' and we don't need more violence like that from law enforcement.  He has to die."

Trump Needs to Scale the Real Wall of 2020.  America's small towns are underpopulated, while big cities of plague, protests, and panic are overpopulated, overpriced, and overpopularized. [...] The crisis of the inner city is not just the erosion of the black family, high crime, fatherless children, dismal schools, cynically concentrated abortion clinics, racism, and tribalism, but the old nemesis of segregation.  Black families should have the alternative of moving out of Chicago or Baltimore into smaller towns and the countryside, where race far more easily becomes incidental, not essential, to one's persona.

The Time Is Now:  Abolish the Department of Education.  The Department of Education should disappear, simply, because each university, each business, each person ought to be able to impose whatever rules of justice they wish on all people and institutions they deal with voluntarily. [...] We got along without the Department of Education before 1979 and we can do so again.  The value of a college education will not disappear if the federal government takes a hands-off approach.

How to help Hong Kong and kick-start our economic recovery at the same time.  Republicans and Democrats are largely united in horror at the Chinese Communist Party's crackdown on freedom in Hong Kong, with the semi-autonomous state now facing increasing censorship from the mainland and rampant civil liberties violations.  We don't have to just watch in despair.  We should follow the United Kingdom's lead and open our doors to immigrants and refugees from Hong Kong. [...] The immigration boost wouldn't have to be an influx of unskilled laborers, a controversial prospect among some factions of the Right.  We could make visas "merit-based" — a shift President Trump and other immigration hawks have supported in the past.  Too, we could even restrict the program to skilled doctors, nurses, researchers, and scientists to help us combat COVID-19 and skilled programmers or technology experts to help us challenge the Chinese Communist Party's growing influence over global technology.  Suffice it to say we would be admitting people with the skills and resources to make contributions, not wards of the state or additions to the welfare rolls.

Police Shoot Tuning Suspect, as He Points Revolver at Officer.  A bit before 6 p.m., in downtown San Diego, California, two police officers noticed a man in a red track suit.  He was wanted in connection with a recent robbery.  He had a distinctive face tattoo, which is how the officers identified him so quickly.  In the ensuing confrontation, the suspect flees from the police, and is shot.  Protestors claim he was shot without justification.  The next day, a hundred protestors gather.  They threatened to "burn down the system".  The San Diego police act quickly.  They released video of the shooting from four sources, including two police body cameras. [...] The well done release by the San Diego Police took control of the narrative.  It is worth watching and studying.  It shows how easy it is to justifiably shoot someone in the back in defense of self and others.  Many have said shooting someone in the back is never justified.  That is false.  Real world defensive shootings are seldom static.  They are fast, dynamic, and changing quickly.  Adversaries are often moving, twisting, and turning.

Republicans must hold firm and reject unemployment extension.  After months of being crippled by the coronavirus and the resulting lockdowns, the economy is gradually improving.  Jobs are coming back, and businesses are reopening.  But that progress will hit a brick wall if Democrats get their way and lawmakers recklessly extend enhanced unemployment benefits, which will create a significant disincentive for people to return to work. [...] On July 9, weekly jobless claims slowed to 1.3 million.  While still high by historical standards, the number was lower than expected and well below the stunning 6.6 million claims filed in just one week of April.

Tucker Carlson rips the mask off the Democrat party.  I was working on a post about how the Democrat party is cynically hiding their presidential candidate, Joe "Who's My Wife" Biden, from public view, while using the Wuhan virus, mobs, and cancel culture to silence any opposition to Democrat politicians or their plans for America.  Then, while I was looking for a specific link, I stumbled across Tucker Carlson's monologue about Biden and the debates.  I knew I had nothing to add.  Carlson is getting increasingly angry about what's going on in this country.  The thread of humor that used to underlie his opening monologues is gone.  Instead, he's gone full constitutional warrior, tackling the Democrats' cynicism, and calling out the dual leftist practices of violence and censorship.  Every day, Carlson is better than the day before, and that's certainly true with this monologue.

You Know What's The Ultimate 'Place Of Privilege'? Living In The USA.  When I was about 10 years old, my mom brought me to the United States.  She had come to the U.S. many years before with only about $200 in her pocket when she stepped off the plane.  She made a life for herself, and when she was finally able, she brought me.  She eventually met my dad, and he later adopted me.  It was one of the happiest days of my life.  My mom and dad are amazing people — caring, salt of the earth, hard-working people.  Thrift shops and Goodwill stores were our malls when I was younger, and to this day I feel a sense of excitement when I enter one.  My parents gardened in the backyard, spent their money frugally, and continued to save for part of that American Dream:  their own house.

The Great Fireworks Rebellion of 2020.  If Donald Trump's Independence Eve address at Mount Rushmore was a battle cry for the republic, millions of Americans seemingly joined forces with the president the next evening with their own sort of ammunition: fireworks.  Lockdown orders and "social distancing" decrees canceled official Fourth of July fireworks displays across the country — the latest in a long list of cruelties inflicted on the public to suffocate freedom and joy — but fed-up patriots from sea to shining sea were having none of it.  Families and friends gathered in defiance of government bans on well-attended gatherings to celebrate our nation's founding.  Then, as the sun set, Americans lit up the skies with red, white, and blue bursts of pride in a not-so-subtle rebuke of leftist mobs intent on destroying our nation's past, present, and future.

Kanye West:  Removing God and Prayer from Schools Meant More Drugs, Murders, Suicide.  Removing prayer from schools has led to "more drugs, more murders, more suicide," said rap megastar and fashion mogul Kanye West, who unveiled his unfiltered thoughts on President Trump, God, and politics in an interview with Forbes just days after tweeting about his presidential bid.  "Reinstate in God's state, in God's country, the fear and love of God in all schools and organizations and you chill the fear and love of everything else, so that was a plan by the Devil to have our kids committing suicide at an all-time high by removing God to have murders in Chicago at an all-time high because the human beings working for the Devil removed God and prayer from the schools," the "Follow God" rapper said.  "That means more drugs, more murders, more suicide."

If Republicans Extend Federal Unemployment Benefits, It's Game, Set, Match For Democrats In November.  In March, a so-called "drafting error" in the $2 trillion coronavirus relief bill led to laid-off workers receiving an extra $600 in federal unemployment benefits on top of the state benefits they were already slated to receive.  It was left as-is despite the protests of a few GOP senators, mainly because Schumer & Co. were quick to use the bad optics of seemingly 'taking money away' from people purposefully forced out of work to their advantage.  Also, outdated and technologically inept state unemployment systems weren't equipped to handle individual situations, making a one-size-fits-all approach the only way to make sure people were made whole — and then some.  It's the "and then some," however, that's been the rub for at least the past month or more as America tries to get back on its feet.  Sure, if the government was going to unjustly take away people's livelihoods to fight a virus that mostly kills people in nursing homes (without protecting those nursing homes) and has a death rate only slightly higher than the flu, said government certainly has the responsibility to ensure those people don't go under.  But in giving many of them an actual raise, they created a whole other set of problems that are now playing out in factories, restaurants, and thousands of other employers that typically employ a lower-skilled segment of the U.S. population.

How Mass Protests End.  As several political scientists noted in The Washington Post, "The United States rarely has protests in this combination of size, intensity and frequency; it usually has big protests or sustained protests, but not both."  When will the protests end?  And what will it mean when they do?  Although all waves of mass protest are different, they tend to follow a similar course.  Demonstrators can't stay in the streets forever.  When they relent, though, that doesn't mean they have stopped caring — or that the movement is over.  After protests die down, their goals and ideas can survive as the ongoing work of organizing continues.

As the crisis deepens, Q says rise or die.  Americans celebrated Independence Day this year in the most perilous state since the Civil War, uncertain if our divided house can still stand.  But beneath the terrifying screams of violence, riots, and political hysteria, a still, small voice could be heard:  the unprecedented voice of Q.  Q's growing community of followers believe that Q is a military intelligence operation, the first of its kind, whose goal is to provide the public with secret information.  Q, they believe, is a new weapon in the game of information warfare, bypassing a hostile media and corrupt government to communicate directly with the public.

Freedom and Independence are Inextricably Linked.  While asserting national independence 244 years ago, the signers of the Declaration understood the freedoms they sought belonged to individuals and that government secured — not granted — those rights.  The Founders understood that self-governance as a nation begins and ends with self-governance by the individual.  We could not have one without the other.  If we turn over responsibility for our lives, families, and communities to government our dependence expands and our liberty contracts.  It is as inescapable as the natural law of gravity.  The Founders' notion of freedom was inextricably linked to personal independence, described as the absence of interference into the daily life and destiny of individuals with the caveat that to preserve and protect freedom, individuals accept some inevitable interaction with government so long as it is minimized to the greatest extent practicable.  Consequently, the most crucial of those rights would be articulated in the Constitution's Bill of Rights.  First among these are the foundational freedoms of religious liberty and the right of conscience.

America's Sovereignty Is Teetering on a Precipice.  Two hundred and forty-four years after the 13 British colonies in North America declared their independence and became a sovereign nation, America is poised to collapse from within.  Her imminent demise will not come from foreign troops quartered on her soil.  It will come from Marxists and anarchists who use racial grievance and the cries of the oppressed to dismantle America's institutions and defenses.  Insurrection labeled as "peaceful protest" is the battering ram weakening our nation's foundations.  Using the voices of the oppressed and deceived masses, and their bodies and legitimate grievances as shields, is part of a deliberate plan to bring about a new order guaranteed to be worse than what exists now.

Happy July 4: Tyranny Of The Woke Mob Might Be Worse Than Suffering Under British Rule.  When we celebrate Independence Day, we rejoice over the freedom won from the English crown.  But there's a new master gaining power in America.  We need to shrug it off before it takes over.  Because we're marking the adoption of the Declaration of Independence by the Continental Congress, it would be instructive to see where we are today by comparing a few passages from our founding document with current events.

Cool Hand Trump.  As the president takes heat from Chicken Littles who whine about acting presidential, President Trump remains coolly presidential in handling two nation-paralyzing events simultaneously.  In both cases, the president gave Democrats plenty of rope and watched them hang themselves. [...] Democrats thought their lockdowns had wrecked his MAGA economy, which they believed would lead to a landslide for Doctor Demented and the end of capitalism.  Instead, President Trump is making America great again — again.  Voters notice.  Covid 19 so failed Democrats that they unleashed Antifa to turn cities aflame in the summertime.  How is that working for them?  Seattle's Karen mayor, Jenny Durkan, stuck her tongue out at the president and turned six blocks of her city over to these thugs.  Three weeks later, she had police shut it down after the thugs went to Her House.  How dare they?

5 Ways You Can Fight Back In The Cultural Civil War.  [#2] Shift your spending away from corporations that hate you, like Amazon.  If you're a conservative, understand that Amazon hates you (but loves communist China).  Also understand that you don't have to buy everything on Amazon.  That new can opener or garden hose you so desperately need?  You can order pretty much whatever you need from Walmart, Target, Best Buy, Home Depot, and so on.  Many of these places will even deliver to your doorstep.  Will you pay a little more for it?  Maybe.  Will it come in three or four days instead of tomorrow?  Yes.  But if you can't bear that miniscule inconvenience for the sake of your principles, then you don't deserve America.

Why Biden's Lead Will Evaporate.  Based on recently released documents, the once-rumored 'Obamagate' conspiracy is now known.  This plot involved people at the highest levels of government.  Also known is that the goal was to destroy Donald Trump's presidency.  Attorney General William Barr and Congressman Devin Nunes have been dropping hints that the seemingly endless investigations are about to come to a head.  What is unknown is what the response will be.  These crimes, if they go unpunished will firmly place the deep state in control of our fate.  Both the Democrats and the anti-Trumpers are fine with that scenario.  Americans are not.  If AG Barr actually does what is right, justice will be served:  Advantage Trump.

They are trying to start a war.  When Corona fails again, they will try to start a war with Russia.  The other day, the New York Times was subtly and not so subtly promoting the claim that President Trump was standing callously by and coddling Russia's Vladimir Putin even as Putin was busily offering the Taliban bounties for the bodies of dead U.S. servicemen.  It was the old "Trump is a Russian agent" canard whipped out in a new form. [...] President Trump denied it.  His acting director of National Intelligence at the time, Richard Grenell, denied it vehemently. [...] And for what it's worth, even the Russians denied it.  But the Times pressed on with the claim and even did some additional reporting to claim that it had proof. [...] Fortunately, there was CBS's Catherine Herridge, who batted back at the press at its own game — and found some pretty exculpatory backing for the Trump administration's statements.

Dilbert creator Scott Adams:  Republicans will be hunted if Biden is elected.  Comic strip creator Scott Adams said there's a "good chance" Republicans will be killed if former Vice President Joe Biden is elected.  Adams, who created Dilbert in 1989, sent out tweets Wednesday claiming conservatives would be targeted with violence should the presumptive Democratic nominee win the 2020 election.  "If Biden is elected, there's a good chance you will be dead within the year," Adams warned in a tweet.  "Police will stand down.  Republicans will be hunted," he added.  Police will stand down.  [Tweets]  After some social media users questioned his claim, Adams said he spoke with a woman who told him she was fired from her job because her colleagues suspected she supported President Trump.  "Just interviewed a woman who was fired for suspicion of liking President Trump.  Suspicion.  Fired," Adams wrote.

Riots to Distract from Obamagate?  In the 1962 musical-comedy, The Music Man, grifter Harold Hill cons an entire Iowa town by whipping up a false crisis (the moral decline of its young men) and championing a false solution (a boy's marching band). He then bilks the town of money for instruments and uniforms while only pretending to follow through with his plan. [...] Today in America, a dark and dystopian version of this theme is unfolding before our eyes.  The Iowa town is all of America, Harold Hill is Obama and the Democrats, the false crisis is the anomalous death of George Floyd, the false solution is 'defunding the police' (an uber-provocative diversion they know is unwinnable), the Mayor is President Trump, and the Town Council/Barbershop Quartet is the conservative movement, including especially conservative media and pundits tasked with exposing Obamagate to the public.  [Video clip]

The Sneaky Covid War on Cash.  We have seen the death of much of the world's funny money in just the last 40 years.  For example, in Peru, one million Intis would buy a modest home in 1985; five years later it would not buy a tube of toothpaste.  Brazil had so many new banknotes they ran out of heroes to print on them.  In Vietnam in the 1980's, factories had to hire trucks to carry the bags of dongs to pay the Tet (New Year) workers' bonuses.  In 1997 in Zaire, it took a brick-sized bundle of 500,000 notes of the local currency to pay for a meal — no one bothered to count them.  On the Yugoslav border in 1989, tourists foolish enough to change "hard" currency for Yugoslav dinars got 14 cubic metres of dinars.  "Dinars can no longer be measured in millions or billions, but only in cubic metres".  It had become a cubic currency.  These grim records were eclipsed in November 2008, when Zimbabwe suffered inflation of 98% PER DAY.

Disarming Elmer Fudd Shows Folly of Hollywood.  The streaming service HBO Max is launching a reboot of the classic children's cartoon Looney Tunes.  In doing so they've caved to antigun cancel culture with two of the cartoon's lovable losers.  When the perpetually-failing hunter Elmer Fudd heads out to hunt Bugs Bunny, he'll no longer carry his trusty shotgun.  Instead, show writers decided he'll need to bump off Bugs with a Grim Reaper-style scythe.  Gunslinger Yosemite Sam's two revolvers were also axed.  Rather than using Fudd and Sam to weave in early firearm safety education for kids, the cartoon's gun ban logic itself is a caricature.

The Room Where It Happens, Indeed.  As the House readied its vote to make a new state out of the District of Columbia, the Speaker went before the press to dilate on injustice of what has obtained for the past 230 years.  Mrs. Pelosi called the District "an affront to our democracy."  She noted that its residents pay taxes, serve in the military, and contribute to the "economic vitality" of America but lack for representation.  "How could it be?  Whose idea was that?"  It turns out that we know exactly whose idea it was.  That's because it was hatched at the very dinner party that, among other things, is now being immortalized anew in the Broadway blockbuster "Hamilton."  The dinner took place in 1790 at New York.  It was no cabal of counter-revolutionary cads.  The three persons in the room where it happened were Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison.

The Old America Is Dead.  Where Do We Go From Here?  Patriotic Americans understand Muley.  Our people, our culture, our history, everything we hold dear, is under relentless attack by the Main Stream Media, politicians, "activists," and kritarchs in the courts, aided and abetted by enemies within, often our own kith and kin, who have internalized the blood-libel Leftist narrative of an irredeemably "racist" America that must be razed to the ground.  "If you know your enemy," wrote Sun Tzu, "and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles."  Our enemy, in this case is the globalist Blob and its militant would-be Che Guevaras and LARPing Leninists, the MSM, the bureaucracy, the courts, the big corporations, and the education establishment.  Yet, for the most part, until recently, the Blob has not confronted the Historic American Nation head-on.  The Blob has been patient, killing us by the death of a thousand cuts, taking ground steadily through subversion, using propaganda and misinformation, censorship via Tech Totalitarians, and the slow encroachment of what the late Sam Francis called "anarcho-tyranny," with mass immigration ("the Great Replacement") as its weapon of mass destruction.  The Blob is amorphous, a slippery, slimy thing that probes and gropes its way into whatever social-economic-political cracks it can exploit, eventually englfing its prey like quicksand.  It is also using "hybrid warfare" tactics that have been used before but have gelled with the expansion of mass communications and can quickly conjure up "flash mobs" and distribute "fake news."

Since we're canceling people for racism, can we talk about Charles Darwin?  [Scroll down]  I do think it's time for the left's own rules to be applied to one of their most cherished and beloved heroes.  Even by the most generous of measures, the intellectual and philosophical heritage of Charles Darwin is one of the most hideously racist legacies one can fathom.  And yet, his inherently racist dogma is not only presented in public schools across America, it is state and federal policy that every student in America demonstrate proficiency in understanding and applying his dangerous ideology.  Set aside the colonialist rage against the Spanish conquistadors just long enough to recognize that it was Charles Darwin himself who wrote in his diary after encountering the "savages" in Tierra del Fuego, "one can hardly make oneself believe that they are fellow creatures."

Is This the Stupidest Time in America's History?  We have real problems in America right now.  We need to solve them with rational discourse, serious conversations, and genuine engagement with each other.  We need to work together.  Instead, it's as though decades of lousy education, a terrible media, and activists who favor retweets over real improvements have all colluded to create the perfect storm of stupidity.  It's a weird time.  We've all been locked up and cooped up.  We're worried about the long-term effects of a pandemic.  Many Americans are out of work and/or facing the end of their small businesses.  We're horrified by the fact that a cop killed a man who wasn't resisting arrest, while three other cops watched as the man said he couldn't breathe.  It's not surprising emotions are high.  But we cannot meet this moment with just our passions.  We have to be serious here.

Why Parler [is bad], and why Gab is superior.  I hate social media, but I've had accounts on Gab, Parler, and Twitter for about a year, so I've used them enough to get a feel for the usability and member engagement.  I've been in the software development world in various capacities for almost thirty years, so I have some opinions on how things work in this space and what's possible.  At this point, sadly, I think Parler is a bad joke.
  •   Parler's app is vulnerable to Apple and Google
  •   Parler is vulnerable to being delisted by their name registrar
  •   Parler's UI is horrible (especially for those used to Twitter)
  •   Parler has no API (that I've found)
  •   Parler is a closed system (your posts aren't visible to non-members)
  •   Parler has bait-and-switched users with their "free speech" spiel
  •   Parler is vulnerable to blacklisting by payment platforms
  •   Parler is vulnerable to being deplatformed by their hosting provider
  •   Parler requires personal info, which can be compromised or sold
  •   Gab has faced and solved all of these issues

Reality Is Going To The Polls.  Yes, blue cities are being wrecked, but in the end, Reality will get it's vote and it's the only vote that counts.  That vote will come in stages.  Stage 1 is where the cops leave black neighborhoods.  Stage 2 is where those neighborhoods turn into abbatoirs while the news media ignores them because rrrrrrrrrrracism!**  Stage 3 is where it gets so bad that no one can ignore it.  Stage 4 is where we realize that the problem wasn't racism after all, it was the destruction of the family.  Maybe we get to Stage 4, maybe we stop at Stage 3 and come to a different conclusion.  Either way, it's going to get harder and harder to sell the fake noose stories as we watch the black bodies pile up in black neighborhoods at the hands of black criminals.

A Black Lives Matter Reading List for Rich, White Liberals.  I lived under Soviet Communism in my parents' homelands of Poland and Czechoslovakia.  I stood in line for lard and I met people who had been tortured for thoughtcrimes.  I've worked in Nepal and the Central African Republic, two of the world's poorest nations.  I currently live in Paterson, a majority-minority city, where the median income is $34,000.  To me, America, with all its flaws, and my life, with all its limitations, are blessed.

Crush Your Enemies.  [Scroll down]  In the end, the upcoming election is not about Donald Trump vs. Joe Biden.  The 2020 version of Biden is plainly afflicted by severe, paralyzing dementia, but even in his so-called "prime," he had no particular vision or core convictions.  This is an election either for Trump or against Trump.  Biden's presence is irrelevant.  The roughly 43% of the solid for-Trump vote and the approximately 45% of the always-anti-Trump vote are already baked into the election.  The election will turn on that casually-attentive, somewhat-persuadable 12%.  The Republicans will make their usual mistake of thinking that the merits of the issues — the facts on the ground, like how far back the economy/employment has come by November and whether or not the racial tension has smoothed out a bit — will carry the day.

Sowing the Sixties Winds, Reaping Today's Whirlwind.  [Scroll down]  History now becomes the systematic demonization of our ancestors for their flawed humanity and failure to create an impossible utopia.  The West now is notable only for its crimes against that idealism, while its unique transcendence of those crimes, its recognition that certain behaviors and institutions are crimes, is forgotten.  For example, slavery, the historical evil that so exercises the "woke" protestors and rioters, is an historically unexceptional, universal institution.  In the past it was no more problematic than the domestication of animals.  But the rejection of slavery happened only in the West, from the 4th century BC Greek rhetorician Alcidamas, who said "The god gave freedom to all men, and nature made no man a slave"; to the Christian American and British abolitionists of the early 19th century, who finally brought about the end of slavery in the West.  But because the left sees only the West's flaws, today we are watching the violent assault on public monuments to people from the past, even statues of Lincoln, who ended slavery in the U.S.  In the Sixties and Seventies left-wing terrorists bombed military recruiting offices and university labs that allegedly served the "military-industrial complex."

The Left Craps Out.  There are plenty of leftists swaggering these days.  Cities have blazed, municipal and state governments have been humiliated, police forces are cowering, mighty corporations are trampling each other to apologize for things they had absolutely nothing to do with.  At first glance, this appears to be the left's moment in the sun, something they've looked forward to for many years, if not generations.  Throughout the 20th century, the left's problem with the United States was the lack of a proletariat to lead against the oppressors.  The American working class was the farthest thing in the world from an "oppressed" — they lived better than all but the ruling classes in most societies.  What did they have to revolt against?

America's Faithful Are Better Prepared for the Coming Anti-Government Rage.  Future historians looking back on the COVID-19 epidemic will likely record two U.S. domestic crises, one physical and the other psychological.  The first we already know: the spread of a potentially lethal virus forcing a countrywide shutdown in order to slow the rate of infection.  The second, soon to be painfully obvious, will stem from the sharp rise in government debt needed to support struggling businesses and unemployed workers during the shutdown. $3.8 trillion in 2020 alone, and more than $2.1 trillion in 2021.  Had Washington politicians listened to the advice of knowledgeable commentators and used the economic recovery of the earlier decade to prudently build a financial cushion, this dramatic increase would not by itself create a financial emergency.  But from 2010 to 2020, the federal government averaged deficits of more than $1 trillion per year, more than doubling its liabilities to $22 trillion.  So when the new borrowing is added on, the resulting deficit will be equal to the entire national economy (GDP), the level where any country's creditworthiness is called into question.

Venezuelan woman begs Americans to wake up:  This is how it starts.  Cubans warned us, we didn't think it could happen to us.  With entitled members of pampered Gen-Z actively engaged in the cultural cleansing of the United States, looking back on history through today's hard left lens, leave it to someone who has experienced this before to put things into perspective.  A woman who said she is from Venezuela posted a video amid the insanity gripping American streets, where even statutes of Union generals who led the fight to free the slaves isn't safe.  "Why do I even worry about some silly little statue coming down?  Or some silly little street names changing?  Why do I even care?" she asked.  "It's because the last time I didn't care," the woman then said, answering her own question.  "The last time, I didn't care about this as a teenager — I have already lived through these things when I was living in Venezuela."  She then detailed the changes she witnessed as a teen.

The Elites Are Revolting.  What you see out there is our alleged betters struggling mightily to hold onto the power that we Normal people dared to wrest away from them in 2016.  One component of their campaign is the burning and looting information operation conducted by black-clad pawns.  The other component is the soft power corporate/media/cultural conspiracy to silence dissent and enforce fearful conformity to their narrative.  Usually, a revolution is conducted by the peasants to throw off a tyrannical ruling class.  Here, the ruling class is waging a political and cultural war to retake and then tighten its grip on the masses.  They are no longer even pretending to seek the consent of the governed.  And once they retake power, that's it — they will never give up power again.

Republicans Must Understand:  We Are at War.  The Republicans have the presidency, the Senate, and the independent media — which is certainly better than nothing.  The Democrats have the House of Representatives...and the mainstream media, academia, education, Hollywood, medicine, and a weird weaponized "science" (that really drives the rational and logical people insane).  In the past, institutions such as the military, mainstream churches, big business, and professional sports may have leaned toward the Republican side.  These, however, have been outright neutralized or are in the process of being assimilated into the opposing side.  In the case of big business, it is firmly entrenched in the opposing side at this point.

Keep the Children at Home.  [Scroll down]  I make a modest proposal:  that it should be against the law for children under the age of 15 (say) to attend political demonstrations or rallies, and that disobedience to this law should be classified as child abuse.

The City that Really Did Abolish the Police.  As a movement grows in American cities and suburbs to overhaul police departments and confront their long records of racially unjust, violent enforcement, Camden is one rare — and complicated — success story, a city that really did manage to overhaul its police force and change how it operated.  And it took a move as radical and controversial as what some activists are calling for today:  Camden really did abolish its police department.  And then the city set about rebuilding the police force with an entirely new one under county control, using the opportunity to increase the number of cops on the streets and push through a number of now-heralded progressive police reforms.  And with time, the changes started to stick in a department that just years earlier seemed unfixable.

There's a reason racial tension is rising in America - it's by design.  If you've been paying attention recently, and you probably have, you've likely sensed that something profound is happening to this country right now, something that could transform what America is.  You can feel it happening. [...] Forty years ago, this was a middle-class country and as a result, America had strongly egalitarian values.  Pretty much everyone used commercial airports and ate at McDonald's.  Do you remember that?  People talked without irony about their rights as citizens and taxpayers.  You couldn't pay extra to jump to the head of the line at Disney World.  The idea that someone like Jeffrey Epstein could beat a sex charge because he was rich would have shocked us then.  We would have demanded an investigation into just how Jeffrey Epstein died.  Why?  Because Americans hated corruption.  They saw corruption as an offense against equality.  That was 40 years ago.  Things were moving in the opposite direction ever since.  We now accept, uncritically, the claim that some people deserve better treatment based on how they were born, and some deserve worse.

When Your Private Dinner Conversation Becomes Your Waiter's Facebook Post.  When you're out having drinks with friends, are your personal conversations about politics private?  Should they be?  According to at least one New England restaurant, the answer is no.

Mass Police Resignations Ensure Societal Chaos.  [Scroll down]  Seven police officers have resigned from the Minneapolis police force due to lack of support from city leaders.  The Star Tribune characterizes this as an "unusually large exodus," but one suspects it is only the beginning.  Retired Minneapolis police officer and use-of-force expert Mylan Masson, explains why:  "They don't feel appreciated.  Everybody hates the police right now.  I mean everybody."  Not everybody.  Millions of decent Americans of every ethnicity and political persuasion are appalled by those who would destroy the nation while calling that destruction "social justice."  They are disgusted as they watch cities get burned and looted and hear such orchestrated mayhem referred to as "peaceful protests."  Moreover, they know those orchestrating the divisiveness are a contemptible combination of racial arsonists, disaffected and indoctrinated youths with bleak futures, useful idiots who assume the color of their skin automatically makes them "guilty" and "privileged," and a cadre of elitist accomplices, organizers and/or cheerleaders with genuine wealth, power, and privilege — including private security forces and gated neighborhoods — who think being "down with the cause" has bought them absolution.

You can't order police officers to die for your politics.  Now that the Senate GOP has begun the process of rolling out their own version of a "police reform" bill, predictable partisan fights are already breaking out.  One of the major bones of contention is the idea that the bill would "discourage" the use of chokeholds by the cops during confrontations with non-compliant, disruptive or violent suspects.  As with some other provisions, this doesn't go far enough for the liberals and Democrats who are aiming to either defund or abolish the police, but will settle for as much as they can get in the meantime.  They want the maneuver to be forbidden entirely with punishment meted out to any cops who violate the prohibition. [...] While this certainly shouldn't be mandated from the federal level, we're talking about things that must be handled with extreme care even at the state and local levels.  The idea that anyone can simply grab a pen and paper and legislate how things will play out during a tense encounter between the police and a criminal suspect is laughable.  Or at least it would be laughable if there were anything funny about such a serious subject.

TUCKER: Why is Senator Ted Cruz Fundraising for a Cheap Labor Senator?  Last week, Texas Senator Ted Cruz sent out a fundraising email calling on people to make contributions to Alaska Senator Dan Sullivan. [...] This is a strange development when considering that Cruz signed on to a letter along with Senators Josh Hawley and Tom Cotton, calling for the suspension of work visas for a year until employment levels reached normal rates.  Indeed, Cruz's actions appear to be incoherent.  His signature on that letter is commendable, but there needs to be more consistency in his actions.  Namely, he needs to be propping up more candidates who actually believe in immigration restriction such as Kris Kobach or forming stronger alliances with the likes of Josh Hawley.  Trying to play nice with everyone will not make patriotic immigration reform a reality.

How to Fight the Woke...and Win.  [#4] Never apologize, and never quit.  The Woke view an apology as a confession, not as a chance at reconciliation.  As such, never apologize.  You will only be made to grovel further or surrender completely.  At the same time, never quit.  That is what your spineless employer will want you to do to save him the trouble of firing you.  Don't do it.  Make them fire you, then move to Point 5.  [#5] Use lawfare.  If you have the means, then use lawfare against the Woke at any and every opportunity (which is one reason why electing President Trump and getting good judges is important).  For instance, if your employer fires you to appease the Woke mob, then make him pay for it.  Don't go quietly.  Instead, hit him with the hardest legal counterpunch that you can.  It won't always work, but it will sometimes, and that matters. [...] [#7] Starve the Woke while feeding your allies.  Stop giving money or time to any Woke-supporting group.  Stop supporting Woke universities or businesses.  Stop watching Netflix and the NFL.  Just stop.  Starve them to the greatest extent possible.

What the wind blew away.  Really, do we have to go over this whole business with Gone with the Wind once again?  Since 1961, the United States has gone through the civil rights era and all that came afterward.  Does anyone really think we're going to rewatch or reread this classic tale of endurance and resilience, of a woman wasting years of her life pining over a man who was wrong for her when the right one was always right there beside her, and decide that the Old South, of which we see just a little before it gets blown up completely, really had something great going on in the plantation system?  Certainly, none of the four characters who speak for the author — Scarlett and Melanie, Ashley and Rhett — ever say anything other than that the war itself was a blunder of historic proportions. [...] In short, if you want a defense of war or the states that began it, Gone with the Wind is not it.  Slavery is in the book, as in slaves and then freed slaves.  But they, like everyone else, are secondary to the theme of the opus, which is that the fittest survive.

Greg Gutfeld compares similar deaths of George Floyd and Tony Timpa — one black, one white.  Fox News host Greg Gutfeld called out the media for fueling the divisive narrative behind the latest police controversies and suggested it's time to "take the foot off the race pedal."  The author and co-host of "The Five" contended that the liberal media needs to "stop pushing inflammatory uninformed opinions" during a monologue on the show Monday.

The 'Woke' Left's War on American History.  The Army now says it is open to renaming bases that have been named for Confederate generals, and it is time to draw the line.  The electorate should support President Trump's decision to veto this idea right out of the starting gate. [...] No civilized person defends, justifies, or glorifies slavery as practiced in the antebellum South along with the Union states of Delaware, West Virginia, and Maryland — unless we count Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats who recently tried to show their solidarity with black Americans by wearing the kente cloth favored by Ashanti slave traders who sold other Africans to Europeans during the 19th century.

This is from a left-wing web site, presented here for what it's worth:
Removing a U.S. President Without an Election.  Five times in the last ninety years, elements of the U.S. power structure have tried to oust a sitting president without an election.  The efforts were aimed at Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton, and Donald Trump.  Two attempts succeeded and three failed. [...] By the time President Kennedy took office in 1961, the military budget had grown twenty times larger in real dollars than in 1933.  The money was paying for a military-industrial complex, including the Pentagon, weapons manufacturers, State Department, CIA, FBI, NSA, Atomic Energy Commission, NASA, Members of Congress, think tanks, universities, and a battalion of friendly reporters.  The sprawling power system had become strong enough to perpetuate itself and to remove a president if necessary.

The Floyd Riots Mark a Century of Communist Agitation.  [Scroll down]  In George Floyd, our neo-communists found their own Sacco and Vanzetti, but much better.  As a black American, his death had much more frightening moral power.  It was caught on camera.  The offending officer was white.  In 2020, these were all essential variables.  Had any of three other officers at the scene — two Asians and a black American — been the one kneeling on Floyd's neck, the story would never have left the twin cities.

The dangers of bowing to the mob and defunding the police.  [Scroll down]  Regardless, our politicians are so worried about this fake army, that they are willing to say and do anything to appease the angry mobs even if it is at the ultimate detriment of the cities and country that we all share.  This is not a new phenomenon, but with the advent of social media and the amplification of Twitter activists, we've allowed cancel-culture to scare politicians, corporations, and individuals into bowing to the mob, even if it means there will be poorly thought-out political policies enacted as a result.  When a leader admits defeat out of appeasement, or gives the mob the apology they are chanting for out of fear, it will never be enough and they will eventually come for your head.  Which is why we need leaders with a strong moral compass, willing to stand up for rational thought with a true sense of patriotism for America.  Elected officials taking up seats for personal gain or those that are propped up by special interest groups don't have the driving force in their hearts to prevent them crumbling before the pressure.

Here's Why Lindsey Graham's Trump-Russia Corruption Investigation Is a Joke.  Sen. Lindsey Graham has always talked a big game.  When he's not praising Joe Biden or treating Robert Mueller like a national hero, he makes his way to Fox News from time to time to rattle the saber over FBI and DOJ corruption.  That's mostly lead to nowhere, as we now stand less than five months from a national election with nothing accomplished and not a single major witness facing a subpoena.  Now, though, he's finally pledging to do what he pledged to do over a year ago.  This past week, his committee passed a resolution allowing the subpoenaing of various Obama era officials involved in Trump-Russia investigation corruption.  Or is he going after FISA abuse?  Or the unsupported appointment of Robert Mueller?  Or the Michael Flynn abuse?  Who knows at this point.

Wokism's Cult Following.  Liberty is privilege.  It's a myth that everyone desires freedom; many aspire simply to be trusties.  But what of those who don't feel 'safe' in that safe space?  They could be a problem, but will soon be shown the error of their ways through reprogramming and soon be groveling on the ground, even washing the feet of demonstration organizers, grateful that they no longer trigger anyone.  Donating large sums of money to obtain forgiveness for social sins will be a standard form of obtaining absolution.  These features so strikingly resemble religious rituals that the Woke movement has been accused of being a cult.

Politics as Religion After George Floyd.  This Isn't an Orwellian Novel.  This Is Your Country.  What are you really seeing as Americans kneel, hands raised in secular prayer, repeating political creeds on the TV news?  And that secular foot-washing?  You're witness to neo-Marxist appropriation of Christian symbolism, in the aftermath of the horrifying Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd.  And now, the priests of the secularist left separate the biblical sheep from the goats on the basis of skin color. [...] In the biblical parable of the sheep and the goats, the sheep went to heaven, the goats were sent to hell.  But in the current political universe, whites must atone for the sins of white racism even if they're not racists, even if their families arrived here only yesterday.  And even the mere suggestion this might be unfair, the slightest hint of resistance, can trigger accusations that could ruin careers, deny entrance to the professions, and drive nuance from the public square.  And it is all by design.

Free Citizens Do Not Kneel.  In the last couple of weeks we have witnessed people, most of them white, kneeling before black protestors and activists as a supposed gesture of repentance for their crimes of "white privilege" and tolerating "systemic racism."  The kneeling penitents include not just ordinary people, but police officers, National Guardsmen, and, in a shocking self-debasement of the world's greatest democratic republic, a gaggle of House Representatives adorned with "culturally appropriated" African kente cloth scarves.  White progressive racial masochism is nothing new; Tom Wolfe skewered it brilliantly nearly a half century ago in essays like "Mau-Mauing the Flak-Catchers."  But the current manifestation is more significant and dangerous.  It has taken place amidst violent widespread rioting and looting and assaults, and so these acts of kneeling are a form of tribute exacted by the sheer power of destruction wrought by the rioters and their "peaceful" abettors.  As such, they undermine the very foundation of citizen self-rule and political freedom[.]

Devolution to Revolution:  An Already Demoralized U.S. is Now Being Destabilized.  The two destabilizing events recently occurring back-to-back, the response to the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic, and the George Floyd rioting, illustrate well how America is now institutionally incapable of making decisions in her own best interests.  That is, the overreaction to the disease and under-reaction to the rioting reflect a country long demoralized.  Moreover, if that's not troubling enough, know that this is a state of being that usually leads to tyranny.  We'd had pandemics before — ones causing more death, especially when adjusted for population — but we'd never before embraced lockdowns, a cure worse than the disease.  But at least the disease was a relative unknown; riots are not.  People the world over know how to deal with riots, and this isn't by letting them metastasize so thugs can run wild, hurt the innocent and destroy the nation.  Yet our "leaders" fiddled while the country burned, motivated by moral confusion and weakness, and some, most certainly, by ulterior motives.

The Editor says...
The so-called pandemic and the riots are connected:  Both are mechanisms to make Donald Trump look bad and diminish his prospects for re-election.  During the coronavirus panic, prisoners were released due to concerns about their safety — not ours, of course.  With lots of violent criminals on the streets, what happened next?  Rioting!  Who would participate in a riot?  Those who are most violently anti-Trump, and those who were already violent criminals and have nothing to lose by going back to prison!

What If Police Officers Go on Strike?  [Scroll down]  The lesson here is that police are starting to respond to these betrayals in more assertive ways.  The Ferguson Effect reflected the trend of police officers to be less proactive on the job, with the predictable spike in violent crime resulting from a lessened police presence.  City leaders apparently haven't gotten the message, so mass resignations like these are the next logical step.  But this mass resignation was only from the Emergency Response team.  Those 57 officers still work as Buffalo police — which raises the question as to what the next step might be if things still don't improve for them.  What if police officers go on strike?  Yes, there are strict rules in police unions forbidding this.  But...what if?  The City of Buffalo employs over 700 police officers.  If all of them went on strike tomorrow, does Mayor Brown have another contingency plan?  Theoretically, if he posted job openings for 700 new officers the following day, it would take months, even years, to vet, hire, train, and deploy them.  By that point in Buffalo's experiment in societal entropy, who would even want the job?

Disney Fans Say Splash Mountain Should Be Re-Themed Because of Ties to Racism.  Splash Mountain, one of Disney's most beloved rides at Walt Disney World in Florida, Tokyo Disneyland, and at Disneyland in California, is being criticized by social media users and Change.org supporters who say the ride's racial overtones need to be "re-themed."  The ride is based on the 1946 Disney film Song of the South, featuring characters such as Brer Rabbit, Brer Bear, and Brer Fox, and has been widely criticized for its depiction of blacks and romanticized view of the post-Civil War South.

The Editor says...
Perhaps the Splash Mountain ride could be redesigned to include a central theme of perpetual victimhood, with an undercurrent of senseless Antifa violence, culminated by a lecture delivered by Hillary Clinton.  That sounds like so much fun!

Communism Is Reborn with a New Name in America.  Do some people really think that the impeachment, the corona-gulag, and the pogroms all occurred in America one after another in a completely random pattern of events?  Why did pre-planned and synchronized riots and looting suddenly arise?  Because the adventure with the coronavirus hysteria failed.  Why did the coronavirus hysteria suddenly lead to a corona-gulag being created?  Because the impeachment failed.  Why did impeachment suddenly arise?  Because "Russiagate" (or, rather, Obamagate) failed.  Why did "Russiagate" arise?  Because leftism was defeated in the 2016 elections.

Know Your Enemy:  China.  If you want to understand why China will attack us, the place to start is the old U.S. Department of War film, Know Your Enemy:  Japan, made the last time we were attacked by a major Asian power that was transitioning from its feudal past.  The Japanese in WWII were driven by their creation myth which says that they were founded by an emperor called Jimmu in 660 B.C. Jimmu had a philosophy called Hakko Ichiu which means that "let us extend the capitol and cover the eight corners of the world under one roof." [...] The Chinese version of Hakko Ichiu is called Tianxia under which China gets to rule the rest of the world.  It has nothing to do with communism.

Be Courageous And Stand Firm, America — We Do Not Kneel.  The kneeling phenomenon demanded by the radical left in the wake of George Floyd's death — and embraced by those guilted into submission — creates a two-tiered social stratification of "kneelers" and "those who refuse to bend the knee" that's wholly un-American.  Mobs resulting from years of citizens saturated in "critical race theory" and grievance studies have pressured far too many into believing they bear guilt for the past sins of others.  Now they kneel in fealty to that false reality or are exiled from society.  Unfortunately, it's also moved beyond just kneeling.

More Than Ever, It's Time to Unleash the Power of 'No'.  For way too long, too many conservatives and other normal people have failed to deploy our most potent weapon in the defense of free thought and expression — the utter refusal to go along with the demands of the carnivorous left.  As has been said before by me and others, we need to introduce these spoiled brats to the concept of "no."  This is a critical moment, and how we react now will determine if our future is citizenship or serfdom. [...] The rioting was really an information operation, and a failed one.  There were two big problems for the furious rioters.  One was that normal people saw no connection between protesting the treatment of George Floyd and looting big screens from the local Target, except that both disgusted them.  The second issue was the inability to identify a specific enemy.  Who exactly was the person supporting the killing of George Floyd?  What was the name of the person who said, "Yeah, that was a good thing"?

How Reliable Are Lottery Revenues?  Back in 2017, New Jersey decided to make the state lottery an "asset" for the pension plans.  As noted in yesterday's post, it looks like the NJ Lottery took a hit, just as New Jersey needs more money for the pensions.  So let me revisit my post on state lottery revenues from 2017.  I'm heavily editing from the original [skipping a data quality discussion], and then adding some new data to see if my conclusions are any different now.

Counterfeit Money Is The Motive Behind Gangland's George Floyd Arson And Looting Riots.  [Scroll down]  George Floyd was in bad health due to his drug addictions.  He knew his condition and all he was expected to do was agree to turn over a list of names involved in distribution of fake money.  Most grown men can handle being wrestled down to the pavement.  The four police officers had no reason to kill him but to the contrary needed to keep him alive as a witness in the counterfeit racket.  Reading him his rights and calling in a lawyer makes for good legal theory by the book, but in reality tough methods are the only way to bust large-scale criminal operations.  If Floyd has one iota of respect for his society, he would have confessed the names of his criminal associates preying on the poorer communities of Minnesota, and he'd be alive today under a witness protection program.  The police are not sadists who enjoy violence but must be tough to break the code of silence enforced by murderous gangsters.  It's a civil war and getting worse due to liberal judges and wide-open immigration for foreign thugs.

The Editor says...
Even if all that is true, George Floyd didn't deserve to be killed in the street, negligently or otherwise.

Wall Street Journal op-ed:  Hold officers accountable who use excessive force, but there's no evidence of widespread racial bias.  Political commentator and attorney Heather Mac Donald posted an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal this week that argues police should be held accountable when they use excessive force, but evidence of "widespread racial bias" by police doesn't exist.  "However sickening the video of Floyd's arrest, it isn't representative of the 375 million annual contacts that police officers have with civilians," Mac Donald wrote in her piece titled "The Myth of Systemic Police Racism."  Mac Donald continues, "A solid body of evidence finds no structural bias in the criminal-justice system with regard to arrests, prosecution or sentencing.  Crime and suspect behavior, not race, determine most police actions."

Arizona Dem nominee Mark Kelly's questionable business dealing and China ties.  [Democrat Mark] Kelly is an ex-Navy combat pilot, astronaut and husband of former Democrat congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, who was critically injured during a 2011 Tucson shooting.  Giffords became somewhat of a celebrity and folk hero following the shooting.  Her status appears to have bestowed a halo effect of sorts around Kelly, which may account for his 49-40% lead in the most recent Real Clear Politics poll average, though recent history — and especially the 2016 Presidential election — has demonstrated that polling is not always an accurate predictor, and a lot can change with five months still remaining till the election.  President Trump's November performance in Arizona is also likely to weigh heavily on the battle for this Senate seat.  Notably, Mark Kelly also enjoys a substantial fundraising margin over incumbent McSally, having raised more than $31 million in direct campaign dollars to her $18 million through March 31, 2020.

Protests, Riots, Death By Cop:  Have We Learned Nothing?  man died tragically after being held in a savage knee-to-neck hold by a policeman.  What was the officer thinking?  Protests have turned to riots in several of our big cities.  Why does this happen?  History is a teacher but we ignore its lessons.  The "we" above, however, is more of a "they."  In a nation of about 330 million, those who refuse to learn number only a few thousand:  the few law enforcement officers who abuse rather than protect and serve; the elected officials who don't police the police nor police the riotous, and even tacitly encourage violence; and the rioters themselves who on some instances refuse to govern their own emotions and in others plan to sow societal disorder.

Everyone Is Sure Biden Is Toast.  I have yet to meet a conservative who thinks Trump is going to lose. [...] Of course, I want him to win, because I love America, but I get edgy when everyone agrees on something. [...] It's going to be close simply because neo-commies dominate most big states.  The pandemic panic has wrecked the economy and we could have a slow recovery — the Dems will do whatever they can to make that happen.  Then there's the fraud factor — despite all the smartest, brightest, best people telling us that there's no such thing as election fraud, there's such thing as election fraud and the Dems will totally make it happen if they can.

Fear: The Best Tool of the Ruling Class.  Social and political responses to the fears of the Corona-19 virus pandemic are news headlines, but do they deserve headlines? [...] Combining a stretch of environmental-saving enthusiasm and fuzzy thinking, activists have wasted no effort in trying to link the imagined effects of climate change to its imagined impact on the Corona virus pandemic.  Economic hardships and social deprivations imposed by the ruling class are said to be good for the globe, and that the necessary price to save it is a cultural and scientific retrenchment.

And the winner is...  There is one big... wait, make that yuuge winner in the sacking of major American cities that has been underway since mobs started with looting Target in Minneapolis and spread all the way to Macy's Herald Square flagship in Manhattan and Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills.  Scott Adams took to Twitter to spell it out: ["]I did not appreciate how profitable fake news could be for Jeff Bezos.  If the Washington Post can support the protestors long enough, there will be no retail store competition for Amazon.  Almost there.  I'd give it a week.["]

By Forcing Control On Hong Kong, Beijing Killed The Golden Goose.  President Donald Trump announced Friday that he has directed his administration to "begin the process of eliminating policy exemptions that give Hong Kong different and special treatment."  His announcement came a day after China's People's Congress passed Beijing's controversial new national security law related to Hong Kong.  Trump's announcement will profoundly affect the future of Hong Kong and the U.S.-China relationship.  The president's decision was based on Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's certification to Congress Wednesday that "Hong Kong is no longer autonomous from China," a decision he said gave him no pleasure but that "sound policy-making requires a recognition of reality."

I'm Not Watching the Minnesota Movie.  I have not watched any of the videos out of Minneapolis or listened to any of the commentary.  I have not watched because I resent having to watch only one genre over and over again.  This is the genre in which a white antagonist, presumed guilty at the outset, kills or injures a black protagonist, presumed innocent.  More than 15,000 Americans were murdered in 2019, but no movies for national release were made about blacks killing blacks, the most common scenario.  Nor were any made about blacks killing whites, Hispanics, or Asians.  In fact, these movies are generally suppressed.  No, only one genre of movie is allowed.  In recent years, we have seen the Trayvon movie; the Ferguson movie; the Baltimore movie; and, for comic relief, the Jussie Smollett movie among others.  The most lethal of the movies was the one filmed in Ferguson.  The most dishonest one was the Trayvon movie, filmed on location in Florida.

The United States and the World Trade Organization.  The WTO, the successor to GATT, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, was founded in 1994 with stated objectives:  strengthen the world economy, lead to more trade, limit barriers such as quotas and subsidies, increase investment, employment, income growth, throughout the world, and to help governments resist protectionist pressures.  Its decisions are reached by consensus and are binding, and are theoretically non-discriminatory.  However, WTO has not lived up to expectations.  It has not been responsible for any major international accord since the trade facilitation agreement of 2013 that aimed at reducing border delays and costs, nor played any significant role in solving the trade dispute between the U.S. and China.  At a time when output in the world's developed economies has sharply declined, and uncertainty about the future is delaying investment and decisions, the WTO task has now become more difficult for a number of reasons.

Here's 23 Questions Joe Biden Needs To Answer About China.  Communist China poses a greater threat to America and our interests abroad than any other nation in the world.  If it wasn't clear prior to the spread of the Chinese coronavirus, resulting largely from the Chinese Communist Party's Chernobyl-like response, the subsequent threats should crystallize this point.  It has acted malevolently toward the U.S., our European and Anglosphere allies, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and India, and across the South China Sea.  Countering the CCP is essential to preserving American life, limb, and liberty.  The public deserves to know what presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden's approach to China would be.

No Bailouts for the Blue States Until They Open Up.  It feels as if it has been, oh, hours since I've complained about the blue states so I may as well get a quick rant off of my blogging chest for you, dear VIP subscribers.  I also better enjoy the fact that, as of right now, I'm still writing from a kinda/sorta red state.  Sadly, Arizona is looking more purple every day but we ain't blue yet.  [Paywall]

Reopening the economy only works if people return to work.  Business owners across the country are lamenting that people are not coming back to their jobs, even when offered.  For small businesses able to survive the quarantine, more will need to be done to get their workers off welfare and back in the workforce.  It's going to require thoughtful action from state and federal leaders, as well as strict enforcement of existing laws regarding unemployment benefits.  Thankfully, some of the nation's governors are making bold and commonsense moves to address the three-headed monster of a health crisis, budget woes, and businesses on the brink of extinction.

The Red Pill Goes to Court.  There is no formal policy in the Department of Justice that governs the filing of politically-sensitive criminal charges during an election year.  There does seem to be an unwritten but widespread agreement that it would be a bad idea to do so within 60 — some would say 90 — days of an election.  We can therefore reasonably expect that if United States Attorney John Durham is preparing to charge high-level figures from the Obama Administration with crimes related to: the use of government surveillance capabilities to conduct political opposition research against the opposing party's candidates and their campaigns; or the use of law enforcement powers to obstruct and sabotage the incoming Administration, Durham will most likely do so before August 1.  The weeks and months that follow will be an extremely interesting period in American history.

As Long As a Political Party Believes It Owns African-Americans, Blacks Will Not Be Free.  We are the most color-blind society on the planet.  When was the last time the United Kingdom elected a Black Prime Minister?  Or how about a Black president or prime minister in France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Holland, Greece, Germany, Belgium, or anywhere else in the oh-so-politically correct dissolving European Union?  Has China ever had a non-Chinese ethnic head their godless country of bat-cat-rat-eaters?  How about the vaunted Russians?  Was Stalin Black?  Khrushchev?  Brezhnev?  Andropov?  Gorbachev?  Putin?  Any Blacks in the wings?

The Editor says...
Yes, but on the other hand, there were 142 million people in Russia in 2009.[*].  Only 50,000 of them were Afro-Russians.[*].  That's why they have no plans for a black president.

Misinformation, Disinformation, and Lies.  Misinformation may spread if no clear official information is present.  The underlying problem is that there is no simple way to prevent that spread, nor is there a single root cause behind it.  Different motives and goals contribute to that spread and to the discussion of the policies, competition, and legitimacy of public authorities.  The internet has brought important changes in how information is spread and how communication occurs.  What is more certain is that prominent public figures play a considerable role in that the spread has regrettably been shown in the context of discussing the responsibility and activity of officials to deal with the pandemic, COVID-19, such as the transmission and the accuracy of reported mortality rates in various countries.  A difficult problem is that much of the misinformation is not completely fabricated, but is the result of spin.  There is no simply way to prevent misinformation, and there is no single root cause for the appearance of misinformation, and there are different motives for it.

I Miss the Freedom of the 1970s.  I never thought I would live to see freedoms and liberties being stripped away from Americans to the extent they are being stripped away today.  It is shocking to see and infuriating to live through.  But I am reminded that although we are losing our basic freedoms en masse today, they have actually been gradually eroding for many decades, mainly as a result of the ever-expanding power of government.  This is happening throughout the Western world, but it is particularly disturbing in the United States — because the United States is supposed to be a special, exceptional nation.  Younger Americans today have no idea what life in a truly free country feels like.  I do.  I am 60 years old, and I can tell you that the last time the United States was truly free — for average Americans — was the 1970s.

The Editor says...
If you're over 30, you probably perceive that the last time this country was truly free was the decade in which you were a teenager.  The 1960's were better than the 1970's, and I suspect the 1950's were even better, from the standpoint of freedom.

The American Media Has Betrayed America.  Who is pulling the strings of mainstream media in the United States?  Why is the media circus focused on vaccines that may be available sometime next year, and probably will only be partially effective, without offering the slightest concern that vaccines may already be over-prescribed?  Everybody knows vaccines are an important tool for maintaining public health, but why has the media painted the issue black and white?  Maybe getting as many as 90 vaccines before the age of 18 is too many.  Maybe vaccines should be used more judiciously.  Maybe people don't want to be forced into getting a vaccine in order to have an "immunity passport."  The horrifying constitutional implications of where we're headed as a nation during this dress rehearsal for martial law are not of interest to the media.  Along with the nauseating, infantile, feel-good, "we're all in this together" corporate commercials that have rolled out in between the useless television newscasts, the only news coverage available paints people who object to the lockdown as, that's right, Trump supporters.  Or white nationalists.  Or "conspiracy theorists."

The ACLU's Absurd Title IX Lawsuit.  That the ACLU is suing the federal government in the hope of altering its due-process standards is not headline news.  That the ACLU is suing the federal government in the hope of weakening its due-process standards is headline news for the ages.  Once more, the line between parody and reality has been blurred.  The targets of the ACLU's suit are the Department of Education; its secretary, Betsy DeVos; and its assistant secretary for civil rights, Kenneth Marcus.  Their offense?  To have made it easier for the accused to defend themselves.

How to Arrange a Credibility Bookcase for Your Toddler's Zoom Background.  Step 1:  Choose a bookcase aesthetic.  Remember, this background is the only way to establish credibility for your two-year-old in our new world.  Are you raising a tiny influencer or a budding anthropologist?  Should you color-code the book spines into a rainbow or alphabetize rows of National Geographic Kids?  These questions must be answered before your toddler can dominate his Zoom music class or his FaceTime with Nana.  You need people to take him seriously when he says, "Me want 'tilla chips."  His bookcase must communicate:  I am no basic baby.

No, Democrats running lockdown states, jobs won't just magically come back.  Democrats who have never held a private-sector job can't fathom the implications of their policies.  They mingle with the private sector daily, but it remains as foreign to them as public schools.  They fail to understand that the public sector can't create wealth.  Wealth is created in the private sector.  All of it.  The private sector is the golden goose that provides the fuel for government, but clueless Democrats want to assassinate the goose anyway.  Government people forget that private-sector jobs produce something society wants.  It's a law of economics.  Otherwise, there's no income to pay workers.  When people no longer go to their jobs, stuff doesn't get made, stuff doesn't get done, and stuff spoils.  Supply chains break, so crops and livestock get discarded; crucial supplies run short; entertainment dries up; dining out becomes a wistful memory; and we all look scruffy without haircuts, manicures, and dry cleaning.

The American Aristocracy's Influence Is Waning.  [Scroll down]  We have become a nation flooded with so many meaningless and laughable Ph.D.s, it seems, not because their holders consider education a path toward greater enlightenment, but so that they can become new members of a noble peerage class entitled to demand newfound privilege and respect nowhere else due.  Expertise isn't conveyed by title; it's earned by consistently revealing a greater understanding of the world around us with exceptional competency and insight.  I know farmers who have thought about our existence more deeply than college professors.  I know mechanics who would be called "Doctor" in a reasonable world.  I have met brilliant men and women who hold multiple degrees and insist they be called by their first names.  I have never met a person of the left with a doctorate who did not insist on being addressed with the title, even when that title denotes supposed expertise in the type of nonsensical nothingness that would earn knowing smiles from normal folk.

China's Happy Harmony Hell.  On January 11, 2007, China launched the KT-1 rocket and obliterated a satellite in orbit, spreading tens of thousands of pieces of high-speed orbiting metal debris that will threaten both manned and unmanned spacecraft for decades to come. [...] The new space/economic/cyber/technology war was now painfully in sight.  Every technology imaginable, from navigation to your banking account, runs seamlessly through information relayed by these satellites.  The signal was clear:  your economic life is no longer safe.  PLA General Peng of the Chinese Military Academy stated without irony that this activity "creates happiness for mankind."  [Bill] Gertz collects 200 pages of evidence to refute this claim.  We all know about the Uighur Camps, Tiananmen Square, the enslavement of Tibet, and organ harvesting.  No one is happy in China.  But the logic of war runs much deeper.  Xi Jinping, the leader of all Chinese thought and policy, respects three people above all:  Mao Zedong, Joseph Stalin, and Adolf Hitler.  The two he hates most are Deng Xiaoping (the Chinese reformer) and Ronald Reagan, who crushed Soviet Communism.  Did you know that the highest-ranking Chinese official to ever offer to defect to the United States was rejected by the Obama administration?

Unemployment Kills.  The issue of unemployment and its micro and macro effects on society is broadly and globally researched in many disciplines of knowledge — economics, philosophy, sociology, psychology, psychiatry, political science, criminology.  The conclusions are unequivocal — unemployment is much more of a deadly phenomenon than any virus.  Unemployment destroys lives and the mental and physical health of individuals and leads to higher suicide and crime rates, as well as poverty-related diseases.  It may cause civil unrest and disorder, catalyzing destructive processes within societies.  Furthermore, mass and chronic unemployment results in or accompanies the development of undemocratic regimes that neglect and abuse individual rights and freedoms "for the greater good," which legitimizes their absolute power.  How do you count the victims of those?

Can America Bounce Back?  The shutdown of the American economy was in large part enabled by the belief that it would be short, that the federal government could borrow a large sum of money at a low interest rate to ease the suffering, and that the economy could come bouncing back in the blink of an eye, making up any losses.  The shutdowns have extended so far four times longer than originally intended, with the governors and mayors of several states and cities proclaiming indefinite shutdowns.  The moneys borrowed from our future were nowhere near enough to ease the pain, and who lent that money anyway?  It hasn't been borrowed yet, so it's anyone's guess.  Two of the three pillars supporting shutdowns have fallen, so can America's economy really come bouncing back, or was that wishful thinking, too?

No Justice, No Freedom.  Four years ago the Obama administration and rogue partisans in the FBI and DOJ abused their powers in order to keep Donald Trump from being elected, and then to hamstring and sabotage his administration.  Now we are nearing the end of the investigations into those crimes, and the truth long obvious to many will finally be confirmed.  But if the verification of these crimes is not followed by indictments and the malefactors put on trial, our political system will be seriously damaged, and we citizens will lose faith in the integrity of our justice system and its role in protecting our political freedom

The Chinese Challenge:  America has never faced such an adversary.  Over the past decade America has been in denial about China's emergence as a global power.  We couldn't believe a country that for generations was a byword for poverty could compete with us.  With Donald Trump's election in 2016 we've transitioned to anger.  As matters stand, we'll be bargaining before long.  For thousands of years China's internal weaknesses — natural disaster, famine, plague, civil unrest, and foreign invasion — kept its attention inward.  We are now at the greatest turning point in Chinese history since its unification in the 3rd century B.C.

The 'Let's Roll' Election.  At the risk of sounding too dismissive of the considerable obstacles before us, I think everyone is underestimating how seriously supporters of the president view this election.  Michael Anton's provocative "Flight 93 Election" essay captured the mood of a significant and largely voiceless group of American voters in 2016.  We went to the polls after an exhausting and abusive election season with one thing on our minds:  if we had any hope of saving America, it was now or never.  After achieving victory, however, the election never came to an end.  The Democrats and press immediately engaged in an unprecedented attempt to overturn the election results, remove President Trump from office, and dismantle any of his fledgling efforts at stabilizing an America in critical condition.  We were given not a single day to acknowledge that Donald Trump had defeated Hillary Clinton for the presidency.

The Hoaxes Cry Out for Punishment.  If we are able to get all the facts about what actually happened in 2016 and 2017, this could very well be the biggest political scandal in American history.  What if the previous president and senior officials in his administration decided to use the power of the state to spy on and "take out" the incoming president and his administration?  And they did this on the basis of what?  Policy differences?  There was no Russia collusion or any collusion of any type.  Smart people knew that years ago.  This likely comes down to Obama and his administration trying to preserve their policy agenda, very specifically their terrible Iran nuclear deal; don't forget Obama fired General Flynn over Flynn's strong disagreement regarding the Iran deal and, of course, Trump's campaign promise to undo that deal.  It means, simply put, that the outgoing administration, unhappy with the election results, was trying to undo them.

How "rent strikes" will wind up hurting renters.  We've already seen multiple cases of tenants, primarily in the larger American cities, proposing or launching "rent strikes" where they refuse to pay their rent until the pandemic crisis passes and people are allowed to go back to work.  This includes one Democratic congressional candidate in New York City named Pete Harrison, who doesn't want anyone to have to pay, even if they can afford it.  Harrison picks a rather easy target for his wrath because his apartment building is owned by a major investment banking firm.  But what Harrison and the rest of the rent strike proponents fail to realize is that not all rental properties are owned by giants of the financial industry.  Many are owned by small businesses or individuals who frequently are not prepared to take a major financial hit any more than the tenants are.  Bloomberg News interviewed a number of such landlords this week to see how they are faring and examined what the long term effects of a rent strike could have on them, their tenants and the economy in general.

Governor should reopen state employee contracts to cancel 3% pay raises due July 1.  An unofficial state revenue forecast is projecting a $7 billion deficit for the next 4 years.  It is possible this deficit number is even understated based on the amount of economic activity that has been shutdown by the Governor's stay home order the last few months.  As of today, however, state employees are scheduled to receive a 3% pay raise on July 1.  A 3% pay raise also took effect last July.  With the state facing a massive budget deficit, the Governor should immediately reopen the state employee contracts to cancel the new 3% pay raise before it takes effect.

Givers and Takers:  Democratic governors' arguments that their states are "donors" doesn't hold water.  [Governor] Cuomo claims that New York is a net donor to the federal government — sending more money to Washington in federal taxes than the state gets back in federal spending — and that all New York wants from Washington now is its fair share back. [...] This argument is not new; Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan made it in the 1970s, when he began studying the flow of funds between Washington and the states to show how New York was being shortchanged. [...] But a close look at the kinds of spending that these studies examine reveals that much of the funding deficit comes from big, non-discretionary spending programs that send cash to individuals and businesses around the country — not to state government itself — and that much of New York's shortfall is its own fault, not Washington's.

A Time to Hate.  [Scroll down]  There is something so evil in a society that tolerates a dual standard of justice, dual standards of everything.  On the one hand, we political conservatives harbor profoundly deep feelings, but we do not destroy people's lives based on abstract politics.  Yes, we oppose them and expose them, and we hope that contemporary society and history judge them for the evil they represent.  But we do not destroy them in their lives.  They get away with everything.  Hillary Clinton spoliated 33,000 emails amid a federal probe, a federal crime that always ends up with prison time — but not for her.  It is a federal crime to lie under oath to Congress.  Comey, Clapper, Brennan — how have they all avoided prison time?  Strzok, Page, the whole bunch of them?  Adam Schiff.  The outliers on the Mueller team.  Not one single slime among them in the swamp has been brought to justice.

The Two Popes Problem.  When Pope Francis grants an interview, he makes news by subverting Church teaching.  When Pope Benedict XVI gives one, he makes news by upholding it. [...] The supposed conflict, though, is mythical, as Pope Benedict XVI is far too nonconfrontational and passive to wage any sort of battle against his successor.  Benedict has gone out of his way to soften any differences between the two, even though Pope Francis represents the very relativistic and politicized Catholicism he feared.

The 'New Normal'? Ridiculous.  Crises, even if they are manufactured ones, are great producers of linguistic mutation. [...] It's not only civil war that produces such linguistic deformations.  Any crisis will do. [...] I remember one meeting in particular when it was explained to us that storms like Hurricane Sandy were "the new normal."  "The new normal."  Is there a more nauseating flake of smug linguistic presumption?  I think that the imperative "stay safe," born of our coronavirus panic, comes close.  But "the new normal" is worse because it pretends to knowledge not just solicitude.  That wretched town official who was telling us serfs what we could and could not do with our homes did so on the hollow authority of knowing, or pretending to know, what the future would bring.  So it is now.

Richard Grenell, a True Hero of Our Times.  You may have noticed, as a mere citizen of this country, there are many things you are not supposed to know.  You are not mature enough or intelligent enough to handle certain information.  You are in, in effect, a child in a supposedly democratic republic.  When Congress wishes to interview key players on a matter of significance, they first, and often only, do it in camera so you infants are not allowed to hear the truth as it emerges under oath. [...] America in 2020, in the midst of a pandemic and a fateful presidential election that may determine whether our future is free market capitalism or socialism, has found its Diogenes just in the nick of time.  His name is Richard Grenell, formerly ambassador to Germany and before that spokesperson for various UN ambassadors and now acting director of national intelligence.  Mr. Grenell, that ingrate, decided that we weren't so stupid after all and were able to determine the truth for ourselves if given access to the facts.  So he marched testimony, heretofore hidden, due to the restrictions of one Adam Schiff, regarding the Trump-Russia probe over to another potential Diogenes (William Barr — two for the price of one) and the rest is emerging history.  What are we discovering so far?

I'm Not Scared Anymore.  I have to confess that a few weeks ago I was scared.  Very scared.  Not of the coronavirus, which most likely will prove to be just as lethal, or even much less lethal than the flu virus that, coming from Asia, hits us almost every year.  No.  What I was scared of was the people President Trump appointed to protect us from the virus, particularly Dr. Anthony Fauci, the government's top infection disease expert.  Why was I scared of him?  Because after just a perfunctory search on the Internet I found out that Dr. Fauci has been invited at least once to talk to the globalist crowd at the Harold Pratt House in Manhattan, headquarters of the nefarious Council on Foreign Relations.  But the CFR is not a simple organization like the National Association for the Protection of Stray Cats.  It is actually the visible head of the invisible government of the US, and the globalist conspirators do not invite people at the CFR to hear what they say, but to tactfully suggest to them what they must say if they want their careers to advance.

Bubble-Wrapped Americans:  How the U.S. Became Obsessed with Physical and Emotional Safety.  The simplest way to get any law passed in America, be it a zoning law or a sweeping reform of the intelligence community, is to invoke a simple sentence:  "A kid might get hurt."  Almost no one is opposed to reasonable efforts at making the world a safer place.  But the operating word here is "reasonable."

Federal Red Tape Is Keeping Local Meat Processors From Helping Fix Our Supply Problem.  The increasing possibility of a breakdown in the meat supply chain in the United States due to COVID-19 is prompting Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) to renew his push for a bill that would make it easier for small, independent slaughterhouses and meat processors to sell directly to consumers.  Large meatpacking plants across the country have shut down due to fears of COVID-19 outbreaks among workers, and less and less meat is making it to grocers and restaurants.  Wendy's has run out of beef for hundreds of its restaurants (leading to many Twitter jokes about its most famous commercial).  Reason's Brian Doherty has documented how the broad shutdown of commerce is harming the world's food supply, and it's likely going to get worse.

Gutfeld pounds on Schiff:  His ego-driven adventure in impeachment implicates him in biggest global disaster in history.  In response to House Intelligence Committee chair Adam Schiff blaming the coronavirus pandemic on President Donald Trump, Fox News host Greg Gutfeld delivered a fiery rant Tuesday [5/5/2020] urging Schiff to ditch his "funhouse mirror" and take a close look into a REAL mirror.  "We have to remember those who had no skin in this game, who love to play politics and assign blame as a sport, because they were wasting our time when time was so important, which brings me to Adam Schiff," he said on FNC's "The Five."  Schiff had "to create in his mind a working scenario to believe because the alternative reality, which is true, is too devastating," Gutfeld continued.  "If he might consider for a moment that his ego-driven adventure in impeachment shoved the pandemic back into a closet, which led to the surprise attack, which led to thousands of dead."

A Chinese Pattern Emerges:  First Fentanyl, Now Coronavirus.  There are people in China and America, some with connections to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, who are upset with reports that the coronavirus is linked to the lab.  They want to blame President Trump for a plague unleashed by China.  But it turns out there are many controversial labs in Wuhan.  Some "study" viruses.  Some produce fentanyl.  A fascinating article in the Los Angeles Times reveals that before Wuhan became known for a virus killing tens of thousands of people, it was the main source of fentanyl, described as the deadliest drug to ever hit U.S. streets, which is also killing tens of thousands of people.

We Have Work to Do.  We are precipitously coming to a point where the Federal Reserve and the federal government have exhausted their capabilities to properly aid states most affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.  The Federal Reserve has put our currency in a vulnerable situation by decreasing interest rates.  This has a direct effect on the market.  The stock market is sensitive to the expectation of stability and growth.  Trade negotiations with China are currently indeterminate.  The immediate need is to get tens of millions of people back to work.  Each state needs to take responsibility to make it easier for employers to hire.  The precondition for healthy progress is deregulation.

True Friends of Liberty Are Rare Indeed.  Since March this year, numerous freedoms — freedom of association, property rights, free exercise of religion, freedom of assembly — have been pulverized as the full power of the state has been unleashed by government agencies across the United States.  In genuine emergencies like war or plague, we let governments do things that we would never otherwise authorize them to do.  But the sheer ease with which this has occurred in recent weeks underscores how a strong in-principle commitment to liberty has weakened throughout America.

The Federal Government Cannot Bail Out the Blue States.  Battle lines are getting drawn up between the two parties on the next round of "stimulus" for the economy.  House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer are demanding as much as $1 trillion more in federal money to bail out state budgets.  The blue states of California, Illinois, New Jersey and New York are lining up to be first at the trough.  Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has said there should be "no blue state bailout," and he is right.  The whole idea of the federal government giving money to states is a foolish one.  It is based on the fiscal illusion that the politicians in Washington magically have some multitrillion-dollar stash of money that it can pass out to businesses, mayors and governors.  But this is an obvious fiction.

Stacey Abrams's embarrassing campaign for the vice presidency.  No one has ever wanted to be vice president as much as Stacey Abrams.  The Georgia Democrat, best known for her failed gubernatorial candidacy in 2018, has launched a full-fledged campaign for the vice presidency in recent weeks, telling every news channel that will book her why she thinks she's cut out for the job.  And in doing so, Abrams has proved why she's not.

A Modest Alternative to a Massive State Pension Bailout.  [Scroll down]  Yes, of course this would amount to a federal bailout of mismanaged and bloated state pensions.  And it raises an important moral question.  Why should a private worker in, say, Texas, be liable to pay for the horrible financial quagmire that New Jersey union bosses and politicians created in their own state?  What should a taxpayer in Texas have to do with any of that?  Shouldn't payouts to pensioners in New Jersey be adjusted, or perhaps the salaries for current public workers adjusted to reflect reduced revenue, or furloughs at least be considered to address the state's lack of liquidity, before demanding that taxpayers from other states pay for the problems that reckless unions and politicians in New Jersey created all by themselves?  What's on display here is a vivid example of the two Americas that are engaged in an ideological battle that's been softly raging for decades.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo Had the Worst Response to the Crisis of Any Governor in America.  The press has been gushing about the performance of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo for weeks.  The media often compares Cuomo's "decisive" response to the coronavirus pandemic to the president, and guess who always wins?  Whether it's good PR from the governor's office or just the media worshipping a liberal who says mean things about Donald Trump, it hardly matters.  What matters is results.  And in that department, Andrew Cuomo has been a miserable failure — using several metrics. [...] Maybe it would be a godsend for the Democrats to dump Joe Biden from the ticket and acclaim Andrew Cuomo their nominee for president.  The myth of Cuomo's superior crisis management would be exposed in short order, leading to an easy Trump victory.

How to stop the coming meat shortage.  Amid the coronavirus crisis, some are calling attention to the coming meat shortages the United States faces as the virus continues to ravage our economy.  Rep. Thomas Massie has been sounding the alarm for weeks, and the Kentucky Republican recently introduced the "PRIME Act" in an effort to address the coming crisis.  The congressman is right to be concerned. [...] There is no actual shortage in livestock. (Remember, farmers are about to kill their produce needlessly.) Rather, the breakdown is coming on the plant side of the equation where cramped quarters are hazardous.  Why can't farmers sell directly to consumers and circumvent this problem?  You guessed it — government regulations.

Is It Time for a Revolution?  It's time for America's business owners to fight back against a tyrannical government.  Some might call that a revolution.  But in this case, I'm talking about a war fought in the courts.  I'm talking about a legal battle.  It's time for lawsuits — lots of them.  It's time to defend our civil rights.  It's time to defend our property rights.  It's time to make tyrant governors understand this isn't a dictatorship and we're not their serfs.

Pelosi's Congress Should Shelter At Home For The Rest Of The Year.  Earlier this week, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer postponed lawmakers' return to Washington DC, citing concerns about coronavirus transmission.  Congress should stay out of Washington DC a lot longer.  Even until next year.  The primary reason isn't because they, like health-care workers or truckers or grocery store employees or pastors, might catch coronavirus doing their jobs.  The primary reason is that when they "do something," Congress usually hurts the country far worse than if they just took naps in the closet or played cards all day, like my husband's coworkers at a union-run former workplace.  The nation should have learned this from activist responses to the Great Depression, which we now know made the depression longer and harder.  It also created expectations, institutions, and ways of life that have upended our exceptional system of self-government.

The Roman Globalist Church:  Pope Francis accelerates Catholicism's descent into humanist utopianism.  On Easter Sunday, the Vatican released a letter Pope Francis wrote to Catholic organizations in South America.  Francis wrote that the coronavirus pandemic "might be a good time to consider a universal basic wage" that would enable the poor to enjoy "the benefits of globalism."  Such a measure, Francis wrote, "would ensure and concretely achieve the ideal, at once so human and so Christian, of no worker without rights."  Toward the end of his letter, Francis hoped the pandemic would generate "a humanist and ecological conversion that puts an end to the idolatry of money, and places human life and dignity at the center."  Nowhere in his letter did Francis mention Jesus Christ.  The letter conclusively proves that Francis is transforming the Catholic Church into another non-governmental organization.  In the process, he is destroying the church's identity and credibility.

COVID-1984.  A well meaning policy intervention that makes a situation worse is often referred to as the "cobra effect."  In the time of British rule of colonial India, the British government wanted to reduce the number of cobras in Delhi.  The government offered a bounty for every dead cobra.  Initially, the program seemed successful — until people started to breed cobras for income.  Soon Delhi had more cobras than when it started the intervention program.  The Chinese experienced a similar well intentioned policy disaster in 1958.  The Four Pests Campaign attempted to remove mosquitoes, rodents, flies, and sparrows responsible for the transmission of disease.  The policy of eliminating these pests led to infestations of other pests that had previously served as prey for those that were wiped out and resulted in a massive loss of crops, causing the Great Chinese Famine, which killed an estimated 15 [to] 45 million people — far more than the "Four Pests."

Holding the economy hostage.  Elie Mystal of the Nation does not want to go back to work without "somebody to come take my children.  A school bus.  A babysitter.  A freaking traveling circus.  It doesn't really matter.  My economy cannot reopen, life cannot return to normal for me, until fully functional child care comes back on line."  That is very telling.  He does not care who takes care of his children — a freaking traveling circus will do — just so long as it is not him.  Mystal also wrote, "I live in the future and have subscriptions to approximately 18,000 streaming services."  So those are his priorities.  He wants to stream entertainment and shove his kids off on a freaking traveling circus.  Perhaps cutting back on streaming subscriptions would free up money to take care of his children.

The revolving door between the DOJ the law firm Covington & Burling.  [Thread reader] Whenever you think you have someone you can count on you have already fallen for the trap.

The Consequences of a Federal Bailout for the States.  As lawmakers debate over a bailout for the states, Jonathan Williams, the chief economist and executive vice president of policy at the American Legislative Exchange Council, has a warning for states.  "Strings that come with these federal dollars oftentimes outlive the federal dollars, as we've found out with the last time we had a bailout of the states during the Obama era," Williams says.  "And I think it's just a dangerous precedent to set that the states would look to the federal government to be their solution for problems that they are well-equipped to handle themselves."  He joins The Daily Signal Podcast today to talk about why states should say no to a federal bailout, if federal bailouts affect states' rights and sovereignty, if federal bailouts potentially affect tax rates, and much more.

Our incurious media.  Our incurious, lying propagandists in the media appear to have little knowledge of or respect for the long history of science and medicine that has brought us to where we are today.  But of course, this group of pitiful hacks have no comment when mentally ill individuals dump dangerous levels of hormones into their systems and mutilate their genitals in order to claim they have become the opposite sex.  With rare exception, the media in America are a vile and dangerous group of folks who are doing serious harm to our country.

How We Pale to Previous Generations.  America went to the moon in 1969 with supposedly primitive computers and backward engineering.  Does anyone believe we could launch a similar moonshot today?  No American has set foot on the moon in the last 47 years, and it may not happen in the next 50 years.  Hollywood once gave us blockbuster epics, brilliant Westerns, great film noirs, and classic comedies.  Now it endlessly turns out comic-book superhero films or pathetic remakes of prior classics.  Our writers, directors, and actors have lost the skills of their ancestors.  But they are also cowardly, and in regimented fashion they simply parrot boring race, class, and gender bromides that are neither interesting nor funny. [...] We have been fighting in Afghanistan without result for 18 years.  Our forefathers helped to win World War II and defeat the Axis Powers in four years.  In terms of learning, does anyone believe that a college graduate in 2020 will know half the information of a 1950 graduate?

It's Time to Stop Paying Government Salaries.  The first days of hashtag-quarantine-life were terrifying.  The models were terrifying. [...] But then we started noticing something.  The numbers weren't adding up.  Oh sure, when we heard Dr. Birx telling us those percentages it was sobering, but when we started looking at what that meant in real-time the concern didn't seem to match the increase.  In Los Angeles the mayor fretted over a doubling of the mortality rate in just a few days but a look at the numbers showed that doubling meant they went from around 200 to 400... in a population of four million.  Considering the horrific homeless problem that still remained it seemed almost impossible that the number would be that low.  As of today the mortality count in the City of Angels stands at 848.  In Orange County and Ventura County (LA county's closest neighbors) the mortality counts currently stand at 36 and 16 respectively.  We're not even close to the level of horror we were told to expect even with social distancing measures.

America Needs Less Federal Bureaucracy, Not More.  The American bureaucracy needs to be reformed.  Congress should make structural and appropriations reforms to regulatory agencies.  First, heads of executive agencies must serve at the will of the president rather than with "for cause" removal protections.  Second, the combination of powers wielded by agencies must be eliminated.  Third, Congress should pass legislation rather than providing an overly broad mandates under which agencies then govern.  Fourth, all agency appropriations should be approved by Congress in accordance with the principle "no taxation without representation."  These reforms will help protect us from the soft despotism of the bureaucracy and help preserve limited government.  It is consistent with our history and our traditions.

When Communism Is OK in America, Patriots Must Resist Harder.  With the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, the Cold War virtually disappeared.  In the 1990s, the People's Republic of China (PRC) was admitted to the World Trade Organization (WTO).  Under Deng Xiaoping (premier of China, 1978-1992), the PRC had begun to set up empowerment zones and allowed capitalist multinational corporations to operate within their borders.  McDonald's has some nice fast food outlets in China, and many of our medicines as well as our Barbie dolls are manufactured there.  Chinese restrictions on child-bearing won the hearts of Western liberals, who are convinced that over-population combined with climate change (formerly "global warming") is the cause of poverty on our planet.  "Sustainable" use of resources became a new mantra.  For many, sustainability means capitalism and communism working together side by side.

Governor Cuomo Is No Governor Compassionate.  I seem to be the rare person who is not impressed with New York governor Andrew Cuomo's philosopher-governor act.  The other day, I disagreed here with his "new normal" prescription that I believe calls for a less-vibrant America.  In his latest escapade, a reporter asked the governor about whether he understands the fear and pain of protestors who want to get back to work.  No, he does not.

The Multi-Talented Ms. Abrams.  Most politicians in the running to join a presidential ticket as the VP candidate are inclined to stay silent, change the subject, or simply express their humility at the thought of being considered.  Stacey Abrams isn't most politicians.

Concede the WH, take Congress?  Democrats aren't worried.  They are hoping for a repeat of 1972.  Oh sure, Dick Nixon murdered George McGovern's presidential ambitions.  Nixon was the first president to carry 49 states.  But Democrats held on to the House and the Senate, even gaining two Senate seats.  And that was what mattered to them.  It allowed them to work with the deep state to force Nixon out of office in less than 2 years.  Biden should do better than McGovern, But the real deal for Democrats are the House and Senate races.

COVID-19 Completes Liberal Takeover of Southern Baptist Convention.  Crisis and upheaval have brought out the best in some (think of Ulysses Grant) and the worst in others (think of Vidkun Quisling).  This holds true of Christian churches and the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC).  In previous columns, my colleagues and I have raised red flags about the SBC, including corruption and leftward drift.  One sees this in executive leadership, in missions, in the management of seminaries, in the workings of the SBC's publishing company, in its political advocacy, in its gatherings, and in funding ties.  Some problems can be framed as left versus right (cultural Marxism creeping into the denomination's entities).  Some are not ideological, but rather symptoms of garden-variety Good Old Boy corruption.  We had a swampy SBC that was bad enough by March 1, 2020.  But then came COVID, and it got even worse.

Speaker Pelosi, end government-by-secret-caucus.  Our Constitution set up three branches of government.  And yet, in this crisis, only two branches are fully operational.  In particular, the House of Representatives is no longer functioning as a legislative body at all but as an executive committee run by just one representative: the Speaker of the House.  There are no open debates, no televised committee hearings, no minority rights.  "The People's House" is not open to the people.

You Won't Catch the Coronavirus at a Drive-In Movie.  [Scroll down]  You'd drive to your local outdoor theater, pay a reasonable per-person or per-car admission, find a nice place to park in front of this gigantic outdoor screen, wait for dusk, and then watch at least two movies, sometimes three.  On the 4th of July, there would be fireworks between shows. [...] How in the world did all this lose favor?  How did we go from thousands of drive-in theaters to just a few hundred?  Imagine if there were still thousands of drive-ins right now.  We could all go to the movies.  Hollywood would still be making money.  Progress isn't always progress, is it? [...] Everyone complains about how awful it is to sit in a movie theater today.  Everyone.  Sticky floors, the price of concessions, the talking and other obnoxious noises.  The drive-in solved all that.

Stop telling the government to make money out of thin air.  Reps.  Rashida Tlaib and Pramila Jayapal will save us all from crushing government debt — just make two coins worth $1 trillion each and parcel the money out!  L. Randall Wray, a proponent of Modern Monetary Theory, disagrees.  He says the Federal Reserve, not the U.S. Mint, should make lots of money and give it to all.  The mistake here, as with all of Modern Monetary Theory (a.k.a. the Magic Money Tree), is to think that money is important.  It isn't. [...] Money is just the way we count, the way to keep score.  What matters is the things that are available, the goods and services that people can actually consume.  Creating more money doesn't change how many valuable goods and services there are, therefore, it doesn't change anything real.

Fawning US Media Is 1 Reason Beijing Thinks It Can Bully Hong Kong.  Pro-China authorities last week brazenly arrested Beijing's chief critics in Hong Kong, a city that is supposed to have a high degree of autonomy.  Unsurprisingly, that sparked further condemnation from the Trump administration at a time when the People's Republic of China was already under pressure in Washington because of its role as the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic.  Why would China be courting further foreign denunciation?  Perhaps it feels it has plenty of wiggle room.  China has silenced critics of its handling of the coronavirus crisis in the mainland itself, curbing potential downside at home, at least temporarily.  In fact, its communist leaders seem to be benefiting from a rise of xenophobia and jingoism.

This is Who They Are.  Contrary to the current "progressive" understanding, the First Amendment wasn't intended to protect obscenity.  The right to speak and to protest government is the heart of the First Amendment.  And, as the revolutionaries who gave us our Constitution intended, the Second Amendment wasn't written to protect the right to shoot squirrels.  It was written to protect the right to self-defense from tyrants who would deny the people's rights.

Beware The Guru.  South Korea now appears to have its COVID-19 situation under control.  Yet in February, a sudden rise in cases there centered on a group named the "Shincheonji Church of Jesus the Temple of the Tabernacle of the Testimony."  It was initially mistaken for a Protestant church, but later was revealed to be a kind of cult.  According to one account, its founder and guru, Lee Man-hee, considers himself to be "an immortal prophet sent to the earth to prepare for the end of the world." Actually, a number of other successful Korean churches probably qualify as cults.  Once touted as "the largest church in the world," the Yoido Full Gospel Church adhered to the teachings of its guru Yonggi Cho until he stepped down in 2008. Eventually he was convicted for embezzlement.  Rather than traditional Christianity, Cho's religion was really a type of Mind-Science — the idea that thoughts can magically alter reality.  Since his teachings promised health, wealth, and success, they unsurprisingly drew multitudes of adherents. [...] Jesus cautioned his disciples against such elevation of religious leaders when he insisted that "you have one Teacher, and you are all brothers" (Matt. 23:8).

You are what you eat during pandemic isolation period.  As others have expressed, my hope is that after COVID-19, there will be a new focus on public health.  Not just on preventive treatments and measures but also on wellness — on the healing power of being in and maintaining good health.  We have been reminded repeatedly that the simple act of adopting a healthy lifestyle can stave off chronic disease.  According to a Harvard University-led study published in January, when compared with those who didn't follow any healthy lifestyle habits, those who followed four or five healthy habits bought themselves an additional decade of disease-free living.  The study involved more than 30 years' worth of health data from 111,000 people who were free of cancer, diabetes and cardiovascular disease at age 50.  The elements of their healthy lifestyle should not be surprising to anyone.  They didn't smoke, limited their alcohol intake, ate a healthy diet, maintained a healthy weight and exercised at least 30 minutes per day.

Elected Sheriffs, A Defense Against Tyranny.  Some time ago, I wrote a series of Pro Second Amendment articles in rebuke to Democrat initiatives attempting illegal gun confiscation.  My thought was that along with the court system, one major line of defense against tyrannical local and state governments, and possibly even an out-of-control Federal Government, could be local Sheriff's.  The vast majority of these constitutional officers are elected officials who are directly responsible to their constituents and more importantly, the Constitution of these United States. [...] Most State Oaths of Office are [similar], first addressing fealty to the U.S. Constitution and only after, to the State Constitution and Laws.  However, not all of these constitutional officers understand the gravity of the oath they are sworn to uphold.

Planning the Great Escape from House Arrest — and From Communist China.  To a substantial degree, China produces what America consumes.  Each country's holdings in the other are enormous.  They are bound by innumerable contracts, deals, projects and cross-posted personnel that are not easily severed.  This system of cross-dependency was consciously pursued to vaccinate the world against a repetition of the two world wars.  However, globalization also significantly eroded the independence and freedom of action of individual nations, though not each to the same degree.  It permitted asymmetries to arise between the more aggressive and secretive regimes at the expense of those which, perhaps naively, adhered more closely to the posted rules. [...] Undoing current arrangements is tantamount to rolling back decades of policy.  However, the system will start to reopen in the direction of subsidiarity, where the interests of the component take precedence over maximizing the system as a whole.

Powerful Americans Were Catastrophically Wrong about China.  For the last thirty years, the vast majority of powerful institutions in the United States placed a gargantuan bet on the idea that the government in Beijing could be a reliable partner in prosperity and would be a responsible actor on the world stage.  Many leading politicians in both parties chose to believe this, many foreign-policy wonks chose to believe this, many academics and university administrators chose to believe this, and obviously, corporate America loved the idea of both using Chinese labor for imported goods and receiving access to the Chinese market.  This includes Comcast, Disney, Viacom, AT&T, and Fox Corporation — the parent companies of NBC News, ABC News, CBS News, CNN, and Fox News, among other large multinationals that own major U.S. news organizations.  The controversy over the NBA last year was a vivid demonstration that most of these entities were not going to let little things like the Chinese government forcing over one million ethnic minorities into concentration camps or a brutal crackdown in Hong Kong disrupt these extremely profitable relationships.

Communist China's War for Global Dominance and the Wuhan-Virus Pandemic.  [Scroll down]  The Beijing gangsters decided that on balance, rather than see their "hundred-year marathon" unravel, the risks involved in letting the Wuhan-virus pandemic go global, sending the American economy into a tailspin, were worth taking.  For them, Chinese casualties in the outbreak of the Wuhan-virus epidemic, irrespective of the final numbers, are merely collateral damage, as were Chinese deaths during the period of the Great Leap Forward under the leadership of Mao, who alone was responsible for more than seventy million deaths.

The Dual Reckoning to Come.  China is not a good global citizen.  China is a corruptor of world markets and global culture.  China operates on a mercantilist, win-lose paradigm that has been destructive to all of its trading partners.  You don't have to ask people in America's Rust Belt.  Ask Italy whether or not their relationship with China has been a net positive.  The virus has exposed all of this.  It can't be hidden from anymore.  Perhaps the reckoning is simply that we move our supply chain out of China and disperse it, or what of it isn't repatriated, to other countries less likely to emerge as hostile.  Hopefully, that will be sufficient to file down the teeth of the tiger.  But what can't be done is to ignore the obvious fact that our forebearance with Chinese communists has been a mistake, and that relationship must change.  We can no longer ignore China's atrocious human rights record, its hideous product quality control, its constant lies, its increasing militarism, and its assault on individual liberties not just within its own borders.

Pope Francis's approach to COVID-19 is a reminder that he is a leftist.  In a few small ways, Pope Francis is a traditionalist.  He opposes abortion, gay marriage (although he supports gay civil unions), and the notion of infinite genders.  In most other ways, though, the Pope constantly demonstrates that he emerged from a Marxist background.  Despite being the Catholic Church's preeminent man of God, he has a Gaia-centric view of nature.  He also brings a Marxist's understanding of economics (i.e., simplistic and wrong) to the papacy.  That's why, on Wednesday [4/8/2020], the Pope suggested that COVID-19 is the earth's revenge for climate change and then implied that politicians concerned about the economy are akin to Hitler in 1933. [...] What's significant is that this viewpoint is totally antithetical to Judeo-Christian doctrine.  The Bible, both in the Old and New Testaments, long ago abandoned animism in favor of a single divine entity, that created the earth and all that is upon it.

Not-So-Great.  I'm trying to picture how far the media would turn up the outrage meter if President Trump governed like Lyndon Johnson, and I can't do it; my imagination isn't expansive enough.  In Great Society:  A New History, Amity Shlaes presents a deeply researched, briskly told account of an era of tumult that was promoted and in many cases even funded by the federal government.  If you want to be reassured that we of the Trump Era enjoy the privilege of relatively placid times, this is the book to read. [...] To reduce the amount of money leaving the country, Johnson called for a moratorium on all American tourism outside the Western Hemisphere for two years.  He used the FBI and CIA to track his political enemies.  Oh, and imagine if President Trump were forcing hundreds of thousands of men to go to war in an obscure corner of the world for poorly defined reasons, and that tens of thousands of these young men, disproportionately poor and members of minority groups, were getting killed or maimed.

The Revolution Is Under Way Already.  Fear sweeps the land.  Many businesses collapse.  Some huge fortunes are made.  Panicked consumers stockpile paper, food, and weapons.  The government's reaction is inconsistent and ineffectual.  Ordinary commerce grinds to a halt; investors can find no safe assets.  Political factionalism grows more intense.  Everything falls apart.  This was all as true of revolutionary France in 1789 and 1790 as it is of the United States today.  Are we at the beginning of a revolution that has yet to be named?  Do we want to be?

House of cards:
European leaders lament:  Coronavirus might just kill the EU too.  If the European Union now finds itself in "mortal danger," it's only because it's faced its first truly mortal threat.  The Washington Post reports that European leaders have begun to warn that unilateral actions by its members — most recently Hungary but also core members France and Germany — will undo their decades-long experiment in continental unity.  The raising of borders and the imposition of trade barriers in the coronavirus pandemic has all but sidelined Brussels in the crisis, and there's little indication that EU members are interested in anything but their own domestic political standing.

Small Businesses Are Almost Out Of Time, And It Matters To All Of Us.  With an average daily income of only $7 above daily expenses, the typical small business has a median cash buffer of 27 days of burn before it runs out of money.  Karen Mills, prior head of the Small Business Administration (SBA), said recently that "20%, even 30%, of small businesses could fail even in a good scenario."  Without immediate support to buffer the cash flows of stalled businesses waiting for the economy to reopen, it is a matter of days until millions begin to shut their doors, driving unemployment up significantly and sending the economy into a tailspin.  Small businesses make up over 99.9% of businesses, employ about 59 million people (about 47% of the U.S. private workforce in 2015), create over 41% of new jobs, and account for 45% of GDP.

A Marshall Plan for Main Street.  While our nation continues to fight against this pandemic, we have a responsibility in Congress to help small businesses survive this storm.  As one of America's main employers, Main Street is the engine of our economy.  According to the Small Business Administration, there are more than 30 million small businesses in America and nearly 60 million small-business employees.  That is over 47% of the entire workforce.  They deserve a government that responds to their needs, especially during moments of crisis.

Stop the panic.  Don't let the coronavirus win.  In response to the coronavirus pandemic, democratic governments across the world have implemented unprecedented peacetime lockdowns.  One California city is even using night vision equipped drones — made in China, ironically — to enforce it.  A city in Washington encourages citizens to snitch on those who violate the "stay home" order.  Let's pause a moment to consider the serious ramifications of what we are doing.  To combat a virus, some state and local governments have ordered everyone, including perfectly healthy people, to stay home for an undefined period of time.  Travel has been curtailed.  Americans abroad (like me) are stuck, not knowing when we can return home.  The consequences of such draconian measures are potentially devastating and irreversible.  With little to no public input, we eagerly have given up our basic rights, decided that economic health is entirely subservient to public health, and radically altered how our society functions.

Mike Lindell, Not the Media, Is the Hero.  MyPillow CEO Michael Lindell, a self-made former crack addict, is going to transform 75% of his manufacturing capacity to make 10,000 cotton face masks per day by the end of the week, ramping up production to 50,000 a day in a month.  That sounds like a patriotic act to me, especially given that Lindell is undertaking the effort without being forced to do so by a federal agency.  I hope the guy becomes a billionaire after this is all over.  NBC?  Not so much.  The headline on its "analysis" of Lindell's remarks was "Trump fluffs MyPillow in Rose Garden."  This matched the basic tone taken by a large faction within the political press.

Apocalypse More Or Less Now.  The $22 trillion U.S. economy is the single greatest achievement in human history, but it's more than that — it is the primary engine of human progress that has dragged the population of Planet Earth out of misery and want. [...] As Steve Skinner so aptly described it last weekend within these pages, we are massively overreacting to the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak.  And there are real consequences to this.  In two weeks, 10 million Americans have filed for unemployment benefits. [...] It's worse than that.  We're losing businesses, significant businesses, and we're going to lose more.  Logan's Roadhouse, the restaurant chain, just closed 260 units and let all their employees go.  They're finished.  It's only a matter of weeks before every department store in the country is gone, which will take down every shopping mall in America.  The big-retail industry might have been on its last legs, but this will clearly finish it off.

The Coronavirus Outbreak Is Intentionally Being Used To Collapse The U.S. Economy.  The Cloward-Piven strategy is an 8-step plan designed in 1966 by hardcore anti-America Liberal Socialists Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven that called for overloading the U.S. public welfare system in order to precipitate a crisis that would lead to a replacement of the welfare system with a new national system.  Here is their plan, look at it and tell me if you see anything it mentions that might be happening right now. [...]
The Cloward-Piven Strategy To Collapse America:
  [#1]   Healthcare — Control healthcare and you control the people.  HAPPENING NOW
  [#2]   Poverty — Increase the Poverty level as high as possible, poor people are easier to control and will not fight back if you are providing everything for them to live.  HAPPENING NOW
  [#3]   Debt — Increase the debt to an unsustainable level.  That way you are able to increase taxes, and this will produce more poverty.  HAPPENING NOW
  [#4]   Gun Control — Remove the ability to defend themselves from the Government.  That way you are able to create a police state.  HAPPENING NOW
  [#5]   Welfare — Take control of every aspect of their lives.  (Food, Housing, and Income)  HAPPENING NOW
  [#6]   Education — Take control of what people read and listen to us" take control of what children learn in school.  ALREADY DONE
  [#7]   Religion — Remove the belief in the God from the Government and schools.  ALREADY DONE
  [#8]   Class Warfare — Divide the people into the wealthy and the poor.  This will cause more discontent and it will be easier to take (Tax) the wealthy with the support of the poor.  HAPPENING NOW

It's time to make the state governments feel the pain and consequences of the disproportionate shutdown of America.  At present, governors and mayors face no political downside to suspending democracy and the economy with overly draconian measures.  They only face accolades and praise from the media commensurate to the degree of lockdown they promote, based on the faulty science that failed so miserably in Europe.  It's time to make them feel the pain of their decisions so that they are forced to pursue a more prudent and balanced approach to coronavirus.  So far, all the damage to our liberty and economy is being pushed by state and local governments, not the feds.  On the other hand, all the bailouts and responsibility for dealing with the fallout of their virtue-signaling decisions are being placed on the president.  Isn't it time for state legislatures and county councils to convene and take full responsibility?  If they are big enough to declare nuclear winter on liberty, jobs, and the economy, they are big enough to handle the blowback and pay for their decisions.

Government and Economics Made Dead Simple.  There are only two types of governments.  Two.  That's it.  There are those where the people control the government and those where the government controls the people.  Likewise, there are only two types of economic systems: economies where free markets control commerce and economies where bureaucrats control commerce.  It's that simple.

The coronavirus and character.  The old adage is that 'tough times build character.'  The old adage is wrong.  The reality is that tough times reveal character and a stunning number of people come up woefully lacking in this department:
  •   A businessman who retooled his operation to make a wholly unrelated product because that product is needed in dealing with this virus is dismissed as "the pillow guy" by a media whose malpractice is almost a punchline.
  •   Members of Congress think it [is] wonderful for people in certain delivery services to go on strike.  Because it's apparently better to have more people crowding into stores, not to mention the loss of income for the strikers.  But, hey; eggs and omelets.
  •   CBS used footage from Italy in a story about an NYC hospital and called that a 'mistake.'  Just like ABC some months back mistook a Kentucky firing range for a Turkish attack on Syrian Kurds.
It's a remarkably enlightening time in our history, not because of things being learned but because of people being exposed for who and what they really are.

Governors Practice Political Distancing In Shifting Blame To Federal Government.  New York Governor Andrew Cuomo called on the federal government to take control of the medical supply market.  Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker demanded that President Trump take charge and said "precious months" were wasted waiting for federal action.  Some critics are even more direct in demanding a federal takeover, including a national quarantine.  It is the legal version of panic shopping.  Many seem to long for federal takeovers, if not martial law.  Yet like all panic shopping, they are buying into far more than they need while not doing as much as they could with what they have.  For decades, governors tried to retain principal authority over public emergencies, but they did very little with those powers.  While many are doing impressive work now, some governors seem as eager to contain the blame as the coronavirus.  Call it political distancing.

The Chinese Communist Party vs America.  The Chinese Communist Party, led by Chairman Xi Jinping, has a membership of 90 million out of a country of 1.4 billion.  Not all may be doctrinaire Marxists or Maoists, but they form a ruling elite for a regime that has managed to bring wealth and prestige to a once-poor people.  They have overseen the building of a modern industrial base, and the creation of a first-world military complete with an advanced nuclear arsenal.  Their intelligence services are larger and more sophisticated than those of any other nation on earth.  At the heart of China's communist ideology is a deep-seated resentment against the world.  After the Century of Humiliation where China was exploited by the Western powers, Russia, and Japan, they are committed to never letting that happen again.  If one doubts the CCP's resolve, one need look no further than the fact that they have killed, through famine and other means, almost 100 million of their own countrymen in a series of communist social and economic reforms they believed necessary to modernize their country.  In other words, these are not a people to be taken lightly.  The presidency of Donald Trump presents the greatest strategic threat to their desire to establish themselves as the world's preeminent economic and military power.

On Coronavirus, Trump Takes Charge.  Even in such a worrisome and dangerous time as the current public-health and economic crisis, there are some entertaining election-year maneuvers.  The Trump-hating media have been reduced to desperate weaving back and forth in their search for a plausible alternative to the incumbent.  And President Trump's domination of prime-time television every day with a demonstrably competent executive performance, even if it has not been without its Trumpesque flourishes of hyperbole and shifts of position, is propelling the practicing, wildly-out-of-the-closet Democrats such as Nancy Pelosi to severe lapses of judgment.

US Chamber of Commerce wants to keep America dependent on China.  In this time, when the Wuhan virus is ravishing the U.S., it is beyond nauseating to read that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce wants America to stay dependent on China for pharmaceuticals, medical equipment, and other manufacturing goods.  That might seem hard to believe, but it appears to be the case.  Tom Donohue, the 82-year-old, well coiffed, and highly compensated president of the CoC, is objecting to the Trump administration's "Buy American" mandates for medical equipment and pharmaceuticals.  This, the silver-tongued Donohue says, will "damage U.S. trading relationships for years to come."  It doesn't seem to disturb Mr. Donohue that the trade relationships and practices he wishes to protect and preserve with China are exactly the ones that have hollowed out the American middle class.  They have also left the U.S. dependent on that communist country for over 90 percent of our prescription drugs and much of our medical equipment and supplies, a truly surreal situation.

Fixing the Roof While It's Raining.  President Trump this afternoon signed a $2 trillion spending bill to respond to the health emergency, while the Federal Reserve spent the better part of a trillion dollars this week buying bonds of every description and lending money to foreign central banks.  That avoided a financial crisis and stabilized the stock market.  When I proposed a massive fiscal stimulus on February 27, I looked like a wild-eyed alarmist, and many readers on this site accused me of playing into a Democratic plot to panic the country and wrong-foot President Trump.  Market intervention is like buying a present for the birthday of your spouse; if you're late, you'll have to pay a great deal more.  A fraction of the $2 trillion tab would have maintained confidence in markets if it had been offered a month ago, but no matter:  What had to be done, had to be done.  That leaves us with a Federal deficit of perhaps $4 trillion — the $1 trillion deficit we ran before the crisis despite full employment, another $1 trillion in lost tax revenues, and $2 trillion in additional spending.  That's nearly a fifth of GDP, unprecedented in peacetime.

How Did We Ever Get to The Roaring Twenties?  [Scroll down]  I'm not trying to say our current situation is as bad as things were in the 1910s.  What happened during that time frame is unthinkable compared to our current predicament.  But it's encouraging to see what people have battled back from in the past.  The fact that people were willing to shrug off such a debilitating period and turn it into one of the most optimistic decades our country has ever seen speaks volumes of our ability to continue moving forward.

The Left is Loving This.  Consider, for a moment, what ideas Americans seem to have generally accepted in the last few weeks. [...] Thirdly, this crisis appears to have nullified any devotion to the concept of individual liberty among Americans.  A friend in Chicago tells me that he and his young daughters daren't risk even walking to the park that his tax dollars built, as he risks a $500 fine for doing so.  The stiffest resistance encountered by the government officials imposing these infringements upon law-abiding citizens is the quiet grumbling that exists beneath all these loud sermons about "social distancing" and "flattening the curve."  And finally, as Americans are left unable to care for themselves because the government is prohibiting their free association in the economic marketplace, the government is now facilitating a massive transfer of wealth from taxpayers as cash payments to Americans below certain income thresholds.

China's Massive Belt and Road Initiative.  China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), sometimes referred to as the New Silk Road, is one of the most ambitious infrastructure projects ever conceived.  Launched in 2013 by President Xi Jinping, the vast collection of development and investment initiatives would stretch from East Asia to Europe, significantly expanding China's economic and political influence.  Some analysts see the project as an unsettling extension of China's rising power, and as the costs of many of the projects have skyrocketed, opposition has grown in some countries.  Meanwhile, the United States shares the concern of some in Asia that the BRI could be a Trojan horse for China-led regional development and military expansion.

Coronavirus Is Not Even Close to America's Biggest Problem.  The immediate reaction of our government to the virus threat was to spend massive amounts of money.  The latest news is that politicians plan to "boost" the economy with nearly two trillion dollars in spending and loans.  "The package is coming in at about 10% of GDP.  It's very large," says Larry Kudlow.  For a plan of this size to sound like a good idea, you need to ignore some important economic facts.  Our country has unbelievable levels of debt, and our debt is rising rapidly.  The numbers are staggering. [...] Governments that have tried this approach have ended up with money that looks like this 50-trillion-dollar bill from Zimbabwe.  It's real paper money.  But this $50 trillion wouldn't buy much.  In Venezuela, the inflation rate is around 53 million percent.  That means everything costs more every day.

Conservative Leaders:  Public Health Measures Must Still Protect Constitutional Rights of Americans.  The public health crisis facing the country is unprecedented, and a whole of government approach is underway.  However, using this crisis as a justification to violate the basic civil liberties of Americans is unconscionable, and in no way justified.  This is also true at the state level, where unprecedented shelter-in-place orders threaten civil liberties as well.  We urge governors to make any movement limitations temporary and tailored.  A federal shelter-in-place order should be avoided at all costs.  Public health must be protected, but so, too, should the rights of Americans under the Constitution.  Americans have mobilized with extraordinary speed and cooperation.  The Trump administration has lifted regulations and expedited actions to begin vaccine testing, facilitate production of necessary medical equipment, and restricted foreign access to the country as appropriate.  These actions are justified.  A dramatic expansion of the police state is not, and we emphatically oppose it.

Wake Up America — China is the Pandemic.  The Democrats stalled the $2 trillion stimulus for three days, in an attempt at stuffing the initiative with all the leftist policies they knew they could never foist upon the electorate through legislation or the ballot box.  China infected the world to save its reputation and provide for itself enhanced income-producing opportunities — and is now not only lying about it but also using the death and chaos they caused as a weapon in its quest to rule the world.  The media is backing both plays.  Twisted millenarianism is one thing they all have in common.  Parties, countries, and media have priorities and if you die, you die.  You see, to the iniquitous Chinese, the Democrats, and the media, your life, or anyone's life, or millions of lives, is a mere quibble when ruling the world is the potential prize.

If money from the feds is free, why not give everyone $100,000?  Most politicians in both parties adamantly disagree with President Trump on the need to achieve proper balance between quarantine and our livelihoods.  They want an economic and liberty nuclear winter, and they want it indefinitely — without investigating any of the science and data behind it.  At the same time, they want to spend trillions upon trillions of dollars "stimulating" a dead body with nothing to stimulate and don't appear to see any downside to accruing all this debt and risking market distortions.  So if that's the case, why not just give every American a year's worth of income?  Like all Kabuki theater in Washington, where Republicans agree with Democrats on 99 percent of an issue but fight truculently over the last 1 percent, both parties shook hands (I mean elbow-bumped!) on a $2 trillion stimulus today plus $4 trillion in Federal Reserve shenanigans.  The bill indiscriminately throws too much money in a black hole without better defining and studying the scope of the problem to come up with a better solution.  It solves nothing, bankrupts our nation forever, and still brilliantly manages to leave many people behind at the same time!

China Is Lashing Out Because Wuhan Flu Has Unmasked It To The World.  The Chinese communists are afraid.  You might not guess it from the invertebrate and borderline anti-national corporate media parroting Chinese state propaganda, but they are.  Beijing is shaken.  Their dream of dominating the globe eventually, with the slow overstretch and collapse of the Pax Americana, was considered a matter of destiny.  Then suddenly, it all was shaken.  A combination of incompetence, criminal negligence, and totalitarian suppression of a new devastating virus originating from the raw meat and wet markets of interior China let it rage through the globe.  The world's first postmodern global pandemic, preventable but not prevented, has so far already caused the deaths of more than 13,000 people, torched all the major power centers, decimated the service sector, pushed the global economy to the brink of an unprecedented recession, devastated the stock market, closed the borders of all the great powers, ended global cooperation on vaccines, and rocked the boat of globalisation in ways unthinkable since the peak days of the autarkic 1930s.  If this is the hegemonic order of the future superpower, then civilization is doomed.

Abolish the World Health Organization.  Way back on January 10, the official Twitter account of the World Health Organization declared that 'WHO does not recommend any specific health measures for travelers to and from Wuhan, #China.'  The tweet went on to say that 'It is generally considered that entry screening offers little benefit, while requiring considerable resources.'  A follow-up tweet described how 'WHO advises against the application of any travel or trade restrictions on #China based on the information currently available.' [...] Two wrong tweets shouldn't call into the question the creditability of the World Health Organization, but the direction in which its director-general, Tedros Adhanom, has steered the WHO, and his unwillingness to diverge from Beijing's public pronouncements, should trouble the world.

This Too Will Pass.  Economists at Goldman Sachs are now predicting a decline of 24% in GDP for the second quarter, though with 12% and 10% rebounds in the third and fourth quarters.  Along with the illness and death itself, businesses and workers are suffering from lost income, and Congress is planning a $2-trillion relief package.  Individual investors have also been hit, and many who sell now may never return to the stock market — just as many bailed out after 2008 and did not participate in the 300% gain that followed the low of March 2009.  Altogether, the global economy is facing an enormous setback as a result of the coronavirus, and it may take several years or more to return to the highs of 2019.

Destroying America:  It's Not A Game.  The GOP Senate leaders could not pass a "shell" bill to enable a stimulus package aimed at mitigating the economic damage caused by the Chinavirus (COVID-19).  The Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, will be submitting a separate piece of legislation tomorrow.  "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose" and, at this point, the Democrats have nothing left to lose.  At a press conference earlier in the day the president was optimistic about the way the deal was proceeding.  "They are very close to getting a deal done," Trump said.  "So I'd be surprised if they didn't and if they don't, I think frankly the American people will be very upset with the Democrats because the Republicans are ready to approve a deal.  The only reason a deal couldn't get done is pure politics."

Time To Step Back from Economic Suicide.  [T]he marketplace realities of a locked-down nonfunctioning economy are inexorable, absolutely deadly and unsustainable:  [#1] No matter how much money consumers have in their pockets, they cannot purchase what the economy does not produce; [#2] The economy cannot produce anything when people do not work; [#3] People either do not work or work less productively when the government has instructed them to stay home and paid them to do so, when they spend much of each day caring for their children because frightened politicians have closed the schools and when they must spend the rest of the day searching for ever-scarcer food and essentials as sellers' inventories are drawn down near to exhaustion.  What sense does it make to isolate people at home away from their jobs and to thereby create shortages that force them to stand in line at stores in close proximity to hundreds of untested strangers?

Let the Cruise Lines Sink.  It is quite possible that all of the major cruise operators will need to declare bankruptcy.  While Carnival's stock has dropped almost 80 percent since January, it still could go a lot lower.  All the way to zero, in fact.  And yet, at least one well-informed bank analyst now believes that Carnival is undervalued because it is too big to fail and will be thrown a giant buoy to stay afloat.  The moral hazard created by the bailouts of a decade ago are undeniable in the hubris of this note, which suggests that investors can ignore bankruptcy risk for virtually any stock in the economy, even one premised entirely on luxury, because the government won't let anything fail.

Crisis Socialism:  No Bailouts for Open Borders Globalists!  Why should working-class American citizens being laid off from restaurants, bars, grocery stores, ports, gyms, entry-level service jobs and gig economy contracts rescue one of the beltway swamp's most powerful corporate lobbies — backed by the planet's third-richest mogul, Warren Buffett, whose Berkshire Hathaway multinational holding company owns massive stakes in American Airlines, Delta, Southwest and United?  Reminder:  Berkshire Hathaway walked away with $10 billion after the 2012 AIG publicly funded bailout.  How much more in private wealth will Bailout Buffett reap from a federal flight fright freakout?  This exploitative campaign to "stabilize" U.S. passenger carriers is about shoring up globalist profits, not patriotism.

Justin Trudeau's Canada Is Obama's Dream for America.  To adapt a phrase from Matt Margolis, Justin Trudeau is the worst Prime Minister in Canadian history.  Like his American counterpart Barack Obama, he is both a know-nothing and a do-nothing leader, and an unmitigated disaster to the well-being of his country.  For example, Trudeau's unconscionably late and incomplete response to the COVID-19 pandemic — the "19" tells us it has been known for quite some time — much like Obama's delayed response to the H1N1 pandemic of 2009, and his determination to keep an illegal border crossing open, are only the latest of his ill-gotten political escapades.  Indeed, like the Obama of 57 states and the Austrian language, Justin Trudeau is a full-blown ignoramus masking as an intellectual prodigy. [...] His major accomplishments prior to being elected to the highest office in the land were instructing snowboarding, practicing yoga, and substitute teaching high school drama classes.

Cheap TVs, Expensive Flu.  Thanks to "globalism" — i.e., cheap goods from China — we've gotten many wondrous things, for example:
  •   Toothpaste on American shelves made with a poison found in antifreeze.
  •   Toxic Chinese drywall installed in about 100,000 U.S. homes, emitting noxious fumes that destroyed electrical wiring and metal fixtures and sickened homeowners.  Replacement of the drywall, pipes and wiring cost Americans billions of dollars.
  •   Hundreds, possibly thousands, of American dogs killed by melamine-laced Chinese dog food in 2007.
  •   The loss of about 200,000 beautiful maple trees lining the streets of small New England towns, eaten by Asian long-horned beetles that arrived on Chinese cargo ships in 1996.

Don't Call Democrats' Pork 'Stimulus'.  With much of the U.S. economy shut down to deal with the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak, Congress is putting together a $1 trillion stimulus package to prevent an economic meltdown, the third major bill to address the coronavirus pandemic.  That's a huge amount of money, but a question looms:  How much of it will actually help the struggling economy, and how much of it will just be politically motivated pork? [...] Before passing the second bill Wednesday, Democrats tried to force through a number of costly additions that had little to do with coronavirus.  And they wanted to make them permanent.  That might sound nice, but forcing small- and medium-sized businesses to foot the bill for expensive paid family leave and increased paid sick leave would bankrupt thousands of small businesses, which often have just a few workers and operate on the slimmest of margins.  Fortunately, GOP negotiators got the "permanent" part removed.

Will the Coronavirus Revolutionize Education?  With some K-12 school districts and administrators across America panicking and attempting to get ahead of any 'outbreak' of the coronavirus, more districts are opting for students to stay home.  I'd be willing to bet that most students thoroughly enjoy this. [...] Throughout the years, American homeschooling and online K-12 education has become far more popular and realistic than 'brick and mortar' public schools want to admit.  School choice is disrupting and angering public school districts and officials, and school boards are voting against student vouchers so they can continue to enslave students to their school districts instead of allowing state-allocated money to travel with that student to a school of their choice.  This includes online education.  School districts also keep knowledge of online schools and online education far away from K-12 students and their parents, at all costs.  After all, bodies in the seats mean more money for 'brick and mortar' school districts.  However, now that the coronavirus is causing school administrators to panic, 'brick and mortar' schools are encouraging students to stay home and engage in "Hybrid/Online" classes, where they communicate with their teachers online and complete online assignments and tasks at home on the internet.

Afghanistan:  Our Second Vietnam.  [Scroll down]  The political situation in 2016 was vastly different.  The Afghanistan war was fifteen years old but most Americans remained unconcerned and uninformed about the war.  They remain so today.  There are no huge anti-war protests and those in the media who bother to report on Afghanistan only do so to criticize Trump.  In both wars, the enemy was undefeated, its ideology intact.  The North Vietnamese and their surrogate force the Viet Cong — supported by Russia and China — were far stronger than the South Vietnamese.  The Taliban — long-supported by Pakistan, and now supplied with weapons, funds, and intelligence by Russia and Iran — are vastly stronger than the Kabul government.

It's All in the Stars.  [Scroll down]  We might also ask ourselves:  Who or what is [Harvey] Weinstein?  He is Hollywood, a representative of one of the sleaziest communities on the face of the earth, comprising a bunch of grasping, invidious, self-infatuated and morally corrupt people, many in cahoots with the man they have now turned against.

The problem with attacking for-profit health care, especially for Bernie.  Profit-seeking companies have cured cancer, reversed heart disease, and created every other advance you can name for the past 100 years of medicine.  A tiny fraction of innovation comes out of the NIH or non-profit society grants — and those discoveries would invariably sit on the shelf without the work and investment of profit-seeking venture capitalists and companies guiding the idea through clinical trials, regulatory hurdles, and production.  The majority of the profits that provide the incentive for innovators worldwide come from the U.S., and other health care systems piggyback (and rip off) our system to take advantage of the innovation that we provide.  In short, the U.S. market and the for-profit health care industry that serves it is the world's golden goose for global medical innovations... so please, Bernie, put patients before socialism and stop attacking profits.

Get Out of Afghanistan.  With few exceptions, America's longest war is largely ignored by our political class while the costs and casualties mount.  Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) held a hearing last month on the Washington Post's explosive and infuriating series on the war in Afghanistan:  Only three of his colleagues bothered to attend.  The sole Democrat in attendance was the committee's ranking member, Senator Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.).  "Doing nothing is no longer an option for any senator or member of Congress with a conscience," Paul said, perhaps during a moment of wishful thinking.  The long-time proponent of ending the Afghanistan war ticked off the stats:  Nearly 2,400 dead U.S. servicemen and women with more than 20,000 wounded.  Soldiers who have faced numerous deployments since the war began in 2001.  And nearly $1 trillion in U.S. tax dollars — an average of $50 billion per year for almost 20 years, as Paul pointed out — spent in a backward nation that still ranks near the bottom of the list of the world's most economically and politically free countries.

Socialism's Inequalities.  Few statements are more revealing of ignorance than the standard conservative indictment of socialism for "equally spreading poverty."  According to this critique, poverty happens when socialism's insistence on equality of conditions deprives people of the incentive to work.  Such statements so offend reality as to lead one to ask whether those who make them have ever opened their eyes in a socialist country.  No.  Socialism makes for the most radical of inequalities among human beings, and enforces them through the state's absolute power. [...] [I]n full-blooded socialist systems — the Soviet Union was prototypical — like Cuba, China, and Venezuela access to government power is the paramount avenue to success.  So much so, that all assets pale in importance by comparison.  Talent and enterprise seldom hurt.  But if you see someone prosper, you can be sure that he is well connected with the powers that be.  Under real socialism, prosperity and power are two sides of the same coin.  Always.  Invariably.  Food is the most fundamental feature of prosperity or lack thereof.

Think Trump is 'outrageous?' He's nothing compared to these past presidents.  Unprecedented, unprecedented.  Everything is unprecedented.  Nothing like this has ever happened before.  Except it pretty much has.  Whenever you see the word "unprecedented" in the media, you should ask yourself:  Has this reporter ever read a history book?  Make the case against Trump if you want to, but if you pretend the sorts of things he does are without precedent, you simply make yourself look ignorant.  Virtually any presidency you examine is guilty of far worse acts than whatever you think is the worst thing Trump has ever done, from John Adams' Alien and Sedition Acts, a breathtaking offense against freedom that was meant to punish political resistance, to Millard Fillmore's Fugitive Slave Act, which made it so the evil tentacles of the South's slavery regime could reach up North and pluck back people who had successfully made it to freedom.

There are Trillions At Stake.  President Trump is disrupting decades of multinational financial interests who use the U.S. as a host for their ideological endeavors.  President Trump is confronting multinational corporations and the global constructs of economic systems that were put in place to the detriment of the host (USA) i.e., YOU.  There are trillions at stake; it is all about the economics; all else is chaff and countermeasures.  We are already familiar how China, Mexico and ASEAN nations export our raw materials (ore, coking coal, rare earth minerals etc.).  The raw materials are used to manufacture goods overseas, the cheap durable goods are then shipped back into the U.S. for purchase.  It is within this decades-long process where we lost the manufacturing base, and the multinational economic planners (World Trade Organization) put us on a path to being a "service driven" economy.

A Return to Beauty.  The guilty flee when no man pursueth, says Proverbs, but it does not follow from this that the guilty do not flee when they are indeed pursued.  The guilty also have a tendency to argue when they know that they are in the wrong, as for example architects who continue to deny that, for the past seventy years at least, they have been disenchanting the world by espousing a dysfunctional functionalism and constructing buildings so hideous that they make Frankenstein's monster look like Clark Gable.  I refuse to think so ill of architects as human beings as to believe them to be totally unaware of what they have done.  Rather, I pity them.  They are like those unfortunate government spokesmen who have to defend the indefensible in public, which is always a disagreeable and nerve-racking thing to have to do.  As government spokesmen invent a language full of polysyllabic euphemism to disguise the catastrophe their masters have wrought, so architects speak a language that is either incomprehensible or, where comprehensible, entirely beside the point.

Don't Revive the ERA.  The House of Representatives voted this month to begin the process of reviving the Equal Rights Amendment, a constitutional effort dating to 1923 and first passed by Congress in 1973. [...] Though supported unanimously by House Democrats, the law remains procedurally suspect.  The Department of Justice has stated its intent to prevent the U.S. Archivist from including the ERA in the Constitution, should it secure enough votes, because of the expired ratification deadline.  Meantime, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg — despite her support for the ERA, in principle — said that proponents need "a new beginning" beyond the 1982 deadline.  "There's too much controversy about latecomers," she added, urging proponents to start the process over.  Yet supporters keep contorting laws and flouting precedent to defend their cause, arguing, in effect, that America can never actually reject a constitutional amendment.  In late January, Virginia joined Nevada and Illinois to support the ERA, in theory securing the required number of states needed to adopt the proposed Twenty-Eighth Amendment.

Harvey Weinstein [is] Now Locked in a New York Prison — Just Like Jeffrey Epstein.  With Harvey Weinstein now headed off to prison on Rikers Island in New York City and holding so many deep, dark secrets about powerful Democrats and Hollywood figures in his creepy head, the countdown on how many days will pass before he suffers some form of highly-suspicious death has begun.  Who knows?  Maybe he will "Epstein" himself soon, or be the only person in a very crowded prison to somehow contract the Coronavirus.  That would be, like, totally believable.

The Russian/Chinese Plan to Bring America Down.  The leadership of Russia and China (both basically Communist countries), believe that the United States is a serious threat to them in at least six (6) major ways:
  1 - our cohesive unity of purpose,
  2 - our Judeo-Christian values,
  3 - our democratic ideology,
  4 - our technical prowess,
  5 - our economic power, and
  6 - our military might.
In response, their plan is to undermine each of these — and the more the better.  Their effort is not a simple six-step sequential series, but rather a multi-pronged campaign.  Some current issues (e.g. immigration) actually span several of the above items.  What's very disconcerting is that the Communists have strong allies within our country — e.g. socialists, etc. who are effectively unwitting pawns of Communist ideology.  [PDF]

ICE Should Deport George Soros as a Nazi Collaborator.  The deportation of a Nazi death camp guard from his residence in Queens, New York, in 2018 by ICE was described as the removal of the "last known Nazi collaborator from the United States."  That's not quite true.  There's another Nazi collaborator living on Fifth Avenue.  He's a billionaire and untouchable because his dubious fortune has been used to finance the Democrat Party, radical leftists, assorted anti-Semites, and opponents of ICE:  the agency that should step in to remove the aged Hungarian from the United States.  The legal basis for removing Soros is quite clear.

Stone Sentencing Ends Russia Collusion, Part I.  The Roger Stone sentencing farce is as fitting an end to the Russia Collusion saga as one could conjure up ... though it might be more fitting to call it the end of Russia Collusion, Part I.  No sooner did the first flick conclusively bomb than the media-Democrat complex was issuing the casting call for Russia Collusion, Part II.  In the sequel, you're asked to believe that Putin is manipulating the chesspieces to steal a second term for President Trump — somehow preferring an incumbent who beefs up the U.S. armed forces, pressures NATO allies to beef up theirs, imposes painful sanctions on Moscow, provides lethal aid to Ukraine, ramps up U.S. energy production, and seeks to thwart the Kremlin's coveted natural-gas partnership with Germany, over an unabashed socialist who honeymooned in the Soviet Union and whose policies would wreck the American economy, end the resurgence of American energy production, and hollow out the American armed forces.  It's a lunatic plot.

Battle of the Boroughs.  There are 329 million people in the United States of America.  They are spread across 3.8 million square miles.  The presidential race will be determined by the actions of three of them:  Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders, and Michael Bloomberg.  Each is a New Yorker.  Each hails from a different borough.  Trump was born in Queens, Sanders in Brooklyn, and Bloomberg, a native of Massachusetts, has worked and lived in Manhattan since 1973.  For a long time New York City politics stopped at the Hudson River.  Now the nation faces the prospect of eight months of septuagenarian New Yorkers yelling at each other.  The geographic, regional, ethnic, and racial diversity of America is nowhere visible.  Religion is an exception:  The first Jewish presidential nominee of a major party will also be, in all likelihood, the most hostile nominee toward Israel ever.  How did this happen?

Political Trials Should Be Tried Outside of the Beltway.  [Scroll down]  Hillary Clinton won 90 percent of the D.C. vote in 2016 compared to Donald Trump's four percent.  In the metropolitan area as a whole, which includes adjacent counties in Virginia and Maryland, Clinton won 68 percent.  The federal government is the area's largest employer; nearly everyone else is somehow tied to government work as a lawyer, lobbyist, consultant, or journalist.  By a 20-to-1 margin, Justice Department employees contributed heavily to Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign.  Any trial automatically is rigged either in favor or against a political defendant based on the team for which the accused plays — and if it's Team Trump, the outcome is predetermined even before the opening statements.  After all, how could a swamp-dweller objectively judge a case tied to a president promising to drain the swamp?  The jury selection for the 2019 trial of Greg Craig illustrated the near-impossibility of seating an impartial panel in Washington.

DC Law.  Washington, D.C. has a relatively small population from which jurors must be found for the federal and local grand juries, petit juries, and civil juries. [...] Since almost 80% of the city are Democratic voters, often employed by the government or are connected to law enforcement or have family members who are, the ability to expeditiously find panels in criminal cases is limited.  Worse yet, the chance of an unbiased panel in a case involving Republican figures is minimal.  If you think this puts Republican figures at far greater risk than Democrats, you are certainly not wrong.  Recall if you will the prosecutor who publicly stated the Starr special counsel's office believed Hillary Clinton had lied to the grand jury, but because ethical prosecutors are not to bring cases they have no reasonable likelihood of winning and no D.C. jury would convict her, they were declining to prosecute her.

Forget Iowa — let's switch to a one-day national primary.  [Scroll down]  The second flaw in the nomination system is that the emphasis on the early states may also increase the tendency of candidates to take extreme positions that increase partisanship and gridlock.  While candidates should be truthful, they sometimes take positions to attract voters.  In the early states, they may make statements which might be popular there but not acceptable to voters in other states throughout the nation.  Ultimately, the parties may have candidates espousing extreme beliefs which they do not believe, and that may cause increased partisanship.  What's more, the current system only requires candidates to show they can win statewide elections serially, not a truly national contest like the one in November.

The Path to Ruin Being Blazed by Congress, the President, and the Fed.  Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell cited a record 11-year expansion, an economy "resilient to the global headwinds," "near half-century lows for more than a year" regarding unemployment, and how "GDP rose at a moderate rate over the second half of last year" in his appearances before Congress last week.  But his more oblique warnings about what should happen if a recession occurs came as the most interesting part of his words to the Senate Banking Committee and the House Financial Services Committee.  He essentially told Congress that economic gimmickry in sunny financial times leaves policymakers with few tools to combat a recession once the clouds roll into town.

America's Growing Approval Of Socialism Is A Rejection Of Freedom.  In February 2009, just after the inauguration of President Barack Obama, Newsweek declared on its cover "We Are All Socialists Now."  More than a decade later, socialism has taken over the Democratic Party, and has a strong hold on young Americans.  It's gone mainstream in a nation founded on principles opposite the tenets of socialism.  Seven in 10 millennials say they would vote for a socialist candidate, while 64% of Generation Z told pollsters last year it is "somewhat/extremely likely" they'd vote for a socialist, according to a YouGov-Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation poll taken last fall.

New Film Shows How the War on Poverty Failed and the Real Hope for America's 'Forgotten' Cities.  Filmmaker Christopher Rufo traveled to three crumbling American cities — Youngstown, Ohio; Memphis, Tenn.; and Stockton, Calif. — and documented the deep human struggles of communities left behind as the 1950s industrial boom yielded to a new kind of economy in the 21st century.  America Lost explains why top-down government solutions fail to address this urban decay and the film suggests a better path forward.

Limbaugh: A Genius at Radio.  [Scroll down]  He certainly did not capture new listeners by adjusting to the times.  While tastes changed and the issues often metamorphosed, he did not.  He remained conservative, commonsensical, and skeptical of Washington and those in it, as if he knew all the predictable thousand faces of the timeless progressive project, whose various manifestations reappear to mask a single ancient and predictable essence: the desire of a self-appointed group of elites to expand government in order to regiment the lives of ordinary people, allegedly to achieve greater mandated equality and social justice but more often to satisfy their own narcissistic will to power.  It was Limbaugh who most prominently warned that lax immigration enforcement would soon lead to open calls for open borders, that worry about "global warming" would transform into calls to ban the internal combustion engine, and that the logical end of federal takeover of health care would be Medicare for All.

The Steele Dossier's Biggest Fan Goes on a Really, Really Insane Rant.  [Scroll down]  A president wants people he can trust to enact his policies, which are subject to the oversight of the electorate via elections.  That's hardly new or unique to the latest inhabitant of the White House.  If you cross that trust, you can go back to the Pentagon or whatever agency you came from.  You'll still be getting your fat check and pension because no one is ever really fired from a government job.  Enough with the pretending that civil servants are actually servants.  They are typically overpaid, with huge benefits packages and get more time off in a single year than most private-sector employees enjoy over half a decade.  They are not martyrs, they are bureaucrats.  The fact that they can't just be outright fired with ease is bad enough, but painting them as everything that holds this country together is asinine and a false sense of grandeur that's incredibly idiotic.

Trump's Presidency Reveals 7 Undeniable Facts About The Swamp.  Although Trump may appear invincible at the time of this writing, ask yourselves who controls the helium to the biggest economic balloons.  The stock market is the pressure release valve.  But when the bond market blows, the USD is toast.  And, as supply chains snap and the bankers foreclose on the world, there will be ever-expanding pain for everyone to varying degrees, as the earth exhales.  Therefore, all current global trends,  including  especially Coronavirus®, are about establishing control prior to the advent of a new order.  Although the immediate future will be anarchy, out of that chaos will come order administered by technological switches and gates.  And the future will be cashless because slavery is rooted in economics.

The Once and Future Scandal.  Donald Trump, in concrete ways, has been far harder on Russia than was the "reset" Obama presidency, and far more helpful to Ukraine than Team Obama ever was.  Trump armed the Ukrainians.  He upped sanctions against Russia.  He ordered lethal retaliation against Russian mercenaries in Syria.  He vastly increased U.S. oil and gas production to Russia's detriment.  He jawboned Germany about its fuel dependence on Moscow.  He coerced NATO to spend more on defense.  He got out of an asymmetrical missile treaty with Russia.  He is rebuilding the U.S. military.  Unlike his predecessor, Trump did not dismantle U.S.-joint European missile defense in order to coax Putin into behaving during his reelection bid.  He did not push a big plastic red reset button in Geneva to mark outreach to Putin, in rejection of prior Bush sanctions on Russians.  He did not forbid the shipment of anti-tank missiles to an endangered Ukraine. [...] So the libel of Russian collusion was absurd from the get-go.

MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell Calls Senate 'Anti-Democratic.' Then Mark Levin Schools Him.  [Scroll down]  Just to rub it in, O'Donnell went on to call the Senate "American democracy's most structural flaw."  Sadly for O'Donnell and his fellow radical leftists, however, America is not now and has never been a democracy.  It's a constitutional republic.  The Founding Fathers made that choice very deliberately because they understood that real, full democracy is actually extremely dangerous.  As Levin explained on his show, the Senate was actually meant to protect the interests of the individual states.  "The 17th amendment" was, Levin explained, a "disaster."  Back in the day, if an attorney general from a state took a specific position, the state's senator would follow suit in the Senate (which would've shot down ObamaCare).  Now, however, senators can do as they [...] please.  This "democratization" has severely weakened the American system.

Gretchen Whitmer was Democrats' poor choice to respond to Trump.  Speaker Nancy Pelosi is commonly referred to in Washington as a master tactician.  But like the partisan impeachment fiasco and the humiliating Iowa caucus disaster, her selection of Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer to deliver this year's response to President Trump's State of the Union address was a major strategic misstep. [...] But if you bothered to watch the speech, you might have noticed that instead of following up with an example of her work to fulfill this campaign promise, Whitmer instead pivoted to what other Democratic governors are doing in other states — for example, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker and New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy.  Whitmer didn't highlight her own work in Michigan [...] and that's because she failed to gather any support, from either party, for her 45-cent gas tax proposal, which would have left Michigan with the highest gas tax in the nation.

Fall Election About Personal and National Sovereignty.  As the Democrats try to sort out the hash they made of the Iowa caucuses — like the impeachment of President Donald Trump, a political mess entirely of their own making — a larger question looms over the fall election:  Will the United States remain a republic or will it molt into a plebiscitary "democracy"?  In the teeth of a constant battering from the left that seeks to call nearly every aspect of the American system of governance into question, the real question to be decided this fall is not Trump versus the Democrats' Your Name Here.  Rather, it's about the Constitution versus an entirely different political structure that may still go under the name of the United States of America, but in fact will be an entirely different country, bearing no more resemblance to the America of the founders than modern Rome does to the Roman Republic.  None of these pressing political issues, including Trump's evanescent impeachment, the critical function of the Electoral College, the proper role of the Senate, and the chaotic but yet somehow always predictable way in which one of the major parties insists on choosing its standard bearer, is occurring in a vacuum.

Insurgent 70-somethings Trump, Sanders have upset Biden's conventional apple cart.  [Scroll down]  Have you heard Obama ardently campaign against the party's current direction?  Or in support of his vice presidential partner for eight years, as Bill Clinton did for Al Gore?  Well, no, actually, you haven't.  The modern American political reality is that the Republican and Democratic parties today are basically just brand names.  They've become hollow, fundraising fuselages of once vibrant organizations that get captured every four or eight years by someone new with a contemporary personality packaged for the times.

The Cult of Western Shaming.  [Scroll down]  By 2015, the EU was a mess, so China was preordained as the inevitable global superpower.  American intellectuals pointed to its high-speed rail transportation, solar industries and gleaming airports, in contrast to the hollowed-out and grubby American heartland.  Now the curtain has been pulled back on the interior rot of the Chinese Communist Party, its gulag-like re-education camps, its systematic mercantile cheating, its Orwellian surveillance apparatus, its serial public health crises and its primitive hinterland infrastructure.  After the calcification of the Soviet Union, Japan Inc., the EU and the Chinese superpower, no one quite knows which alternative will next supposedly bury America.

Obama Stole an Election, Not Trump.  [Scroll down]  It's long been noted that anytime Democrats accuse Trump or Republicans of something, it's the Democrats who are actually guilty of it.  A scholarly study conducted by the American Enterprise Institute concluded that suppression of the Tea Party movement by Obama's IRS helped him get reelected. [...] The effectiveness of the Tea Party, combined with Obama's relatively small margin of victory in key swing states, suggests that the IRS's suppression of the Tea Party movement likely tipped the scales in favor of Obama.  "Had the Tea Party repeated and built on their activism of 2009 and 2010 in 2011 and 2012, Obama would have lost the election.  What happened to the Tea Party boost?  It didn't grow from 2010.  It appeared to weaken," Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform wrote in his book, End The IRS Before It Ends Us.  "The Tea Party didn't fall down the stairs.  It was pushed."

Ruling Class Held Hostage by Trump's Impeachment.  Since the Reagan era, the American Ruling Class has succeeded in electing George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, all of whom were members in good standing.  Thus, by 2016 the ruling elites were thoroughly entrenched and dominant throughout the halls of power.  They were prepared to govern this nation for many years to come as one of the flaws in the magnificent governing blueprint set up by the founding fathers was the reality that this government can only function with just two major political parties.  Both political party hierarchies had and fully intended to continue nominating candidates for the presidency and Congress who were either beholden to or members of the ruling class.  The rank and file voters were left with only superficial differences in the choice of candidates.  The election of Donald Trump in 2016 was an act of defiance and a rebellion by the deplorables and a devastating blow to the ruling elites.

Obama Prefers a Republican President.  During the 2008 election campaign, the party was divided into two major camps:  the left-centrist and more traditional wing supporting Clinton and the openly far-left, more energetic, and younger wing backing Obama. [...] Obama humiliated Clinton during the debate and his rallies.  The situation had reached a boiling point, as hatred between clans could cost the Democratic Party elections.  Formal reconciliation and the unification of groups around Obama took place in the house of the skilled apparatchik Dianne Feinstein.  It was decided that Obama would become the candidate for the Democrats, and Clinton would receive an important and prestigious post of secretary of state in the case of a victory.  Obama followed Sun Tzu's advice, keeping his friends close and his enemies closer.  Of course, formal reconciliation did not lessen Obama's and Clinton's deep hostility to each other, but they played the roles of good comrades in front of the public exceptionally.

Illinois pensions 101: Paltry contributions yield million-dollar payouts.  Illinois' pension crisis is the worst in U.S. history — which raises the question, "Why?"  First, because public employees pay very little toward their own retirement and assume none of the economic risk for investments.  Second, because workers retire relatively young so they are drawing from the systems longer.  And third, because they receive pension benefits often in excess of $2 million during the course of their long, generous retirements.  Ultimately, this poorly designed system is bad for the retirees.  They face a serious risk that the pension systems will go insolvent.

Paging Laura Ingraham:  An Alaska Senate Seat Is Yours for the Taking In 2022.  Everyone in Alaska already knows who Laura Ingraham is, and they all like her.  Name recognition isn't an issue.  They also know who Lisa Murkowski is — and they can't stand her.  The Republican Party machinery in Alaska is cowed by her, but an outsider need not care.  Someone like Laura Ingraham could walk in and just take the seat.

An Introduction to Q.  If you're unfamiliar with Q or only know it through the media's attacks, I'd like to provide a brief introduction to this extraordinary phenomenon.  I've followed Q since the first drop, and I've grown increasingly impressed by the accuracy, breadth and depth of Q's messages.  Q followers were prepared long in advance for the easing of hostilities with North Korea, the deflation of the mullahs of Iran, and the discovery of Ukraine as a hotbed of corruption for American politicians.  They knew a great deal about Jeffrey Epstein's activities before the public did and anticipate even more shocking revelations to come.  As Q likes to say, "Future proves past."  As Q's predictions come true, they lend retroactive credibility to the entire enterprise.  Q's followers believe that Q is a military intelligence operation, the first of its kind, whose goal is to provide the public with secret information.

A Tale of Two Terrorists.  Osama bin Laden deserved to die.  Only the fringe of the fringe disagree with this statement (looking at you, British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn), which is why no one seemed to mind when Seal Team 6 invaded Pakistan to upgrade his train ticket to Hell to first class. [...] The country was ecstatic, justice had finally come to the man with the blood of 3,000 Americans on his hands.  Almost immediately, the raid was politicized to benefit President Barack Obama.  After all, he was facing re-election.  Democrats in and out of the media had themselves a new catchphrase: "gutsy call." [...] Now compare that to the reaction from those very same people to the operation that killed another terrorist mastermind, one with the blood of at least 600 American soldiers and tens of thousands of civilians around the world, Qasem Soleimani. [...] Iran shooting down a Ukrainian airliner and watching Democrats blame America for it was just the cherry on top.

One missile.  One Iranian regime change.  The death of Qasem Soleimani may have done more than lop the head off Iran's terrorism forces.  The regime change foreshadowed by a trucker's strike last June may come to fruition.  The Jerusalem Post reported, "A group of Iranian protesters demanded Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei step down on Saturday after Tehran said that its military had mistakenly shot down a Ukrainian plane, killing all 176 people on board.  'Commander-in-chief [Khamenei] resign, resign,' videos posted on Twitter showed hundreds of people chanting in front of Tehran's Amir Kabir university.  This is the first protest since the assassination of IRGC Quds Force Commander Qasem Soleimani.  Last November, hundreds were killed in protests in multiple cities across the Islamic Republic.

Nationalism Is Looking Pretty Normal Right Now.  The recent troubles with Iran highlight the problem with America First nationalism: it would mean placing the interests of regular people at home before transnational "interests" like foreign wars that have no bearing on middle-American life.  Put another way, real people living in a real country with real interests of their own have a real problem with really stupid government and the real Stupid Party, otherwise known as the Republicans, that enables bad government while pretending to stand against it.  Americans generally have no desire to see the blood of their children spilled on the altar of the foreign policy establishment.  Not so "democracy" can be spread around the globe, whatever that means, and certainly not so that sovereign states may be compelled into "acting like a normal country," as Secretary of Defense Mark Esper has said of Iran — not least of all when "normal" is defined by a government that provides millions in taxpayer funds for abortion and to inject children with puberty-suppressing, opposite-sex hormones, rendering them permanently infertile.

WW3 didn't happen but something else did.  The reaction to Soleimani's death has proved more destructive than the original strike itself.  It has already caused one mass casualty funeral stampede born of crowds eager to prove how beloved the late IRGC chief was; an Iranian missile volley that fortunately missed the town of Hit fired by the ayatollahs for face saving reasons and one accidental shootdown of a Ukrainian jetliner killing nearly 200 passengers in vigilance of an American strike that never came.  It also precipitated a nonbinding Congressional resolution "asserting that President Donald Trump must seek approval from Congress before engaging in further military action against Iran."

On Soleimani, President Trump Did the Right Thing.  James R. Hannibal flew the A-10 Thunderbolt II, the B-2 Spirit (stealth bomber), and the MQ-1 Predator UAV.  During that time, he worked numerous classified assignments and spent time as a mission planning cell chief, intelligence liaison, stealth materials liaison, and weapons and tactics officer.  He commented to American Thinker, "Americans need to understand that Qassem Soleimani was evil, a known terrorist, and proudly wore the blood of Americans on his hands.  Our intelligence surrounding this individual leaves no doubt about these facts.  This is intelligence that the politicians loudly mourning his death have access to, so they should know better.  That makes their betrayal all the worse.  They would sell out the memory of fallen Americans for their own political gain.  I have seen American blood spilt by Soleimani's proxy action with my own eyes.  I have wept over that blood on the worst day of my military career.  Any politicians pretending this man was anything but a bloodthirsty terrorist deserving of death have betrayed this nation and the people they claim to serve."

Iran's miscalculation.  It is hard to understand Iran Supreme Leader Khamenei's blunder in attacking the US Embassy in Baghdad.  He either believed Trump was weakened by his impeachment, as western liberal Media breathlessly and continuously reported, or he might have been misled by John Kerry's incompetent advice (apparently Kerry met again with Khamenei's emissaries in Paris just few weeks ago). Whatever the reasons, his goal of triggering a limited war with America to rally his people around the regime has failed miserably.  Iran desperately wanted a war — drone attacks on Saudi Arabia's heart of oil production, false-flag hits on oil tankers, unrest in Yemen — all aimed at this goal.  Trump restraint in responding to these provocations must have been disappointing.  But as Tehran resorted to attack the US Embassy in Baghdad, it must have realized it had overplayed its hand when the reaction was surgical, devastating, and unexpected:  the elimination of the mass murderer Qasem Soleimani, commander of the IRGC's Quds Force, Khamenei's right-hand man and chief executioner.

Maybe This Cycle Will Force a Change in Which States Vote First in the Primaries.  There's a good chance that two months from now, every delegate in the first four contests will have gone to one of four white candidates:  Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, or Pete Buttigieg.  This might just be enough to spur some serious talk of changing the order of primary states — if not for insufficient ethnic diversity in those first four states, then out of the general sense that 46 other states would like a turn going earlier.  But as far as it goes, those first four are lacking some features found in many other parts of the country.  As Castro observed, "I've gotten asked more about ethanol in Iowa than I ever have about mass transit or transportation."

The Editor says...
Wow.  This is the first time I've heard a writer complain about "insufficient ethnic diversity" in specific states.  Is there now a racial quota for each state?  As if every state must have the same percentages of ethnic groups or something's wrong with them.  Too many white people = bad.  Too many minorities = impossible!  It sounds like the writer (in the National Review) watches too much television:  TV commercials are filmed in a world where all the heroes are black, all the villains are white, and women live in spotless houses without a man to be seen — except for the prowler outside who is always a white male.

Tucker Carlson's Inane Claims About the Soleimani Raid.  To say this point of view is hopelessly naïve would be too charitable.  It's one thing to abjure nation building, but the isolationist belief that the United States can safely retreat from all "foreign entanglements" is pure fantasy.  Carlson clearly doesn't get this.  First, it would not make us safe!  It's hard to believe that this isn't obvious to anyone old enough to remember September 11, 2001.  Unless one is naïve enough to accept Osama bin Laden's propaganda — that it was the result of our presence in the Middle East — it should be clear that fighting our enemies abroad renders us safer at home.  Moreover, the 9/11 attacks were hardly our first exposure to this reality.  American isolationism in the 1930s led directly to Pearl Harbor.

Soleimani Schemed Against America As His World Crumbled.  Qassem Soleimani's demise came as his life project — spreading the Islamic Republic's zeal in the Mideast and beyond — was crumbling.  That doesn't mean the Iranian general couldn't, or wouldn't, have wreaked the kind of harm that the Trump administration felt it needed to preempt.  It may even explain why Soleimani has been on such a manic campaign.  In any event, shortly after the drone kill at Baghdad airport was confirmed, Secretary of State Pompeo re-tweeted a video of gleeful Iraqis who had awakened at at 4:30 a.m. in Baghdad and proceeded to march at the city's Tahrir Square.  There they celebrated the death of the arch-terrorist who sought to dominate their country.

Democrats still delusional about Trump even after Qassem Soleimani death.  The calendar turns and a decade begins, but there is nothing new under the sun in Washington.  Even the killing of an Iranian mass murderer is cause for more partisan strife.  In a sane country, which America used to be, there would be shared sober satisfaction over the elimination of Gen. Qassem Soleimani.  Yet Democrats apparently outsourced their reactions to robots, whose script called for conceding that the departed was a very bad man, but prohibited approval of President Trump's decision to take him out.  Instead, the quibblers' chorus raised questions of timing and expressed fear of escalation and retaliation.  In the context of Iran's military aggression and Soleimani's bloody hands, there is another word for that fear:  appeasement.

No, killing Soleimani doesn't mean war.  Everybody knows Donald Trump is going to start a war.  His critics have been saying so since his first year in office — remember the war with North Korea they predicted right after Trump tweeted about unleashing 'fire and fury' on the Little Rocket Man?  That war didn't happen.  Nor did an insurgency break out when President Trump moved the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, an act that the Trump haters were certain would incite waves of violence and unquenchable turmoil.  But maybe the third time's the charm — maybe the killing of Gen. Qasem Soleimani, leader of the Quds Force division of Iran's Revolutionary Guard, in a US airstrike in Iraq will finally give the president's detractors the war they've been anticipating.  Or maybe not — maybe the critics are just as wrong as they've been every other time: about wars that Trump didn't start, about collusion with Russia that didn't happen, about the crash of America's economy... the list goes on.  The president should be reassured to have enemies who are so reliably wrong.

The Episcopal Church's Fruits of Heresy.  Anglican author David Virtue, a longtime critical observer of worldwide Anglicanism, reviews the Episcopal Church's decades-long fall from grace in an exposé of Christian folly in accommodating a secularized, sexualized modernity.  Virtue tells the depressing, detailed "story of a once proud Christian denomination that stood as a landmark church in a nation that has seen presidents, senators and business leaders pass through its hallowed red doors."  "Spiritual and ecclesiastical death marks the present and future state of this denomination" today as Episcopal Church membership has cratered from a 1966 peak of 3,647,297, to 1,676,349 in 2018.  Particularly the 2003 consecration of noncelibate homosexual V. Gene Robinson as an Episcopal bishop unleashed an "ecclesiastical tsunami wave" and the "worst single outflow of Episcopalians in modern history," over 100,000.  In an Episcopal Church "intoxicated with the spirit of the age," 31 percent of Episcopalians according to the latest statistics are 65 or older while 79 percent do not have a child under 18.

A Prediction About the Coming Split in the Methodist Church.  If the reports are true, then "a tentative plan" has been put in place "to split the [Methodist] church over differences on same-sex marriage and the inclusion of gay clergy." [...] Assuming that this split actually takes place, what will happen to these two branches, one conservative and the other liberal?  The answer is easy, based on history and common spiritual sense.  History says that the conservative branch will grow and the liberal branch will diminish.

Why the USA Needs a Space Force.  An ICBM is a weapon that attacks from space.  During its flight, an ICBM follows an elliptical orbit around the Earth.  It is based on land for convenience and because of arms control (proper control, I might add).  We have learned to live with ICBMs as a deterrent to all out war.  In the meantime, the U.S. has developed major space frontier vulnerabilities of a completely different kind.  Space has become the purveyor of information that we need for our very survival.  There are three types of information that have become critical:  1) observation of activities on Earth and in space, 2) secure communications, and 3) Global Positioning System navigation and timing.

The Editor says...
If we're paying for a Space Force, we no longer need NASA.

The Pope's Mask Falls Again.  Jorge Bergoglio is not so much the pope of the common man as a friend to the globally powerful.  He disdains the most devout members of his faith, labeling them "rigid," while rolling out the red carpet for thugs and pagan celebrities.  Not a week passes without the pope meeting and greeting some enemy of the faith.  The media, for the most part, continues to serve as his PR agents.

Our Lady of Perpetual Impeachment vs.  America.  During this coming year our nation is likely to be shaken to its foundations either by the indictment and trials of powerful individuals, or by the lack thereof.  The left may stop threatening to kill the president and actually do it.  It is quite possible that our southern borders will be overrun.  It's even more likely that we will be traumatized again and again by Islamic incursions, both anti-Semitic and anti-American.  It's looking like some terrible showdown is brewing in Virginia over the right to bear arms, and who knows what will happen with Iran, North Korea, or China?  We must choose our leadership wisely. [...] Were there a viable, responsible, clear-thinking candidate to run against Trump in November, small things might make the difference.  But this year we choose between a man who has been doing the job splendidly and Corruption Central.

Morality and the Presidency.  [Scroll down]  President Trump has been accused of "womanizing," but such behavior was rampant with John F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton.  What is more, even if the accusations against Trump are true, one would be hard-pressed to argue that they somehow threatened the security of the United States or compromised his presidency.  This was not the case with John Kennedy.  Kennedy was purportedly on the precipice of being compromised as a result of his cavorting with an East German communist spy (and others with connections to organized crime) while he was president.  Had this been publicly disclosed it would almost certainly have ended his presidency.  It could be argued that Kennedy fell in the only way that allowed Camelot to rise.  That image inspired a generation.  President Kennedy did not die in disgrace, but had he lived he may well have been forced to resign the presidency in disgrace (or suffer defeat in the 1964 election).

The Many Faces of Scientific Fraud.  Any scientific article must be considered a reconstruction, an account, a clear and precise narrative, a good story.  But the story is often too good, too logical, too coherent.  In a way, all researchers are cooks, given that they cannot write a scientific article without arranging their data to present it in the most convincing, appealing way.  The history of science is full of examples of researchers embellishing their experimental results to make them conform to simple, logical, coherent theory.

Watch Venezuela's Dramatic Economic Plunge Under Democratic Socialism.  Economist Mark Perry has been putting together a series of intriguing animated charts to show changes over time in everything from recorded music formats, Social Security spending, to top manufacturing nations.  Over the weekend, Perry posted his latest animated chart, this one showing per capita GDP among Latin American countries.  Pay close attention to the highlighted bar, which represents Venezuela.  [Video clip]

Christianity Today vs. the Myth of Monolithic Evangelicalism.  Thirty-five percent of Americans identify as Evangelical, Pew Research finds.  But only a fraction of them, or 6 percent of the U.S. population, are Evangelical according to Barna, a Christian research organization that applies nine theological criteria (e.g., firm belief that Satan exists).  It classifies a respondent as Evangelical only if he or she meets all of them.  Christianity Today is a magazine for that 6 percent, David [French] writes:  Its recent newsmaking editorial (in which Mark Galli, CT's editor in chief, argues that the president should be removed from office) "is aimed like an arrow at that audience," which represents the publication's "colleagues and peers."  That may be.  We shouldn't assume, though, that Evangelicals who disagree with the editorial are less committed to their faith.

Democrats actively rolling out scheme to remove VP Mike Pence so they can install Nancy Pelosi, then Hillary Clinton as President.  The criminal coup scenario I warned you about has finally arrived.  A scheme is now active to convict Trump and remove V.P. Mike Pence from power, then install Nancy Pelosi as president.  Once there, she will appoint Hillary Clinton as her V.P. with no resistance from the Senate, then she will resign, making Hillary Clinton the president.  I warned about this exact scenario in an earlier article entitled, "It's ON: The deep state plot to install Hillary Clinton as PRESIDENT this year, bypassing elections altogether."  As many Natural News have come to realize, I have excellent sources deep inside the bureaucracy, and they fill me in on what's going down.  That's the only way I was able to write the following words over two months ago, almost word-for-word what we just witnessed with the fake impeachment by the House: [...]

The Editor says...
Come on, now.  This scenario presupposes complete cooperation (at every step) from the spineless RINOs in the Senate.  That would never happen, right?

How Democrats Could Undo Trump's Lasting Legacy in the Courts.  Aside from the well-known power to impeach judges, Congress can also pack the Supreme Court.  Yet it apparently has still another power, one little known:  to abolish entire federal courts.  The only federal court mandated by the Constitution is the SCOTUS; as to "inferior courts," Article III states that Congress "may from time to time ordain and establish" them, which it has often done.  But implied is that what Congress can make, it can unmake; or, as the Legal Information Institute puts it, the Houses can both "expand and contract the units of the system" (emphasis added).

Barr is on the case.  Attorney General William Barr sat for an extended interview with NBC's Pete Williams to discuss the findings in the Department of Justice Inspector General report released yesterday afternoon.  NBC has cut the thing up in a couple of stories, but it has also posted the whole thing on YouTube.  Barr is familiar with the evidence gathered so far; he knows what he's talking about.  He understands that what we have staring us in the face is an unprecedented political scandal.  He tentatively anticipates the criminal investigation reaching "a watershed" by late spring or early summer.  I urge interested readers to watch the whole thing.  The interview is invaluable in its entirety.  I'm not sure whether Pete Williams is just playing the fool for purposes of the interview, whether he is a fool, or whether he is handicapped by the fact that he gets his news from NBC News.  Whatever the case, everything he elicits from Barr is of interest.

Tucker Carlson's Critique Of Paul Singer Is Part Of The Reckoning Underway In America.  Tucker Carlson is perhaps the only major media figure in America willing to attack across party lines to make his point.  On Tuesday night he went after Republican mega-donor Paul Singer in a withering 10-minute special segment on how Singer destroyed a small town in Nebraska in a hostile takeover of the sporting goods retailer Cabela's.  For those who don't know, Singer is a New York hedge fund manager who has made billions as a so-called "vulture capitalist," buying up the sovereign debt of financially distressed countries at a discount and then cashing in later, using lawsuits to pressure governments to pay up.  He's done something similar with U.S. firms — buying up debt, shipping jobs overseas, firing American workers and cashing out — in some cases at taxpayer expense.

New Zealand:  Not the Paradise Americans Think It Is.  I will tell you right now that Americans craving a move to New Zealand — who nonetheless love their Constitution and Bill of Rights, 'til death do us part — need to cancel all of those plans immediately, and don't ever look back.  In New Zealand, as well as in Australia, we do not have the comprehensive search and seizure protections Americans are granted by their Fourth Amendment.  What results is that the New Zealand police regularly deploy roadblocks — euphemistically called "checkpoints" — which infringe on you being able to go about your daily driving business unmolested by the state.  At all of these roadblocks, the intention of the police is to find ways to either drag you away in handcuffs (failed drug tests or carrying contraband) or shank your bank account (fines for expired warrants of fitness, expired registrations, etc.) in order to help the government compensate for their — by global police standards — very high salaries.

Robocalls on the rise:  Americans get 18 spam calls per month, report says.  The United States is again the eighth-most-spammed nation in the world and the annoying calls are on the rise, according to a new report.  Americans received 7% more spam calls in 2019 compared to the year before, said Truecaller, a Swedish company that tracks spam calls, but hung on to their ranking from the last annual report.  The report Tuesday comes after efforts by the Federal Communications Commission to crackdown on robocalls, which are the No. 1 complaint consumers make to the agency.

The Editor says...
The Editor gets four or five such calls every day.  Each call comes from a different number, so there is no way to block them based on the number alone.  Many of the calls come with obviously spoofed Caller-ID information, because the alleged calling number is invalid.  (For example, a call came in this morning from 800-174-2604.  How would one complain about it?  There is no such number.)  Sometimes the Caller-ID shows my name and number.  The Editor was one of the first to sign up for the National Do No Call Registry, which is a sham and a farce.  The calls have never slowed down.  In most cases, the telemarketing calls are placed by machines.  The machines sometimes pretend to be people and if you play along, they will carry on a conversation.  Sometimes the machines have apparently called a dozen numbers, and the person in the telemarketing "boiler room" talks to the first party who answers the phone, and hangs up on the rest.  Sometimes the telemarketer is obviously calling from a crowded and noisy room in India, claiming that his name is Steve or Larry or George, and he's calling from Microsoft.  The Editor sometimes engages these callers for a few minutes, just to waste their time, ruin their averages, and keep someone else from being annoyed.  The Editor is still paying the phone company 50 cents a month for "Anonymous Call Rejection," which does not work.  The Editor should write a book.

The Great American Eye-Exam Scam.  [Scroll down]  On the one hand, some number of Americans who visit an optometrist to get a new prescription will indeed discover that they have a serious condition that requires immediate care.  On the other hand, it is likely that a much greater number keep wearing glasses that are too weak — or won't wear glasses at all — because they want to avoid the cost, time, or stress of a visit to a doctor.  I have not been able to find any studies that credibly assess how this barrier affects Americans' quality of life.  But it's reasonable to assume that it has an adverse impact on many people, especially underprivileged Americans — those who don't have insurance, have little cash, or lack the social or financial capital to navigate our country's byzantine medical system.

A 'Farm Kid' Thwarts the Coup.  If a full and fair analysis of the Trump-Russian collusion hoax ever is conducted, it will reveal the collateral damage suffered by innocent people ensnared by the wicked, multi-faceted operation launched by Barack Obama's White House in the spring of 2016.  There are plenty of infuriating passages in The Plot Against the President, a must-read book by journalist Lee Smith.  But the description of how the hoax plotters targeted the family of Representative Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) evokes particular outrage.

How Our Administrative State Aids Communist China.  [Scroll down]  Concerned with what the report discovered hiding in plain sight, U.S. Senator Rob Portman (R-Ohio) said:  "China wins twice.  First, the American taxpayer funds China's research and development.  Second, China uses that research to improve its economic and military status."  Equally disconcerted, his colleague on the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, Senator Tom Carper (D-Del.) warned "there are serious consequences that come from giving a foreign government so much control over the vital research we rely on to drive our country's economic competitiveness and bolster our national defense."

JFK's Assassination Only Grows More Distant at Dallas's Sixth Floor Museum.  [Scroll down]  Finally, there is a lull in the traffic, and the men sprint into the street, moving as briskly as their stiff-looking boots will allow, with their hands reflexively holding onto the brims of their Stetsons.  One of them breaks off from the pack, readying his phone.  The other two plant themselves on the large X that has been crudely affixed to the middle lane with reflective tape.  There's some debate about its accuracy; the X moves a little whenever the road is repaved, replaced each time by still-mysterious sources.  But it supposedly marks the precise spot where President John F. Kennedy was hit by a fatal headshot on a sunny November day much like this one.  With the faded red-brick building of the former Texas School Book Depository stationed picturesquely behind them, the two men position their feet on either side of the X, and throw their arms around each other's shoulders.  As their friend snaps away, they smile.  It's a grim yet familiar scene, one that plays out many times per day here — like Dallas's own morbid version of Abbey Road.

The Editor says...
The scene of the JFK assassination is the most popular tourist attraction in Dallas, even though it is never advertised as such.  The tourists are welcome, I guess, but when they impede traffic they are annoying.  And since there are always cameras around, "Deadly Plaza" has become a popular location for political protests and news conferences.  The official explanation of the JFK assassination does not add up.  There are several credible alternative explanations which point to various kids of conspiracies, and numerous sub-plots and loose ends that most people have never heard of.

Adam Schiff's Terribly, Horribly, Painfully Transparent Back-Tracking.  If you have liberal family members around for this weeks Thanksgiving feast and celebration it would be wise to understand the scale of their disappointment, even if they have yet to recognize it.  Perhaps the best course will be just smiling.

Netanyahu's Indictment Is a Fraud.  The indictment of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that was announced today did not come as a surprise to anyone who has been paying attention.  Israeli politics have become less workable and less democratic over time.  What we are seeing here is an attempted coup by the Israeli version of the Deep State.

Another feminist movie bombs at the box office.  [Scroll down]  I have not seen and don't plan to see this movie.  I saw one trailer about the "superwoman" theme and decided that watching a Stars hockey game was better for me.  Why are young women staying away?  My guess is that a lot of young women are sick and tired of the message.  So I have a message for the people of who financed this movie:  First, stop making films with predictable dialogue.  We know that Hollywood hates Trump and believes in climate change.  How many times do you have to tell us directly or indirectly?  Second, I would change the title overseas to something like "Charlie's Angels Defends the World from Trump."

How to Launder Foreign Aid.  [Scroll down]  All the former government buildings in and around Monrovia were shells, as destitute Liberians had stripped bombed buildings for whatever they could use or sell to scrapyards.  The two-story airport terminal structure had been bombed and gutted down to the concrete floors and columns during the war.  The Liberian Customs office at the airport was a two-car garage-sized structure with a single 25-watt lightbulb barely illuminating the area.  There were three desks, two with signs that read:  No bribes taken at this desk.  There was a single customs official present but she wasn't sitting at a desk with a sign. [...] Customs agents don't take bribes at those desks with signs but it is apparently perfectly fine to take bribes at desks without signs.  And if an American Embassy dumps taxpayer funds into a foreign company's operational account, isn't that how you launder money?

Democratic Debate Winners and Losers.  MSNBC went full "woke" with their production of Wednesday night's [11/20/2019] primary debate.  They held the event at Tyler Perry's historic Atlanta film studios — a seeming nod to the Black community although they perplexingly left out nearly any mention of Black voter issues — and they had an all women panel of moderators, led by Rachael Maddow.  Again, there was a perplexing lack of questions surrounding the issues you'd think most Democrat-voting women would be curious about... outside of the sacred abortion questions.

Americans Should Remember the Ninth Amendment.  The animating principle of the Ninth Amendment is one that, as Justice Stevens wrote, "goes to the very core of the constitutional relationship between the individual and governmental authority." Although the Ninth Amendment has only rarely been explicitly invoked by the Supreme Court, you can see its fingerprints on many of the Court's decisions.  The Court's protection of unenumerated fundamental rights that are "deeply rooted in this Nation's history and tradition" acknowledges that today, as at the time of the Founding, listing every one of a person's rights is impossible.

The Media Are Missing the Biggest Story Since the Fall of the Soviet Union.  Attorney General Bill Barr enunciated the anti-liberal manifesto at a speech before the Federalist Society.  Barr offers an ideological explanation for the rebellion against the establishment in a way Trump, being Trump, never could.  As such it is the first genuinely post-Trump political development in conservative ranks.  The Barr declaration means the attempt to isolate the causes of the 2016 rebellion to one man has decisively failed.  It is now a cause of its own, bigger than Trump.

The Department of Defense Joins the Coup Cabal.  Since the Vietnam fail, the Gulf War had to be fought twice.  Iraq is still a hot mess.  Syria has become another divided, surrogate killing field.  After thirty years of American campaigning, Afghanistan is arguably worse off today than it was under Soviet occupation.  Libya is still a smoldering Obama/Clinton era ruin.  Now, North Africa has another Specified Command bureaucracy and another spasm of pyric small wars.  And the global, so-called, "war on terror" might be the longest and most expensive bad joke in the history of military inertia.  Adding insult to insanity, we now have a new Cold War with Russia.  Much of this came to pass with [General James] Mattis and company at the helm in the Pentagon.

Bernie Sanders Goes Full AOC: 'Time for Us to Become the Party that Fights for Queer Liberation'.  In the campaign for the 2020 presidential elections, socialist Senator Bernie Sanders has joined forces with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her fellow members of the so-called "Squad." [...] She connects all those issues to FDR, a guy who literally did nothing to help "queer liberation," and who (rightfully!) dragged his fellow countrymen into a new world war.  You can certainly say that FDR helped establish peace and prosperity, but he only did so after declaring war on the Axis (Germany, Italy, and Japan).  Yes, yes, Harry Truman finished the job.  True.  But without FDR, America's involvement in the Second World War may have been much more limited than it was.  And that's not all — other Democrats were also quite warlike.  Woodrow Wilson (World War I).  FDR (World War II).  JFK (Bay of Pigs).  LBJ (Vietnam).  Bill Clinton (Yugoslavia).  Barack H. Obama (Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan).

The Establishment Hates Russia.  [Scroll down]  It's true that Russia is neither England, France, or Mexico for that matter.  We are not at war with Russia, but our relations are less-than-friendly.  Western elites' chief problem with Russia is that it has not complied with the script Western advisors provided after the downfall of Communism.  Russia was supposed to embrace the ever-changing kaleidoscope of modern values, including capitalism, secularism, multiculturalism, and sexual liberation.  Under Boris Yeltsin, Russia did exactly that, but these reforms led to chaos during the 1990s.  A handful of oligarchs became rich by looting the country, while prosperity declined and gangsters ruled the streets.  Vladimir Putin restored law and order, as well as Russia's ability to project power abroad.  Now Russia is a moderately authoritarian county that is largely white, nationalist, conservative, and increasingly Christian.  As such, it is an obstacle to the Western elites' desire to make the whole world look like San Francisco.

Stanford professor who changed America with just one study was also a liar.  Susannah Cahalan is the author of "The Great Pretender" about famed psychology professor David Rosenhan, whom she discovered while on a book tour for her memoir, "Brain on Fire."  The book chronicled her experiences with doctors who believed her autoimmune disorder was a serious mental illness.

Time for Conservatives to Build Their Own Hollywood.  It's time for conservatives and what Kurt Schlicter calls the "Normals" to have an entertainment industry of their own.  Hollywood has effectively divorced conservatives (and the Normals).  And after a divorce, as they say, "living well is the best revenge."  The question is how.  It's not easy and one of the big reasons is the conservative world itself.  Conservative financiers abjure the arts — indeed they seem even to fear them — unless it's putting money in their local philharmonic to have their name on a plaque in the lobby.  Problem is, we all love Beethoven but he doesn't need our help at this point.  Conservative fat cats also put a ton of money in think tanks that aren't particularly effective.  I don't mean to unnecessarily diss those tanks.  Some of my best friends are, etc., etc.... but the truth is, one good movie or television series is worth more than a hundred, or even a thousand, position papers when it comes to moving society.

The Editor says...
A conservative version of Hollywood is a nice idea, but it's not likely to materialize.  First of all, The Studios at Las Colinas was supposed to be the Bible Belt Hollywood.  At least that's the impression I got 20 years ago.  Secondly, how would a company run a conservative film-making operation without employing homosexuals, fornicators, druggies, and self-important egomaniacs — just like the other Hollywood?

The Looming '1984' Election.  For a variety of reasons, the 2020 election is going to be a referendum beyond Donald Trump's record and his Democratic opposition.  The furor that Trump has incurred, and the radical antithesis to his agenda and first term, have redefined the looming election.  It is becoming a stark choice between a revolutionary future versus American traditionalism. [...] In 2020 we will witness the penultimate manifestation of what radical progressivism has in store for us all — and the furious, often desperate, and unfettered pushback against it.

I Am the Anonymous Whistleblower.  [W]e Orthodox Jews, the fastest growing community of Jews in America, are deeply conservative.  Pro-life.  We oppose assisted suicide.  We are people of deep faith.  We live by the principle of personal responsibility.  We recognize only two genders.  We despise Communism and the socialist Left.  We love President Trump.  In the Democrat-predominant New York Tri-State area, more than 90 percent of Orthodox Jews are happy with Trump.  Even in radical left Los Angeles — Home of the Homeless, Turf of the Typhus — more than 70 percent of Orthodox Jews vote Trump.  We despise what the Democrats have done, particularly these past three decades, to destroy the social unity and moral fiber of our country.

How Libertarianism Makes People Susceptible To Huge Government.  [Scroll down]  For example, libertarian advocacy for legalizing drugs and prostitution seems to arise less from the prudential belief that suppressing these vices causes more harm than good than from a philosophical commitment to maximizing individual autonomy.  But hard drugs and prostitution are degrading, and they lessen the human capacity for responsible self-government.  In these and many other ways, today's libertarianism allows and even encourages the destruction of the virtues and associations necessary for successful self-government.

The reasons the IG report has been delayed will delight Trump supporters.  The continuing delays in releasing the Department of Justice Inspector General's report on the FISA warrant have discouraged a lot of conservatives.  But according to Joe DiGenova and Victoria Toensing, whose sources on the ongoing scandal have been excellent, the reasons behind the delay are entirely positive.  Yesterday [11/6/2019] they appeared on Lou Dobbs's show on Fox Business Network, and laid it out.  [Video clip]

DiGenova and Toensing on Upcoming IG Report: "it's going to be worse than you can imagine".  Joe diGenova and Victoria Toensing appeared on Fox News to discuss issues surrounding the ongoing investigations of Inspector General Michael Horowitz and U.S. Attorney John Durham.  Mr. diGenova and Ms. Toensing bring the tick-tock hammer to the audience.  According to Ms. Toensing the upcoming IG report is going to be "very bad for people in the Obama administration."  Toensing went on to say, according to her sources, "it's going to be worse than you can imagine."  Mr. diGenova went on to say:  "it's going to be devastating" ... "it's going to ruin careers" etc.  Mr diGenova has a great deal of confidence in AG Barr, Horowitz and Durham.

The Editor says...
This cliff-hanging build-up to the upcoming IG report has been going on for weeks.  I'm ready to see bad things happen to bad people.  Bring it on, already.

No, Kentucky Isn't Turning Blue, Here's Why.  If you were on social media last night, you probably saw a lot of folks on the left celebrating that Kentucky, a deep red state, "had turned blue" because of the razor-thin victory of Democrat Andy Beshear over incumbent Republican Matt Bevin.  Let me just get it out of the way right now and tell you that Kentucky isn't turning blue.  The state hasn't been "flipped" or whatever else they're saying.  We've seen this narrative before.  When Democrat Doug Jones narrowly defeated Republican Roy Moore in the special election for Jeff Sessions' vacant Senate seat in 2017, many on the left seemed to interpret that election as a sign of Trump's weakness, and Alabama's competitiveness in future statewide elections.

How the World to the Dark Tower Came.  "California," argues Victor Davis Hanson, is "becoming pre-modern" despite ballooning government solutions.  Like fictional pre-modern societies, it is becoming a two-tier society; a landscape of fantastical castles amid a sea of peasants.  It is as if the technologically sophisticated components of the Golden State were creating its shadow of poor, homeless, drug-addicted and unskilled populations. [...] Yet in some respects, not only California but the whole global world is morphing into a similar two-tier arrangement.  This may be driven by something called knowledge inequality.  The processes by which a society produced its goods and governed itself were once common knowledge to a large percentage of the population.  But they are not now.

Mexican blood is on liberal hands.  Drug abusing Americans have turned Mexico into a narco-state.  Last night, a drug cartel murdered nine Mormons in Mexico in an attack that should shame America's potheads, meth-heads, and coke users.  The blood of the LeBaron family is on their hands.

Fall Back, Spring Ahead.  Get ready to go through the routine of turning the clocks back an hour this weekend.  Daylight savings time is leaving us... yet again.  Daylight savings time has been with us in the United States since the days of World War I.  It has seen several changes since then but still exists essentially in its original form.

Fall back, daylight saving time — You need to cease and desist.  Proponents of daylight saving time — which ends at 2 a.m.  Sunday — argue that it gives more daylight hours after a workday and decreases energy consumption.  But the negatives far outweigh any positives.  It's time to get rid of daylight saving time once and for all.

How America Will Win the Next 100 Years.  Use any measuring stick and you will find the United States leads the way.  We are number one in opportunity, quality of life, access to healthcare, academics, and diversity in intellectual and political thought — we even lead the world in dog and cat ownership. [...] But American superiority is not a message we have heard from the Democrats running for president.  What's worse is that it seems to be a notion they outright reject.  If America, and our ideals of freedom, are going to outwit the communists in China and the antagonists in Russia, then we must elect leaders who understand how we became number one in the first place.

Chang:  China is 'the Third Reich in the 21st Century'.  Scholar Gordan Chang warns that the United States must ultimately "disengage from China" on all fronts if it is to maintain its status as a global superpower or risk China's massive potential to change the geopolitical structure of the world.  Chang, who just returned from Japan, Hong Kong and South Korea, spoke on The Sara Carter Show where he described the current state of Beijing and the authoritarian government's influence across the globe.  "This is the Third Reich in the 21st century," said Chang.  China's policy "is incompatibility with our system.  We are unfortunately going to have to reverse course and disengage from China to protect ourselves — to reduce our vulnerability to an extremely dangerous actor."

The First Four-Star Flag Officer in US History Joins the Effort to Void the Election of the US President.  From time to time, I like to promote the Combat Veterans for Congress Political Action Committee, as their cause is righteous.  I agree whole-heartedly with almost all of their stances on issues.  Here is one of those opinion pieces that I'm certain will resonate with you, too.  In fact, the topic makes me furious!

Black leaders say 'racist' Hoover's name has no business on new FBI HQ.  Black lawmakers want to strip J. Edgar Hoover's name from the proposed new FBI headquarters because they think he was a racist, outraging longtime agents who say America's culture of political correctness and victimhood has gone too far.  The fight is bursting into public view again as the FBI inches toward building a new headquarters, a plan that has been simmering for nearly a decade.

The Editor says...
Why does every government building have to be named after a bureaucrat or a politician?  No matter which name is chosen, eventually that name will fall out of favor.  It would be better to name a building, in an anti-Orwellian manner, after someone whose name we are supposed to forget.  Like Richard Jewell or Vince Foster.

There Is No Basis for Barr to Recuse Himself Over Ukraine.  If Dianne Feinstein didn't recuse herself from the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings, why should anyone ever be recused from anything?  Senator Feinstein is in the news, making the characteristically hyperpartisan and frivolous claim (on Twitter) that Attorney General Bill Barr should ["]recuse himself from matters related to Ukraine because of concerns about his role in President Trump's efforts to damage a political opponent and undermine the Russia investigation.["]  Feinstein says she is speaking for Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats, all of whom have signed a letter to the AG.  There is no basis for Barr to recuse himself.  First, before we ever get to the law, the Democrats' claim is factually vacant.  The AG has no role in President Trump's dealings with Ukraine. [...]

China's president's daughter is at Harvard.  That's a big warning sign.  [Scroll down]  For a princeling, if you married Xi's daughter, you would become consort to the empress, but there would be a downside:  you would be killed in any palace coup.  If Xi Mingze is at Harvard, that suggests that the project to get her married off has had pushback and that President Xi isn't having things going all his way.  Another problem with Xi establishing a dynasty is that all the other families living in the gated community in Beijing for China's elite, Zhongnanhai, would become less than equal, something that would stick in their craw more than the president-for-life thing.  The communist regimes in Russia and Eastern Europe lasted about 70 years before they burned out, and it has been wondered if the 70-year rule will also apply to China.  The communist party in China recently celebrated 70 years since its founding, and it looks as if burnout is happening on cue.

Trump's greatest tweet ever:  Meet the dog who chased down Baghdadi.  How much did I enjoy this tweet?  Put it this way:  I'm thinking of voting for him next year now.  The dog, I mean.

The Post-Christian Pope and the Pacha Idols.  In his latest outrage, Pope Francis has had the police fish out of the Tiber the Pacha idols an anonymous Catholic removed from a church near St.  Peter's Square and threw into the river.  The writers at the Onion must be scratching their heads over how to satirize this one.  Their fake headlines can't beat the real ones, such as:  "Pope Francis asks for forgiveness after Amazon statues stolen, thrown into river."  His apology was of the most craven PC sort:  "As a bishop of the diocese, I ask forgiveness from the persons who were offended by this."  The post-Christian pope is rapidly making Rome pagan again.

The Democrats Are Neoconservatives Now.  When the establishment boot comes stomping, it's clear that party affiliation matters less to the swamp than loyalty to its dictates.  Representative Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) is a doctrinaire liberal in nearly every respect but one.  Yet what unites her and Trump is significant enough to make both targets of a machine bent on destroying them.  Last week, Gabbard became the center of an intra-party dispute after Hillary Clinton, the exiled queen of neoliberals, accused her of being a "Russian asset."  It was not the first time Gabbard was so libeled, but the attack, coming from Clinton, exposed a rift between the dominant international Left of apparatchiks who think that "Putin bad" is foreign policy, and the vanishing, historic anti-war Left that Gabbard exemplifies.

Take Tulsi Gabbard's explanation for not seeking reelection with a grain of salt.  Gabbard's decision not to seek reelection may have something to do with her longshot 2020 Democratic primary candidacy, which has never broken above 3% in surveys of potential Democratic primary voters, according to a RealClearPolitics polling average.  But the congresswoman's announcement this week also certainly has something to do with her troubles at home, including declining fundraising and polling numbers, neither of which are mentioned in her official reelection statement.

Stop Claiming 'No Quid Pro Quo'.  Quid pro quo ... it's the new "by the book."  You remember "by the book," right? [...] That was the memorable phrase Obama national-security adviser Susan Rice emphasized in her notorious CYA memo.  Remember?  The memo took the form of an email.  She wrote it while clearing out of her White House office while Donald Trump was being inaugurated.  It purported to summarize a meeting more than two weeks earlier, when President Obama held an Oval Office pow-wow on next steps in the Trump-Russia investigation.  Fully aware that what they were orchestrating was highly irregular (the continuation of a probe targeting the new president even as he entered office), Rice took pains to note that Obama had insisted that everything be done "by the book."  It was a flashing neon sign that "the book" was being burned.  There is no "book" — no set of legit procedures and norms — that endorses the exploitation of executive investigative powers in the service of partisan politics.

GOP Has A Choice:  Fight Anti-Trump Coup Effort Or Surrender Government To Democrats.  What we are facing now is not partisan warfare, it's not a mystery novel, it's not politics-as-usual.  We are facing an attempt to tear down the foundations of our republic by corrupt, unelected bureaucrats who have decided the will of voters is subordinate to their will to power.  It represents a fatal threat to our system of government, and if this coup succeeds — whether through impeachment proceedings, or through an election that (if the last three years are any indication) the other side is clearly willing to steal by hook or by crook — the nation will cease to be a constitutional, democratic republic.  This isn't about Trump, or Republicans, or conservatives.  It is about Washington needing to learn that political differences have to be settled at the ballot box lest they instead be settled with an undermining of our constitutional norms and institutions.

The Truth About China That LeBron and the NBA Don't Understand.  [Scroll down]  Genocide is more than an "excessive measure," and Mao was unquestionably a bloodthirsty, genocidal maniac.  Over the years, I have heard similar statements regarding the Holocaust, minimizing it subtly, as if it wasn't so bad after all.  I couldn't let this go.  "'Excessive?'" I said, so that the full room of students and business executives could hear me.  "Let's be clear, Mao killed between 40 and 70 million of his own people."  Silence.  Total silence.  I felt like Ann Coulter at Berkeley or like Daryl Morey after his controversial tweet.  One Chinese student sitting next to me, a fellow who had been quite friendly while giving me a tour around the campus, literally backed away from me.  The economist paused, looked around the room and at the doors, and then continued nervously.  No one argued the point.  It was as if I had said nothing.  They were afraid.  This is what societies with a history of violence and repression look like even after they're somewhat liberalized.

Pompeo: The Term 'Human Right' is Being Used 'For Something That is a Mere Preference'.  Secretary of State Mike Pompeo says his department's new "Commission on Unalienable Rights," which held its first public meeting Wednesday, aims to develop a document by mid-2020 that will make clear what precisely are "fundamental human rights and why they matter so much to America."  The initiative comes at a time when repressive regimes around the world are subverting the concept of human rights — a point highlighted by Pompeo in a speech Tuesday [10/22/2019] at the Heritage Foundation, where he cited as an example the Maduro regime in Venezuela's recent election onto the U.N. Human Rights Council (HRC).  He returned to the subject Wednesday during an interview on Tony Perkins' national radio show Washington Watch, citing the HRC election as an example of how humankind has "deviated" from what human rights actually are.

What Is Conservative American Nationalism?  As I suggest in a new book, Age of Iron, conservative American nationalism is the country's oldest foreign-policy tradition.  Designed to preserve American self-government, it always has been based on a recognition that the United States is an independent nation-state.  This means that the material integrity, security, prosperity, and health of the U.S. as a nation ought to be of real concern.  It also means that in formulating U.S. public policy, the interests of American citizens come first.  One might think this is obvious.  And for previous generations, across party lines, it was.  But in our own time, a great many public intellectuals — along with the now-dominant progressive wing of the Democratic party — have together decided otherwise.

Democrats Seek to Drown Trump in Drama.  Democrats are running their own version of a hostage scenario, only they've taken a sizable portion of the American public hostage to their eardrum-splitting insanity.  Their hope is to create a crushing wave of noise and disruption through the use of bogus impeachment screeds, relentless media attacks, Antifa violence, never-ending investigations, daily Deep State leaks, Intelligence Community hits, strategically placed partisan polls, and the rest of the tactics they are deploying.  That noise becomes overwhelming, which is the point.  The never-ending churn is intended to wear out America to where enough voters so desire a return to "normalcy" that they will submit and vote for the Democrat.  They are trying to force voters to wave the white flag.  Their hope is that drama-exhausted voters will blame President Trump for their misdeeds and pull the lever for the Democrat.

Imagine if the Federal Government Were Ever Broken Apart into 'Flyover Country'?  [Scroll down]  Given the popularity in some circles of a push to deploy anti-trust suits against Big Tech, [James] Piereson went one step further.  Why not go anti-trust on the biggest monopoly of them all?  And what would that be?  Why, the U.S. federal government, of course.  He did not advocate burning down the house — but relocating it.  That could be done, he suggested in so many words, by moving the Interior Department to Boise, Idaho; Transportation to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Treasury to Laramie, Wyoming; and the like.  This would severely restrict the ability of the Establishment (aka the Deep State) to plot in cabals to do injury to their preferred targets, such as President Donald Trump.  These days they walk a couple of blocks — and plan their skullduggery over a pricey lunch.

McRaven and Mattis:  The M&M's of Perpetual War.  Give writers their pens, soldiers their swords.  Do not, however, salute old warriors who write in defense of war without end.  Do not let retired admirals and generals end the peace with their pieces about the honors of war.  Not the horrors of war, of the dead and disfigured, of the living dead who have nothing but their discharge papers and paper prescriptions, of minds deadened by killing and bodies dying from painkillers.  Do not let Admiral William H. McRaven and General James Mattis blind us with their medals and stars.

These 3 Countries Tried Socialism.  Socialists are fond of saying that socialism has never failed because it has never been tried.  But in truth, socialism has failed in every country in which it has been tried, from the Soviet Union beginning a century ago to three modern countries that tried but ultimately rejected socialism — Israel, India, and the United Kingdom.

Is America Becoming Sinicized?  Westerners, who apologize when Islamists kill cartoonists and journalists for supposedly insulting Islam, do not say a word when China puts a million Muslims into re-education camps, bulldozes Islamic cemeteries and shuts down mosques.  Loud human rights lions in Europe turn into kittens when it is a question of Chinese organ harvesting, forced abortions and sterilizations, and the jailing and execution of dissidents.  American environmentalists demand a radical shutdown of the current fossil-fuel-based U.S. economy.  They say little about greenhouse gas emissions from China, the biggest polluter in the world by far.  Outspoken NBA athletes and hip Hollywood celebrities damn the Second Amendment, curse their president and boycott states they find politically incorrect.  But they become abject cowards when it comes to China.

Obama Broke NATO.  Since the end of the Cold War, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has been fraying.  Without the common Soviet threat, NATO has struggled to justify its existence.  Frankly, it has outlived its usefulness.  Yet, despite what many of his detractors claim, President Donald J. Trump has not broken NATO.  That honor falls to Trump's vainglorious predecessor, Barack Obama, the man who presidential historian Michael Beschloss believed to have been the "smartest guy ever to become president."

Trump in a landslide?  This historically accurate model predicts exactly that.  President Donald Trump has a love/hate relationship with polls, surveys and predictions.  He loves the ones that paint him in a positive light, and, of course, he hates all those "fake" ones that don't.  He's going to absolutely adore this one.  According to Moody's Analytics, Trump is headed toward another four years in the White House.  And, if the numbers are right, it won't even be close.

The FBI Eagerly Accepted Foreign Interference — To Give A Third Term To FDR.  Franklin Delano Roosevelt is one of the canonized saints of the Democratic Party, despite his long-known anti-Semitism, plus philandering that ranks him right up there with Democratic successors John F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton. [...] But the man Democrats consider the greatest president of the 20th century, the commander in chief who led the Allies to victory in the Second World War, and who established the country's most popular government entitlement, Social Security, did something that looks uncannily similar to what House Democrats are poised to impeach Trump for.

Is China Orchestrating the Democrats' Faux Impeachment Scheme?  China has not only compromised Biden, it is extremely likely that they are actively colluding with Democrats and the media to take down Trump.  Consider Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), whose financial ties to the Red Chinese are well-known through her husband, who somehow (like Hunter Biden) landed tens of millions of dollars in "investments" as she chaired the Senate Intelligence Committee.  Worse yet, China was able to implant a spy into her staff for about 20 years.  But, of course, she knew nothing.  We all know that President Trump is costing China a lot of money.  The media's unprecedented and insane attacks against Trump raise my Spidey-sense.

The Syrian Kurds Are Not America's Problem.  There has been much conflation of both the American mission in Syria and the disposition of America's erstwhile Kurdish friends.  The fact is, despite being the world's largest stateless ethnic population, sharing a contiguous landmass that cuts across Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran — roughly a 500,000-square-kilometer area — the Kurds are by no means a monolithic entity.  What's more, the United States government has never officially endorsed the concept of a Kurdish state in the Middle East.  Don't let those facts stop the experts from trotting out many falsehoods and half-truths about the messy situation that is Syria, though.

We're in a permanent coup.  On Thursday [10/10/2019], news broke that two businessmen said to have "peddled supposedly explosive information about corruption involving Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden" were arrested at Dulles airport on "campaign finance violations."  The two figures are alleged to be bagmen bearing "dirt" on Democrats, solicited by Trump and his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani.  Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman will be asked to give depositions to impeachment investigators.  They're reportedly going to refuse.  Their lawyer John Dowd also says they will "refuse to appear before House Committees investigating President Donald Trump."  Fruman and Parnas meanwhile claim they had real derogatory information about Biden and other politicians, but "the U.S. government had shown little interest in receiving it through official channels." [...] The men who are the proxies for Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani in this story are asserting that "official channels" have been corrupted.  The forces backing impeachment, meanwhile, are telling us those same defendants are obstructing a lawful impeachment inquiry.

Think Twice before Buying Chinese Stocks.  The Trump administration recently floated the idea of delisting Chinese stocks in the U.S.  This was met with ridicule and hand-wringing not only from the usual political opponents, but also from mainstream business analysts.  Though delisting Chinese companies already listed on U.S. exchanges is problematic, there are good reasons besides being a bargaining chip in the trade dispute why the U.S. should be more stringent about any Chinese company listing on U.S. exchanges.

Google, Apple, ESPN, Hollywood & NBA Committing Treason With China.  America's major entertainment and tech corps have decided that they're not going to be patriotic.  They have no particular loyalty to America.  It's just where a lot of their markets and talent happen to live.  But it's not as if they're incapable of loyalty.  The statements by the NBA and EA touting Chinese nationalism, Apple and Google's decision to pull protest apps, Hollywood's eagerness to let Chinese Communist apparatchiks censor their scripts, make it clear that they are capable of loyalty.  Just not to America.

The people are still sovereign:  Only Trump gets that.  There are a lot of differences between the global threat Roosevelt defeated in Germany and the global threat Mr. Trump faces now in the Syrian civil war.  But one thing remains the same:  American voters are still in charge.  Therein lies the great political sickness of our time.  American voters of every stripe are nearly unified against U.S. involvement in these endless wars in places like Syria at the very same moment when American politicians in Washington of every stripe are nearly unified in favor of same said wars.  The disconnect between voters back home and politicians in Washington is cavernous.  Mr. Trump is one of the only politicians to hear the voice of the people and obey it.

Liberals' Tears For Kurds Ring Hollow After Vietnam.  As a veteran of the Vietnam War and the so-called secret war in Laos, I don't get upset thinking about how we lost the war.  That's because we didn't lose it.  We won it.  It was lost — thrown away — by liberal politicians besotted with hubris over from their success in forcing Nixon from office.  It was they who threw away our victory.

Can we keep our Republic?  [Scroll down]  First was James Comey's phony investigation of Hillary's felonious abuse of rules for handling sensitive government information.  Even worse was the press conference in which he laid out the obvious predicates of an indictment, then found a nonexistent "intention" proviso in the penumbras and emanations of the relevant statute, and then usurped the Attorney General's authority as to whether or not to indict by making the decision himself during the press conference.  The second violation has not been as commented on as it should be — the handling of the "hacked" DNC servers scandal.  We know the narrative, since it is regularly repeated even by conservative commentators:  Several of our intelligence agencies discovered that a Russian operative named Guccifer 2.0 hacked the DNC servers, and then via Wikileaks publicized the contents to embarrass Hillary and weaken the Democrats, the goal being to help Donald Trump in the 2016 election.  This has become a foundational dogma of the whole Russia collusion, foreign interference, Trump corruption tale that provides the flimsy rationale for the Trump-haters' invective and calls for impeachment.  But as George Parry summarizes in an important analysis, this claim is unsubstantiated by any forensic evidence.

Hey, Congress:  Take Back Your War Powers, Or Shut Up About Syria.  If you want to stop Donald Trump from making unilateral decisions regarding war and peace, then stop letting all presidents make unilateral decisions about war and peace.  It's really quite simple.  Trump can abruptly pull back U.S. troops from northern Syria because Congress, having abdicated its foreign policy responsibilities long ago, has no leverage to stop him.  When Congress passed the War Powers Resolution as the Vietnam War was winding down, it gave presidents the power to send troops abroad for 60 days in response to any "national emergency created by attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or its armed forces."  If the president failed to gain congressional support for the deployment, he would have another 30 days to pull back troops.  Congress is the institution vested with the power to declare wars, to debate where we send troops, and decide which conflicts are funded.

Five 'Gutsy Women' Who Didn't Make it into Hillary Clinton's Book.  [#4] Ayn Rand was born in Russia and was an eyewitness to the horrors inflicted by the Bolshevik Revolution.  By the time she emigrated to America in 1925, her core beliefs were established. [...] Her 1957 follow-up, Atlas Shrugged, portrayed a United States on the edge of collapse as a result of socialist and collectivist policies.  The novel proved to be enormously influential and stunningly prescient.  The election of Barack Obama in 2008 and the creeping socialist policies that followed caused the sales of Atlas Shrugged to spike.  To anyone who had read the dystopian novel, it all seemed depressingly familiar.

His doctors ordered an emergency flight by air ambulance.  His insurer wouldn't pay.  Yes, Americans pay more for healthcare than anyone else in the world.  Yes, for all those trillions of dollars spent annually, we have lower life expectancy and higher infant mortality rates than other developed countries — two key metrics for judging the effectiveness of a nation's healthcare.  But the thing that never ceases to astonish me is how needlessly cruel our system is.  I'm not just talking about the life-saving prescription drugs that can cost tens of thousands of dollars.  I'm talking about the small acts of greed and pettiness that make a bad situation for the sick even worse.

A Tale of Two Coups.  There appears to be a curious symmetry connecting both the blocking of Brexit, and the continued attempts to bring down a free and fair American election.  The same or different types of "deep state" involved on either side of the Atlantic is debatable, but the repeated attempts at a coup d'état against both the American President and the British Prime Minister have a lot in common, not least the desire to thwart the openly expressed wishes of the US and British electorates.

For the Soul of America, 'Shifty' Schiff Must Go.  Fake news media and Democrats have launched another lie-filled, treasonous silent coup to remove Trump from office.  On TV, Adam Schiff lied to the world, claiming that during a phone call Trump threatened the president of Ukraine.  Schiff said that Trump told the Ukraine president that if he did not dig up dirt on Joe Biden, he would hold back funds from Ukraine.  To the horror of Schiff, Democrats and fake news media, Trump made the unprecedented decision to publicly release the transcript of the phone call between himself and the Ukraine president.  The transcript proved that everything Schiff reported Trump said was a lie.  In an America in which truth and justice rule, Schiff would be politically tarred and feathered and run out of Washington D.C. on a rail.

Muslims hurl firebombs, burn tires as Jews pray at Joseph's Tomb.  This is the hatred, bigotry and barbarity in which Rep. Rashida Tlaib was raised.  Palestinian terrorism and Palestinian incitement against the Jews must be debated in the United States Congress.

The Pope's Pitiful Reign of Error.  A visit to the Vatican was once an awe-inspiring religious experience.  It now feels more like a trip to Disneyland.  It exists primarily for tourists, not pilgrims.  It is a bazaar of camera-snapping Asians, cackling Germans, thieving vendors, gum-chewing priests, and trysting middle-age couples.  The overwhelming impression it leaves is that Catholicism is a religion of the past, not the present or future.  Whatever the future of Islam, at least Muslims have enough regard for God to keep Mecca and Medina from turning into Touristville.

Am I the Only One Who Does Not [Care About] the Ukraine Garbage?  [Scroll down]  But here's what does matter to me:  People who work hard and have worked hard all their lives to earn an honorable though modest income, only to find themselves challenged in later life as technology changes make their skills obsolete, even as people alongside them who are healthy and capable of working choose instead to game the system to live off government handouts ranging from food stamps to welfare.

How China 'Woke' America.  American trade and political appeasement were never interpreted by Beijing as magnanimity to be reciprocated, but always as weakness to be exploited.  It was always ludicrous to think that the more concessions on trade and human rights the United States gave, the more China would Westernize and begin to resemble America or an EU nation.  Even sillier was the old shibboleth that China's embrace of capitalist reforms — as if by some unwritten, determinist economic law — would lead to constitutional government.  But the ability to buy a new cellphone never ensures the right to vote for a candidate of one's choice.

Why Libertarians Are Unwitting Enablers of Socialism.  When the anti-socialist vote is split, the socialist wins.  In the real world, we have nations so that people with a common culture and heritage can govern themselves.  This necessitates the existence of governments, laws, regulations, taxes, public spending, and a host of other things libertarians may consider nasty.  To oppose overreaching laws, bad regulations, high taxes, excess spending, wasteful spending, or inappropriate spending, is the duty of any fiscal conservative.  But the role of government is to protect a national culture, not to just get out of the way so corporate multinationals can commoditize the world.

America's domestic enemies are the Democratic Party and its allies.  The leading foreign enemies of the 20th Century were clear.  The Empire of Japan.  The Third Reich.  Then the USSR, the Peoples' Republic of China and the Korean War. Followed by an episode of the Cold War turned hot in Vietnam.  The domestic enemies — those inside our borders — were Soviet spies, many known to exist but identified only by their code names, particularly in the era of nuclear arms development.  Later came spies from the Peoples' Republic of China entering America as foreign students in U.S. universities, not just searching for state secrets but for industrial secrets enabling the theft of intellectual property.  Today, the leading domestic enemies of the U.S. Constitution are not dispatched to America from foreign shores.  They were born in the USA.  English is their first language.

Hey Democrats, Impeach This!  Remember 10 years ago when we conservatives trusted and respected the FBI and our intelligence community?  Good times.  Well, that's over.  It will be decades before a woke Republican is stupid enough to trust them again.  But on the other hand, we now have an opportunity to exploit their strategic blunder in order to rip them apart next November.  We have a chance to teach the Democrats, to the extent they are trainable, that their socialist-curious, corporatist nanny state dreams are electoral strychnine.  Letting these creeps steal our country from us is worse than the resulting carnage from the fight they've picked.  We could roll over, but instead we'll take the hit to keep our liberty.  In the end, after many figurative casualties, impeachment is going to boomerang on these clowns.

30 of The Biggest Lies & Hoaxes Perpetrated on The American People.  [#4] The Vaccine Industry:  Those overseeing the vaccine industry have weaponized it.  From the false swine flu epidemic, to the measles scare to change legislation, HPV causing deaths, thousands of reports of them causing autism, and over $4.1 billion in injury and death claims — it has been weaponized.

The Coup Has Begun — The Empire Strikes Back Everywhere.  You know I think there are no coincidences in politics.  Everything happens on a particular schedule.  So when I see a day as crazy as today I have to ask the question, "Why this, why now?" [...] When you lose control of the narrative, when you spin a story out of whole cloth all you can do is double down.  This is what the Democrats are doing in the case of Ukraine.

Angela Merkel's Toll on Germany.  At Leipzig University she devoted a year to studying Marxist-Leninist thought.  She attended a university in Leningrad for a year in 1977, away from Stasi and available to the KGB without the Stasi being aware.  Coincidentally, Vladimir Putin was a KGB officer in Leningrad in 1977.  Being such a devout communist and so sympathetic to the Russians, it is inconceivable that she was not approached by the KGB during this period.  Which explains a lot about the way she has governed Germany for the last 14 years.  And why nothing about her was found in the Stasi archives after reunification — she wasn't one of theirs. [...] De-industrialising Germany today reduces Russia's military threat on its western flank.  This has been an ongoing project of Merkel's in her years as Chancellor.  The Fukushima disaster was an excuse for Merkel to close Germany's nuclear reactors.  The influx of Syrians a couple of years ago was designed to reduce social cohesion.  De-industrialisation of Germany using the global warming hoax as the excuse is ongoing.

Why is teen climate activist off limits, but innocent Covington kids fair game?  While conservatives have some points of contention with Swedish teen Greta Thunberg's rabid climate change activism, leftists are accusing them of outright attacking the child activist. [...] But several right-leaning pundits have noticed that there is a glaring discrepancy between how Thunberg is being treated by conservatives, and how Nick Sandmann was treated after the media picked up on edited footage of the Covington Catholic School students just standing there.

Why are we calling Ukraine story leaker a whistleblower?  The question begs to be asked:  Why is the person who came forward with a story about President Trump and a telephone conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky still being referred to as a whistleblower?  Inspector General of the Intelligence Community, Michael Atkinson, is a Trump appointee.  Allegedly he found a reason to go forward with a complaint lodged against President Trump stemming from a conversation with Zelensky in July.  The anonymous "whistleblower," as it turns out, is not, in fact, a whistleblower.  The complainant is essentially a gossipmonger.  The person admits no direct knowledge of the conversation.  Doesn't that seem to be an important fact in this whole story?

What Are The Differences Between e-Cigarettes Vaping & Vaccines:  Both CAN & DO Kill!  Before readers and astroturfers, in particular, decide to 'attack' this article, let me cite U.S. CDC/HRSA statistics!  E-cigs are vaped into adolescent kids' growing lungs, whereas vaccines are injected into babies' tiny, day-old bodies, i.e., the Hepatitis B vaccine!  How many day-olds will be injecting meth and other street drugs, or participating in unprotected sex — the diseases that specific vaccine is geared to 'protect' against?

The Democratic Nomination Process:  The Electoral College on Steroids.  The two processes start out quite similarly.  Candidates must win 270 of 538 electoral votes to gain the presidency, and 2,382 of 4,763 delegates to gain the nomination (in 2016).  For all intents and purposes, electoral votes and delegates are the same concept.  Electoral votes are allocated to the states via constitutional law and the Census Bureau.  The nomination process, created and controlled by the Democratic National Committee (DNC), literally uses the Electoral College in its formula of allocating delegates to states.  But the DNC's formula is far more complex, even awarding bonus delegates to bordering states that hold simultaneous primaries later in the voting season.  Defying the laws of science, the DNC considers Maine as bordering Vermont, Hawaii as bordering Oregon, and Puerto Rico as bordering Guam.

The US Export-Import Bank is China's cash cow.  If you are wearing a tie, there's a good chance it was made in China.  The factory where that tie was made was probably subsidized by the Chinese government.  But here's what you probably never guessed:  That subsidized Chinese factory may have been subsidized by you, the U.S. taxpayer.  And for that, thank the Export-Import Bank of the United States, a federal agency whose single biggest recipient is the communist-run government of China.  Congress this fall has a chance to end U.S. subsidies to China's crony capitalists, but some Democrats don't like that idea.

The Fool in the Vatican.  I never thought I would refer to a Pope as a fool, but it has come to that. [...] But after reading Francis X. Rocca's article in the September 11 edition of the Wall Street Journal, which has the pontiff saying that it would be "an honor that [conservative Catholic] Americans attack me," for not standing up for traditional Catholic teachings on marriage, sexuality and bioethics, while instead opining on climate change and migration, I can't hold my tongue.

Battle over the Bahamas:  Whatever happens in the world, the answer is always mass migration to the US.  Do the resources of the United States government exist for the benefit of Americans or for the benefit of the world?  This is a simple question that needs to be answered now, because it seems that any time any event — be it weather, poverty, or war — breaks out in any part of the world, the answer is always immigration, and it's always to be brought to just one country — the United States. [...] Are we vetting these people?  What about the public charge?  Who is paying for their stay, and where would they stay?  Will they receive work permits?  How can we ensure that they will not remain here indefinitely like hundreds of thousands have done since the 1990s when we began granting amnesty to people from all over the world who experienced natural disasters in their home countries?  Will we grant them birthright citizenship for their babies too?  Why aren't other countries pitching in?

Lack of Common Sense, Comfort Animals and Anarchy:  Where Does It End?  The truth is the truth.  It always has been, and it always will be.  And truth's oldest child is common sense.  Unfortunately, that child has all but been banished by segments of the American population in the last several decades.

The Turn Toward a Pre-9/11 Mindset.  Intelligence-based security can be effective only if the government can collect and analyze it in secret.  Otherwise, we will get scant cooperation from key sources of threat information, from foreign intelligence services to people who've been admonished to say something if they see something.  Yet we remain error-prone humans acting on imperfect information.  A suspicion that a person could be a threat, however reasonable, will necessarily be wrong in some cases.  Some innocent people inevitably will be harassed.  On the other hand, if suspected people are given notice of, and a meaningful opportunity to challenge, their placement on the list, the list will no longer be secret.  And if it is not secret, it will no longer be effective.  It is Congress that is supposed to wrestle with these tough line-drawing exercises.

Bubbles: Seen One, Seen them All.  One of the greatest blunders in the history of financial bubbles is not a policy error that inadvertently forces a collapse.  Instead the real blunder is celebrating the old theory that some agency can prevent financial setbacks and recessions.  In various forms it dates back to the early 1600s. [...] There is an old saying in physics that "If you keep your database short enough it will fit your theory."  A full review of market history from the 1600s concludes that great financial bubbles have had similar setups, climaxes, and contractions.  All five from 1720 to 1929 suffered severe liquidity problems in the fall of the year.  All cleared their problems in November, except for the 1825 Bubble when pressures ran into Christmas.

Case closed in Russia collusion.  I believe the real reason we're getting all these exaggerated, dramatized news headlines and impeachment threats against the president is that the Trump "collusion delusion" is slowly falling apart.  Starting with the setup of 28-year-old George Papadopoulos in a London wine bar with Australian liberal party hack Alexander Downer.  This is a man who in testimony forgot to mention his role in helping the Clinton Foundation get $25 million in aid from his government in 2006.  In attendance were liberal Israeli diplomat Christian Cantor and his mysterious attractive girlfriend whose job at the Australian embassy remains a mystery.  We have recently learned Mr. Downer never contacted either American or Australian intelligence about his conversation with Mr. Papadopoulos, which is against established protocol.  Instead, he directly contacted the U.S. embassy in London.  His connection there was Elizabeth Dibble, who previously served as principal deputy assistant secretary in Hillary Clinton's State Department.  Strange coincidence that I find very hard to believe.

Put Your Hope In Radical Decentralization.  The EU is the first step on the way toward the creation of a European Super-State, and ultimately of a one-world government, dominated by the USA and its central bank, the FED.  From its very beginnings, and despite all high-sounding political proclamations to the contrary, the EU was never about free trade and free competition.  For that, you don't need tens of thousands of pages of rules and regulations!  Rather, the central purpose of the EU, supported all-along by the USA, was always the weakening in particular of Germany as Europe's economic powerhouse. [...] In fact, Europe has essentially become a dependency, a satellite or vassal of the US. This is indicated on the one hand by the fact that US troops are stationed all across Europe, by now all the way right up to the Russian border.

The Real "Helicopter Money": Since 2009, China Has Created $21 Trillion Of New Money, More Than Double The US.  Back in the days of the Fed's QE, much of thinking analyst world (the non-thinking segment would merely accept everything that the Fed did without question, after all their livelihood depended on it), was focused on how massive, and shocking, the Fed's direct intervention in capital markets had become.  And while that was certainly true, what we showed back in November 2013 [...] is that whereas the Fed had injected some $2.5 trillion in liquidity in the US banking system, China had blown the US central bank out of the water, with no less than $15 trillion in increases to Chinese bank assets, all at the behest of a juggernaut of new credit creation — be it new yuan loans, shadow debt, corporate bonds, or any other form of debt that makes up China's broad Total Social Financing aggregate.  Now, almost six years later, others are starting to figure out what we meant, and in an Op-Ed in the FT, Arthur Budaghyan, chief EM strategist at BCA Research writes about this all important topic of China's "helicopter" money which — far more than the Fed, ECB and BOJ — has kept the world from sliding into a depression, and yet is blowing the world's biggest asset bubble.

New World Order In Meltdown.  By now it has dawned on people that the central bankers acting as central planners in a command economy and printing money (aka quantitative easing) to fuel asset bubbles are about to wipe off the last vestiges of what used to be a market economy. [...] Perhaps the weirdest news to crown it all, came from Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where the Western central bankers were holed up for their annual retreat.  The president of Bank of England Mark Carney shocked everybody (at least those not present) by announcing that the US dollar was past its best-before and should be replaced with something the central bankers have up their sleeves.

Dan Crenshaw:  The 'Principled Conservative' Who Wasn't.  U.S. Representative Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas) has enjoyed a relatively glowing reception from right-wing media since his election to Congress.  But that honeymoon period may come to a very swift end, in what could be the single biggest political casualty of the "red flag" law movement.  The freshman congressman and former Navy SEAL is no stranger to endorsing positions that invite criticism from his right, including his support for keeping U.S. troops in Syria indefinitely and his winks and nods to believers in the Russian collusion hoax.  But following the mass shootings in El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio, earlier this month, Crenshaw offered support for what may be his most controversial position yet, "red flag" legislation.

Trump — or what, exactly?  No president for the past 19 years has sought to offer any remotely sane budget.  And with still relatively low interest rates, massive federal spending, a $22 trillion national debt, and an annual deficit of nearly $1 trillion, it is hard to imagine, in extremis, that there remains any notion of "stimulus" or "pump-priming" left.  Yet we hear little about such financial profligacy.  Not a word comes from Trump's critics about the need for Social Security or Medicare reform to ensure the long-term viability of each — other than the Democrats' promises to extend such financially shaky programs to millions of new clients well beyond the current retiring Baby Boomer cohorts who are already taxing the limits of the system.

Why No Congressional Investigation into Epstein's Intelligence Connections?  With convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein now dead, the Justice Department has launched an investigation into prison procedures that allowed him to commit suicide.  Meanwhile, women who were sexually abused or raped by Epstein when they were minors are continuing civil actions against Epstein's estate.  But why no congressional investigation into Epstein's relationship, if any, to intelligence agencies, including the CIA, the Mossad, or any others?  Have we gotten to the point where everyone is so scared to be labeled a "conspiracy theorist" that Congress is precluded from conducting a legitimate investigation into the CIA or other intelligence agencies?  Such an investigation would not come out of the blue.  It would revolve around the undeniably sweetheart deal that the U.S. Attorney in Florida, Alexander Acosta, gave to Epstein and the reasons that he gave that sweetheart deal to him.

Red China Aligns with Dems to Swing the 2020 Election.  Red China is our frenemy, mostly enemy, and they steal our intellectual property or they get it gratis when a company opens up for business in their country.  The companies have to give them their secrets and follow their Communist rules.  That is ethically questionable and the U.S. has made these violent, dangerous people a Super Power.  President Trump is responding appropriately battling them and if a President had taken this on before now, it wouldn't be so difficult.

The Myth of Jewish Influence in the Democrat Party.  [Scroll down]  When the Democrats know they have you in their pockets, they move on.  For example, they figure they have Blacks in their pockets, so they now focus on importing Hispanic voters to leapfrog Blacks socially and economically — which is exactly what is happening.  And the Democrats likewise know they have non-Orthodox Jews, Fake Jews, and anti-Semitic Jews in their pockets.

Criticizing Israel is fine, but anti-Zionism is anti-Semitic.  [Scroll down]  Of all the world's 200-plus countries, the only country anti-Zionists declare illegitimate is also the only Jewish one.  That's pretty much all you need to know about their motives.  Why, for example, don't they make this claim about Pakistan?  In 1947, nine months before the establishment of Israel, India was partitioned into a Muslim state, Pakistan, and a Hindu state, India.  Unlike Israel, Pakistan had never existed before.  Unlike Israel's founding, which created about 700,000 Jewish refugees from Arab lands and 700,000 Arab refugees from what became Israel, the founding of Pakistan created about 7 million Muslim refugees from India and about 7 million Hindu refugees from Pakistan.

Hong Kong is a huuuuuuuge embarrassment for Democrats.  Hong Kongers are waving the stars and stripes, singing the national anthem, and issuing a global cry for freedom.  For a Democratic party that loudly supports bend-a-knee leftists who hate the U.S. flag, such as Colin Kaepernick, that's a problem.  And for a party that is trying to sell socialism to the U.S. public, well, thug-state China's got socialism in spades.  President Trump has taken flak for his response to the crisis, arguably so, but the real clown show is in what's coming from the Democrats.

We Are In A Battle Against The Full-Scale Implementation Of Communism In America!  While for decades, Watchmen such as Steve Quayle and others have warned America of a sinister plan to destroy the national sovereignty of the United States by tearing down our nation's borders and allowing in to our nation those who will not conform to our way of life, eliminating our God-given Rights to defend ourselves which are merely protected by the US Constitution and 'endless wars for the global empire', for all of those decades, those warnings have been labeled 'conspiracy theory' by the mainstream media.  Well, as we learned in [an] extremely important story over at Breitbart [...] on Wednesday [8/14/2019], the attempts being made to take down the United States are very real despite being labeled 'conspiracy theory' with this new Project Veritas expose proving that tech giant 'google' was planning on tampering with the 2020 elections to "essentially overthrow the United States".

Terror without trust.  The crisis of confidence in Western institutions can be described as a crisis of morality.  The public has discovered that many public figures are shams.  The #MeToo sex scandals, the accusations of collaborating with foreign powers, and most recently the Epstein case have undermined the reputation of our social betters.  They are perceived are no better than the common clay and probably a good deal worse.  This has undermined the trust that formerly allowed them to exercise authority over the public. [...] Perhaps no one exemplified this more than Mao Tse Tung, a sex maniac and pedophile who was worshiped by millions of people.

The Election Is Legitimate Only If the Democrats Win.  "Horrifying!"  As we've seen, candidates can get chirpy at final presidential debates less than three weeks from Election Day, and Hillary Clinton was no exception.  What "horror" had her inveighing so?  The very thought that her Republican rival would question the legitimacy of the presidential election.  Donald Trump being Donald Trump, he wouldn't budge.  He would not pledge to accept the election results a priori.  Okay, no, Trump didn't use the phase a priori.  But he did speculate that the electoral process could be rigged.  Until he saw how it played out, the Republican nominee said, he could not concede that the outcome would be on the up-and-up.

The Strange Case of 'White Supremacy'.  America's founding documents were unique in their singular calls for innate and universal human freedom and equality under the law that would eventually and logically demand reification of such ideals.  In other words, in America there was a real chance to overcome not American sins per se, but the ancient sins of mankind in general.  The result is that more than 243 years after its independence, the current longest-lived democracy arguably is also the world's most racially, ethnically, and religiously diverse nation and unmatched in its efforts to promote equality.

We need criminal and crazy control, not gun control.  Mass murder is not a gun control problem.  In 2003, Kim Dae-han, a middle-aged taxi driver, killed 192 people and left 151 others wounded, by setting a South Korean subway train on fire using paint cans filled with gasoline.  In 2016, Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, a Muslim terrorist, killed 86 people and wounded 458 others by ramming a truck into a crowd celebrating Bastille Day in France.  In 2001, Muslim terrorists killed 2,977 people and injured 6,000 more, by using box cutters to hijack airplanes and fly them into buildings.  Guns are a tool.  There are a whole lot of other devastating ways to kill lots of people.  American mass killers often use guns because they're convenient and available.  There are plenty of alternatives like trucks, boxcutters, pressure cooker bombs and paint cans full of gasoline.

Epstein's death raises questions about his prosecution and imprisonment.  Epstein should not have died in federal custody — the Justice Department's Bureau of Prisons will have to explain how someone under their care, and recently on suicide watch, was able to commit suicide.  But the other lingering question is:  Should he have been in federal custody in the first place?

Wanda, Wilton, Bambi, and Randy Andy.  The Church had once led the West in moral standards.  Now she slavishly followed the West's lowest ones, becoming in the process as sick and dysfunctional as its shabbiest pagan institutions.  All the scandals that defined a crumbling secular society hit the Church, culminating in a pederasty scandal of epic proportions.  That scandal is not unique to the Church — indeed, it is seen across the culture, from public schools to Ivy League universities to the Boy Scouts and college sports programs — but it is reflective of the modern Church's uniquely stupid embrace of Western decadence.

An ahistorical Voice of America Is dangerous for the nation.  By pure chance I stumbled recently on a news report posted on the U.S. taxpayer-funded Voice of America website.  It was a news feature story about the personality cult of Argentine Communist Ernesto "Che" Guevara.  He is described as a "Marxist revolutionary" in a complimentary narrative that would make any antifa sympathizer proud.  Americans who know something about the history of communist atrocities of the last century might find it shocking and wonder how their tax money is being spent.  What VOA failed to mention is that Che was a ruthless communist, directly and indirectly responsible for brutal murders of tens of thousands of innocent human beings in Cuba and elsewhere.

Repealing Michigan's Rat Bounty:  A Cautionary Tale.  This current advance of the pestilential rodents reinforces the wisdom of legislators who recognize that the more things change, the more they may stay the same — or can become worse, due to short-sighted, unsound laws.  As the instance in St. Clair Shores evinces, the reasons for the Senate Law Revision Task Force's call to repeal the rat bounty remain sound, specifically that there are better, more efficacious means to curb the city's rodent problem than incentivizing a vigilante army of rat hunters who could prove a bigger problem than their quarry.

Democrats exploiting mass shootings for political gain have forgotten the lessons of the Wellstone funeral.  When Senator Paul Wellstone and seven others, including his wife and one son, were killed in an airplane crash in northern Minnesota on October 25, 2002, just 11 days before he faced re-election, a massive memorial service was planned for Williams Arena in Minneapolis, the University of Minnesota basketball and hockey venue capable of seating close to 20,000.  Vice President Cheney, the presiding officer of the Senate, announced his plan to attend, only to be told by Wellstone's surviving sons that he was not welcome, much as President Trump has been told by some politicians and activists to stay away from El Paso.  Cheney, respecting the wishes of the family, did not attend, possibly avoiding some ugliness.  The memorial service degenerated into a political rally, so blatant that the Wellstone staff issued a public apology.

Shoehorning Multiple-Causation Shootings into Single-Cause Narratives.  We keep hearing the same kinds of anecdotes after a mass shooting.  The details change, but the gist is the same.  Often but not always, there's no father in the home.  Often but not always, the shooter has few or no friends and nothing resembling a real support network.  Often but not always, the shooter is unemployed or barely employed.  Often but not always, the shooter has some mental-health issue, sometimes formally diagnosed, sometimes not.  Often but not always, the shooter played violent video games.  Often but not always, the shooter was active on extremist or Columbine-focused chat boards or had a noticeable interest in or obsession with previous mass shootings.  Often but not always, the shooter has gotten in trouble in school or has been kicked out of school.

I'm Certain This Will Be Taken As An Insult.  When you see a run-down, dirty neighborhood full of trash and vermin you can assume the people living there don't really mind all that much.  Not so much that they do anything to prevent it themselves.  They wait until conditions deteriorate to the point Government steps in and makes it all like new again.

Social Media's Transition from Novelty to Malignancy.  What made sense as a communications vehicle for a diverse but circumscribed group of people sharing many life experiences on campus and later as a helpful tool for the larger world, has transformed benign to malignant as fast as rapidly improving technology could take it there.  Students moved off the campus into the "real world," taking Facebook with them. [...] Unlike on campus, where myriad shared activities were constant, for many the world of work just wasn't as engrossing or dynamic and offered far less commonality of interests among friends than the world of college.  Therefore, the communications rapidly turned to social life and the truly banal, like what a person was cooking for dinner, or the family dog's Halloween costume.

When You Understand Israel's May 1948 Borders, You Understand There is No "Occupation".  There are really only two ways to consider the borders of Israel when it declared independence in May 1948:  the entirety of the Palestine Mandate OR the proposed border put forward by the United Nations General Assembly in 1947.  As discussed below, only one of these is legally valid, while both options demonstrate that Israel does not occupy any "Palestinian Land."

Time to Kick the Islamizing Turkey Out of NATO.  Foreign and military policy needs to change along with circumstances.  During the Cold War, it made sense for Washington to forge the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and make Turkey a member.  Today, an American-dominated NATO makes little sense, and Ankara's membership even less so.  Bringing in Turkey, which no one ever mistook for a liberal Western-style democracy, was always a bit of a stretch.  That nation has proven over the years to be politically unstable, with occasional military interference in governing affairs.

Democrats woke and broke.  The Democrats have no money but they do have 20-plus candidates for president.  Adam Parkhomenko, a former DNC national field director, told Vice, "When Hillary became the nominee in 2016 she was handed nothing.  The DNC was nothing and there was nothing to build on.  You'd think we would have spent the last few years making sure this would never happen again, and it has."  How you run your party is how you would run the country.

George Will finds his presidential candidate.  I'm so old that I remember when George Will's opinion mattered to Republicans.  Apparently, the Bezos Bulletin scribe realizes he's lost his influence on the Grand Old Party and now offers advice to the Democrats on their nominee, in hopes that someone out there still cares about his opinions.  His disgust at President Trump — who has the support of roughly 90% of Republicans — is such that he has now taken to telling (fellow?) Democrats whom they should nominate in 2020, in order to defeat the man who has restored the American economy to growth rates exceeding population growth (a task his predecessor assured us required a "magic wand"), nominated conservatives to the federal bench in numbers that matter, and exposed a nefarious plot among the federal intelligence and law enforcement apparatus to reverse a presidential election.

The [New York] Post says: de Blasio must be removed as mayor.  The lights went out on Broadway Saturday night, and Bill de Blasio was a thousand miles away in Iowa.  It was the moment that perfectly captured his distracted, ego-driven failure of a mayoralty.  Bill de Blasio does not care about New York City.  He does not care about its people.  He does not care about how it's run.  He does not care about you or your taxes, creating jobs or improving lives.  All Bill de Blasio cares about is Bill de Blasio.  And so, for the good of the city, Gov. Andrew Cuomo needs to remove the mayor from office.

Something is Rotten in the Pentagon.  The strains of almost eighteen years of continuous war, Obama's massive budget cuts, and a tide of damaging politics have eroded critical parts of our military.  What has held together, until last week, was the most critical element:  the trust that must exist between the civilian leadership and the military of all ranks.  A huge blow to that trust has just occurred on Secretary of the Navy Richard Spencer's watch.  Another failure of leadership, both similar and different, is taking place about the nomination of Gen. John Hyten, Commander of U.S. Strategic Command, to be the next vice chairman of the joint chiefs of staff.

Devin Nunes Has a Warning for AG Bill Barr:  Without Prosecutions None "will trust the FBI or DOJ for generations".  HPSCI ranking member Devin Nunes has a deliberate warning to U.S. Attorney Bill Barr, and the Department of Justice should take it very seriously.  In a 30 minute podcast interview last week, Representative Nunes rightly warns of massive political consequences if Justice Department officials don't face jail time for their conduct during the Russia investigation.  I strongly urge everyone to listen to the podcast.  [Link]

Nineteen Eighty-Four: What Orwell Got Right.  Starting in academia, politically correct speech has now infected the media, the arts, tech companies, and corporations.  The protagonist in Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston Smith, works for the ironically named "Ministry of Truth," which is engaged in the practice of constantly editing history to conform to the current party line.  People and places are changed, erased, or added as needed.  "Who controls the past controls the future," Orwell explained, "who controls the present controls the past."  The erasing of America's past, the renaming of holidays, and the defacing and elimination of statues — the cultural vandalism that proceeds on a daily basis — is all part of an effort to conform America's history to the Progressive party line.

Don't Blame Wikipedia for Clinton and Epstein Edits.  Here's how Wikipedia works:  Anyone who cares to can go there and write an article. [...] For a lot of topics, Wikipedia is very useful, especially technical topics.  Articles on Math and Computer Science are generally at least pretty good, although sometimes written for a technical audience instead of a general one.  But the point is that there's no such entity as the Wikipedia Editors.  On current events, it's more like blog comments.

Hiding socialism behind skirts.  Former Hillary Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon tweeted on Sunday [7/7/2019] what I have said for months:  Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the soul of the soulless Democrat Party.  His tweet responded to Pelosi dismissing as ineffective backbenchers AOC and three other rookie congresswomen Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, and Rashida Tlaib.  Pelosi told Maureen Dowd, "All these people have their public whatever and their Twitter world, but they didn't have any following.  They're four people and that's how many votes they got."  True.  In the House, they have four votes.  But the Fearsome Foursome have the media and the party's billionaires such as Jeffrey Epstein.

The Absurd Attack on Alexander Acosta.  The leftist media machine has launched an effort to link Donald Trump with sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.  This tiresome methodology of character attack is a threat to the core of free speech, as victimhood — whether of border children, women, blacks, gays, transgenders, or inquiring people — is transformed into a self-righteous weapon unhindered by policy prescriptions, employed by one political group against another on purely ideological grounds. [...] Consider that the ideology that wishes to erase criminal records attacked Brett Kavanaugh for an alleged juvenile offense, for which he was never charged; personally attacked Norm Pattis, attorney for Alex Jones, by association; forced the resignation of Harvard professor Ron Sullivan solely because he represented Harvey Weinstein (who has not yet been tried); and now calls for Alexander Acosta's resignation because he was a prosecutor in a case that (years later) the media have in hindsight "judged" was too lenient in sentencing.

A tired old man.  I'm tired of people telling me that symbols of freedom of this great country are supposedly symbols of oppression.  I'm tired of people telling me that symbols of Christianity offend them yet I am supposed to turn the other cheek when two persons of the same sex make out in public.  I'm tired of naturalized citizen politicians who denigrate the same people who kept them safe when we opened our arms to them to enjoy the fruits of America.  I'm tired of politicians who know the truth about the past Administration's illegal spying on political opponents yet continue to deny facts to brainwash the public with their lies.  I'm tired of the LSM who praise the yet to be found merits of the last Administration but will not recognize the herculean achievements of POTUS Trump.

When Dems Lose Elections, They Lose Pride In America.  [Scroll down]  They go on afterwards, I'm not going to play the whole thing, but they talk about all the ways they think America is not great and some of the stuff they say is fair, but a lot of it is questionable.  So, they use our high poverty rates without mentioning the fact that poverty in America is wealth anywhere else because of wealth transfers.  The problem we have here is not that people don't have enough money because they can get enough wealth transfer so that people living in poverty today are living at a fairly high level compared to other countries if you've ever been to another country with the exception of Democrat cities where people are homeless.  That's the kind of poverty that is widespread in a lot of other countries.  We'll talk about the high mortality rate among infants without mentioning the fact that we try to save a lot more infants who have been born so early that they would die in any other country.

John Adams Wanted Independence Day Celebrated With 'Devotion to God... Pomp and Parade... Guns, Bells, Bonfires'.  Americans declared their independence from Britain on July 2, 1776, a date that John Adams called "the most memorable epocha in the history of America."  Congress approved the Declaration two days later, on July 4, which we now celebrate as Independence Day.  Writing to his wife on July 3, 1776 from Philadelphia, John Adams said he believed the occasion would be "celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival."

Why Liberals Need To Shut Their Faces About Tanks Appearing During Trump's Independence Day Event.  Right now, we have a near Chernobyl-level style blow up over tanks and armored vehicles being part of the Fourth of July festivities this week.  President Trump ordered it.  It was a great decision.  And the fact that the Left is triggered by this means that he should have ordered more tanks for the event.  Tanks have been present for victory parades before.  The optics is fine.  No one cares about that.  Americans are patriotic and they like seeing tanks.  The only people who have problems with all of this are the Democratic Party and their allies in the media because Trump has taken over the event.  He can do that.  He should do that.  And the Left just needs to shut their face over this.

America's Detour from Sanity.  It is time for waking Americans to shout down every action witnessed or contemplated that devalues human life, denigrates fatherhood and motherhood, makes speaking the truth "hate speech," and replaces common sense and morality with political correctness.  This is a hard but necessary stand in order to make loud and clear to everyone throughout the land that Americans will no longer tolerate the deliberate and systematic dismantling of this nation.

Ideoloons.  In fact, idolatry is a major contributor to the current plague of ideologues.  We have made idols out of celebrity, of wealth, of movements (Antifa, Pro-choice, even the Earth itself) and if we can't achieve whatever we think demonstrates the approbation of these gods we become desperate and frozen, unable to crawl out of the hole we have dug for ourselves. [...] The most dangerous idolatry of all is the leftists' tendency to idolize themselves.  They shut their eyes to the clearly present God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and place their own puny selves on the altar and then run around trying desperately to prove that they're deserving of that position.  Virtue signaling has become a plague on our society.

Laws must be applied equally or they don't matter.  Yes, I know, Volodymyr Zhukovskyy is not an American, but he is in the country legally (pending the ICE detainer of course).  The problem is, with all the illegal immigrant criminals who are here getting a pass, day in and day out, on everything from identity theft to fentanyl dealing, why shouldn't Volodymyr, too, have expected all the passes he got — on drunk driving, on cocaine, on heroin, on larceny, in Massachusetts, in Connecticut, in Texas?  And so he enjoyed his multiple passes, right up until last Friday afternoon [6/21/2019], when he's accused of killing seven Americans by driving a pickup truck into a group of motorcycle riders in northern New Hampshire.

California Unplugged.  The very idea makes the mind reel:  San Francisco, San Jose, Silicon Valley — all gone dark.  The electric-car charging stations, the $500-a-plate sushi restaurants, the rows of workstations at Google, Uber, Facebook, Twitter, and Salesforce — all suddenly unplugged.  This summer, blackouts could plunge large swaths of California into darkness — an act of deliberate policy, not equipment failure or operator errors.  Pacific Gas & Electric, Northern California's largest power supplier, recently announced that it will begin shutting down parts of the grid, possibly for days at a time, to help reduce the risk of wildfires.

Will you survive the coming blackout?  The largest red flag on this issue in years just waved in South America.  Last weekend, tens of millions of people in Argentina, Paraguay, and Uruguay found themselves in a complete blackout.  In one moment, they had electricity.  The next moment, they had none, and they were catapulted back to the 1800s.  Only much worse.  People in the 1800s were not dependent upon electricity for their jobs, money, communication, Internet, transportation, education, security, medical services, prescriptions, water, and very lives.  The national power grid of the United States is truly a mess held together with, as the joke goes, by not much more than "baling wire and chewing gum."

Jerry Nadler Is A Sexist Pig Who Should Be Censured By Congress.  On June 19, Hope Hicks, the former White House director of strategic communications then director of White House communications, was interviewed by the House Judiciary Committee.  The interview was not public and was behind closed doors.  Yesterday, a transcript of the interview was released.  It was revealed that during the interview Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) referred to Hicks as "Ms. Lewandowski" three separate times before she corrected him.  If I hadn't seen the transcript for myself, I simply would not have believed it.

Jerry Nadler Waddles Into Hearing, Calls Hope Hicks "Ms. Lewandowski" Three Times.  Jerry Nadler is the Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee and he's currently leading what can only be described as a clown show of an investigation involving the President and his associates.  After saying the Mueller report would be the final word, he and other Democrats have decided they want a do-over, which means dragging everyone who's already been interviewed multiple times back in front of Congress for no real reason whatsoever.  This had Nadler waddling into yet another "hearing," this time with former Trump associate Hope Hicks being grilled.

A Madisonian Remedy to the Social Media Revolution.  So effective is Madisonian political science that it provides remedies for such up-to-date threats to freedom as social media and the giant companies that monopolize the provision of information about us and about others.  According to Madison, one way of "curing the mischief" of factions — citizens' propensity to act on passions and interests hostile to the rights of individuals and to the public interest as a whole — was to eliminate the causes.  This would require either changing human nature or destroying liberty.  Since the former was impossible and the latter would defeat a leading purpose of political life, it was necessary instead to control factions' destabilizing effects.

How Secret Algorithms Are Crushing Conservative Media.  "Where do I go to get my reputation back, even though nobody knows I lost it?"  That seems paradoxical, since your reputation is what people generally think of you — but in digital publishing what really counts is what computers think of you.  Earlier this week, secret algorithms besmirched my digital reputation, in ways that could negatively impact my paycheck, and my employer's profits.  And it all happened behind the scenes, without any of my readers knowing.

Red Ed.  The malcontents and revolutionaries were a tiny sliver of the population.  But it was this fraction of 1% that was more and more shaping the country.  How is that possible?  By the muscular device of infiltrating the command structure of any organization you encounter.  Universities.  Businesses.  Churches.  Foundations.  Political organizations.  Publishers.  Media.  Showbiz organizations.  If you see any possible political or propaganda benefit, try to take over.  Soviet defector Yuri Bezmenov has explained to American audiences how cunning the Russians were at psychological warfare, subversion, and manipulating Western society.  The KGB thought they needed only about 20 years to undermine and destroy most countries.  Sometimes it seems that Russians love deception more than victory itself.  They love what spies call "the game."  If they could fool Americans into surrendering their country, Russia would win the biggest duel in history without firing a shot.

Why I dislike casual dress religious services.  We attend a funeral in a dark suit and somber tie out of respect for the deceased and his survivors.  But Progressive clergy these days are hard at work on destroying respect for The Deity. [...] If the answer to why we attend services is to engage in a social organization that provides a venue for weddings, funerals, and coming-of-age ceremonies, all focused on furthering "Social Action," on electing the right people, it makes perfect sense.  Who cares, after all, how one dresses at a political rally?

The Editor says...
Believe it or not, I've been to church a few times this year myself, and yes, the football jerseys and ratty-looking jeans are annoying.  Other annoyances include music that's 20 dB louder than necessary (God's not deaf), people reading from three or four very different versions of the Bible, people of all ages checking their email and social media feeds the whole time they're in church, those who can't sit for an hour without something from Starbucks in one hand, and people who leave trash on the floor afterward.

Manifesto Destiny.  This Land Is Our Land:  An Immigrant's Manifesto by Calcutta-born NYU journalism professor Suketu Mehta takes pro-immigration polemics to their logical conclusion:  "Immigration as reparations." Historically white countries must open their borders because whites have sinned and deserve punishment. [...] It's absurd, of course, for Hindus, the world's most racist, reactionary, and inegalitarian culture, to be paid to lecture white Americans on our crimes against wokeness.  It's relevant to note that most of the new generation of South Asian pundits on the make, such as Mehta and Saini, aren't egalitarian progressives in any abstract sense.  They are regressives, loyal to their families, clans, and races.  They wish their people to drive before them their enemies and hear the lamentations of their women.

Swamp expert to Levin: 'There's absolutely no authority for the administrative realm in the Constitution'.  The administrative state, the federal leviathan, the Swamp:  The monstrous, centralized, bureaucratic, entrenched decision-making apparatus within the federal government that seems to answer only to itself.  On Sunday night's [6/16/2019] episode of Life, Liberty & Levin, LevinTV host Mark Levin and Claremont Institute senior fellow and University of Nevada, Reno, Professor John Marini talked about how that Swamp got to be so deep and how things are actually worse now than most people realize.  [Video clip]

The Sky-High Stakes in Hong Kong.  In Hong Kong's huge protest over a proposed law that would allow extradition from the territory to mainland China, there is far more at stake than "confidence" in the integrity of Hong Kong's legal system, or the health of Hong Kong's economy — important though those both are.  The real showdown going on in Hong Kong has long been between despotism and democracy, between tyranny and the Free World.  And whether we, the free people of America, and our allies, choose to think of it this way or not, the reality is that the showdown now taking place in Hong Kong will shape our future as well.

Breaking Up Big Tech Companies Is A Big Government, Not Free Market, Response.  Google, Facebook, Amazon, and others have just become too powerful, says the narrative.  And it's not just the political right, which is justified in being upset at Big Tech's efforts to marginalize and silence it, that wants to use the nearly limitless power of the federal government to tame private businesses.  Some Democrats are in the game, too, most prominently Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who "has made breaking up the tech giants a cornerstone of her campaign."  The fact that a high-profile Democrat who has no appreciation for property rights and the blessings of markets, nor their power, is lighting torches and handing out pitchforks should be a warning.

The Occult Roots of The Wizard of Oz.  Although the Wizard of Oz is widely perceived as an innocent children's fairy tale, it is almost impossible not to attribute a symbolic meaning to Dorothy's quest.  As in all great stories, the characters and the symbols of the Wizard of Oz can be given a second layer of interpretation, which may vary depending on the reader's perception.  Many analyses appeared throughout the years describing the story as an "atheist manifesto" while others saw it as a promotion of populism.  It is through an understanding of the author's philosophical background and beliefs, however, that the story's true meaning can be grasped.

The Goal of Hollywood and the Entire Entertainment Industry is to Normalize Satanism.  In 1988, I left my parent's home in New Jersey and headed west to California.  In A very short period of time I found work as an actor, became a stand-in and double for then-stars like Richard Gere and Matt Dillon, acting in dozens of commercials and enjoyed small roles on many of the popular shows of the day.  I was a card-carrying member of SAG and AFTRA for 18 years.  From what I personally saw during the 6 years I was actively involved, before the Lord called me out of it in 1994, it was not an overly wholesome place.  Many crazy things were done behind closed doors.  But in 2019, not only are those things now done openly, you can also see that Hollywood, the music industry, and even formerly family friendly companies like Disney are working to normalize the occult in general and satanism in particular.

Capitalism Makes Miracles; Socialism Makes Dust.  A common example I often use in conversation with young people is a pizza that you might order for ten dollars on a weekend.  The owner of the pizza store, who might be making a good living assembling and delivering his product, did not plant or thresh the wheat needed to mill the grains into the flour used to make the dough, nor did he raise the cows that are milked to produce the cheese or the pigs needed to produce the pepperoni, nor did he cultivate the tomatoes used in the sauce.  No, the owner of the pizza store purchased all of these things from others, all of whom have their own ambitions and profit motives and employ thousands of individuals who likewise feed their families by applying their trades in order to provide us that $10 pizza that can feed any family of four or hungry college kids, indiscriminately, for that agreed upon price.

Venezuela: There's No Disaster Quite Like The Collapse Of Socialism.  Even while surrounded by military dictatorships and poverty, Venezuela at one time prospered with a strong economy and stable society.  Today, three Latin American nations produce more oil than Venezuela, though it has the world's largest proven reserves of crude, and just getting sick is nearly the same as death for some children.  It has rightly been called the "biggest economic disaster in modern history."  "Hospital shortages," says the headline of an Agence France-Presse story posted on Yahoo News in late May, are "a death sentence for Venezuelan children."  Half of the children who aren't dying can't get enough to eat.

Democrats stuck with Russiagate.  The only collusion in the 2016 election was between Donald John Trump and voters in 30 states.  But Democrats manufactured the Russian Collusion excuse after he beat them, their crone candidate, their billionaire donors, and their sycophants in the media.  For two years, Democrats promised the Mueller Report would bring him down.  But it didn't.  Mueller could not find a smidgen of collusion.  This presents a problem for next year because Democrats promised their base they would impeach the Orange Man.  They didn't.  In the eyes of their base, they are failures and cowards.  To the rest of us, Democrats are fools who fell [for] a hoax.

Must parental leave be dictated by government?  Can't we say something isn't government's job?  Both Republican and Democratic politicians want government to "do more" to give parents paid time off.  "This is not a women's issue.  It's a family issue," says Ivanka Trump.  "Every worker in America should be guaranteed at least 12 weeks," says Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.  "That's a very arbitrary number!  Why not 14 weeks?  Why not 26 weeks?" asks Independent Women's Forum analyst Patrice Onwuka.  She opposes Sanders' plan, saying government one-size-fits-all policies don't meet most parents' needs.

The Editor says...
The same idea is at the root of many leftist ideas:  Workers getting money without working.

It's Time for a Thoroughgoing Revamping of the Intelligence Community.  Today we've got too many spooks collecting too much money, with predictably bad results.  Among other bad consequences, intelligence is typically churned out by committees, guaranteeing that we don't identify our best analysts.  We need to drastically reduce the numbers of both budgets and bureaucrats, in order to figure out who's good.  Then we need to promote them, within a much smaller system.  It's hard to imagine this happening under normal circumstances, but today's circumstances aren't normal.

Levin: Only Way to Make Dems Stop Using Soviet Tactics Against Republicans Is if Soviet Tactics Are Used Against Them.  Thursday on Fox News Channel's "Hannity," conservative talker Mark Levin, author of "Unfreedom of the Press," made the argument for a criminal grand jury to be impaneled and a special counsel to be appointed to "get to the bottom of" the events that led to the appointment of special counsel Robert Mueller's probe based on allegations of Trump-Russia collusion.  Levin argued that if Democrats were going to use "Soviet tactics" against Republicans, it was up to Republicans to reciprocate.

Impeach or get off the pot, Democrats.  History didn't begin in 2016.  Every modern president has asserted executive privilege.  Attorneys general have been cited for contempt on much firmer grounds.  Former Attorney General Janet Reno was found in contempt in 1998 for refusing to turn over memos about Bill Clinton's campaign finances.  In 2012, Eric Holder became the first US attorney general in history to be held in both criminal and civil contempt after refusing to hand over memos detailing his knowledge about the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives' disastrous and bloody gunrunning scheme.  Nadler knows this, because he joined a Democratic Party walkout protesting the Holder vote.  Yet no Obama administration official was arrested.  There were no impeachments.  TV anchors didn't unsheathe melodramatic monologues about the corrosion of law and the end of democracy.

The Calming Feeling as Jew-Hate Now Takes Deeper Root in the Democrat Party.  When Ilhan Omar tweeted that Jews control because "It is about the Benjamins, baby," she revealed herself not a convenience-store-quality bigot but a ready-for-primetime Nazi.  Not every Nazi in the 1940s acted violently.  Most Nazis simply stood along the avenues and highways of Germany and cheered as Hitler's limo drove by.  Some made speeches.  Muslims led by the Grand Mufti, Haj Amin el-Husseini, were among Hitler's best Nazis.  When Omar tweeted about "the Benjamins," she revealed her Nazi moorings.  The irony, hardly surprising, is that it is she who rakes in the cash.  Ilhan Omar has leveraged her anti-Semitism to raise more than a million dollars in record time.  [It certainly] was about the Benjamins — hers.

Colluders, Obstructionists, Leakers, and Other Projectionists.  Real coups against democracies rarely are pulled off by jack-booted thugs in sunglasses or fanatical mobs storming the presidential palace.  More often, they are the insidious work of supercilious bureaucrats, bought intellectuals, toady journalists, and political activists who falsely project that their target might at some future date do precisely what they are currently planning and doing — and that they are noble patriots, risking their lives, careers, and reputations for all of us, and thus must strike first.

A problem for every solution.  As Heritage Foundation President Kay Coles James has written, "The federal budget is at the core of our political system.  Everything the federal government does, from taxing, to regulating, to providing services, to protecting our very freedoms, it does through the federal budget."  Liberals might dismiss the foundation's "Blueprint for Balance:  A Federal Budget for Fiscal 2020," but they shouldn't.  The document is based on verifiable facts.  If implemented, Heritage claims, it would save trillions of dollars compared to projections by the Congressional Budget Office and produce a budget surplus by 2025.  Everyone knows "entitlements" are the main drivers of debt and that politicians don't want to reform them because they fear attacks by the media and by their political opponents.

Liberals Are At War With Science In The Transgender Athlete Controversy.  Democrats have long claimed to be the party of science, but on an increasing number of issues, party activists are pushing ideological agendas that are at odds with scientific evidence — sometimes to the detriment of the people they intend to help.  California Sen. and 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris is proposing that businesses prove they compensate men and women the same or pay a fine, although evidence shows the pay gap is not due to discrimination, but to women making different choices about work.  We know obesity is a dangerous medical condition, yet left-wing activists now demand obesity be celebrated and encouraged, actively working against the once-universally accepted idea that a good physique, diet and exercise is [...] good.

Let's Make Sure 'Obstruction of Justice' Is Properly Defined.  A line must be drawn.  No longer can the phrase "obstruction of justice" be allowed to mean something obscenely different from what any fair-minded, free person knows it was intended to mean.  In the minds of most, the phrase refers to blocking the discovery of truth, truth being the only legitimate basis on which appropriate redress can be made for some wrong that has been suffered.  Any codified law that uses the phrase "obstruction of justice" to mean something other than precisely this is in jeopardy of obstructing true justice.  If a law is needed to insure that an official investigation is not obstructed, then the language of the law must refer to obstruction of an investigation or obstruction of police work or obstruction of intelligence activities.

'Blazing Saddles' and other classic films don't deserve wrath of social justice warriors.  Classic films now face the wrath of perpetually enraged social justice warriors.  Last weekend's "Watters World" on Fox News Channel analyzed the impact of this politically correct phenomenon.  Exhibit A was Mel Brooks' "Blazing Saddles," the single funniest motion picture ever committed to celluloid.  Jesse Watters' guest, Cathy Areu, publisher of Catalina Magazine, responded to a clip of the comedy-Western in which Brooks himself portrays a Yiddish speaking American Indian chief.

"Something Strange Going On" At Fox News, And Not For the Good of America.  [Scroll down]  Nor is it just the millions of viewers that Fox News is gifting the likes of Sanders and Buttigieg with their 'town halls' that makes Fox "something very strange", it's the every day talking heads to whom the network is now giving voice:  With the 2020 election campaign underway, Fox brought in former DNC chairman Donna Brazile as a featured political pundit.  In other words, Brazile, who admitted she leaked questions for the last 2016 presidential debate to Hillary Clinton, is now an ongoing contributing Fox News political pundit.

Rent-A-Standing-Ovation-Crowd at Fox News' 'Town Halls'.  Since when did town halls become Fox News pep rallies? [...] Try to remember, folks that through no choice of our own, we all live in an era where "people are what they see on TV".  High time to tune out of Fox News and tune in to your own common sense.

Do We Need NATO?  NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, remains a problem for the U.S. [...] NATO has always differed from other military organizations in that it claims that it is not only a military pact, but also an alliance of countries with shared values, individual liberty, democracy, human rights, and rule of law, and it has a mechanism for collective defense and military command.  From the start, there have been ironies in the composition of this "North Atlantic" alliance and in these claims.  Geographers have been obliged to accept Balkan countries, and Hungary and Bulgaria as well as Turkey, as countries within the designated region of North Atlantic.  In addition, the portrait of Turkey is less democratic than autocratic, under President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who is the holder of all executive power and who in 1996 defined democracy as "not a goal, but an instrument."

China's Crackdown On Free-Market Economists Recalls Obama Tactics.  The Unirule Institute of Economics in Beijing, called "China's most prominent free-market think tank" by Bloomberg News, is a target of harassment from the Chinese government.  Its economists are considered dissidents by President Xi Jinping's regime.  The story reminds us of the treatment the Obama WhiteHouse gave to Tea Party groups that dared challenge the administration.

Democrats Look at South Africa, and They Like What They See.  Even in the wake of its latest free election, held on May 8, South Africa is not, on the face of it, a model of vibrant democracy.  The country suffers from persistent racial divisions, a stagnant economy, poor service delivery, rampant crime, and the world's worst income inequality.  Surely this would not be the kind of society that any American would want to transplant to our shores.  And yet the America that Democrats envision and are striving to create looks very similar to dysfunctional South Africa.  We should therefore view that country's steady unraveling as a cautionary tale.

Are Impeachment Democrats Geniuses or Idiots?  What would you have done as president the first time you heard about the Hillary e-mail system?  I'd say any president with half a brain would demand that either the e-mail system or Hillary is outta here by sundown.  But Obama is weak, feeble.  And what about the non-concession of the 2016 election?  I'd say that on election night, Hillary was drunk, and in no fit state to make a concession speech.  And then on the following day, she was hungover.  People don't make very good decisions when they are drunk and/or hungover.  And then the Mueller investigation.  I thought that Rule One for a lawyer is:  you never ask a question in court unless you already know the answer.  So, you gin up a two-year witch-hunt without knowing whether the witches did it?

Rebellion is Bursting out All Over.  As Spygate proceeds to its certain conclusion — the trials of those who engaged in this scandalous coup attempt — we receive the details of the scheme only in dribs and drabs.  Too many were involved and have too much to lose at this point by not revealing to the investigators their role in exchange for more lenient treatment, which is why I believe all will soon be revealed.  So for the moment let's turn to the broader picture that explains in large part why so many officials were so determined to keep Donald Trump from the White House and to oust him once he won the election.  To me, it has seemed they are clinging to the privileges and benefits of an order which is dying because its underpinnings — the post-World War II order — no longer suit the citizens of the countries involved, or the changing world.

Allow Venezuela To Fail.  Are we stepping on the same rakes again — in Venezuela?  Secretary of State Mike Pompeo recently tweeted "My message to the Venezuelan people is clear:  the United States stands firmly with you in your quest for freedom and democracy."  He also confirmed that the military option is on the table.  In other words, the U.S. is ready to liberate the Venezuelan people from themselves.  For those who suffer historical amnesia, it is worth pointing out, that the Venezuelans had democratic elections and they have chosen socialism.  Hugo Chavez was a socialist, and he ran on a socialist platform and got elected with wide popular support.  So was his successor Nicolás Maduro.  Whether the Venezuelans voted for socialist serfdom knowingly or they have been duped is irrelevant.  If people are ignorant or complacent, they deserve the government they elect.

The Next Battlefront:  Social Media.  Imagine a day when newspapers only publish articles regarding the benefits of late-term abortions, socialism, and open borders.  Where history books vilify Republican conservatives for fighting to defend slavery, inciting segregation, and founding the KKK.  Cable news shows would only report crimes committed by conservatives or capitalists and social media only allowed leftist ideas to be communicated over their platforms.  Well, if the left continues its scorched-earth policy against free speech, in no time at all the United States will have no resemblance to what the Founding Fathers envisioned.  So many examples exist that fully detail the poverty, violence, and atrocities that quickly emerge when free speech is taken away that it raises the question as to why so many younger Americans are indifferent about the loss of such an important right.

Hey, How About Sending U.S. Troops Into Venezuela?  Venezuela's dictator Nicolas Maduro is a former bus driver who rose through incompetence and luck to become a pompous, ruthless twit who's turned a wealthy oil-rich land into a stagnant, starving socialist state.  Bernie Sanders expressed admiration for socialism there years ago.  But Maduro and Hugo Chavez before him have created widespread starvation, hyperinflation and a refugee nightmare for millions of Venezuelans and Colombia and Brazil.  Maduro would be one of those laughable Peter Sellers movie characters if his military wasn't running over protesters in the streets of Venezuela, a large, resource-rich country of 32 million about the size of Texas and Arizona combined.

Russian 'democratic fraud' vs American hybrid war.  Venezuela is Trump's first new foreign "war," the only major conflict he did not inherit from the Obama administration.  "War" is in quotes because no military forces are likely to be involved.  This is the peculiar characteristic of what appears to be an American version of "hybrid war" using only sanctions, diplomacy, information operations, and proxies.  Why it has evolved is easy to explain.  A new Cold Hybrid War has been raging for some time, though its existence has been played down for years to preserve the fiction of a Global World Order.  Some of its most intense chapters are now coming to light.

Hey, Mazie Hirono!  Who Do You Work For?  Who is pulling your strings?  Surely, it's not the people of Hawaii or the rest of the country.  Your father left the family when you were very young, and your mom managed to bring you and your two siblings to Hawaii.  She supported the family by working long hours to put a roof over your head and food on the table.  In spite, of your meager surroundings, you managed to get yourself a fine education at the University of Hawaii and prestigious Georgetown Law School.  One would expect gratitude for the opportunity this country offered you, but instead you shamefully and ungratefully had the gall to state to your staff that "people are getting screwed in this country every single second, minute, hour of the day."

Ilhan Omar blames US for Venezuela crisis.  Rep. Ilhan Omar blamed the US for the political turmoil in Venezuela, saying we "helped lead the devastation" through the use of sanctions.  "A lot of the policies that we have put in place has kind of helped lead the devastation in Venezuela and we have sort of set the stage for where we are arriving today," the Minnesota congresswoman said during an interview Wednesday [5/1/2019] with Democracy Now!.  "This particular bullying and the use of sanctions to eventually intervene and make regime change really does not help the people of countries like Venezuela and it certainly does not help and is not in the interest of the United States."  The freshman Democrat added that there are "finally" members of Congress who agree with what she said.

The Editor says...
The situation in Venezuela is entirely the fault of socialism and a ruthless socialist dictator, which, in my opinion, is exactly what Ilhan Omar would become, if given the chance.

Joe Biden is the canary in the coal mine for today's feuding Democrats.  In recent times Republican and Democratic parties have stumbled in apparent dysfunction.  The tea party rebellion bubbled up to split GOP adherents because Republican leadership in Washington lost its conservative focus and seemed more interested in going along to get along.  Also, ideological purity became important.  In 2016, that resulted in a lifelong, pro-choice Democrat named Donald Trump cleverly capturing GOP leadership and the White House with long-term party ramifications yet to be determined.  Nowadays, Democrats are experiencing their own divisive, left-handed rebellion over deep dissatisfaction with the progress of progressive ideas in the hands of House leadership, all of whom are in their late seventies.

Here's How to Tell if Scientists are Exaggerating.  Let's call it:  "The Principle of Comparative Difficulty" (PCD): if an easier task is too difficult to accomplish, then a harder one certainly is too. [...] The PCD exposes Darwinian braggadocio to a very much deeper level.  I'm a biochemist.  Biochemistry is the study of the molecular and cellular foundation of life.  Back in Darwin's day the cell was thought to be a simple jelly called protoplasm.  Yet modern biochemists have discovered to their surprise that the cell is chock-full of sophisticated machines — actual machines, made of molecules.  Like the machines of our everyday world (say, a lawn mower), cellular machines consist of many parts that have to cooperate with each other to do their tasks.  Yet, as physicist David Snoke and I have shown, Darwin's mechanism of random mutation and natural selection strains to explain even the very simplest molecular example of cooperation (called a "disulfide bond").  Here's an analogy.  Suppose a lawn mower were stored in a shed that was kept closed by a hook and eye latch.  Darwin's theory struggles mightily to explain even the latch, with just two simple cooperative pieces.  So we're supposed to think it explains the lawn mower?  The PCD lets us easily realize that's ludicrous.

Get Ready for a Paradigm Shift on Russia, Climate Change, Everything You Think You Know.  It may now sound ridiculous, but Nikita Khrushchev once told America "we will bury you" and Washington believed him.  For years the intelligence community thought the U.S.S.R. was on the verge of overtaking the U.S. as the world's largest economy before the Soviets unexpectedly collapsed.  Daniel Patrick Moynihan's book, Secrecy: the American Experience, tries to explain how such a tremendous intelligence misjudgment could take place.

A Democrat disaster looms with their nominating convention.  The Democrats are setting themselves up for a possible, even probable, disaster at their nominating convention in Milwaukee, July 13-16, 2020.  The party that created the concept of "superdelegates" to rein in their crazies may have outsmarted themselves by allowing them to vote only in the second or later ballots.  As the field evolves and Joe Biden's still undeclared candidacy appears to be chaotic, the party elders (the ones with big money fundraising capabilities) are very worried that socialist Bernie Sanders will walk away with the nomination and lose to Donald Trump in a landslide.

Russia Collusion Peddlers Will Turn on Each Other.  Now that the Mueller Report has been published, what further investigations is Attorney General William Barr likely to pursue?  [Video clip]

Trump Guilty of Obstructing a Coup d'état.  The scurrilous anti-Trump innuendoes and outright lies spread by a weaponized FBI, CIA, State Dept. and various other federal agencies amounts to an attempted coup against America's duly elected president.  Such blatant treason cannot be allowed to go unpunished.  Nor can the two-tiered "justice" system We the People currently suffer under be allowed to stand.  If we no longer have rule of law in the United States then we are no longer a free republic.

What Really Caused the Notre Dame Cathedral Fire?  Following the horrifying fire that badly damaged one of the world's great treasures, the mainstream media is pushing the storyline that the fire that ravaged the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris was caused by an "electrical short circuit."  But the story in the Daily Mail lacks any evidence to back up that claim. [...] "Investigators" brought in to determine the cause of the tragic blaze have not yet been given access to the burned-out cathedral.  Nevertheless they are already announcing the results of their investigation.  Even as the embers were still glowing on the day of the fire, French prosecutors were ruling out arson.

What 'Free Money' Means to Me.  Officials in Stockton, Calif., a hard-pressed agricultural and industrial city 75 miles northeast of San Jose, are enjoying the glow of media attention from their ongoing, first-in-America program to provide residents with a Universal Basic Income, or UBI. [...] This is about more than helping a few residents in a mid-size city pay medical bills, buy groceries, repair the car, or spend the weekend in the Sierra foothills gambling at the Jackson Rancheria Indian casino (there are no limits on how the money is spent, after all).  It's about setting the stage for a national political "discussion" that might eventually involve large, direct taxpayer payments to lower-income residents.  The research and storytelling will be used to soften us up for the hard sell, which will come in various state or federal proposals, and will sometimes be linked to plans for reparations.

Four Members of Congress Have Lifetime ACU Conservative Rating of 100%.  According to the 48th edition of the American Conservative Union's (ACU) Ratings of Congress report, Representatives Dave Brat (R-Va.), Ted Budd (R-N.C.), Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), and Debbie Lesko (R-Ariz.) have maintained a 100% lifetime conservative rating.  Although 11 other members of Congress also received a 100% rating for 2018, they have not maintained it for their entire careers in Congress.  Of those 11, only Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) was awarded 100% for both 2017 and 2018.  The ACU rates elected officials by defining conservatism, as detailed in both its report and website, and taking into account their stances on specific types of legislation.

The Internet Erupts With Speculation About Who Started The Notre Dame Fire.  Ever careful to watch for false-flags and conspiracy theory concerns, video is emerging of a Gilets-Jaunes in black clothes at one of the two towers half an hour after the start of the fire at Notre-Dame.  [Video clip]  One definite way to disenfranchise the yellow vests — as they crush French autocracy — would be to set them up as the fall-guys for this national disaster.  Surely that is not possible! [...] In the end, there are only two options.  Either this was an accident, or someone intentionally started the fire.  And if the fire was intentionally started, obviously someone had a motive for doing so.

Reeducation Digest #1.  As a public service for long-time viewers of CNN and MSNBC who were shocked to discover that the two-year long narrative of Trump-Russia collusion was a total and complete hoax, the following tidbits may help in your red-pill journey. [...]

Let me tell you about 'White Privilege'.  I'm an adult white man living in the United States of America in 2019 and I feel absolutely no white privilege at all.  None.  I worked hard all my life at my chosen profession.  I didn't come from a family of money.  I had many menial jobs as a teen and young man until I was able to work my way into the career I wanted to have.  I hated social climbing and office politics so I didn't engage in it.  Whatever I achieved I got through hard work, talent, and perseverance.  No one ever gave me anything that I didn't earn.

Candace Owens:  The anti-Ocasio-Cortez.  It has been a long time since a person as young as Candace Owens appeared on the political scene who is as brilliant, grounded, and quick-thinking as she is. [...] Owens's grace and class are the antithesis of Ocasio-Cortez's empty-headed, ditzy meanderings.  Owens's videos are all worth watching, and her performance on Tuesday [4/9/2019] in front of the House Oversight Committee was spectacular.  She put the Democrats on that committee to shame, especially Jerrold Nadler and Ted Lieu.  Both of them tried their best to humiliate her, to use her as a prop in their latest narrative that Trump is responsible for a make-believe rise of white nationalism and white supremacy.  The two of them are imbecilic at best.  Their focus on "white nationalism" is nonsense, but that is all the Democrats have now:  nonsense.

Report: Lori Loughlin Thought The Feds Were Bluffing, Now "Freaking Out" About Having To Do Time In Prison.  [Scroll down]  Loughlin has now been dropped from and edited out of her current show, a frontier drama on the Hallmark Channel.  Her character apparently isn't minor, either; she plays the town mayor.  It would have been much easier for producers to leave the episodes they've already completed alone and just write her out of future ones, but apparently Loughlin has already reached a level of such O.J.-esque ignominy that they can't bear to have her onscreen.  They can add her back in five to 10 seasons from now, I guess.

Democratic socialism is the scenic route to serfdom.  In his 1944 book "The Road to Serfdom," Nobel prize-winning economist Friedrich Hayek argued that socialist economic planning resulted not just in accumulating losses of economic efficiency but "the very destruction of freedom itself."  History was kind to Hayek's worldview.  The United Kingdom, Sweden, and India tested socialistic planning without sustained repression.  But people in the Soviet Union, Venezuela, Cambodia and Cuba were not so lucky.  Natural experiments between socialism and capitalism in East Germany and West Germany, North Korea and South Korea, and Hong Kong and China, bore out the link between economic liberty and personal freedom.  Upon reunification, for example, GDP per capita in East Germany was one-third of the West German level, and the latter did not require the East's Stasi or emigration restrictions.

Google's treatment of Kay Coles James is shameful, misguided.  It was bound to happen.  In fact, I'm surprised it took this long for leftists to viciously attack Kay Coles James.  The general strategy since she became president of The Heritage Foundation seems to have been to largely to ignore Mrs. James in an attempt to keep the masses unaware of her effective advocacy of conservative principles.  It was only a matter of time that they no longer would be able to bite their collective tongue and launch an all-out attack on Mrs. James' voice of reason.  But their plan backfired.

The Democratic Party, Not America, Is Experiencing a Civil War.  Contrary to the overheated speculation of so many, the United States is not on the cusp of another civil war.  Sure, things are tense in America's political system.  Things usually are.  Americans are not, however, about to take up arms against each other and hunt down those with whom they disagree.  Instead, what we are experiencing is the very public collapse of our managerial elite and this has resulted in a civil war within the Democratic Party.  To them it must feel like a more widespread conflict since most of our self-styled elite are Democrats.  The good news is this Democratic Party civil war is sure to end in disaster for the Left.  And this can only benefit the American people.

The Democrat-media meltdown over Special Olympics funding is everything we hate about Washington.  The current debate surrounding grant funding for the Special Olympics is an excellent case study of why our country will probably never get out of debt.  In case you missed it, there's been a fair amount of outrage over the Department of Education's budget proposal to cut $18 million in federal grant money to the Special Olympics.  The proposed budget states that "such activities are better supported with other federal, state, local or private funds."

Germany's Refusal To Fund 2 Percent Of Its Defense Is Not The Action Of An Ally.  Bob Gates, perhaps the most farsighted post-Cold War defense secretary, presciently predicted in 2011 "that there will be dwindling appetite and patience in the U.S. Congress — and in the American body politic writ large — to expend increasingly precious funds on behalf of nations that are apparently unwilling to devote the necessary resources or make the necessary changes to be serious and capable partners in their own defense."  Gates, who once rightly understood that the Saudis would fight Iranians to the last American, also essentially hinted the same with regards to Germany and Russia, "nations apparently willing and eager for American taxpayers to assume the growing security burden left by reductions in European defense budgets."

Earth Hour:  A Dissent.  Abundant, cheap electricity has been the greatest source of human liberation in the 20th century.  Every material social advance in the 20th century depended on the proliferation of inexpensive and reliable electricity.  Giving women the freedom to work outside the home depended on the availability of electrical appliances that free up time from domestic chores.  Getting children out of menial labor and into schools depended on the same thing, as well as the ability to provide safe indoor lighting for reading.  Development and provision of modern health care without electricity is absolutely impossible.  The expansion of our food supply, and the promotion of hygiene and nutrition, depended on being able to irrigate fields, cook and refrigerate foods, and have a steady indoor supply of hot water.

Thomas Sowell Is Right to Predict a Socialist America.  America's size, diversity, and democratic character are precipitating our demise.  The emphasis on equity, a moral foundation that causes envy, will surely lead us to a political ideology, socialism, that is widely known as the "politics of envy."  To conclude, the many characteristics of the American democracy that made it great are simultaneously contributing to its downfall.  As man grows estranged from his ancestors and his institutions, we will look for easy answers in all the wrong places.  Socialism is the lowest hanging fruit to pick for modern man, and we will reach that fruit by trampling our own democratic principles.

The Era of the Private Automobile Is About to Be Over.  Once you think about it, it seems almost inevitable.  No, the age of the automobile is not about to end, but the age of the private ownership of automobiles is passing away, at this very moment. [...] Note that the advances in ride sharing have been produced by private enterprise, not by public entities.  I trust that you do not find that surprising.  In New York, government cannot make the subways function.  You did not expect them to innovate, did you?

What Did the Founders Mean by "Invasion"?  Even by the middle of the 18th century, the English language lacked a widely-used set of standard definitions to English words.  While English dictionaries existed, those that did were widely considered deficient for a variety of reasons. [...] With this background in mind, a firestorm of controversy has recently erupted over what is meant by the word "invasion" that appears in both Article I, Section 8, Clause 15, and Article IV, Section 4 of the Constitution.  Respectively called the Militia Clause and the Guarantee Clause, these powers were meant to assure that the general government would protect the states from invasions.  However, the two clauses have recently been cited by those who support sending military forces to the southern border to restriction immigration, with some going as far as to suggest that the president has a unilateral power to do so.  It seems reasonable, then, to take a glance back and analyze what the American founders had in mind when they constructed the invasion authority.

Blankenship Is Right:  Sue the Mainstream Media Out of Existence.  [Scroll down]  [S]wamp-bought media hitjobs such as the one perpetrated against [Don] Blankenship prevent anti-establishment candidates from taking office and discourage them from running.  Can we say with certainty that now-Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh would have dared accept his nomination by President Trump had he known in advance the flurry of irresponsible reporting on unsubstantiated sexual misconduct allegations to come?  And our concern shouldn't be limited just to these cases:  consider the reckless endangerment of the very lives and careers of the Covington Catholic children by the mainstream media.

Sorry, Sandy, Capitalism Needs No Redemption.  The Industrial Revolution did, in fact, lead to the concentration of capital in the hands of some more successful and innovative individuals, which allowed some of them to create large businesses that flourished (and many more that failed), particularly in places like America.  The country's framework of laws allowed free markets to exist relatively unimpeded.  Without this "ideology of capital," where the profit motive drove success for many individuals and companies, there would have been no mechanism to create the economies of scale necessary for producers to provide larger quantities of higher quality goods and services.  That, in turn, led to the lower prices which made those goods and services more desirable and attainable among more consumers in a competitive marketplace.  The net effect of this economic system has been wealth creation such that the world has never seen, a more robust economic marketplace, and the exponential betterment of human well-being.  To grasp this doesn't require an economics degree, but only the most basic understanding of how the principles of supply and demand guide economic progress in a free market of voluntary, reciprocal exchanges of value.

What Trump does not do.  When Democrats lost to a non-politician in 2016, they could not swallow the failure and began to degrade their opponent's victory (by manufacturing "Russia collusion"), insult people who voted for the winner (calling them racist), and assassinate the character of the winner (calling him a dictator).  To make the case for the third act, they invented a story that Donald Trump likes dictators and wants to be one and will not leave office if not elected in 2020.  But his actions show the opposite.  Trump does not want to be a king or a dictator, while his predecessors behaved as if they wanted to be.  To demonstrate this fact, I will provide examples of what Trump has not done and what King Barack H. Obama and King George W. Bush did. [...]

Time to Embrace the 'American's Creed'.  If today's politicians, at all levels of government but especially members of the United States Congress, strongly embraced and let the "American's Creed" guide their daily actions and decisions, it would certainly be in the best interests of America.  Such a "lifestyle" should help overcome, one hopes in a major way, the terribly bitter and divisive political environment that presently exists in America.

Uncle Joe Biden Meets Hollywood McCarthyism — and Folds.  Mike Pence, one of the finest and most decent guys around, is shunned and cast out by an entire sector of America.  His candid and well-lived Christianity is an affront to those who are the very living example of the characteristics they falsely attribute to him.  Why is Pence so reviled?  Well, it's because he not only talks the Christian talk; he walks the walk.

Inviting Self-Professed Socialist Democrats to Venezuela.  It's an obscenity to allow the "Socialist Democrats", who are really propped-up "Justice Democrats," to continue spouting their socialist ideals on society as long as the good citizens of Venezuela are having to rummage, dog-like, through street garbage for scraps to eat and collecting sewer water for their children.  AOC, Omar and company are equivalent to the socialist Venezuelan politicians who converge nightly in Caracas steak houses while the people they were elected to serve slowly starve to death in the dark.  If these Justice Democrats dared try to extoll the virtues of socialism in the streets of Venezuela the way they do in America, they'd be torn apart limb by limb.

Hey Ilhan!  Hey Alexandria!  Venezuela's democratic president wants you to come to Venezuela to see some socialism.  In the past, lefties have flocked to political pilgrimages to newly created socialist countries to drink in the collectivism and praise the new regimes.  It happened in Cuba with the Venceremos Brigade sugar cane-cutting harvest, it happened in Nicaragua with the Sandalistas (ain't that right, Bill de Blasio), and it certainly happened in Venezuela during the salad days of socialist Hugo Chavez (until socialized Cuban Castrocare actually killed him in 2013).  Oliver Stone, Sean Penn, Naomi Campbell, and Dial Joe-4-Oil Kennedy were all in, and don't think they weren't loud about it.  Well, now a new invitation has been issued to the current defenders of socialism, from Venezuela's democratically elected president, Juan Guaido.

Trump's Anti-Socialist Strength Could Turn Venezuelan-Americans Into Republicans for Decades.  Ernesto Ackerman watched the horror play out in Venezuela this weekend on a large screen on the stage of a rally he had helped organize in support of the country's opposition leader, Juan Guaido.  The event was initially meant to bring Venezuelans in the city together to coincide with the protests back home.  It ended up being something very different.  "A killing of civilians without arms, burning the humanitarian help, we are dealing with the genocide," the Venezuelan-American activist said as they watched the violence play out in real time.

Don't conscript women into combat.  A federal district judge presumed last Friday to overturn U.S. Supreme Court precedent on a long-dormant topic — the military draft.  The judge, an appointee of George W. Bush, ruled that the current requirement that only men and not women register for the draft at age 18 through the Selective Service system is not "substantially related to Congress's objective of raising and supporting armies."  There's plenty to debate here.  Is the ruling legally sound?  Should Selective Service exist?  When is conscription morally defensible, if ever?  How are women in combat affecting troop readiness and morale?

Three Cheers for the Labor Market.  If your prospects are tapped out in the place you are, then move.  Go where the action is.  That isn't always easy.  Neither is being disabled or a convicted felon trying to make a new life for himself.  Nobody's asking you to take a Conestoga wagon through Indian country to homestead a farm in the western territories.  Just get on with it.

All News Is Bad News.  America is a country in trouble, of course, what with a gay black actor faking a mugging by racist white folk, and women claiming rape when hard hats whistle (they get twenty years minimum for whistling twice, life in jail for a long wolf whistle).  America is also in trouble when a Muslim woman goes over to Syria, gets married three or four times, is widowed three or four times, then wants to return and watch TV in Alabama.  Even worse is the fact that an intellectual congresswoman called AOC wants to do away with airplane travel to save the planet and take away all of Jeff Bezos' money.

Sorry, Pope Francis, your sex abuse speech was a disgraceful display of excuses and evasions.  Pope Francis's closing address to the Vatican Summit on Child Protection was a disgraceful display of excuses and evasions.  He began with an extended meditation on how a "great number of" abuse cases are "committed within families."  He urged the assembled bishops to focus on "other forms of abuse" experienced by "child soldiers," "starving children," "child victims of war" and "refugee children."  He laid out an agenda that, bizarrely, focused on matters have nothing to do with clerical abuse (such as combating "sexual tourism").  And, most shamefully of all, he lashed out at those demanding that bishops who covered up abuse and silenced victims be held to account, declaring that the church must "rise above" those who "exploit, for various interests, the very tragedy experienced by the little ones."

If We Can't Cut Entitlements, What Can We Do?  Thanks to the overspending of Congress and successive presidential administrations, America's debt totals $22 trillion, and it is projected to grow faster and larger in the years to come. [...] We must deal with the drivers of our future debt:  Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.  But for those who think it is not politically feasible to tackle entitlements, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) recently published a report with a broader range of suggestions.  They include limiting highway and transit funding to expected revenues (translation: don't spend more than you collect), eliminating Head Start, and creating a federal value-added tax (VAT).  Disappointingly, many of the CBO's alternatives are meant to grow government revenue rather than shrink government expenditures.

Trump Should Just Let the Democrats Self-Destruct.  President Trump has demanded that Ilhan Omar voluntarily resign.  The idea of impeachment of another Muslim Democratic congresswoman, Rashida Tlaib (Michigan) is also being actively promoted.  The events surrounding Ilhan Omar, of course, are a shame for America.  The anti-Semitic focus of her recent statements is obvious.  However, this does not mean that President Trump has an urgent need to intervene in the process of natural political selection and demand the resignation of an anti-Semitic congresswoman.  Trump's intervention in the natural self-destruction of the Democratic Party is a strategic mistake.

Hey, Democrats, I've lived in a socialist country with income 'equality' and it was miserable.  [A]s Democrats justify grandiose proposals by decrying income inequality, many of us who immigrated to the United States from socialist countries see great irony.  After all, unending income equality is what drove us to leave our native lands in the first place.  My family left post-Mao Communist China in the mid-1980s precisely because there was so much equality to go around.  As a child, I lived in Guangzhou, the third largest city in China.  Everyone in my city was equal in having no running hot water, no modern toilet facilities, no refrigerator, no washer, no dryer, and no color television.  Imagine a world without Whole Foods, Safeway and Walmart, or the plethora of products stocked on their shelves.  Imagine no Vitamin Water, no Gatorade, no Starbucks, no Panera Bread, no candy bars and no sea salt potato chips.  Now imagine instead being allotted food stamps from the government, indicating how much your family can eat.

The Whole Lot of Them Are Bat-Crazy.  In his SOTU address, the President showed deep compassion for African Americans, for Hispanic Americans, for women — for all the groups that the liars and real haters allege he disdains.  All the haters who accuse this President falsely of racism and anti-Semitism and Islamophobia and all are self-serving liars who themselves view every person with bigotry, identifying each by gender, race, sexual preference, religion.  That is what their Identity Politics is all about:  "Vote for me because I am your Identity, too, or will try to change myself to be."  Stacey Abrams was the perfect Democrat counterpoint:  not Caucasian, not male, and still whining about losing.  The Loser as counterfoil to Make America Great Again.

Look Upon the Media's 'Life of the Mind'.  [Scroll down]  The primary mission of the media today is not to inform dispassionately but, like Charles Boyer, to convince the public that it cannot trust the evidence of its own senses, observations, or experiences, and is in fact losing its collective mind unless it undergoes an immediate attitude readjustment and gets with the program.  Many of the reporters and commentators can't help themselves.  As Ben Rhodes famously observed, they're small children who literally know nothing, and thus are prime receptacles for all kinds of counterfactual nonsense.  (The myth of manmade climate change is a prime example, since it is so easily countermanded by a simple glance back at history.)  Others are simply careerists, busily building their "brands."  The news business is no longer a calling, nor even a profession, but a trade once again, this time not in service to the truth but to the Narrative.

How Venezuela Struck It Poor.  Venezuela was considered rich in the early 1960s:  It produced more than 10 percent of the world's crude and had a per capita GDP many times bigger than that of its neighbors Brazil and Colombia — and not far behind that of the United States.  At the time, Venezuela was eager to diversify beyond just oil and avoid the so-called resource curse, a common phenomenon in which easy money from commodities such as oil and gold leads governments to neglect other productive parts of their economies. [...] Such success makes the sorry state of Venezuela's oil industry today, not to mention that of the country at large, all the more surprising — and tragic.

No gray areas are left anywhere:  The lesson of Ralph Northam's fall.  It's hard to recall a politician who has so quickly and starkly been exposed as a cipher who ascended to a major office almost by accident (any Democrat would have won in Virginia in 2017).  So there won't be a lot of tears for Ralph Northam, but the controversy consuming him is disturbing nonetheless for what it portends about the drift of our political culture.  It is increasingly frenzied, unforgiving and irrational, and only likely to get more so.

A Digital Iron Curtain Descends Over The Internet.  A centralized environment will be inherently collectivist.  It's impossible for it to be anything else.  And when a handful of companies control the internet, they become its political and cultural weak point.  Any government or totalitarian movement that can compromise them will control the internet.  If we want an open internet, then we must once again envision it as a chaotic environment of competitive companies, none of whom can get so big that they hold its future and ours in their hands.

It's Time to Get Real About Our Enemies.  There is more to #TheResistance than the political panic inspired by the likes of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.).  They are riding a monster not of their own making.  In order to survive, they are providing cover and normalization of something not at all normal.  Conservative pundits have latched onto the fun words "hysteria" and "Trump derangement syndrome."  These words, though cute, mask the seriousness of what is actually happening.  The mass hysteria is a goal and a tactic, whipped up by cool-headed, purposeful people.  It was not caused by Trump's tweets or orange coloring.  It has everything to do with a long game to change our country.  The exaggerated, weird loathing of President Trump and all Republicans — that flies in the face of our peace and prosperity — is the daily work of thousands of professional leftists.

Elizabeth Warren is not proposing a tax; she's proposing asset forfeiture.  In most cases, the revolution begins with a peasant prelude and reaches its crescendo with some variation on the theme of Napoleon; socialist revolutions in particular have a peculiar habit of beginning with a man in a work shirt and ending up with a man dressed like Cap'n Crunch.

Battle of the Brainless:  Justin Trudeau vs.  Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.  Sorry Americans; I know you like to finish first in everything but in this contest you lose.  The Canadian PM is hands down less intelligent than the newly elected representative from New York.  It is true AOC's airhead statements are becoming more and more bizarre, but the things she comes out with show a lack of education and the fact she is a committed socialist who has never learned the truth about socialism.  Trudeau, on the other hand, says things that no person above the age of five and of average intelligence would ever say.

Harry Reid Exposes Greatest Liberal Scam of All-Time.  The U.S. government is partially shut down over the wall.  But it's all a massive liberal scam.  A Ponzi scheme.  Pure fraud.  Bernie Madoff couldn't come up with a better scam.  Because the same liberal politicians and donors who scream about the "racism" and "immorality" and "ineffectiveness" of a wall all live behind walls.  President Trump needs to buy TV infomercial time and run a 30-minute TV show in a Ross Perot fashion — featuring aerial views of the mansions and estates of liberals, protected by walls, gates, and armed guards.  You know, the exact same protections they don't want you and me or our children to have.  Exhibit A is Harry Reid, the Democratic former Senate Majority Leader from my home state of Nevada.

Do intellectuals oppose religion?
Is Religion Anti-Intellectual?  Should you believe in a God?  All the discord and vitriol in our culture boils down to how you would answer.  Border walls, gay marriage, abortion, national defense, school choice — where you stand on these issues and the myriad others comprising our daily tussle is for the most part defined by how you answer this question.

Why is the Vatican standing up for the Venezuelan dictatorship?  Look at it this way:  can you imagine Pope John Paul II sending in his diplomats to legitimize the military dictatorship of Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski while it was in its showdown with Solidarity?  Pope John Paul was with the democrats all along, and as they won freedom with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Velvet Revolution, the Vatican in the end played a pivotal role for freedom.  Poland, as a matter of fact, is one of the few countries in Europe where Catholicism is still significantly practiced.  No such luck in Venezuela.  The battle lines have been drawn, and the first Latin pope and his Vatican bureaucrats have picked the bad guy, the ruling dictatorship, over the suffering people, all in the phony name of preserving peace, something whose potential came and went years ago.

Congress Is Not a Coequal Branch of Government — It's Supreme.  The notion of coequality of the branches is a myth that has been popularized over the past half century, during the rise of the imperial presidency, as a way to boost the executive's standing in the eyes of the public.  There are three main reasons that Congress is supreme.  First, Congress can get itself involved in the actions of the other branches.  It can override presidential vetoes.  It can deny appointments to the executive and judicial branches.  It can impeach officers of the executive and judicial branches.  It can set legislative and judicial pay.  It also has wide discretion in determining the size and shape of the executive and judicial branches.  Every executive department and indeed every officer except the president and vice president are creations of Congress.  And Congress also has total authority to design the court system as it sees fit.

More Populist, More Conservative.  It's not the free market that is financializing the American economy and empowering Wall Street's leveraged buyouts of American businesses.  It's the federal government's preferential tax treatment of corporate debt and guarantee of "too big to fail" bailouts.  It's not the "invisible hand" giving investment income preferential tax treatment over workers' wages, even though in a globalized economy that discrepancy can incentivize American investors to create jobs overseas instead of here.  It's not Adam Smith who simultaneously ended vocational tracking in American high schools while flooding college campuses with students and borrowed dollars that would have been better off elsewhere.  Nor did Milton Friedman make it unprofitable for residential real-estate developers to build anything other than mid-rise apartments and McMansions.  That's federal and state policymakers.  It wasn't capitalism that stripped religion from public schools and, indeed, the public square, denying working communities a source of social capital and solidarity they depended on.  That was a group of activist courts.

Sen. Cruz:  Democrats Forcing Partial Government Shutdown To Appease Their Base.  Senator Ted Cruz is blaming the partial government shutdown on what he calls the most radical and extreme members of the Democrat Party.  During an interview with the Daily Caller Friday [1/11/2019], the Texas lawmaker said Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer are being held captive by far-left Democrats.  He claimed Democrats are filled with hatred and anger for President Trump and are politicizing the shutdown.

What was Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez doing, making a third Democratic response to Trump's wall speech?  The Trump speech started as a duel between Trump, who spoke out about a border wall last night, and not one, but two Democratic responders.  That had a precedent in how a State of the Union address response goes to the other party, but the Democrats couldn't even agree on a single responder.  They had a pair of them, hoping to hog more camera time, perhaps, but it came at a cost of a unified message.  Nancy Pelosi, who leads the House, was a logical response agent, but Democrats went and put New York Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer up there as well.  The result, as they stared out at the TV cameras together, all botoxed and heavily made up, was "American Gothic," except maybe with oily game show hosts instead of farmers.

Schumer and Pelosi's response to Trump's address becomes instant meme sensation on Twitter.  The Democratic leaders, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, gave their response Tuesday to President Trump's prime-time Oval Office speech that called for border security.  Pelosi said Mr. Trump had "chosen fear.  We want to start with the facts," while Schumer said "We don't govern by temper tantrum" in their joint televised statement.  The lawmakers' stoic appearance standing at the same podium in front of a row of flags made for perfect meme material — and Twitter users quickly noticed — comparing them to everything from the famous painting "American Gothic" to angry parents and Bond villains.

Creep Show:  Pelosi and Schumer Freak Out Viewers:  Blank Stares, Scowls and Crazy Eyes Consume Dem Response.  President Trump held a national address the perils of open borders and illegal immigration on Tuesday.  Democrat leaders Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi delivered the response.  Big mistake.

Pelosi, Schumer spark laughs on social media for 'angry parents' rebuttal to Trump address.  House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif, and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., triggered plenty of laughs on social media Tuesday night [1/8/2019] for their rebuttal to President Donald Trump's address from the Oval Office.  During his address, Trump called the conflict at the southern border a "crisis of the heart and the crisis of the soul" and repeated his request for $5.7 billion for a steel barrier.  Meanwhile, Pelosi and Schumer stood firm with their position that the government shutdown must end in order to continue talks about border funding.  However, folks on Twitter drew more attention to the serious tone of the Democrats' remarks and had some fun at their expense.

The Internet wasted no time roasting Schumer and Pelosi.  The Democratic response to President Trump's speech by Sen. Chuck Schumer and Rep. Nancy Pelosi quickly got ripped apart online, as jokesters mocked the way they spoke while standing close together behind a small podium wearing scowls.  "Yikes.  I like Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi but they gotta work on the whole 'not looking like villains from the next bond movie' thing next time," said Twitter user Dan Luke.  "Why are Chuck and Nancy every pair of white suburban parents who just witnessed you shotgun a coors light while home for break?" Twitter user Zachary Miller wrote with a screenshot of the pair.  "We trusted you with Dad's car because we thought you could be responsible with it, but we see now you're not ready," Vulture writer Kathryn VanArendonk joked.

Pelosi, Schumer say Democrats should get 'equal airtime' after Trump address.  Democratic leaders on Monday night [1/7/2019] called for equal airtime in response to President Donald Trump's primetime address to the nation on southern border security scheduled for Tuesday evening.  Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., argued that since Trump's speech will be broadcast, the other side of the aisle should have their fair share of broadcast time, too.

The Editor says...
The Speaker and the Senate Majority Leader were attempting to elevate their status to that of the President by demanding equal media coverage.  In reality, they were in no position to demand any such thing.  Moreover (in hindsight), the message delivered during their "equal time," and the way they delivered it, was a public relations fiasco.

The Coming Democratic Disillusion.  By the seventh year of his presidency, when some 100 U.S soldiers were killed in Iraq every month and gas on average cost $2.80 per gallon, George W. Bush was about as popular as Donald Trump is today.  And in 2007, as we all remember, Pelosi's Democrats set about enacting universal health care and ending the war in Iraq.  Fooled you!  Actually, the victories of the 110th Congress were much more modest:  a minimum wage increase, lobbying reform, and a ban of incandescent light bulbs.

Keep It Closed for Two Years.  I don't know about you, but I am enjoying the 25% Government shutdown.  I really am.  This is the closest we ever may come to demonstrating how much of our Government is wasteful, unnecessary, duplicative, and pointless.  As but one example — only from the 25% now shut down — we simply do not need a federal Department of Education.  States and municipalities can and should run education at the local level.  Under conservatives, a federal Education Department — at best — does nothing that justifies its existence; under liberals, it works to destroy civil rights and the national culture.

Anti-Semitic doctor who threatened Jewish patients should lose medical license.  Anti-Semitism should not be tolerated in any setting — least of all in an environment where medical personnel take a pledge to provide care and comfort to patients.  But that's exactly what's at the center of a controversial case unfolding in Ohio.  Physician Lara Kollab, a first-year resident at the prestigious Cleveland Clinic, took part in social media rants that included anti-Semitic hate speech and dangerous threats.  In her tweets, Kollab referred to Jewish people as dogs, downplayed the Holocaust, and said she was brutally unsympathetic about it.  She said Allah will kill the Jews and threatened to purposely give all the (derogatory term for Jews) the wrong meds.  This behavior is abhorrent and dangerous.

Stereotypes are often accurate.  Almost any belief about almost any group has been considered a "stereotype" in empirical studies.  It is, however, logically impossible for all group beliefs to be inaccurate.  This would make it "inaccurate" to believe that two groups differ or that they do not differ.  Alternatively, perhaps stereotypes are only inaccurate group beliefs, and so therefore accurate beliefs are not stereotypes.  If this were true, one would first have to empirically establish that the belief is inaccurate — otherwise, it would not be a stereotype.  The rarity of such demonstrations would mean that there are few known stereotypes.  Increasing recognition of these logical problems has led many modern reviews to abandon "inaccuracy" as a core definitional component of stereotypes (see Jussim et al, 2016 for a review).  Nonetheless, an emphasis on inaccuracy remains, which is broadly inconsistent with empirical research.

Dems unprepared for a partial government shutdown that lasts for months and months.  Conventional wisdom among the media and politician branches of the Democratic Party holds that President Trump and the Republicans will pay a serious price for the very partial (25%) "government shutdown" as it drags on.  The passage of a House budget bill with not even one dollar, as Speaker Pelosi averred, is supposed to increase pressure on President Trump in their view.  They seem to believe that the public so loves visiting national parks in the middle of the winter — one of the few aspects of the 25% of the federal government that affects ordinary voters — that Republicans will crack under public pressure.

The Editor says...
There is no point in having national parks, national monuments and national museums if we don't have international borders.

Why Trump Shouldn't Cave On Border Wall, By The Numbers.  Despite all the hand-wringing about a government shutdown, President Donald Trump still has a strong hand.  The amount he's asking for is a relative pittance.  And the shutdown is exposing how useless much of the federal government is. [...] According to various news accounts, federal agencies sent about 400,000 "nonessential" workers home during the shutdown.  (Another 400,000 "essential" workers are putting in hours without pay.)  Not counting the Postal Service (which is self-funded) and the military, there are about 1.7 million federal workers.  That means that at least one quarter of the entire federal workforce is "nonessential."

False Flag Destroys Roy Moore — Why No Apology?  Reid Hoffman is not yet a household name, but as co-founder of the business platform LinkedIn, he is in the crosshairs of conservatives as an enemy of the people.  Hoffman's sin is funding the organization that faked a "Russian bot" infiltration that piled on the misery of Judge Roy Moore's ill-fated campaign in Alabama for the U.S. Senate.  Alt-left billionaire Hoffman gave American Engagement Technologies (AET) $750,000, with $100,000 earmarked for offshoot cybersecurity firm New Knowledge.  It, in turn, fabricated 1,000 Russian-sounding Twitter accounts to follow Moore and discredit his campaign.  Oh, but not satisfied with the Twitter disinformation campaign, the company went further, creating fake Facebook pages urging Alabama conservatives to support a "write-in" candidate instead of Moore.

Shut the doors of Government.  And leave them closed.  The continued shutdown of the government is good to the extent the government is shut down.  Most estimates are that about 25 percent of the U.S. Government shut down.  The good ends there.  A better shutdown would be, perhaps all of it.  Then a return to some kind of federal system.  No.  There is no federals system now.  There is a corrupt national system.

The Real Reason Why Fewer Americans Think Religion Matters.  Religions make moral proclamations that transcend individual belief and cultural consensus.  They also make moral claims that require our submission.  Unsurprisingly, as America shifts toward moral autonomy, fewer Americans rely on religious systems that make transcendent, unchanging, ethical claims and demands.

The Fed Must Repeal Its Disastrous Rate Increases.  With the stock market falling another 8 percent in the wake of the Federal Reserve's decision to raise interest rates earlier this month, it's now clear that the biggest threat to the Trump economic boom is the Fed itself.  At a time of strong growth, wage gains, and record low unemployment, Fed policies have created one of the most dangerous deflation cycles in decades.  Falling prices — which we are seeing now in farm products, oil, silver, copper, iron, and so on — can be as destructive to growth as inflation was in the 1970s.  The job of the Fed is to keep prices stable, yet this year prices of all commodities are down 12 percent — with most of that decline following the two disastrous rate increases, first in September and then another one a week before Christmas.

7 Presidents Who Were Tougher Than Trump on the Media.  [President] Trump regularly tweets about "fake news."  He has doubled down on the view that overly critical news outlets are the "enemy of the American people."  He talked about more stringent libel laws to make it easier to sue news organizations, threatened the broadcast license of certain networks, and the Trump White House pulled the press pass for CNN personality Jim Acosta after a confrontation at a press conference.  But so far he hasn't taken government action, as Roosevelt and other past presidents have.

In DC a single day is a "prolonged shutdown".  Today is the sixth day of the government shutdown.  The first four days were scheduled days off.  The first two were Saturday and Sunday, followed by Christmas Eve, which President Trump decreed as a day off for federal workers, and Christmas.  On Wednesday morning [12/26/2018] — barely three hours into the first actual workday in the shutdown by Congress — Politico reported, "Federal workforce starts to feel pinch of prolonged shutdown."  If federal workers cannot last a single day under these circumstances, maybe we should replace them with adults.

The Editor says...
If federal workers are "non-essential personnel" whose services we can do without for a few weeks, their jobs should be eliminated.

Brandon Smith:  The Fed Is A Suicide Bomber With A Deeper Agenda.  I believe according to the evidence that the central banks are motivated by ideological zealotry with the core purpose of total global centralization of economic and political power into the hands of a select group of elitists.  This agenda is really just a modern "reboot" of feudalism or totalitarianism.  They sometimes refer to the plan in public as the "new world order," or the "global economic reset." I often refer to the encompassing ideology as "globalism" for the sake of expediency.  To attain this goal, central bankers must influence mass psychology using traumatic events.  Fear opens doors to centralization of power.  This is simply a fact of social behavior and history.  The more afraid a population is, the more willing they will be to give up freedoms in exchange for safety and security.  Therefore, the most effective weapon at the disposal of the globalists and their central banking counterparts is engineered economic crisis — a weapon that can, if allowed, destroy entire civilizations almost as fast as a nuclear war, while still keeping most of the expensive infrastructure intact.  Beyond that, economic crisis is also a weapon that can influence a population to embrace even greater enslavement while viewing their slave masters as saviors rather than villains.

Americans' faith in faith is failing.  Although Americans' church attendance is declining and they believe its importance in national life is dwindling, nearly three-quarters of them maintain that faith is important to them.  After one of the holiest days in the Christian calendar, Gallup is reporting that a large majority of Americans (72 percent) say religion is important and 51 percent say it's very important.

The Editor says...
God does not expect you to have faith in faith.  He expects you to have faith in Him, because He has paid for your sin through the sacrifice of his son, Jesus Christ.  Faith in candles and statues and beads and incense and stained glass and organ music and regular church attendance is of no value.

I did not vote for Jim Mattis.  General Jim Mattis decided to quit as secretary of defense in protest to the president's decision to withdraw our 2,000 troops from Syria has flipped the switch in Washington back to hawk.  After warning us for three years that President Donald John Trump would lead us to three or four wars, the Washington Establishment is angry that we are not going to war with Russia and Iran in Syria.

If a Green Beret Is a War Criminal, then So Is Obama.  One would think that in war the duty of a soldier is to kill the enemy before he kills you or your fellow soldiers.  The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are different in that the enemy doesn't usually obey the rules of war, like wearing uniforms and rank insignia, and there are no "front lines" per se, only improvised explosive devices and sniper fire from second-floor windows or civilians used as human shields.  That is where Mathew Golsteyn found himself in 2010 when the Green Beret killed a Taliban bomb-maker who had killed two Marines, Sgt. Jeremy R. McQueary and Lance Cpl.  Raymon A. Johnson, in a war where only one side obeys the rules and the other is trapped by rules of engagement that make no sense and an Obama administration treating the whole thing as a law enforcement matter.

Democracy, Deliberation, and the Internet.  For 2500 years a consistent criticism of giving political power to the masses has been the question of competence.  To critics like Socrates and Plato, the knowledge of history, philosophy, and facts necessary for governing are beyond the abilities of the average citizen.  Hoi polloi had to spend their time making a living rather than studying these disciplines, or they were by nature driven more by their self-interest, appetites, and passions than by the rational search for knowledge of the true and good.  Thus from Plato's Republic to today's progressive technocrats, some form of technocracy has been preferable to rule by the "low-information" voting masses.  In the last few decades, the explosion of information instantly available on the internet has made this fear of giving political power to the uninformed more urgent in an age of "fake news."  Has the availability of an astonishing volume of information worsened the dangers of ignorance to governing, or has it provided a means of correcting it?

It Didn't Start With Hillary.  I'm always amazed at the number of people who have no knowledge of The Venona Papers.  Now, I grant you that reading some of the books and articles put out about them can be an eye-rubbing, mind-stultifying experience.  The mental effort to focus on the analysis, and to follow the logical reasoning of those who've spent years identifying those agents and their enablers can be hard.

Wanna Make Your Community Unaffordable?  Fill It with Government Workers.  There's no industry to speak of in the D.C. area; even more than Los Angeles, it's a one-industry town and in this case that industry is government, which (unlike Hollywood) creates not one cent of wealth but sure knows how to spend other people's money.  Accordingly, housing prices have soared, transforming places like Falls Church, Va., and Silver Spring, Md., into fancy bedroom communities.

When Does Trump Say, 'Enough Is Enough!'?  So what if Trump personally paid Stormy Daniels to keep quiet?  Obama's campaign, not him personally, paid Reverend Wright hush money during the 2008 campaign and I don't recall any special counsel investigations or Congressional hearings into campaign finance violations.

Obama's Big Campaign Finance Violation That Everyone Wants to Forget Will Redeem Trump.  It appears all the pundits are out and claiming President Trump should be impeached because of his former attorney Michael Cohen's statements that allegedly implicate him in campaign finance violations. [...] It's strange that Barack Obama was hit by the SEC with one of the biggest campaign finance violation fees ever levied but no one called for his impeachment.

More about Obama's fundraising scandals.

Vandals, or Militants?  The origin of the present protest is not the price of bread but an increase in gasoline taxes.  Yet, with gasoline now occupying a central place in our way of life as bread once did, there is at least some link between the two eruptions.  And Louis XVI was guilty by inattention, just as Emmanuel Macron the First, France's president, seems strangely indifferent to public sentiment.  To enact policies that raise gasoline prices — already the highest in Europe — on the eve of the year-end holidays and without offering a justification, was a major political error.  Macron's mistake was made worse by the justification given after the uprising:  the government explained to skeptical citizens that the new tax was actually an ecological measure, and therefore justified, since the goal was not to add to the state's coffers but to help fight climate change.  Obviously no one believes this excuse, including the government that issued it, or so we must hope.

It's Time to Move Corruptible Bureaucrats Out of D.C. and into Flyover Country.  Today, D.C. is awash in expensive restaurants, some with Michelin stars even, and most of them have private dining rooms.  Dinner parties in those spaces abound, and if you're a foreign agent, or one of the FBI's gang of spooks, you want to get inside the "private" rooms, either physically (get one of your own invited to the table) or electronically.  The proliferation of expensive eateries requires money, as do private schools and costly colleges and universities, which are important to Washington parents.  A smart friend pointed out to me that you can't pay for all this with a government bureaucrat's salary.  Not even with two.  But they do pay for it, and the restaurants.  That means extra income from somewhere.  Writing books and blogs and op-eds doesn't come close to generating enough cash.

The Editor says...
If we move all the corruptible bureaucrats to Abilene or Salt Lake City, the lobbyists will move there, too, and then we'll have two centers of corruption.  Location isn't the problem.  The overgrown centralized government that prints and spends money is the problem.

Hollywood Is a Sex-Grooming Gang.  Former CBS chief Les Moonves's career had already ended in disgrace for repeated instances of alleged sexual harassment and assault uncovered last summer by The New Yorker.  Yet until this week the board that fired him for preying on women was planning to beg His Majesty's forgiveness for decoupling him from his kingdom, pressing into his hands a $120 million payoff.  Maybe not anymore.  The New York Times, with the cooperation of a washed-up talent manager who, at 75, decided to open his mouth about Moonves, reported on how the triangular sex trade works in Hollywood.

What Is Saudi Arabia to Us?  [Scroll down]  In other words, what is going on, including murder, is a purely dynastic power play.  But that is Saudi Arabia's nice side.  The fundamental reality is that this is a slave society, (the Arabic word for black man is the word for slave) which considers work something that inferiors do for superiors, prizes idleness, and practices cruelty as a means of asserting superiority.  Everyone knows that women, treated as property, end up disproportionately in the harems of the wealthy.  But few stop to think that this custom dooms the majority of Saudi men to lives without legitimate sex, never mind families. [...] The ultra-puritanical Wahhabi sect, which authorized the House of Saud to take power by murdering non-Wahhabis, is inexorably interwoven with the Saudi power structure.  No doubt, many believe its teachings.  And yes, Wahhabis pay for radical mosques throughout the world, America very much included.  But hypocritical corruption is at its core.  Fly first class from Riyadh to Paris or London.  Watch the women with Burqas step onto the plane.  Off comes the headgear.  On take-off, they doff the Burqas, revealing Dior fashions with plunging necklines.  And the booze flows.

Give Thanks for What Remains of Free Speech.  Free speech is increasingly imperiled as nations around the world turn to authoritarianism, which comes packaged as everything from iron-fisted dictatorial rule to coercive "progressivism."  One thing every brand of authoritarianism has in common is speech codes.  Dissenting ideas dilute authority, so they must be suppressed.  We should be thankful for the free speech that remains, and rise from our Thanksgiving tables prepared to fight for it.  Our political speech is soggy with endless calls to "fight" for various "rights," few of which bear any resemblance to what America's founders considered to be inalienable rights.  One important clue to their thinking is that rights were seen as something an unjust government could take away from citizens by force, not something benevolent governments present to citizens as a gift.

Media Hysteria Over Nationalism is Democrat Revisionist History.  No, President Macron:  nationalism isn't treason — it's necessary to a free and thriving nation.  Americans who are serious about their freedom should be ecstatic that the question of the importance of nationalism is enjoying a renaissance, after laying dormant under the four U.S. presidents before President Trump.  In the wake of Trump's declaration last month that he's a nationalist, it's been astounding to observe the revisionist history, historical ignorance, and flat-out lies Democrats, the DMIC (Democrat Media Industrial Complex), and members of the NeverTrump CMIC (Conservative Media Industrial Complex) have been willing to propagate.

The Medical Industrial Complex.  Our dysfunctional system combines the greed of capitalism with the corruption of socialism — the worst of both worlds.  Companies raise prices to what the market will bear.  But since third-party payers — both public money and private insurance — grotesquely distort the market, companies charge exorbitant prices that a natural, normal market would never abide.  In a natural market, where individuals chose, nobody ever opts to pay $4,000 for a drug when a competitor charges $125 for the same drug.  But in this distorted market, where groups — insurance and government bureaucracies — make the choices, such waste happens regularly.  In our The Twilight Zone, the company does not go out of business but the country, slowly, does.

It's Not What Happens Next.  It's What Won't Happen.  [Scroll down]  First, there will be no big ticket legislative packages going through.  No major immigration reform supporting the highest priorities of either party.  No new tax cuts, but also no tax increases.  No new gun control legislation.  The fact is, these folks will be lucky if they can name a new Post Office.  The President isn't going to be impeached.  The Democrats would need to round up every one of their members in the House to get the ball rolling and too many of them are on record saying that would be too extreme.  And even if they managed it in the House there is zero chance of a conviction in the Senate.  Donald Trump will finish his first term at a minimum.  The wall isn't going to be finished.  That's somehow become a badge of honor among Democrats, despite being one of the most doable solutions to immigration problems imaginable.

Birthright and the Angry Election.  President Trump wants tomorrow's [11/6/2018] election to be about the "caravan" of asylum seekers coming to the U.S. through Mexico and the false accusations made against Justice Brett Kavanaugh in his confirmation proceedings.  A lot of people are angry about those things.  For the Democrats, this election is all about anger:  anger at Trump for beating Clinton two years ago, anger at his attempts to control immigration, and anger at his success in making the economy robust at the expense of some of their pet programs.  Inevitably the election is a referendum on Trump.

Are You Better Off Than You Were Two Years Ago?  President Reagan won a landslide election in 1980 when he asked voters a simple question:  "Are you better off than you were four years ago?"  Voters knew they weren't.  Midterm voters should be asking themselves that same question now, before casting their ballots next Tuesday.  Only this time, the answer is yes.

The Electronic Committee of Public Safety.  Megyn Kelly will probably go into opulent seclusion and find herself disinvited from ceremonial appearances and speaking events, guillotined as a racist, with no more sympathy than a once privileged, beheaded Bourbon.

Annoy Liberals By Refusing To Care About Their Stupid Fake Outrages.  In the current convulsion, our moral and intellectual betters who make up our glorious elite are in a fake frenzy because Third World thugs are acting like Third World thugs. [...] Chopping up political opponents is generally a bad thing, though I will not hold my breath waiting for the libs to, for example, cancel their holidays in Havana because the Castro clan has butchered tens of thousands of people for preferring freedom to tyranny.

The Kingdom and the Power.  [Jamal] Khashoggi was a legal permanent resident of the United States, a Washington figure with a huge network of contacts, and a Washington Post columnist.  Any harm to him — including "merely" his kidnapping and disappearance into prison or the holding of a show trial — would inevitably become a cause célèbre and damage relations with the United States.  It would also inevitably damage Mohammed bin Salman's own reputation.  So the decision to act against Khashoggi was a revelation of ignorance about the United States, impulsiveness, brutality, or all three.  In the shadow of the Khashoggi killing we can now see the forcible detention of Lebanon's prime minister, Sa'ad Hariri, last year as a prelude.  It too revealed a thuggish approach and a remarkable lack of understanding of how such events would be viewed in the outside world.  It is perhaps not coincidental that MbS, rare among Saudi princes, has spent his entire life in the kingdom and never lived or attended school in the West.

Just in time for Halloween:  Democrat-led voter intimidation!  If we have learned anything about liberals, it is that they will do nearly anything to gain power.  This election season their strategy is all about enhancing turnout by ginning up their base with hateful negative messaging, divisive identity politics, demonization of president Trump, and threats of violence.  Witness the perfectly timed hit job on Trump's pick for the Supreme Court, Brett Kavanaugh, designed to scuttle his confirmation or at least whip up an anti-Trump frenzy and perhaps separate the supposedly fragile "suburban white female voter bloc" from the Republican Party.  In recent days, another exquisitely orchestrated assault on the president's border policies, a "caravan" of "migrants," is headed toward our southern border from Honduras, gathering human and political momentum with each mile.  Is the media hysteria over the death of an obscure Saudi journalist meant to embarrass Donald Trump, who has been cozying up to the Saudis lately as a regional counterbalance to Iran?  Even the curiously scheduled Sixty Minutes interview of the president last weekend appeared to be designed by the left as a game-changing hatchet job, although, fortunately, it did not turn out quite as they had planned.

It's Past Time For Pope Francis To Come Clean, But Instead He's Burying Himself.  As news about the Catholic Church's sex abuse scandal spreads, public confidence in Pope Francis' handling of the matter has plummeted.  A recent Pew Research Center poll shows that six in ten American Catholics say the pope is doing an "only fair" or "poor" job of managing the scandal.  That is almost double the share who said he was doing a poor job earlier this year, and triple the share who said this in 2015.  The lack of confidence is also broadly based — both Catholic women and men, young and old, and church-attending or not, have grown increasingly critical of this pontiff.

Bring on More Kavanaughs!  No man or woman — let alone their children — should be forced to endure the slanders that Brett Kavanaugh and his family experienced in the past three weeks.  If good and decent people of talent and brains now decide to run and hide in fear of a similar onslaught, it would be disastrous for the United States and for our future.  Surrender to that onslaught, giving a victory to the bullies and McCarthyites of the Left who want to end all opposition and dissent, and have been working most intensely for the past decade to undo the Constitution and the Bill of Rights is unthinkable.  They cannot be allowed to cement their hold on power.  No, now is not the time to hide.  Now is not the time for Americans who believe in the Constitution, in freedom, in the rule of law, in the presumption of innocence, of freedom of speech, of limited government, of due process, of the right to bear arms (rights all delineated clearly in the Bill of Rights) to shirk their responsibilities and hide from the assault of the smear machine of the Left.

Liberalism:  An Intrinsically Uncivil Ideology.  When Hillary Clinton and Eric Holder occupied positions of power in the federal government, they would often lecture conservatives on the virtues of civility and dialogue.  To counter Rush Limbaugh and the power of talk radio in the 1990s, rattled liberals once proposed "civility" boards, recruiting such models of civility as Paul Begala to serve on the "Penn Commission," an undertaking so stupid it didn't even last Bill Clinton's presidency.  In power, liberals peddle self-serving babble about "civility"; out of power — witness Hillary's recent pitiful interview and Eric Holder's endorsement of kicking conservatives — they peddle self-serving babble about the need to suspend civility.

Kavanaugh May Change Election Map.  This is impetuous, but I think the electoral map has changed with the Kavanaugh decision.  The Democrats avoided direct confrontation and tried to sandbag the nominee by a late allegation of sexual assault from 30 years before.  They gambled that whipping up post-Weinstein militant-feminist support would induce the president to say something outrageous that would split his party and drench him in another momentary shower of confected outrage, such as during the partial migration ban, the Charlottesville imputations of softness toward Nazis and the Klan, the Helsinki comments, and the detention of abandoned minors of illegal immigrants at the southern borders.  This would be the biggest such explosion yet and would leave the Supreme Court vacancy unfilled, assure control of the House for the Democrats, and possibly the Senate, and facilitate grid-lock and continued distractions about impeachment for another two years.

Vatican Cardinal:  Pope Francis Is 'Ice-Cold, Cunning Machiavellian'.  The German progressive weekly Der Spiegel has ended its love affair with the pope, declaring that the Church's sex abuse crisis is "increasingly about Pope Francis."  In a stunning cover article titled "The Silence of the Shepherds," the magazine blasts the pope for his unwillingness to answer direct questions regarding what he knew about the serial homosexual abuse by U.S. Cardinal Theodore McCarrick and when he knew it.

Hillary Clinton, Brett Kavanaugh and the Art of Trolling.  One of the dominant features of our time is that more and more people define themselves by what they hate.  For many partisans, what motivates them the most isn't support for their side's policies but their hatred of the other party.  Most Republicans didn't vote for Donald Trump; they voted against Hillary Clinton.  Most Democrats didn't vote for Clinton; they voted against Trump.  This dynamic doesn't just apply to presidential candidates.  It saturates both parties and both sides of the culture war, and it even distorts how we process basic facts.  The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences just came out with a report on how people will misinterpret objective data — in this case on climate change — if there's any hint that the data came from a Republican or Democratic source.  The moment Democrats saw a Republican logo, the ability to interpret a chart went out the window for many of them, and vice versa.

Video of Americans yutes talking about their problems should kill off any hope you have left.  Here's the background — President Trump said during a speech that now is the best time to be a young person in America, because of his presidency.  OK, kind of a spurious claim, but let's run with it.  So, the BBC goes out and talks to American yutes and asks them if they feel fortunate.  [Video clip]  It's unbelievable the level of ignorance you have to operate under to believe that the problems of young people are worse than ever before.

I Really Don't Feel Like Submitting To Socialist Tyranny.  Do You?  Allow me to unleash that which leftist nincompoops fear the most, besides gainful employment and their mom walking into their room at night unannounced while they are interacting with their computer/girlfriend.  Math.  Let's take the richest man ever was, Jeff Bezos.  He's got a net worth of at least $150 billion.  It not in actual dollars, though, unless he has the world's biggest mattress.  It's mostly in Amazon stock.  We'll just leave aside the inconvenient issue of what would happen to Amazon's stock value if it were "seized" and nationalized and just assume he's got a big pit full of dollar bills.  We take all that and split it among the 330 million Americans and everyone gets... $454.55.  Congrats.  Everyone gets one payment on their 2015 Toyota Camry.

When funerals become politics.  Sixteen years ago, on the eve of the 2002 midterm elections, and at a time when the United States was beginning to divide over the Afghanistan intervention and a looming Iraq war, Sen. Paul Wellstone, Minnesota Democrat, tragically died in a plane accident.  Mr. Wellstone's Minnesota funeral was meant to be a commemoration of a life of public servant well lived.  But the funeral service was soon hijacked by partisan speakers and ended up a loud and often grating political pep rally.  The message to mourners of all beliefs and persuasions was to translate their grief into votes for progressive candidates like Mr. Wellstone.  Popular discontent over news of the politicalized funeral may well have explained why, two weeks later, the in-power Republicans actually picked up seats in George W. Bush's first midterm election.

Trump and His Enemies.  The United States is now like Egypt, in that the armed forces are the only respected institution left standing.  A narrow majority disapprove of the president, and steadily larger majorities are doubtful of the judiciary, despise the Congress, loathe the academy, and detest the national media.  In a democracy, somebody will pay for this, and it is unlikely to be Donald John Trump, the principal accuser of the others.

Kavanaugh confirmation chaos offers a preview of what life would be like if Dems ran the government.  Judge Brett Kavanaugh's confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee on his nomination to the Supreme Court was set for its second day Wednesday [9/5/2018], after the unhinged left was on full display on the opening day Tuesday.  Partisan rancor reigned as outbursts, interruptions, protests, and juvenile political stunts broke out when opponents of the nomination attempted to highjack the day's proceedings.  Each Trump-hating Democrat on the committee took his or her turn flaunting the left's radical anti-freedom agenda, as the American people got a glimpse of what life would look like if Democrats were entrusted with control of government.

Leading U.S. Exorcist:  Catholic Church Sex Abuse Scandal Is Demonic, Likely to Get Worse.  In a recent interview, a world-renowned exorcist said the sex abuse scandal currently rocking the Catholic Church is demonic in nature and likely to get worse before it gets better.  "We are in for a long storm," said Father Gary Thomas, the exorcist for the Diocese of San Jose, California.  Fr. Thomas' training in Rome was the subject of the 2010 book The Rite:  The Making of a Modern Exorcist by Matt Baglio.  The book was made into a movie starring Anthony Hopkins in 2011.  "It's only going to get worse," Father Gary Thomas told the National Catholic Register's Patti Armstrong.  "But as bad as it is, it has to come out.  It is unacceptable."

The Audacity of Obama.  Few things could be more embarrassing than giving Barack Obama a prize for "ethics in government," as the University of Illinois did on Friday [9/7/2018]. [...] The media has made a great deal of Donald Trump's personal moral failings and fabrications.  The funny thing is, his exaggerations and braggadocio don't affect our lives.  But when Barack Obama told us that "if you like your health care plan, you can keep it," knowing full well that this was untrue, he defrauded every American.  And when he and his staff knowingly misinformed the media about the nature of the Iran Deal, he made every American (and every Middle Easterner) less safe. [...] And now that Donald Trump has waved that wand, sparking the economy, renegotiating trade deals, bring America to the point that — for the first time in history — the Department of Labor reported more jobs available than people looking for work.  Obama wants you to believe it was all his doing.

Journalists Celebrate Bob Woodward's Trump-Bashing Book After Trashing His Reputation For Years.  The mainstream press is rushing to defend Bob Woodward after President Trump attacked him over his new book.  That's funny, because journalists themselves had been saying far worse things about Woodward for more than a decade.

Catholic clergy in the news:
The Catholic Scandal Is More About Power Than About Sex.  A sociopathic cardinal and kingmaker caught retrospectively with his pants down is big news.  That the pope knew and covered for him is even bigger.  So the torrent of coverage is inescapable.  You have already read the sorry details about "Uncle Ted," his beach house sleepovers with seminarians, the cuddling and groping, all while Theodore McCarrick moved up the clerical ladder, reaping power and influence.  Then appeared Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò of Kosovo, former apostolic nuncio in Washington D.C., to finger a bevy of hierarchs in color-coded zucchettos who protected and advanced him.  Worse, he stated that Pope Francis had been aware of McCarrick's sexual history.  The pope who should have cashiered a serial predator made him a trusted advisor instead.  It is a blockbuster story.  But where does it lead?

The Scandal of Left-Wing Journalists Covering a Left-Wing Pope.  Last year, my wife and I visited Italy for the first time.  In Rome, we arranged for a guide to take us through the Vatican.  I envisioned an elderly gentleman, but our guide turned out to be an attractive young woman who, I soon decided, was a practicing Catholic.  At one point, she asked me guardedly what I thought of Pope Francis.  I'm not a Catholic, I said, so it's probably none of my business.  But I don't like him.  He seems to care more about left-wing politics than about Christianity.  When it comes to politics and economics, he is ignorant; he should stick to theology.  She discreetly kept silent, but I was pretty sure she agreed.

The Catholic Church sex abuse scandal.  It is not the first time such allegations have been made, but it may be the first time the allegations have been so exhaustively detailed, including the naming of priests and their alleged victims.  In Ireland, where Pope Francis visited last week and issued another apology (but took no responsibility) for un-priestly behavior, more stories surfaced detailing what happened to unwed mothers and their babies seven decades ago in a home created for girls and women who became pregnant out of wedlock.  The girls and women were abused, their babies either buried in the home's yard, or forcibly taken from them to be adopted, all this from a church that claims to be "pro-life."

Two Funerals and a Missing Cardinal.  Pope Francis was under attack for failing to act on countless documented cases of sex abuse within the Catholic Church.  The Vatican's ex-ambassador to Washington, Archbishop Carlo Viganò, fired the first salvo, detailing the misconduct of Archbishop Theodore McCarrick and Cardinal Donald Wuerl and calling on the pope to resign.  Ricochet had the best wrap-up of the crisis in the church and the Lavender Mafia flourishing under Pope Francis. [...] There are calls for Cardinal Wuerl to resign and he appears to have gone missing, with rumors that he was spirited out of the country to avoid prosecution.  Certainly all this turmoil in our justice system and the Church is unsettling.  But it's a useful reminder that in all hierarchies, sooner or later, the mission of the organization becomes the protection of the hierarchy, not the stated mission, and every now and then, a thorough housecleaning is in order.

They Destroy Everything They Touch.  The Pope has a bigger agenda," said Cardinal Blase Cupich, the Archbishop of Chicago, in an interview about bombshell allegations about sexual abuse by Catholic clergy.  "He's got to get on with other things of talking about the environment and protecting migrants and carrying on the work of the church.  We're not going to go down a rabbit hole on this."  And in that quote, which Cupich has protested was taken out of context (it wasn't), Cupich showed a sad reality, which is that the Catholic Church is the latest in a long line of exceptional institutions of Western civilization brought into deep decline by the infiltration of the cultural Marxist/postmodern Left.  The "rabbit hole" Cupich refers to is a testimony released Saturday by Archbishop Carlo Viganò, a distinguished Vatican veteran who had served as the papal nuncio, or ambassador, to the United States, which included a scathing critique of Pope Francis.

The Coming Global Middle-Class Majority:  Thank Capitalism, Not Socialism, For The Boom.  Capitalism has failed.  Socialism is ascendant.  That's a common message we get from the media these days.  Which is funny, because capitalism in the last few decades has had the most revolutionary impact on improving human lives in history.

Is the Pope a Catholic?  No one can have much to add to NRO's coverage of the crisis in the Catholic Church.  Michael Brendan Dougherty, Kathryn Lopez, and other colleagues have covered all the shocking events fully and with a kind of angry or hurt conscientiousness: the nature and extent of the sexual abuse; the quiet shuttling of pedophile priests from one parish to another; the legalistic bullying and manipulation of victims and their families; the placing of the Church's political and financial interests above justice and charity; the fact that bishops showed greater concern, even tenderness, towards clerical abusers than towards those they abused; and the repeated assurances that these abuses were being corrected when in fact they were being concealed and smoothed over.  These revelations have been deeply disturbing, and anyone predicting them a few years ago would have been dismissed — as indeed some critics of the bishops were dismissed — as dealing in fantasies of sexual perversion and blasphemy.  Despite the sensational nature of the revelations, however, we all had the eerie sense that there might be worse to come.

How The Pederasty Cover-Up Will Make Civil War Within The Catholic Church.  Sixteen years ago, reporters at The Boston Globe conducted an extensive investigation of the sexual abuse of minors by priests in the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston.  Not long thereafter, reporters elsewhere detailed similar abuse in places like Los Angeles, Chicago, New Orleans, Philadelphia, and the like.  The word used in the press to describe what had been going on was pedophilia, which is a misnomer deliberately employed to cover up what journalists then considered and still consider now an inconvenient aspect of the truth.

The sneering contempt of Pope Francis.  On Saturday night [8/25/2018] a document with the stark heading "Testimony" appeared online.  In this dossier Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, the former papal nuncio to the United States, accused the pope of reversing sanctions imposed upon the disgraced Cardinal Theodore McCarrick by Pope Benedict XVI.  He also alleged, among other things, that various curial insiders attempted to hamper Benedict's own internal investigation of McCarrick, that under Francis the cardinal served as a kingmaker who was responsible for the appointments of various eminent bishops who are close allies of the pope, and that all of this was quid pro quo for McCarrick's quiet masterminding of Francis' own election.  Viganò ended by calling upon the pope to resign.  It is almost impossible to the overstate the significance of this letter.  If Viganò is lying, he is guilty of one of the greatest slanders in the history of the Church.  If he is telling the truth, the Eternal City is mired in filth unseen since the days of the Borgias, and Francis is among the worst wretches who has ever besmirched the Chair of Peter.

Should the Pope Resign?  Many years ago in the early 1980s I was drawn ever so transiently into the bureaucratic intricacies of the Roman Catholic Church in America.  There was a saintly priest at Indiana University, Fr. James Higgins, who was driven from the university's Newman Center to a parish some 20 miles away from campus.  The archbishop of Indianapolis replaced him by two utter lightweights.  Their homilies had nothing to do with Catholic doctrine and much to do with their Yoga classes, interpersonal relationships of an odd sort, and, in one instance, the thrill of approaching a cliff and questioning whether to jump or not.  I looked over at my young children and decided I would drive 40 miles every Sunday rather than wait for the idiot to jump.  The more I looked into the plight of Fr. Higgins the more I discovered the early glimmerings of the full-blown crisis that confronts the Church today.  The sex scandal and its decades-long cover-up now confronting the Church is the most serious crisis that the Church has faced since the Protestant eruption of centuries ago.  The boys who took over from Fr. Higgins were planted on campus by a corpulent, luxury-loving archbishop, whose interests were worldly rather than spiritual and, incidentally, not very sophisticated.

Why Are We in Media Hell?  [Scroll down]  So, for instance, Senator John McCain dies.  For the record, the man was a heroic patriot with whom I often disagreed. [...] Either pay tribute, say Rest in Peace, or keep your mouth shut.  Nothing else is required.  And this is how we all behave — for about five minutes.  By the sixth minute, however, the reactions on the news channels and social networks have turned predictably vicious.  Some can't get out of their own heads long enough to silence their political snarling.  Others use their tributes to McCain to make nasty comparisons to the living.  Still others start attacking the way some paid their respects.

Prayers for the souls of hundreds of thousands of children that died because of McCain.  The Roman Catholic religion, and the Church, are fronts for the world's biggest business empire, a multinational at least 1500 years older than the next one, Holland's VOC which existed maybe 100 years.  It has played power politics for longer than anyone else, all over the world.  Its real estate portfolio alone is worth more than many a country.  For that matter, it effectively owns many a country.  There would have to be a huge outcry over the child abuse before there could ever be an investigation.  Multiple popes have promised exactly such investigations, and nothing has happened.  It would upset the business model too much.  And most faithful still believe their priests are decent men, anyway.  Yes, there's that word again, 'decent'.  If a priest can no longer be maintained in a specific church because he's been too obvious, too perverted and too greedy, he simply gets transferred to another parish.  They've been doing this for 1,500 years, they got it down.  And when things heat up, they beg god for forgiveness.  While the Church gets ever richer.

The Catholic Church is beyond redemption.  The new round of revelations involves pornographic episodes of sexual abuse in six Pennsylvania dioceses.  (The situation in Philadelphia, the state's largest diocese, was separately documented in a 2005 grand-jury report.)  On top of that, the leading figure from that 2002 convention in Dallas, the former cardinal Theodore McCarrick, is accused of sexually assaulting two children in addition to carrying on a series of exploitative sexual relationships with adult seminarians — relationships that had been an open secret among his colleagues.  And just last week The [New York] Post revealed that the Archdiocese of New York has paid out close to $60 million to sex-abuse victims in the last two years.  The rot is not exclusive to the United States.

The Unmasking of The Weekly Standard.  Barack Obama really owes Bill Kristol — big time.  First, had Kristol and his fellow neoconservatives not pushed for a deadly, prolonged war in Iraq after September 11, there would be no President Obama. [...] Second, Kristol's magazine, The Weekly Standard, just gave political cover to Obama's most unforgivable scandal:  The weaponization of our law enforcement and intelligence apparatus to target Donald Trump's presidential campaign and violate the constitutional rights of private U.S. citizens.

It's Not Just CIA's Brennan:  No Former Spy Should Have Access To Nation's Secrets.  Maybe former CIA Director John Brennan's loss of his security clearance and subsequent public meltdown is doing us all a favor.  Increasingly, many wonder:  Why should anyone have access to U.S. state secrets when they leave government?

Incrementalism:
List of Qualified Conditions for Medical Marijuana Use in Minnesota Grows.  Minnesota residents with autism or obstructive sleep apnea can now qualify for the state's medical marijuana program.  Those additions are effective Wednesday [8/1/2018], marking the latest expansion of the program that launched in 2015.  Minnesota lawmakers passed one of the nation's most restrictive medical marijuana laws in 2014, banning the plant form and restricting its use to patients with just a handful of serious conditions.  Patients with intractable pain were added to the fold in 2016.  The state allowed residents suffering post-traumatic stress disorder to buy the medication starting last summer.

The Editor says...
Next, they'l be adding those who have been triggered and victimized by microaggressions, the poor folks who have been addressed by the wrong pronoun, and the unfortunate fellow with no sound from his left stereo speaker.  They all need the healing power of medical marijuana!  What a sad generation of helpless, spineless, godless, lost people.

How Support For Socialism Arises From Ingratitude.  The free market took off at about the time the American experiment in liberty got going.  Before that time, life for virtually everyone was like a bad dream they could not wake up from.  People lived tired, dirty, hungry, downtrodden, and at the mercy of their circumstances.  You don't have to trace very far back in your family line to reach a time when your own people would have found the ease, affluence, and expansiveness of the life you lead totally astonishing.  Would they also be astonished by your lack of gratitude for what the free market has given you?  Or would they find you celebrating the free market and the gifts it provides?

And They Wonder Why We're Angry.  When the interpreters regained control of the House in 2006 — much as they seek it now — they immediately deregulated the GSEs, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, under the guidance of House leader Barney Frank.  The lack of oversight over these massive federal government loan operators caused the massive economic collapse robbing the people of more than six trillion dollars in home values.  Home values in Washington, D.C. and surrounding areas did not drop.  To this day, the suburbs of D.C. remain among the ten wealthiest counties in America.  There was no great recession in Washington, D.C.  The housing crisis and recession were strapped by the interpreters to the political corpse of President Bush, and the super-populist interpreter President Barack Obama was ushered into power.  Attempts to criticize or limit his political actions were regularly interpreted as racist.

Pope Francis collectivizes the guilt.  I am sure the holy father means well, and I am sure he is doing the best he can with his limited socialist background.  But his letter to the faithful on the massive Church scandal out of Pennsylvania alone leaves a lot to be desired.  The pope rightly condemned the abuses by priests of minors and seminarians, criticized the bishops who covered it up, and condemned the culture of "clericalism" — that weird belief among some clerics that they can do anything they like and get away with it, simply because they are clerics entrusted with powers from God. [...] But then his socialist orientation got the better of him.  He made it a matter not of individual guilt, but of collective guilt, societal guilt, something we all are part of and must atone for.  This is a big tenet of liberation theology and similar lines of lefty thought.  Society is guilty.

The Catholic Church's Homosexual Problem.  According to Cardinal Raymond Burke, "It was clear after the studies following the 2002 sexual abuse crisis that most of the acts of abuse were in fact homosexual acts committed with adolescent young men.  There was a studied attempt to either overlook or to deny this.  Now it seems clear in light of these recent terrible scandals that indeed there is a homosexual culture, not only among the clergy but even within the hierarchy, which needs to be purified at the root.  It is of course a tendency that is disordered."  If you're surprised to hear this candid admission, you're not alone.  As Cardinal Burke observed, "There was a studied attempt to either overlook or to deny this."  Yes, it was fine to talk about Catholicism's problem with pedophilia.  It was fine to discuss sexual scandals in broad terms.  But it was basically forbidden to connect them directly to homosexuality.

An Open Letter to the Catholic Bishops.  Last week, a Pennsylvania grand jury reported that several hundred Catholics priests might be predators.  The Catholic Church is losing the moral high ground by failing to recognize and report on these offenders.  Individuals who commit crimes are not real priests; they are criminals who have no place in the Catholic Church.  If proven guilty, they must face criminal justice.  These issues could have been resolved in 2002, when the church appointed a lay-independent commission.  The commission's chairman was Governor Frank Keating (former Oklahoma governor), a highly competent executive and former FBI agent.  He was the right man at the right time to expose wrongdoers and refer them to the prosecutors.  Keating began with an open mind, but quickly realized that some of the accusations were true and that the bishops covered them up.  It also became evident that the bishops did not have the moral courage to permanently resolve the crisis and expose the predators.

Why Hasn't Pope Francis Removed Cardinal Donald Wuerl?  On Tuesday afternoon [8/14/2018], the Pennsylvania attorney general released a shocking and sickening grand jury report documenting hundreds of cases of sexual crimes against minors committed by Catholic clergy in six Catholic dioceses over the course of 70 years, mostly before the sex-abuse crisis rocked the Boston archdiocese in 2002.  We've read enough of the report that we cannot fathom why Cardinal Wuerl, who served as bishop of Pittsburgh from 1988 to 2006, has not resigned or been removed by Pope Francis yet.

The Devil Resides In The Vatican.  Before his death in 2016, the Vatican's chief exorcist for over a quarter century, Father Gabriele Amorth, observed, "The Devil resides in the Vatican, and you can see the consequences."  We are seeing the consequences now from Pennsylvania and Washington, D.C. all the way up to the College of Cardinals.  Fr.  Amorth described "cardinals who do not believe in Jesus and bishops who are linked to the demon."  The Pennsylvania grand jury report relates one instance of ritualized, satanic abuse of a young boy by four priests.  There is some ambiguity regarding the precise nature of the incident owing to page-long redactions in the report. [...] Fortunately most of the 301 priests listed in the Pennsylvania Grand Jury report are now dead, and many have been dead for decades.

Vatican Cardinal: 'Homosexual Culture' In The Church Part Of Abuse Crisis.  Cardinal Raymond Burke has called upon Pope Francis to clean up what he calls a "homosexual culture" in the Church that has contributed to the sex abuse crisis.  As noted by Matt Walsh and other Catholic commentators, roughly 80% of the sexual abuse victims in the Catholic Church were male, many of them being postpubescent.  Recently-ousted Cardinal Theodore McCarrick had sexual relations with both adult males and minors; far too often, he preyed on male seminarians entering the priesthood.

In the face of horror, the Catholic Church is worried about PR.  They read like scenes from a Marquis de Sade novel. [...] Yet the blockbuster grand-jury report on abuse in six Catholic dioceses in Pennsylvania is credible, deeply researched and all too real.  The findings — that 300 predatory priests victimized 1,000 children over seven decades — mark a crisis of still-unfathomable scale in the American church.  It involves clerical fathers who gravely sinned against their children and against the Father in heaven, and others who averted their eyes or made excuses or covered up the sins.  The most painful aspect of all this is the blasé response of many American hierarchs and especially those, like Washington Archbishop Donald Cardinal Wuerl, who are implicated in the report.  Wuerl and his colleagues have treated the report as a PR headache rather than a moral and spiritual wake-up call.

The Shame of the Church.  The release yesterday [8/14/2018] of a state grand jury report on the widespread sexual abuse of minors by priests in six Pennsylvania dioceses only serves to confirm — as if further confirmation were necessary — that there is a deep moral rot in the heart of the Roman Catholic Church, and one that will not be easily eradicated.

The Catholic Church's Rotherham.  'We are deeply saddened."  So begin the many perfunctory statements of many Catholic bishops today in response to the Pennsylvania grand-jury report detailing how priests in that state abused children and how bishops shuffled these priests around. [...] What exactly are they sorry about?  Soon the bishops are telling us about a chance for "renewal" after the promised implementation of new policies.  They tell us about "overcoming challenges" in the Church.  Or they use the phrase "a few bad apples."  I find it impossible not to notice that these expressions of sorrow never arrive before the courts, the state attorneys general, or the local press arrive on the scene.  That fact gives you another idea about what causes the bishops' sorrow.

Open Offices are the Communism Of Seating Arrangements.  It starts noble enough.  You're plugging along, working on a presentation or analyzing some numbers, then someone pops in with a question about a project that involves both of you.  Instantly, you're out of the zone and stuck trying to get back in it.  Or maybe your coworker is on a roll, performing a complicated task requiring a number of steps that must be performed in a specific order, and you pop over to his desk to discuss a project and pull him out of his work.  Either way, someone is getting hit, and not with the rhythm.  No one argues that the cube farm is the ideal working arrangement.  It does afford some privacy, with its small fences, but it also makes it easy for you to interrupt your coworkers and for them to do the same to you.

Conservative Confusion About Who and What We're Fighting.  [T]hink about who will take over the leadership of crucial committees if the Democrats flip enough seats to regain a majority in the House:  Adam Schiff will probably become the Chairman of the Intelligence Committee — Adam Schiff!  Before we go any further, think about that.  This buffoon is still braying about Russian collusion even as he covers up the crimes of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.  Schiff's first order of business as Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee will be to halt any ongoing investigations into Obama administration abuses of power — particularly the illegal deployment of the FBI, CIA, and IRS against domestic political opponents of the Democratic Party, including the Trump presidential campaign.  Schiff will likewise close down all inquiries into Mrs. Clinton's copious catalogue of crimes.

Kremlin Eyes U.S. Power Grid as Pols Take a Powder.  In the last two weeks, the Department of Homeland Security held four briefings, including one in New York City on July 31, warning that Russian hackers are already practicing how to throw the switch and cause a blackout in the United States.  We'd have no lights, no gas at the pump, no life support in hospitals, no mass transit, no food supply.  Yet nearly all Washington pols are ignoring the danger.

The Profound Impact of the Superficial.  Stephen Josephson, a therapist who specializes in "First World problems," told me that when he asks kids what they want to be when they grow up, the most common response is "rich and famous."  He added that those kids are at risk of depression.  "Everyone wants to be rich," said the American billionaire David Siegel, who sells "luxury" timeshare units on credit to middle- and working-class customers.  "If they can't be rich, they want to feel rich — and, if they don't want to feel rich, then they're probably dead." [...] He followed it up with the surprising insight that "money doesn't make you happy.  It just makes you unhappy in a good section of town."  If everybody knows that money doesn't bring us happiness, why do we devote our lives to trying to get more of it?

A pernicious example of anti-American propaganda:
Time to retire the Blue Angels.  Seafair has always brought a festive mood to the Puget Sound region.  No one can deny the excitement of the Navy's Blue Angels roaring overhead.  Yet I find their annual visit in poor taste.  Given the many worthwhile activities taking place during Seafair, I wonder why it is necessary to use the Blue Angels as part of the celebration.  The Blue Angels certainly provide entertainment; but do we really need this type of diversion?

The Editor says...
The article above apparently appeared in the Seattle newspaper, since it was on their web site.  It is not surprising that someone in Seattle would be opposed to an exhibition of America's military strength, because Seattle, from what I hear, is full of America-hating hippies.  The Blue Angels air show is a recruiting tool for the Navy.  It inspires young men and women to consider military aviation as a goal — and it's not a career that just anyone can enter.  Moreover, there is no wasted talent:  everyone involved in the Blue Angels air show is combat ready, and combat-ready pilots have to practice sometime, so they might as well let everybody watch.  Let the Communist spies get a good look at them, too, and imagine what it would be like to be under attack by guys like the Blue Angels.  The whimpering Seattle hippies probably don't appreciate the noise generated by fighter jets, but I can assure you that's the sound of freedom.

Are we giving fighter jets to a friend or foe?  Is Turkey still a friend to keep close, or an enemy to keep closer?  On Wednesday [8/1/2018], the Treasury Department sanctioned Turkish officials over the country's detention of an American pastor, Andrew Brunson, on flimsy charges.  It's the latest incident in deteriorating relations with the NATO ally, complicating matters far beyond the captive pastor.  When Recep Tayyip Erdogan was still considered a model ally, Turkey became a partner in a 2001 program launched by Lockheed Martin to manufacture the state-of-the-art F-35 fighter jet, designed to consolidate the West's air superiority in battle.

Allen West: 'Pursuit of Happiness' Means Equal Opportunity, Not Equal Outcomes.  Retired Army Lt. Col. Allen West, a senior fellow with the Media Research Center and a former congressman, told the National Conservative Student Conference Tuesday [7/31/2018] that they will not be successful in life if they whine, insulate themselves from the reality of the world, and fear taking risks.  He also stressed that the "pursuit of happiness" in the Constitution means equality of opportunity, not equal outcomes, the latter an ideology pushed by socialists, such as New York Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Either John Podesta was quite a Russian dupe, or ...  Was John Podesta a Russian dupe?  At a minimum, he was a Russian dupe, based on information from a long, interesting article today titled "How Silicon Valley Became a Den of Spies," from Politico magazine.  Politico points out that the very firm that Podesta was involved with, Rusnano USA (via its Joule subsidiary), is the likely new vehicle for Russian spying these days, effectively replacing the now shuttered Russian consulate in San Francisco. [...] Rusnano, eh?  That's the one former Clinton campaign chief John Podesta was involved with, though Politico doesn't mention it.

Milking the System.  Why should children under the age of 5 in a country like Britain be in receipt of free milk, mostly through the intermediary of their mothers?  Milk, after all, is one of the cheapest of commodities, so cheap that its producers are constantly complaining of its price, and the problem seems to be that of overproduction rather than of scarcity. [...] Do people who mostly possess televisions whose screens are the size of many found in art cinemas really need to be given free milk?  And if they do, because they have expended whatever money they have on subscriptions to cable television, what does this say about their sense of priorities, and the culture in which they developed their priorities?  Moreover, one might have hoped that women who really could not afford the cost of milk (than which practically nothing is cheaper) would hold off having babies until they could scrape together the price of a pint or two.

NATO's Challenge Is Germany, Not America.  Does NATO still protect the West?  Does it prevent destructive European feuding?  Does it ensure the postwar global order of free trade, commerce, travel, and communications?  And is NATO — or the United States and its leadership of NATO — the real reason there has not been a World War III or a return to global tribalism and chaos?  NATO's post-Cold War expansion to 29 nations and to the border of Russia meant the alliance became more expansive at the very time the old existential Soviet threat disappeared.  Larger membership tended to weaken common ties, even as common dangers disappeared.  The result was that the idea of NATO membership became more important to the countries that are part of it than the reality and responsibility of actual military readiness.

America's Delusional Self-Destructiveness.  [Scroll down]  So, to our perpetually hysterical media, Trump is now a traitor who is siding with Russia over his own country.  Yet the childish reactions have obscured a number of important facts.  To begin with, as Pat Buchanan, Daniel McCarthy, and others have noted, our corrupt intelligence agencies have been inept and averse to America's interests for decades.  As such, they are hardly more credible than Russia, which, of course, has been meddling in our presidential elections for a long time.  Most important, Trump is trying to avoid a second Cold War with a formidable nuclear power.  That is a goal that, to say the least, scolding the proud Putin on the world stage would have done nothing to facilitate.

12 Advances of Civilization by Flawed White American Males.  Since 1965, 75 million people have immigrated to the U.S. — the largest migration of human life the world has ever seen, despite the fact that far too many of those immigrants have agreed to take part in fostering the left's slander against the flawed American white males who, in the first place, generously let them in.

The Left's Trump-Putin Meltdown.  In a press conference with Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump refused to validate the findings of a deeply corrupt and compromised intelligence community that has been working assiduously since before he was even elected to discredit and destroy him, and now the sky is falling. [...] It is also interesting that the people who are crying "treason" the loudest today never uttered the word when Barack Obama shipped billions of dollars in cash in the dark of night to the Islamic Republic of Iran, even as the mullahs were chanting "Death to America."  Treason is defined in American law as giving aid and comfort to the enemy.  Wouldn't billions given to a terror-supporting rogue state be a great deal more aid and comfort to an enemy than some skepticism about our manifestly corrupt intelligence agencies at a press conference?

Nolte: Watch the Oh-So 'Sacred' Intelligence Community Lie, Lie, Lie.  In 2002, in the lead up to the disastrous Iraq War, we were told to salute and buy 100 percent into the Intelligence Community's (IC) assessment that of course Iraq was in possession of weapons of mass destruction, and of course those weapons would end up in the hands of terrorists.  Therefore, we had no choice but to launch a pre-emptive war, and anyone who disagreed, or who even expressed skepticism, was deemed a traitor, suspect, and un-American.  And to my everlasting shame I was one of those shaming others.  But at least I learned.  The establishment media, Democrats, and the neocon dead-enders in Never Trump are all desperate to return to 2002.  But this time it is worse, much worse, because this time we are supposed to salute and buy 100 percent into an IC assuring and reassuring us nuke-heavy Russia is destroying everything sacred about America.

Once Again, President Trump Is Magnificently Right — This Time About Russia.  President Trump offended the entire political spectrum with a tweet this morning blaming the U.S. for poor relations with Russia.  "Our relationship with Russia has NEVER been worse thanks to many years of U.S. foolishness and stupidity," the president said, and he is entirely correct.  By this I do not mean to say that Russia is a beneficent actor in world affairs or that President Putin is an admirable world leader.  Nonetheless, the president displayed both perspicacity and political courage when he pointed the finger at the United States for mismanaging the relationship with Russia. [...] I have no reason to doubt the allegations that a dozen Russian intelligence officers meddled in the U.S. elections of 2016, but this was equivalent of a fraternity prank compared to America's longstanding efforts to intervene in Russian politics.

A Ghastly and Tasteless Escalation of Tensions... With Ourselves.  Trump's intelligent conservative enemies among the commentators are now down to mere bile, like seasick passengers who have vomited out everything else.  The inevitable Carl Bernstein, who a few months ago was announcing a constitutional crisis because Trump's mental incompetence required the application of the 25th Amendment, is this week proclaiming the new constitutional crisis provoked by the president's treason.  This may all be another manifestation of the president's undoubted singular genius at provoking his enemies to uncontrollable outbursts of psychotic foolishness.  There are the usual comparisons with a kaleidoscope of horrible miscreants from Jim Jones to the ever-popular Adolf Hitler.  But it was all unwise, unnecessary, and debilitating.

Everyone Is Smart Except Trump.  [Scroll down]  Here's the thing:  Putin is a dictator.  He answers to no one.  He does whatever he wants.  If there arises an opponent, that guy dies.  Maybe the opponent gets poked with a poisoned umbrella.  Maybe he gets shot on the street.  Maybe the opponent is forced to watch Susan Rice interviews telling the world that Benghazi happened because of a YouTube video seen by nine derelicts in Berkeley and that Bowe Berghdal served with honor and distinction.  But, one way or another, the opponent dies.  Trump knows this about Putin.  And here is what that means: [...]

Do ordinary Americans take seriously the Left's Russia hysteria?  Trump Putin RussiaI'm so old I can remember when Teddy Kennedy, the revered lion of the Senate, during the height of the Cold War asked the Soviets to intervene in the 1984 presidential election.  I'm so old I can remember when Democrats constantly castigated conservatives for being paranoid about Soviet interference into world and American affairs.  I'm so old I can remember when Democrats and their fellow travelers brushed off stories about Soviet atrocities as mere Cold War propaganda.  I'm so old I can remember when we were told Communism is just another type of government and we should be more open to the Soviets and that the Cold War was a sorry relic of a fascist American past.

Why are greens silent over this ongoing ecological war?  Since the end of March, Hamas-spurred terrorists have flown hundreds of Molotov cocktails and improvised firebombs into Israel, setting aflame thousands of acres of farmland, forests and nature preserves.  The damage to Israeli agriculture is said to be in the millions, and a drop in tourism dollars compounds that.  The cost of fighting the fires, too, is enormous, not to mention the stress on locals.  But it's not just an economic hit.  Israel's Environmental Protection Ministry fears that particulate matter from the fires may boost cancer and vision problems as well as respiratory illness.  The world regularly shrugs at such Israeli suffering.  But what about the assault on Mother Nature?  The fires are destroying nature preserves, killing some animals and destroying the food supply for others.

Did Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders Save America?  Over the past 55 years, regardless of any Republican in the White House or in charge of Congress, no one has been able to halt the incessant spread of left-wing radicalism in the nation's institutions and culture as well as the exponential growth of government with its tentacles increasingly intertwined in the day-to-day lives of all Americans.  As long as the people remained largely disengaged the potential damage to society as a whole and to the financial health of the country was ignored by the vast majority of the population.  Since 2012 this indifference has begun to change as the reality of the nation's future and the motives and tactics of those in the American Left has come into focus. [...] What these permanent adolescents and their megalomaniacal leadership fail to understand is that they, due to their hubris, obliviousness and single-mindedness, are responsible for the circumstances that eventuated with Donald Trump as President and the Republicans in control of Congress.

How the United Kingdom Became a Police State.  This article will demonstrate how the United Kingdom has steadily become a police state over the past twenty years, weaponizing its institutions against the people and employing Orwellian techniques to stop the public from seeing the truth.  It will demonstrate, contrary to official narratives, that both overall levels of crime and violent crime have been increasing, not decreasing, as the size of the state in the UK has gotten bigger.  It will also expose how the Labour government under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown from 1997 to 2010, deliberately obscured real crime data with estimated crime rates based on survey data as opposed to the real numbers.  I will demonstrate that, contrary to popular opinion perpetuated by progressive myths, life was much safer in Britain during the era of classical laissez-faire from the 1850s to 1911.

Guilt by Inadvertent Association.  The propensity to condemn others, usually writers, for what we might call guilt by inadvertent association is a method of abuse or disparagement often used by those who are incapable of intelligent rebuttal.  It is a technique favored by the left and its legion of trolls, who like to point out that an author quoted in a conservative argument has dubious affiliations or, analogously, that the founder of a political organization is responsible for some of the suspicious characters who gravitate around his banner.

The Left Can't Come To Grips With The Loss Of Power.  Key Trump administration officials have been confronted at restaurants.  Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) urged protestors to hound Trump officials at restaurants, gas stations or department stores.  Progressive pundits and the liberal media almost daily think up new ways of characterizing President Trump as a Nazi, fascist, tyrant or buffoon.  Celebrities openly fantasize about doing harm to Trump.  What is behind the unprecedented furor?  Just as Barack Obama was not a centrist, neither is Trump.  Obama promised to fundamentally transform the United States.  Trump pledged to do the same and more — but in the exact opposite direction.  The Trump agenda enrages the left in much the same manner that Obamacare, the Obama tax hikes, Obama's liberal Supreme Court picks and the Iran nuclear deal goaded the right.  Yet the current progressive meltdown is about more than just political differences.  The outrage is mostly about power — or rather, the utter and unexpected loss of it.

Keep the Kids Away from 'Drag Tots' — This Cartoon Is Coming Soon.  A new show proves the need for parents to monitor carefully what programs their little ones are watching:  On June 28, a cartoon called "Drag Tots" is premiering on World of Wonder network, and it is exactly what the title conveys — a cartoon about baby drag queens.  Not only that, but these are baby drag queens with a message:  The president is bad.  "In the show's first trailer ... a voiceover warns that the world is 'on the brink of chaos' because of President Donald Trump and his controversial administration," notes The Hollywood Reporter.  "After a clip is shown of Trump touting his plan to build a wall between the U.S. and Mexico, the voiceover suggests a quick fix to all of today's political unrest:  'baby drag queens.'"

Ted Cruz for the Supreme Court.  The 5-4 SCOTUS decisions upholding the constitutionality of President Trump's travel ban and declaring the unconstitutionality of public sector unions extorting money from non-members to support political parties, candidates, and causes they oppose are two more benefits from President Trump's appointment of originalist Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court.  The retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy provides another opportunity to appoint another justice like the late Antonin Scalia, an originalist who believed that the words of the Constitution should be interpreted as written by the Founders in the context of the time in which they were written.  I put forward the name of Sen. Ted Cruz.

'Jurassic World' Is Dumb, Leftist Claptrap.  As in virtually every movie and television series made by Hollywood of late, it is quickly hammered home to the audience that white males, military figures and corporations are the true enemy of humanity.  Beyond that, the film has more holes in it than a pasta strainer and the filmmakers could not care less.  They are playing movie goers for chumps to be manipulated and exploited while insulting their intelligence.  The massive box office for the movie is proof that their craven calculations are working.

ACLU Won't Support Free Speech If It's Offensive.  The ACLU admits it doesn't support free speech as written in the Bill of Rights so maybe it's time to start calling them what they are — Leftists.  They were always hard-left but they use to believe in free speech.  Imagine a group calling itself a civil liberties union but they're wishy-washy on free speech.  This is what the hard-left does.  They support free speech to ensure their own survival but when they have enough power, they ditch it.

World Asteroid Day:  Will we defend our planet together or perish like the dinosaurs?  Saturday [6/30/2018] is Asteroid Day, an annual, global educational event aimed at learning more about the hazard that nearby asteroids pose to Earth and our civilization, and marshaling support for the search and deflection technologies we need to protect our planet.  Many thousands will gather around the world this weekend to hear the latest science on the asteroid hazard, and what we can do to prevent a future damaging impact.

The Editor says...
If you have the time to be concerned about issues like this, your life is too soft.  When was the last time someone was struck and killed by a meteorite?  Statistically, you are at greater risk from earthquakes, tornados or flooding.

Much Ado About Caring.  [P]ublic outrage on social media is the easiest and most risk-free way to prove to the world that you're a good person without actually having to help anyone. [...] If you're going to step up on a digital soapbox and complain about a situation without doing anything of substance to fix the situation, I will immediately suspect that you are more concerned with appearing to be good than actually doing anything good.

How to Go Out in Public as a Trump Supporter without Getting Beat Up or Denied Service.  It's obvious that Trump supporters are increasingly unwelcome in the public square.  Tomi Lahren can't go to brunch without getting assaulted, Milo can't drink at a bar without being chased out by vulgar swine chanting "Nazi scum," Sarah Sanders can't take her family to dinner, and Pam Bondi can't go to the movie theater without being harassed by screeching SJWs.  There's no doubt you're next, random Trump supporter. [...] If you really want to be left alone, then don a hijab or burka and no one will dare approach you for any reason.

Tyranny Has Finally Arrived in America.  Enough with the endless investigations that lead nowhere and leave the guilty unpunished.  Enough with absurdity of agencies investigating themselves in order to protect the institution they serve rather than the people.  We need to see indictments and trials to restore the foundations of our political order.  The president and his Attorney General need to give more support to the Congressional oversight committees trying to do their jobs of holding accountable the abusers of the public trust.

Venezuela's Future — and Ours.  Venezuela and North Korea could not be more dissimilar in terms of their respective cultures, peoples, and histories.  And yet they have arrived in approximately the same place:  at the terminus of F. A. Hayek's "Road to Serfdom."

Illegal Immigration, Internment Camps, and Useful Idiots.  The Bush family has a famously adversarial relationship with English.  It became clear this week that at least one of them is also illiterate where U.S. history and immigration policy are concerned.  This was demonstrated when former First Lady Laura Bush took to the pages of the Washington Post to denounce President Trump for enforcing a statute signed into law by her own husband, George W. Bush.  Even worse, she compared the HHS facilities where the children of illegal immigrants are briefly housed to the infamous internment camps where Democrat icon FDR imprisoned 110,000 American citizens of Japanese descent.  This comparison not only played into the hands of the very Democrats and partisan journalists who remorselessly savaged both her and her husband for eight solid years, it is wildly inaccurate.  Mrs. Bush clearly knows very little about the plight of children caught up in the illegal immigration crisis, and even less about the internment camps she so glibly evoked.  It's blindingly obvious that she has been suckered by the propaganda relentlessly pumped out by the "news" media, completely taken in by their lurid images of wailing children and "cruel" DHS officials.  Laura Bush has thus become just another useful idiot.

Democrats don't cry for U.S. citizens — or aborted babies.  [MSNBC's Rachel] Maddow, for instance, didn't have an on-air crying meltdown when Kate Steinle, an American citizen, was shot and killed by an illegal with previous deportations and a felony record who was back in-country, taking advantage of San Francisco's glorious sanctuary city sunshine.  She didn't publicly cry, either, when Omar Mateen, serving an Islamic terror master, shot up a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, killing 49 and injuring 53.  Did Petkanas go off on a "how dare you sir" rant about Barack Obama-era open-door border policies and lead-from-behind nationally risky foreign affairs diplomacy?  The same open borders and foreign affairs strategies that put U.S. citizens in harm's way?  Guess not.  Or, if you really want to speak to the plight of innocent lives — neither Maddow nor Petkanas nor anyone on the left cry rivers of tears for the 44.5 million babies the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate were aborted in this country between 1970 and 2014.  Ouch.  At least these kids on the border being ripped from their parents' sides, as the left would put it, had a chance at life.  Not so the aborted millions.

Forget Facebook, Google.  Here's what I worry about much, much more.  Today in China, if you email friends about books like Orwell's "Animal Farm" or Huxley's "Brave New World," your message will be blocked.  Even pictures of Winnie the Pooh were banned because someone said president Xi Jinping resembled the stuffed bear.  And now, another step, one subtler than just banning things:  the social credit score.  The government brags the system will "allow the trustworthy to roam everywhere under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step."  That's totalitarianism.

Melinda Gates [is] Wrong, Of Course — White Males [are the] Key to Innovation.  According Melinda Gates, the wife of the (white, male) Microsoft pioneer Bill Gates, only women and minorities can give us innovation.  Perhaps Mrs. Gates should talk to the psychologists who actually research these things.  Because their finding is that it is overwhelmingly high IQ — and therefore white — countries that are responsible for per capita innovation.  And it is specifically those high IQ, white countries whose populations have the highest levels of the male hormone testosterone.  We tend to assume that a country's scientific achievement is essentially a reflection of its average IQ.  Controlling for population size, smart countries produce the most science Nobel Laureates, the most important scientific breakthroughs, so it's the countries with the biggest brains that are the engines of civilization.  However, a recently published study, led by Dutch psychologist Prof. Dimitri Van der Linden has concluded it's not so simple.  Of course national IQ is important — but so are national average levels of testosterone.

A Baptist Reader Says The Election Of J. D. Greear Means The "Soros Wing" Has Captured The Southern Baptists.  Commenters call these people the "Soros wing" of the SBC because they all have ties to the open-borders, Soros-funded Evangelical Immigration Table.

Pope calls on oil execs to convert to clean fuels.  Pope Francis warned that climate change risked destroying humanity on Saturday [6/9/2018] and called on energy leaders to help the world to convert to clean fuels to avert catastrophe.  "Civilization requires energy but energy use must not destroy civilization," the pope told top oil company executives at the end of a two-day conference in the Vatican.  Climate change was a challenge of "epochal proportions", he said, adding that the world needed an energy mix that combated pollution, eliminated poverty and promoted social justice.

The Editor says...
Anyone who believes man-made climate change might "destroy civilization" is a person with no faith in God and no knowledge of the Bible.

What's Next for Conservatism:  Today's young Libertarians, who came of age as Ronald Reagan was readying history's dust bin for the Evil Empire, think the previous age consistently overrated communism's threat.  It didn't; and the youngsters should show more respect for the analytical ability and survivalist instincts of their freedom-loving forebears whose blood ran strong for so long — even as they should respect their forebears' desire to preserve a culture free from, and opposed to, radical social experimentation unmoored from the truths and traditions that sustained Western Civilization for centuries.

Let's not polish Saint Bobby Kennedy's halo yet.  Look, of course it's terrible that RFK was murdered at the age of 42, leaving behind all those kids and Ethel pregnant with the last of them.  But since his passing, there's been even more historical revisionism about Bobby than with almost any of the other liberal icons.  So, as the gushing from his fawning biographers like Comrade Chris Matthews of MSNBC begins, let's remember a few things about St. Bobby.  First of all, he was not going to be elected president in 1968.

'Roseanne' Canceled; Why Not 'The View'?  The "Roseanne" revival was abruptly canceled by ABC Tuesday following crude, racist tweets sent by show star Roseanne Barr about former Obama aide Valerie Jarrett.  And while there's absolutely no excuse for Barr's tweets, it's extremely hypocritical of ABC to continue airing "The View" given all the abhorrent things the co-hosts have said.  In February, Behar infamously and openly mocked the Christian faith of Vice President Mike Pence and millions of Americans when she proclaimed that the ability to hear messages from God is not a marker of faith, but "mental illness."  It took Behar weeks to apologize, and she only did so after constant public criticism and ridicule.

Roseanne and the High Cost of Embracing Craziness.  If Roseanne Barr is a poster child for anything, she's a poster child for cultural brokenness.  Consider, for a moment, the cascade of failures that brought us to today — a day when one of the most popular shows on television is canceled after its toxic star tweeted a racist insult of Valerie Jarrett.  First, ABC shouldn't have brought her back.  She was, quite obviously, one of the more toxic and troubled personalities in American public life.  This was a woman who, after all, trafficked in grotesque conspiracy theories, said that anyone who eats at Chick-fil-A "deserves to get the cancer that's sure to come," and defiled the National Anthem more thoroughly than a thousand kneeling football players.

Socialism's victory tour.  You know when you are living in a socialist country when there are no more pets, because they have been eaten.

Mr. Trump, end DOJ's campaign of secrecy — Declassify everything possible.  Democrats and their media allies are again shouting "constitutional crisis," this time claiming President Trump has waded too far into the Russia investigation.  The howls are a diversion from the actual crisis:  the Justice Department's unprecedented contempt for duly elected representatives, and the lasting harm it is doing to law enforcement and to the department's relationship with Congress.  The conceit of those claiming Mr. Trump has crossed some line in ordering the Justice Department to comply with oversight is that "investigators" are beyond question.  We are meant to take them at their word that they did everything appropriately.  Never mind that the revelations of warrants and spies and dirty dossiers and biased text messages already show otherwise.

Mr. Sessions, Your 'Extraordinary Circumstances' Are Here.  In March, Attorney General Sessions wrote to three Republican congressman, declining to appoint a special counsel in the matter of the FBI, CIA, Obama administration and... and... frankly, I don't know what to call it, since there is so much from the Clinton Foundation to the emails to the FISA court to who knows what.... because, the AG said, a special counsel necessitated "extraordinary circumstances."  I sympathized somewhat with Sessions at the time.  Special counsels do not have the best track records.  Often they are appointed for dubious politicized reasons.  In the Valerie Plame case, a special counsel put Scooter Libby in jail for outing the insignificant Plame as a CIA agent when she was already easily identified in Who's Who (not to mention that the never-indicted Richard Armitage, not Libby, did the initial public outing anyway).

How Low Can the ACLU Fall?  During recent testimony before the House Education and the Workforce Committee, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos said that "the issue of reporting undocumented students is a 'school decision' and 'local community decision,' adding that 'we have laws and we also are compassionate.'"  That is an accurate, well-balanced statement:  for better or worse, Americans do not have a legal duty to aid law enforcement.

It's time for Mueller to put up or call it quits.  The FBI opened Crossfire Hurricane, a counterintelligence investigation of the Trump campaign, on July 31, 2016.  Ten months later, Acting Attorney General Rod Rosenstein passed the counter-intelligence baton to special counsel Robert Mueller to continue the inquiry.  Thus, the question of whether there was "any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump" has dragged on for 22 months.  To quote former FBI director James Comey when defending the drafting of an exoneration of Hillary Clinton in May 2016, 11 months into her email investigation and before interviewing her, "If you've been investigating something for almost a year, and you don't have a general sense of where it's likely to end up, you should be fired because you're incompetent."  Thirteen Russian nationals and three Russian companies were charged with conspiracy and identity theft involving a Russian propaganda campaign.  Paul Manafort and Rick Gates were charged with financial crimes occurring years before Donald Trump even announced his presidential candidacy.

Mueller caught in a trap of his own making.  Special counsel Robert Mueller looks likely to face a huge humiliation in court and a massive public relations disaster.  And it couldn't happen to a more deserving guy.  Unless a Trump-appointed judge bails him out and grants an exception to federal law, trampling on the rights of the defendants he indicted, Mueller will have to go into court to try a case he doesn't seem to think he can win — or else face the humiliation of dropping the charges he brought against 13 Russian entities (some of which did not exist at the time of the alleged crime) with great fanfare. [...] I am no lawyer, but the problem with this excuse is obvious to even me:  if the case is so complex that extra time is required, then why was the indictment brought in the first place?  Why did the special counsel rush the indictment when he now confesses that it was too complex to go to trial?

Trump White House's feud with John McCain is an ugly scrimmage in the war against political correctness.  Kelly Sadler, a White House communications aide, made a crack recently during an internal meeting about how Sen. John McCain's opposition to President Donald Trump's CIA pick, Gina Haspel, didn't matter because McCain is "dying anyway."  Once the remark was leaked, presumably by someone who doesn't much like Sadler, the media — mainstream and social — exploded as if the stock market had crashed.  What a horrifying thing to say!  Proof of the rottenness at the core of the Trump White House!  Off with her head — that is, let's get her fired and ruin her career!  Of course, it was not at all a nice thing to say.  And yes, Trump says many, many not nice things.  And it could be that his rudeness and crudeness trickles down to the staff.  But Trump's directness has been a big part of his appeal, even to evangelicals and other "deplorables" accused of hypocrisy and obtuseness for backing a profane man.  They were tired of being told what they are allowed to say and think.  And nobody is going to tell Trump what to say.

Pass 'right to try' to advance my child's life — tomorrow, it could be yours.  Lawmakers have another chance to make things right by passing "Right to Try" legislation that will give terminally ill patients one more shot at life.  Legislation making experimental drugs and treatments accessible for individuals with life-threatening conditions is set to be voted on Tuesday by the House of Representatives.  Thanks to Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., a similar bill passed the Senate last August and is a lead priority for President Trump.  Until now it has been in political limbo due to a lack of bipartisan backing.  As the mother of a child with cystic fibrosis, a life-threatening illness, I want options when it comes to experimental treatments that could prolong my daughter's life.  But as an American and taxpaying voter, I also want to see Congress working to take morally correct action for the most vulnerable and sickest among us.

Goodbye, Netflix.  After about thirteen years of being a loyal customer of Netflix, the time has come for me to say goodbye. [...] Given that I'm a conservative, one might be inclined to believe that my choice to leave Netflix is predicated upon the company's most recent decision to partner with Barack and Michelle Obama's new company, called "Higher Ground Productions," to produce loads of new content.  In a way, I guess that's correct.  But this choice by Netflix has not alone led me to this decision.  Rather, this was the straw that finally broke the camel's back — the latest in a series of indicators that the network has become little more than a propaganda arm for radical left-wing political actors.

A Royally Useless Spectacle.  The man who is sixth in line to be king of Great Britain is getting married today, and America has lost its mind.  What does it mean to be sixth in the line of royal succession to an office that depends solely and exclusively on who your father is?  It means that five family members have to die before you get the real goodies.  Granted, those goodies are amazing.  Who wouldn't want to live in a thousand-year-old castle (too bad it's in Scotland) or have dozens of "servants" cater to your every whim and need?  But that lifestyle depends on people believing that you are deserving of such wealth and privilege because you happened to be lucky enough to be sired by a big-eared dolt whose mother is currently known as a "queen."  I find it unbecoming that citizens of our republic should be so enamored of the goings-on of a family who takes the issue of "bloodlines" seriously.

Right Here:  Mass Murder Is The Problem, And Today, Hollywood Has The Answer.  Searching for answers in the wake of a terrible tragedy, many people turn to God.  Others consult friends and family.  Perhaps some find wisdom in the words of experts.  However, there is a large contingent among the masses that looks nobly to that greatest bastion of superior thinking:  Hollywood actors. [...] In light of the terrible mass murder of 10 people at Santa Fe High School in Texas today, many Tinseltown elites took to the Twitterwaves in order to solve the planet's problems in 280 characters or less.

Time for Mccain to Resign.  It is unfortunate that a careless person in the Trump White House made the callous remark — even if in a supposedly private setting — that John McCain doesn't matter because "he's dying anyway."  First, that staffer, Kelly Sadler, obviously doesn't know the first rule of Washington, which is that nothing is ever truly off the record, especially in White House staff meetings, though coming in a close second is the rule that "in Washington, all microphones are live."  Of course, while Sadler was foolish, how does the substance of her remark differ from the liberals who gleefully point out that the Trump majority is temporary at best because so many Trump voters are old and dying off quickly?  I have heard political science professors say this very thing several times in recent weeks at academic gatherings.

Honest Discourse About Article V Convention Needed.  Whether States should ask Congress to call a convention under Article V of our federal Constitution is one of the most important issues of our time.  The Delegates to such a convention, as Sovereign Representatives of The People, have the power to throw off the Constitution we have and set up a new Constitution — with a new and easier mode of ratification — which creates a new government.  Americans need the Truth.  But former law professor Rob Natelson's recent article in The Hill is filled with ad hominems and misstatements.

The War on Wisdom.  Last year, Amy Wax, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, co-authored an opinion piece in the Philadelphia Inquirer with a professor from the University of San Diego School of Law in which they wrote that the "bourgeois culture" and "bourgeois norms" that governed America from the end of World War II until the mid-1960s were good for America, and that their rejection has caused much of the social dysfunction that has characterized this country since the 1960s.  Those values included, in their words:  "Get married before you have children and strive to stay married for their sake.  Get the education you need for gainful employment, work hard, and avoid idleness.  Go the extra mile for your employer or client.  Be a patriot, ready to serve the country.  Be neighborly, civic-minded, and charitable.  Avoid coarse language in public.  Be respectful of authority.  Eschew substance abuse and crime."  Recognizing those norms as universally beneficial constitutes wisdom.  Rejection of them constitutes a rejection of wisdom — i.e. foolishness.

Happy Birthday, Karl Marx.  Not.  Marxist dialectic was never about logic.  It's about anti-logic:  the kind, you might almost say, that collapses under the weight of its own contradictions.  It's about ignoring the obvious truth, for example, that if a troublesome intellectual like Marx had had to live under any of the totalitarian regimes he inspired — Stalin's Soviet Union, Mao's China, Pol Pot's Cambodia, etc — he would quickly have found himself dead in a ditch with a bullet in the back of his head, or, at best, in a mental institution.

A Reality Check for Those Who Deplore the Nuking of Japan.  In his book With the Old Breed, E.B. Sledge will enlighten you on the true cost of war and the paramount need to end it as quickly as possible.  If you have the stomach to learn what war really is like, read his book.  When you are done, judge for yourself whether E.B. Sledge was a good man — and then make a stab in the dark as to whether he might have approved of Truman's decision to nuke Japan.  If all this leaves you cold because it seems inadequately grounded in reason, then please explain why it is reasonable to keep civilians out of things when discussing a war for survival.

No, We Shouldn't Include Girls In Everything.  It's fitting that the Girl Scouts are still the Girl Scouts while the Boy Scouts have changed their identity and now even their name to include girls.  Girls can still have their own spaces and their own organizations in our culture.  They are forced to allow boys into their locker rooms and bathrooms, which is insane and dangerous, but even in that case the boy has to pretend to be a girl in order to gain admittance.  Boys, on the other hand, are expected to include girls in everything.  They are provided no area and no time to be boys, and do boy things, and be around other boys.  We used to understand that boys need space apart from girls.  Not anymore.  It's been trending this way for a while now.

An Imminent Counterattack Begins the Fight of Our Lives.  Unparalleled government abuses of power are about to become public.  The question is what we, the people, will do in response to this overt attempt by deep state players to strip us of our freedom. [...] The Left's ongoing refusal to accept the results of the 2016 election and live according to the rule of law, along with their willingness to destroy people's lives, are irreconcilable with a constitutional republic of self-governing people.  There can be no negotiated settlement over such fundamental differences.  We must boldly reclaim the righteousness of liberty and equal justice under the law on behalf of all Americans.

Congressman Louie Gohmert Just Absolutely Wrecked Robert Meuller With Epic 48-Page investigation Blowout'.  "What I have accumulated here is absolutely shocking upon the realization that Mueller's disreputable, twisted history speaks to the character of the man placed in a position to attempt to legalize a coup against a lawfully elected President," writes GOP Congressman Louie Gohmert.  Gohmert is referring to the exhaustive expose he just released called:  Robert Mueller:  Unmasked.  And the GOP Representative does exactly that, shining a bright light on decades of Mueller misdeeds, stating:  "Robert Mueller has a long and sordid history of illicitly targeting innocent people that is a stain upon the legacy of American jurisprudence.  He lacks the judgment and credibility to lead the prosecution of anyone."  And that's the nice part.

The last word on Chappaquiddick (for now).  Believe it or not, there are still things to be said about Chappaquiddick.  One of them is that the real thing that protected Ted Kennedy from the wrath of the crowd after his failure of nerve in that night of dark water was much less his family's money and power than the strength of the victim mystique. [...] The Kennedy legend, which began with PT-109, died at Chappaquiddick, where the script was played backward.  One brother saved the rest of his crew, and pulled a shipmate to safety, while the other left a woman to die in his car.

Is a false flag attack on a US Navy ship next?  Even without the recent upgrading of the Kinzhal system, the experience of the British fleet in the Falklands conflict illustrates the vulnerability of warships to low-flying missiles.  In addition to the sinking of the HMS Sheffield and Sir Galahad, virtually every British ship was hit by at least one of Argentinian's French-made Exocet missiles — a weapons system which was already 20 years old at the time.  [Video clip]  Reportedly the only thing that saved the UK force from obliteration was that the Argentinians had got their missile altimeter settings wrong.  The Russians will not make the same sort of error!

Would You Vote for a Felon?  I Plan To.  The GOP primary in June for Staten Island promises to be newsworthy and a difficult decision for residents of this conservative NYC borough.  The race will be between two men I have supported in the past and for whom I have great respect, but I plan to vote for Michael Grimm, described in the mainstream media as the disgraced former congressman who served seven months in prison for felony tax evasion.  It is my hope that the president will pardon Grimm and Dinesh D'Souza, another individual who was also railroaded for being conservative.  These men both admitted they made the mistakes; however, their sins have always been ignored when perpetrated by Democrats.  President Trump just pardoned Scooter Libby, another soul railroaded by the left, so I'm hoping he'll rectify the damage done to Grimm and D'Souza.  Michael Grimm was sent to prison for felony tax fraud committed when he under-reported business income and paid employees under the table.  Frankly, about 90% of businesses in New York do the same thing, it seems to me, but they aren't the targets of a congressional cabal.

Not only is Flynn not going to jail, his plea is going to be reversed.  Mueller's now on a desperate fishing expedition with Michael Cohen that's going to lead to...well nothing really.  Mueller was given free reign because they knew the team he'd be working with would do this kind of absurd over reach.  They haven't even come CLOSE to laying a finger on Trump or any Trump campaign collusion with Russia during the 2016 election.

Maybe the Russians Did It.  If ever a military incident seemed to scream "false flag," it's the alleged chemical weapons attack on Douma.  The Chief of Russia's General Staff, Valery Gerasimov, predicted a staged chemical attack almost a month prior.  If Syria launched such an attack, it did so a week after President Trump spoke of bringing American troops home, when Syria was clearly winning its war against myriad rebel groups, and knowing the attack would bring global condemnation and possible military action by the US and its allies.  The losing rebel groups have chemical weapons (chlorine gas can be produced by mixing ammonia and bleach).  If Syria's government was blamed, any retaliation by the US and its allies would aid the rebel cause and further the interests of Saudi Arabia and Israel, America's putative allies who would dearly love to see Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad deposed.

Can We Judge People By What They Look Like?  In Fact, Yes.  Unless it involves mocking President Trump's supposedly "small hands," there is nothing that horrifies our multiculturalist masters more than judging by appearances.  It is impossible, they claim, to infer anything about how someone is likely to behave by their gender or because they are from a particular ethnic group.  Everyone is unique (but also, somehow, equal).  Judging by appearances is not just superficial but plain evil.  It will be fascinating to see what they'll make of the recently-published book by British academic Dr. Edward Dutton titled How To Judge People By What They Look Like, which argues that even within races and sexes you can, with a fair degree of accuracy, infer people's personalities from appearances.  You may even get an inside track on how smart they are by taking a good look at their physical characteristics, according to Dutton.

A California Reader Warns That A "Speaker Kevin McCarthy" Will Be Wholly Owned By The Cheap Labor Lobby.  There are rumors that Kevin McCarthy is going to replace Ryan as Speaker.  [Paul Ryan endorses Kevin McCarthy to be next House speaker, By Matt Richardson, Fox News, April 13, 2018]  It's horrible news for Americans if he is — McCarthy's district includes Paramount Farms, probably the largest employer of illegal aliens in the nation, they've imported so many migrant farm workers they've turned Bakersfield from a white American city into a brown Socialist Latino city.  McCarthy can't enforce federal immigration law and stay in office, Paramount Farms was also used in the Reagan amnesty, pretty much any illegal alien in the nation claimed a work record there and there was no verification.

Attacking Trump's Attorney:  Calling All Tea Partiers.  Let's get the Tea Party visible again with rallies in support of Trump's agenda, the border wall, ending sanctuary cities, and other important issues.  We must inform the masses about Trump's remarkable achievements.  Here's a taste:  for each regulation that Trump has introduced, he has ended 66 of Obama's overreaching, job-killing, and insane leftist regulations.

Trump should offensively depose Yates and Comey.  [Scroll down]  Critically, one would argue that before a sitting president, President Trump, could or should be forced to testify, the defense should be able to depose Yates and Comey to expose what was an objectively cognizable conspiracy to knowingly lie in their FISA court application whose result could be to effect a coup d'etat.  The first question would be:  Is such an offensive motion by the Trump defense team for a Yates/Comey deposition in, and of itself, an "obstruction of justice?"  The answer is that if legitimately attempting to zealously defend your client against a governmental conspiracy in seeking to depose the authors of a sworn written FISA document where the statement is objectively false is an "obstruction of justice," then any legitimate act of President Trump's legal defense by the President is, in and of itself, an "obstruction of justice."  A person and his legal team legitimately defending himself can't be considered "obstruction of justice," otherwise every legitimate act in every legal defense for every alleged defendant in the United States is obstruction of justice.

Media Matters:  Bully Masquerading as Tax-Exempt Charity.  According to public records, David Brock's Media Matters group has ignored important legal requirements for tax-exempt charities.  Instead of reveling in the impact of his attacks against Laura Ingraham, David Brock and his team at Media Matters for America (MMFA) need to try complying with the strict laws that do regulate activities of publicly supported, tax-exempt organizations.  In theory, MMFA is an "educational" charity.

Chappaquiddick Wasn't the Only Scandal.  [I]n regard to the mainstream media's breathless, non-stop coverage of the self-levitating Trump-Russia collusion theory, consider this bit of trivia:  In 1991, when Russian President Boris Yeltsin opened the archives of the Soviet Central Committee, Western researchers quickly descended on Moscow to plow through the treasure trove of previously classified official documents.  Among those researchers was Tim Sebastian, a reporter for the London Times and the BBC who found a May 14, 1983 letter from KGB chief Viktor Chebrikov to Soviet General Secretary Yuri Andropov.  Bearing the highest security classification, it summarized a confidential offer by Senator Ted Kennedy to the Soviet leadership to help stop President Ronald Reagan's aggressive, anti-Soviet defense policies.

When the Lie Becomes a Pillar of the State.  The whole Soviet system was built on lies.  As Alexander Solzhenitsyn was later to write, "In our country the lie has become not just a moral category but a pillar of the State." An unceasing attempt to establish the Lie and to destroy the truth has been as characteristic of the Left here in America as it was in Soviet Russia.  The Lie has become systemic because a reductionist ideology based on lies has thoroughly invaded the academia, the media, and the body politic.  It has metastasized to the point that if it is not eradicated — not just modified — the body will die.  What is the chief characteristic of the great Lie that grips so many of America's institutions?  It is that human beings are on their own when it comes to the pursuit of Truth.  The issue has been the same since the creation of mankind.  It is the belief in the sovereignty of the individual as opposed to the sovereignty of God.

Running in hot pursuit of George Orwell.  George Orwell is dead and gone, and more than a half-century has passed since he wrote "1984," but he would recognize America today.  He was an Englishman (real name Eric Blair) who understood that no state is immune to human mischief.  "Every record has been destroyed or falsified," he wrote in "1984," his novel of Utopia despoiled, "every book rewritten, every picture repainted, every statue and street building renamed, every date altered.  And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute.  History has been stopped.  Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right."  We're almost there, and the Mob has replaced the Party as the intimidator of men who were once free.  Once we cleansed the square of Robert E. Lee, whose memory is held by perfectly honorable men and women to be a hero of their past, all toil and trouble for the abused and mistreated among us would be avenged at last and forgotten forever.  Weak men of cramped mind went along with the barbarians who wear ignorance as their only badge of distinction.  Now the Mob moves on, as the attentive and alert knew it would.

Fahrenheit 451 Updated.  [Amy] Wax and [Larry] Alexander were roundly condemned by their university colleagues. [...] What they found especially egregious was Wax and Alexander's observation that "All cultures are not equal."  That hissing noise you hear is the sharp intake of breath at the utterance of such a sentiment.  The tort was compounded by Wax's later statements in an interview that "Everyone wants to go to countries ruled by white Europeans" because "Anglo-Protestant cultural norms are superior."  Can you believe it?  Professor Wax actually had the temerity to utter this plain, irrefragable, impolitic truth.  Everyone knows this to be the case.  As William Henry argued back in the 1990s in his undeservedly neglected book In Defense of Elitism, "the simple fact [is] that some people are better than others — smarter, harder working, more learned, more productive, harder to replace."

Why We Cannot Afford To Ignore Anti-Freedom Activist David Hogg.  Let's say, just for the sake of this discussion, that your house catches on fire.  Would you ignore the flames, thinking that they'll go away if you give them no attention?  Of course not. [...] Nor should we ignore Hogg and his not-so-merry band of demagogues, who are now burning the country down in their mission to strip us all of at least two of our most fundamental rights.  You see, not only do they want to take away our right to keep and bear arms, but they also seek to silence anyone critical of their point of view.  Just look at what Hogg and the George Soros-funded Media Matters are doing to Laura Ingraham.

Laura Ingraham is Too Weak.  Laura Ingraham said Baby Hitler David Hogg "whines."  This offended people who do not watch her show.  She apologized.  Idiot. [...] Baby Hitler refused to accept her apology.  The left does not want her apology.  The left wants her dead because she is a conservative.  She is not a victim of anything but her own cowardice.  As an experienced journalist she should know this by now.  Never apologize.  That is a sign of weakness in both spirit and mind.  If you cannot stand by your words, shut up.

Rhode Island considers cash incentives to win new residents before Census.  One Rhode Island state representative wants to pay cash to people willing to move there, as the state faces the prospect of losing half their congressional delegation after the next census and reapportionment process.  State Rep. Carlos Tobon (D) has introduced legislation that would give families $833.33 per month — up to $10,000 — to move to Rhode Island for a year.  Those families would be counted in the 2020 census as Rhode Island residents.  The goal, Tobon said, is to attract enough residents to maintain Rhode Island's two seats in the House of Representatives at a time when most population projections show the state has not grown fast enough to warrant two seats.

The Editor says...
This could be construed as buying votes.  If you accept compensation to reside in a state for a year, specifically for the purpose of tampering with the outcome of the census, which then amplifies the power of that state in the House of Representatives, you abetting an attempt to affect the balance of power in the Congress.  Are you willing to relocate to another part of the country at the request of the highest bidder?  To migrate across state lines for a better job is one thing, but this bonus is for one year only, and $10,000 is not enough:  That's not much more than it would cost most people to move to Rhode Island, and it's certainly not enough to compensate for the high cost of living there, not to mention the cost of heating one's house in Rhode Island's long winters.  None of this matters much, because the idea is unlikely to become law.  Where is the State of Rhode Island going to get ten thousand dollars, multiplied by the number of additional residents they'd need to acquire another seat in the House of Representatives?  That would be a lot of money.

Mental health:  The issue everyone dodges until after the mass shootings.  A new report by the Secret Service on recent mass shootings finds a vast majority involved people with mental illness whose behavior could have tipped off authorities about their latent danger.  While recent protest demonstrations across the country were aimed at creating new laws, the report suggests a clear unwillingness to address the issue of mental health, which could be covered under existing laws and regulations.

Silicon Valley has gone from liberating to creepy.  Next stop, government regulation.  Silicon Valley's reputation used to protect it from regulation.  Now it's changed in ways that make regulation more likely.  From the old days of Lotus and Visicalc and CP/M, to just a year or two ago with Facebook and Uber, Silicon Valley has basked in its glowing reputation.  It was seen as a center of innovation, where hard-working entrepreneurs started businesses in garages, and produced things that made everyone's lives better.  Because it was constantly innovating, it stayed ahead of regulators' ability to regulate, resulting in "permissionless innovation" — change that didn't have to ask for permission first.  And that seemed fine, as it brought us personal computers, spreadsheets, word processing, databases, laptops, cell phones, smart phones and social media.

Was Social Media A Mistake?  Here's An Experiment To Find Out.  What strikes me most is the contrast between this and the Internet era before social media, before Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube swallowed up everything.  I'm talking about the 2000s, the great era of the blogs.  Do you remember what that blog era was like?  It felt like liberation.  The era of blogging offered the promise of a decentralized media.  Anybody could publish and comment on the news and find an audience.  Guys writing in their pajamas could take down Dan Rather.  We were bypassing the old media gatekeepers.  And we had control over it!  We posted on our own sites.  We had good discussions in our own comment fields, which we moderated.  I had and still have an extensive e-mail list of readers who are interested in my work, most of which I built up in that period, before everybody moved onto social media.  But then Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube came along and killed the blogs.  There were three main reasons they took over.

This Omnibus pork barrel has a shelf life of 6 months.  We need to consider the [...] storm coming down the line with OIGGate, ClintonGate, ObamaGate and other scandals.  There's no way that these won't touch Congress itself.  More than a few Congress critters are implicated, especially on the Dem side (also GOPe).  Each hit the Uniparty takes, makes Trump stronger.  Each hit the Dems take, makes Trump stronger.  Removing GOPe swamp creatures also makes him stronger.  Keep that in mind, as the next few months unfold.

Deep-Freezing the Truth at Penn.  The diversity imperative demands dissimulation and evasion.  The academic-achievement gap, the behavioral differences that produce socioeconomic disparities, and the ubiquity of racial preferences must all be suppressed in public discourse, since they undercut the narrative that white racism is the driving force in American society.  This dissimulation was on display last week at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, when Dean Ted Ruger announced that law professor Amy Wax would no longer teach mandatory first-year law courses at the school. [...] Wax was deemed a "white supremacist" for suggesting that not all cultures were equal in preparing people for participation in a modern economy.

The Dangers of Drugged Driving.  There are measures that law enforcement, government, and the public can take to combat drugged driving, including implementing a system for testing whether a motorist is high, akin to the use of Breathalyzers to test for elevated blood-alcohol levels, experts say.  Increasing public awareness of the problem would also help.  The public widely agrees that drinking and driving poses a serious danger, but studies have found that a significant portion of the public doesn't feel the same way about driving while high on marijuana.

Nobody Wants to Talk About What Many Mass Shooters Have in Common.  Some blame guns, others blame mental health, and still others confidently blame false flag events and crisis actors.  But one commonality among numerous mass killings in the United States remains absent from these conversations.  It is always reported when details of the shooter are published, but the widespread connection is rarely acknowledged:  A mounting number of mass shooters have ties to the military, including Nikolas Cruz, who was a member of his school's military prep organization, JROTC (Army Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps).  The United States has indulged in a culture of 'patriotic' militarism for decades, glorifying this institutionalized violence as a sign of strength and morality.

Collapsed bridge, courtesy of Obama program.  The $14 million project was partly federally funded through Obama's Tiger program (Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery).  "The 174-foot, 950-ton section of the bridge was built adjacent to Southwest Eight Street using Accelerated Bridge Construction (ABC) methods, which are being advanced at FIU's Accelerated Bridge Construction University Transportation Center (ABC-UTC).  This method of construction reduces potential risks to workers, commuters and pedestrians and minimizes traffic interruptions.  The main span of the FIU-Sweetwater UniversityCity Bridge was installed in a few hours with limited disruption to traffic over this weekend," the press release said.  It went up quickly.  It came down even quicker.

Collapsed FIU Bridge Was Funded by Federal Grant Program Criticized for Shoddy, Politicized Review Process.  The pedestrian bridge that collapsed at Florida International University's Miami-Dade campus today, killing several people, was funded with $11.4 million from the U.S. Department of Transportation's Transportation Investments Generating Economic Recovery (TIGER) program.  The TIGER program has come under repeated fire for awarding money based on politics rather than merit.  Eight vehicles were reportedly crushed when the 174-foot, 950-ton pedestrian bridge, installed Saturday over Southwest Eighth Street in Miami, collapsed this afternoon [3/15/2018].  The bridge was supposed to demonstrate methods developed by FIU's Accelerated Bridge Construction University Transportation Center (ABC-UTC), whose work is also funded by U.S. DOT grants.

Time To Ditch Daylight Saving Time — It's A Killer That Doesn't Save Energy.  Sunday, March 11, is the start of daylight saving time across the country.  But it might be the last time people in Florida have to switch their clocks.  The legislature there voted overwhelmingly to abolish the biannual changing of the clock, and stick with daylight saving time year round.  Last year, Massachusetts considered a similar move by switching to Atlantic Standard Time, which would permanently set their clocks ahead one hour.  Maine also passed bills to ditch daylight saving time.  Arizona and Hawaii don't abide by daylight saving time.

The Problem With White Guys These Days.  [Daniel] Johanson wants to inform you that he is a white man but is NOT happy about it one bit: [...] I gotta tell you:  The way he describes it, it sounds positively exhausting to be a white man.  As a white man, Daniel Johanson has a bone to pick with all those dead white men who composed all those dead white symphonies, as if poor black Americans are threatening to burn down cities from coast to coast if they aren't allowed easier access to opera music.  Have you ever met a black person that didn't love opera music?  I haven't.  And when I say that, I mean that I've never asked any black people about it.  It's one of those topics that you instinctually know not to raise with them because they'd probably laugh in your face.

Tell the Truth on Tariffs!  While totally free trade is an ideal and a goal, it is impossible to accomplish without becoming wholly interdependent on other nations.  There will always be another country capable of driving your domestic industry into the dirt on some product or another, as no one nation can be the most efficient and best producer of everything that nation requires.  Because some industries cannot be outsourcedwithout risk to national security — even to friendly nations — trade representatives have always balanced imports and exports of these products through the use of taxation (tariffs) to both protect the viability of their domestic industries and to ensure a place for their own exports in the economies of other nations.  While a simplistic explanation, it covers the basic function of tariffs.  Throughout history, administrations and regimes have misused tariffs, sparking "trade wars."  And it is true that these disruptions have proven costly to both sides, but to say "no one wins in a trade war" is patently false.

Homeland Security Oversight Is a Mess.  Here's What Should Change.  Since its founding in 2002, the Department of Homeland Security has never been reauthorized, which has allowed various problems to fester.  Last July, the House passed a reauthorization bill that addressed many of the problems.  But more can be done to address the inefficient and complex congressional oversight structure that continues to plague the department.  On Wednesday [3/7/2018], the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee passed the Senate's version of the reauthorization for Homeland Security, which is good news considering the department is desperately in need of reform.  Specifically, the Senate bill proposes a commission to fix the department's impractical congressional oversight structure.  The Department of Homeland Security was created after 9/11 to bring several national security-related agencies — including the Coast Guard, Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Secret Service, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement — under one roof.

Forget Gun Control:  Bring Back Mental Hospitals.  After another inexplicable act of violence in Parkland Florida claimed 17 lives, the usual chorus (and some of the not so usual chorus) is screaming for gun control.  We don't need gun control; we need nut control.  With the first one constructed in 1773, our country has a history of building and maintaining mental hospitals.  In 1955, the United States had more than 100 mental hospitals with a population of over 560,000 people.  The U.S. population in 1955 was around 165 million.  Today, with a population around 323 million, we can safely assume more than 1 million people would be institutionalized by 1955 standards.  Where are these millions of people who should be in mental hospitals?  Living in our communities, wandering the streets while arguing with imaginary figures, or in prison having been declared to be insane, but competent after having committed a crime.

Don't Be Fooled:  Russia is Weak and Dying.  The Russian presidential elections are two weeks away and the outcome is hardly in doubt.  Vladimir Putin on Wednesday gave his annual state of the nation address to the Russian Duma.  During his speech, the strongman-president raved about Russian strength.  Then, with bizarre computer-generated images of weapons projected behind him, Putin detailed five new Russian weapons systems.  The new weapons are dangerous, of course.  But their appearance is misleading.  In reality, Putin's announcement was a sign of desperation and weakness.  Fact is, the Trump Administration's yearlong show of strength against Russia from Ukraine to Syria has worked well.

Scientologists Open Two New Mega-Churches in a Single Weekend.  Mainline denominations are bleeding members at unsustainable rates.  Even the overall growth of evangelicalism has become stagnant, and the only reason that's true is because it's growing among Hispanics and African-Americans.  However, one religion that seems to be growing and thriving is the weirdness that is Scientology.  To be clear, I'm not convinced that Scientology should be classified a religion and not a cult.  I've always thought of it as a pyramid scheme with eternal rewards in place of a pink Cadillac.  How it could be growing is beyond me. [...] However, since movie stars seem especially susceptible to Scientology, the religious cult has taken on an aura of glamour for some people.

The Coming Controversy Over Admitting White Refugees from South Africa.  The news that South Africa is moving decisively in the disastrous direction of Zimbabwe — confiscating the land of white farmers, which is by definition ethnic cleansing and almost certainly will involve mass murder (as it did in Zimbabwe) — has already sparked a petition to allow the resulting refugees into the United States: [...] Similar petitions have been created in the E.U. and Australia.  Stand by for the inevitable backlash.  President Trump is putting a lid on refugee flows, and the left is dead certain that this is because of racism.  Asking to make an exception for white people is going to be called every nasty name under the sun, with special emphasis on those starting with R.

Much of the federal government should be shut down.  The conventional wisdom about the government shutdown chaos in Washington is completely wrong.  Whoever you listen to, their explanation for the shambles is political.  If you're on the left you blame President Trump — just as you blame him for everything from bad weather to burned toast.  If you're on the right you call it the "Schumer Shutdown" — after Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. — and point out that today's Democrats are being driven by their extreme "open borders" base.

The absurdity of government 'shutdowns'.  First of all, government shutdowns aren't the end of the world.  President Ronald Reagan had eight government shutdowns in his terms in office and the nation experienced strong economic growth.  Quite frankly, if Republicans really knew how to win a messaging fight, they should shut the government down.  When shutdowns take place, all non-essential federal employees are sent home.  While there is a pause in their pay, historically Congress has voted to make that pay retroactive once government reopens.

CPAC's disastrous, misguided embrace of Marion Le Pen.  [Scroll down]  What has changed?  There are, I think, three possibilities.  The first is that conservatives are taking their cue from Trump, whether out of tribalism or personal ambition. [...] The second is that immigration, especially Muslim immigration, has become such a vast issue for conservatives that it squeezes out everything else. [...] The third explanation is the likeliest.  For some culture warriors, my enemy's enemy is my friend.  Leftists uncomplicatedly loathe the Le Pens, so some rightists, whether from contrarianism or ignorance, defend them.

The Russians Colluded Massively — with Democrats.  Team Mueller did find Russian interference in the 2016 election — and how!  The February 16 announcement of federal criminal indictments against 13 Russian nationals and three Russian companies was a Cold War flashback.  Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein told journalists that Russians close to the Kremlin infiltrated the last presidential campaign "to promote discord in the United States and undermine public confidence in democracy."  But Rosenstein threw a bucket of wet sand onto the Left's simmering narrative that DJT = KGB.  The Russian meddling began in 2014, well before Donald J. Trump's campaign commenced.  The Russians promoted Vermont senator Bernie Sanders's Democratic-primary bid and Green-party nominee Jill Stein's general-election effort.  After Trump won, the Russians organized pro-Trump and anti-Trump demonstrations, once in New York City on the same day.  They also staged an anti-Trump rally in Charlotte.

NRA's Wayne LaPierre Makes Valid Point On School Security.  For all the talk about gun control these days, we're not hearing much about school security.  As per usual, the people screaming so loudly for gun control are acting like it's a silver bullet for any and all problems at schools.  They don't seem to even be capable of acknowledging the possibility that new gun laws might not make all the evil in the world go away. [...] LaPierre has a valid point.  Armed security is everywhere; we see it everyplace from our banks to Hollywood awards shows.  And yes, some of us even see it in our schools.

The Failure to Confront Evil in Florida Shooting.  So far, reactions have been governed by emotions, which tend to be irrational and uninformed.  Almost always, it is the Republican leadership that is blamed for someone else's act of free will.  That an individual person has free will and that they act according to it is an unimaginable reality in the culture of victimhood.  As a result, the media is conflicted.  Should they treat the shooter as a victim of the system?  That is tempting because then, perhaps, reform of the system might prevent future incidents?  Of course, this always means more regulation.  But if criminals are seen as victims, where does that leave the actual victims who have perished in crimes?

Obnoxious, ignorant teens now demand curbs on guns.  Teens across the nation, fed up with school shootings, are planning marches, media events and three-minute demonstrations at the White House in order to get across their messages of frustration with the Second Amendment and to demand lawmakers take immediate action.  Now if only they weren't so [...] entitled, snarky and obnoxious.

Thoughts On The Mentally Ill.  There is an issue of liberty that makes dealing with this situation a huge problem.  So let us just imagine that someone 'brings this guy in' to talk about the youtube comment.  They put that with all of the other contacts that the cops have had with him and realize he is a loose cannon.  Then what?  How do you propose that the state respond?  Involuntary detention?  For how long?  For what specific purpose?  Current statutes say that if he is clearly suffering from a mental illness and is imminently dangerous to himself or others, he can be held and involuntarily treated in a locked psychiatric facility. [...] What about the other hundred idiots that say this sort of thing but DON'T go on killing sprees?

Was the Florida School Shooting Part of the CIA's MK Ultra Program?  [Scroll down]  What's even more interesting is this tie into cell phone technology, mixed with psychotropic drugs and mind control.  As far as I know, none of these school shootings existed before cell phone technology.  That's not to say that has to be used, but it is an interesting fact to consider.

Hollywood Elite Triggered By Breitbart's Positive 'Black Panther' Review.  Early Friday afternoon [2/16/2018], Breitbart News published my mostly glowing review of Marvel's Black Panther.  By Friday night, some among the Hollywood elite were triggered by the review, including Don Cheadle, another member of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.  Outside of the fact that the review was mostly positive, the trigger seemed to be my noting the obvious connection between the film's hero, T'Challa aka Black Panther (Chadwick Boseman), and President Trump.  I also noted the obvious comparison between the film's villain, Killmonger (Michael B. Jordan), and Black Lives Matter.

Florida Teacher of the Year's gun violence post goes viral after school shooting.  The middle school teacher said over her almost two decades as an educator that she's seen an increase in violence and a lack of compassion among students.  "Until we, as a country, are willing to get serious and talk about mental health issues, lack of available care for the mental health issues, lack of discipline in the home, horrendous lack of parental support when the schools are trying to control horrible behavior at school (oh no!  Not MY KID.  What did YOU do to cause my kid to react that way?), lack of moral values, and yes, I'll say it — violent video games that take away all sensitivity to ANY compassion for others' lives — as well as reality TV that makes it commonplace for people to constantly scream up in each others' faces and not value any other person but themselves, we will have a gun problem in school," the sixth-grade language arts teacher wrote.

The Tea Party is dead — it's the Covfefe Party now.  The Tea Party is dead.  The Covfefe Party has killed it.  The Tea Party was the term given to the grassroots movement that emerged out of nowhere in spring 2009 in response to an explosion of government spending and direct federal involvement in the economy the likes of which we had never before seen in peacetime.  Both those who sought to claim the Tea Party's triumphs for their own conservative causes and those who sought to use the Tea Party as an umbrella term for every conservative policy idea they wished to discredit misunderstood it.  The Tea Party wasn't complicated.  It wasn't a conspiracy.  Simplicity was the hallmark of its success.  Its message was:  You're doing too much — too much spending, too much regulation, too much interference in the private economy.  Too much government.  And the message resonated because it was true.

Did Michael Flynn Actually Do Anything Wrong?  Special  prosecutor  counsel Bob Mueller has one significant scalp on the wall:  that of former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, who pled guilty to one count of lying to the FBI and has yet to be sentenced.  But, in a brilliant column, Byron York reviews the sequence of events as we have tortuously come to know them.  Based on what we now know (or think we know), it is highly doubtful whether Flynn did anything wrong at all.

General Flynn Should Withdraw His Guilty Plea.  His New Judge Is A Government Misconduct Expert.  Extraordinary manipulation by powerful people led to the creation of Robert Mueller's continuing investigation and prosecution of General Michael Flynn.  Notably, the recent postponement of General Flynn's sentencing provides an opportunity for more evidence to be revealed that will provide massive ammunition for a motion to withdraw Flynn's guilty plea and dismiss the charges against him.  It was Judge Rudolph Contreras who accepted General Flynn's guilty plea, but he suddenly was recused from the case.  The likely reason is that Judge Contreras served on the special court that allowed the Federal Bureau of Investigation to surveil the Trump campaign based on the dubious FISA application.  Judge Contreras may have approved one of those four warrants.

Andrew Weissmann:  Robert Mueller's Dirty Cop.  One of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's lead attorneys has an ethics problem.  Actually, a lot of ethics problems, considering what he's gotten away with.  According to investigative journalist Sara Carter, Weissmann has been busted for withholding evidence in a previous court case involving prosecution of organized crime, to put an extra thumb on the scale of justice in his own favor.

President Trump, Buy The Newseum!  What a lot of people don't realize is the Newseum is basically an event space, which drives more than twice the revenue of the actual admission dollars.  This only happens because of the A+ location — which it can't afford.  Because of the revenue derived from the event space, if the Newseum moves, which seems inevitable in very short order, it will really be a going out of business move.

Newseum: Monument to America's Most Disgraced Institution in Talks to Sell.  The Washington D.C.-based Newseum is a massive failure, bleeding red ink and in serious talks to sell out and relocate.  Someone actually believed that a massive monument to the most disgraced institution in America — journalism — was a good idea.  Then, to the surprise of no one in the real world, that massive monument to left-wing liars and frauds not only failed, it is now talking seriously about selling out and moving elsewhere.  The Newseum currently stands seven-stories tall in a pretentious $450 million building right on Pennsylvania Avenue, a stone's throw from the U.S. Capitol.  The only problem is that it is running massive deficits.  Last year alone, what Kyle Smith described as a "cathedral of sanctimony," lost over $8 million.

The Great Flynn Case Mystery.  I have been wondering why, shortly after Judge Rudolph Contreras was (without explanation) recused from hearing the Michael Flynn case and Judge Emmet G. Sullivan took over, Special Counsel Robert Mueller agreed to postpone the sentencing until May, after the inspector general's report is due.  I have no assurances that my suppositions are correct, but I'm beginning to think that at the next hearing of this case, Judge Sullivan will hear Mueller dismiss the case.  Here's how I come to that. [...]

Scandal, Corruption, Lawbreaking — And So What?  Democrats at some point will see that what they thought was the formerly defensible is now becoming absolutely indefensible.  Adam Schiff, after months of leaking, making grandiose false statements on cable TV, and getting punked by Russian comedians, is now a caricature.  He became the sad legislative bookend to the neurotic James Comey.  Schiff will probably soon be forced to pivot back to his former incarnation as a loud critic of FISA-court abuse.

Republican Embarrassments.  George W. Bush doubled the national debt.  After running against Bush profligacy (remember the Chinese credit card trope), Barack Obama doubled it again by doubling Bush's levels of borrowing.  Conservatives blasted Obama for his even greater lack of thrift.  The Tea Party movement emerged in reaction to reckless expenditures and borrowing to fund Obamacare.  Now Donald Trump is caught in the same old matrix.  His deregulation, tax cuts, and energy expansion will likely increase federal revenue.  But his various budget concessions and his own proposed increases in defense spending and infrastructure would likely bleed the budget at a far greater rate than the growing federal revenue.

This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things.  [W]hile every generation undoubtedly had valid complaints about the pop culture of their time, there is no way, even in the era of bell-bottoms and pet rocks, the popular culture at the time was a dumb as it is now.  People are filming themselves eating laundry detergent and posting the videos online, because being stupid for attention is now something people aspire to.  First off, if you're dumb enough to eat poison, the genepool can do without you.

NBC apologizes to the Korean people for its insulting comments.  [Scroll down]  So how on earth could someone like this say something so earth-shatteringly insensitive?  This was a gaffe of classic Michael Kinsley character:  Inadvertently telling the truth in an offensive way.  The Koreans are reacting in horror because of the implication that they admire the Japanese and are inspired to emulate them.  They do not want Japan to be seen as a shining examle to anyone, least of all to Koreans.  But among the people Ramo associates with, bygones will be bygones and there's a lot of money to be made.  Globalists adhere to a global culture in which mere national identity is an afterthought to the class interest in smooth transactions with many more to come.  Yes, the globaist elite is that out of touch with the common folk.

Stage a grand military parade?  Absolutely — it's overdue.  The Pentagon has confirmed that it is in the preliminary stages of planning a military parade down Pennsylvania Avenue — one of President Trump's fondest desires.  Trump was, understandably, impressed in a visit to France last July by the pageantry of the Bastille Day parade.  The parade dates back to the 1880s.  Nothing the United States comes up with will match its resonance or its beloved, unifying nature.  Trump's motivation for ordering up a parade anyway is pretty obvious.  He likes big, brassy displays, and he gets a kick out of being the commander in chief of the most impressive military on the planet.

Disinformation: Russian Espionage, Infiltration, Influence Peddling, and Sabotage.  Disinformation is [Ion Mihai] Pacepa's warning to America and the Western World about the reach and influence of communist propaganda and disinformation and its ability to compromise Western culture, traditions, institutions and influence movements in target societies.  He warns us:  do not underestimate the magnitude of effort and the effectiveness of the communist intelligence, propaganda and espionage operations, or their ability to sow seeds of destruction in western societies.  For example, all foreign representatives of Russia (the USSR) are agents — physicians, nurses, engineers — they are all saboteurs or at least provocateurs for the movement, and they are agents for the regime or they would not be out of the country.

Senator Mark Warner and Entire Senate Intelligence Committee Compromised, Corrupt and Finally Exposed.  Tonight Fox News is reporting on the efforts of Senator Mark Warner to make secret and off-the-record contact with Christopher Steele in March of 2017.  Warner, a rabidly partisan Democrat, is the minority Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.  The Majority Chairman is Richard Burr (R-NC) and also corrupt as [can be].  Not surprisingly, Burr is covering for Warner.

Joe 'The Drooler' Kennedy III's lip service hard to ignore.  By the squalid standards of his family, JoJoJo Kennedy had a successful evening in Fall River this week.  I mean, not one young woman was raped, drowned, crippled or beaten to death with a golf club.  No one tried to play footsie with Adolf Hitler, crashed an airplane, died of a drug overdose, told a Barnstable cop that she was drunk, screamed "Do you know who I am?!?" or began slamming his head into a wall (Uncle Max, this means you).  Many wiseguys, of course, have made sport of U.S. Rep. Joseph P. Kennedy III, especially that strange whatever-it-was going on with his lips, the thin line of drool.  Was it really caused by Chapstick, or, as one internet wag asked, Chappaquiddick-stick?

Democrats turned a hero into a horror story.  During Tuesday night's State of the Union address, the president honored an undeniable hero — a kind and caring New Mexico police officer who stepped up to save a child about to be born, and her desperate, homeless, opioid-addicted mother.  It was a three-hanky anecdote, made all the more vital because it concerned a drug-damaged, impoverished woman and the law enforcement officer who protected her, a man more likely to be treated with contempt these days than with the respect and love he deserves.  The feel-good moment didn't last.  Within hours, the hard left got hold of the inspirational story and mangled it into a cautionary tale about Republican misogyny, mistreatment of the poor and a handmaid forced to reproduce against her will, human roadkill in the evil war on drugs.  No mention was made of innocent children maimed by drugs and parental neglect.  It was dizzying.

Joe Kennedy's 'drool-mouth' outshines his State of the Union response.  Congressman Joe Kennedy III gave the Democratic response to the State of the Union — and drew comments both about his policy ideas and for what was dripping off his lips.  The 37-year-old Kennedy family scion — who is the grandson of RFK — appeared to have large, bizarre wet spots at the corners of his mouth as he talked after President Trump's speech, prompting people to wonder if it was drool or an abundance of Chapstick.  "Marco Rubio had dry-mouth during his #SOTU response in 2013.  Joe Kennedy has drool-mouth," tweeted GOP pollster Frank Luntz, as he compared Kennedy's speech to the disastrous 2013 Republican response by Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Florida) in which he awkwardly reached for water.

Health Ranger's Theory:  The Flu Vaccine Is Causing The Flu Outbreak.  If there is any part of you that's inquisitive you've likely wondered how on Earth this year's flu could be so bad.  Afterall, we have vaccines and Western medicine's advancements in technology to help people.  But the Health Ranger says that is the exact problem with the influenza outbreak.  As the reports continue to come in that this influenza outbreak is killing about 100 people a day, many begin to wonder what the purpose of getting a vaccine that's only 10% effective could possibly be.

Burger King Tries To Explain Net Neutrality.  Burger King is just about nobody's first choice when it comes to garbaging up on fast food and its latest gambit helps to explain why.

Black Nixon.  If you read the Articles of Impeachment against Richard Nixon, what jumps out to a modern reader is just how weak the case was against the President.  Impeachment is a political action, so the rules of evidence we see in a courtroom don't apply, but even so, the allegations seem weak in comparison to those against Bill Clinton.  The case against Nixon was what we would now call a corrupt enterprise, like a mobster.  Bill Clinton, in contrast, was accused of specific crimes that he committed while in office.  In both cases, the key question to be decided by the political class was what was best for the political system.  The guilt or innocence of either man was a secondary consideration, outside of the impact on the political system.  In the case of Nixon, his decision to resign, rather than fight impeachment, was all about defending the political order.  Whether or not it was proper to run Nixon out of town or allow Clinton to remain in office is debatable, but the calculus at the time was about the best interests of the political order.

When Government Shuts Down...Everyone Else Is Better Off.  Every single function they take on sucks resources out of the economy.  They squander and waste the majority of those resources, then end up giving people a $2 billion website that doesn't work.  Clearly this is a government in need of serious downsizing.  Any other organization in the world with a history of such gargantuan waste would be forced to strip itself down to its core and limit itself to only the most essential functions.  Sadly, though, the public attention seems to be focused on how terrible this shutdown is and how these politicians need to come together to reopen the government.  Are you kidding me?  This is a gift.  Keep it closed.

James Clapper's perjury, and why DC made men don't get charged for lying to Congress.  Former National Intelligence Director James Clapper is about celebrate one of the most important anniversaries of his life.  March 13th will be the fifth anniversary of his commission of open perjury before the Senate Intelligence Committee.  More importantly, it also happens to be when the statute of limitations runs out — closing any possibility of prosecution for Clapper.  As the clock runs out on the Clapper prosecution, Democrats like Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) have charged that Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen committed perjury when she insisted that she could not recall if President Donald Trump called Haiti and African countries a vulgar term.  The fact is that perjury is not simply tolerated, it is rewarded, in Washington.  In a city of made men and women, nothing says loyalty quite as much as lying under oath.

'White Privilege' and the Great Stink of 1858.  In sophisticated Roman vacation spots like Pompeii, you can still walk on the double-raised sidewalk as long as you hop over the open excrement channel in the middle. In India, the Untouchables come from native Indian tribes who were kept for centuries out of the governing caste system, because their job was to collect and somehow dispose of mountains of poop that collected in cities like Calcutta.  In Arabia, it is still taboo to touch someone's left hand, because that was the hand used to wipe one's bottom before toilet paper was imported from the West.  It was only in Europe and America, and soon other places, where great engineering systems were constructed over the 20th century that allow college students and other snowflakes to take all that for granted.

The Value of Calling [Bad Places 'Bad'].  In a news cycle full of poverty, war, political intrigue, and all the usual torment, America's media have wasted valuable time this week debating the value of President Donald Trump's use of a bad word. [...] It is a fact that those of us with family roots in oppressed nations know all too well:  the left divides the world into "paradises" and [bad places] all the time, depending on how much money there is to be had in duping apolitical Americans into buying their classifications.  It takes barely any time to find a handful of examples of profiteers selling naive thrill seekers the notion that any variety of impoverished, exploited underdeveloped country is a secret oasis full of exotic beauty and free of the "stain" of Western luxury.

For example, Cuba.

Tonya Harding is no hero.  It's hard to recall a second act in American life like Tonya Harding's.  She doesn't deserve it.

Of Crudeness and Truth.  Nothing scandalizes a leftist like the truth.  Point out that women and men are different, that black Americans commit a disproportionate amount of violent crime, that most terrorist acts are committed by Muslims, and the Left leaps to its collective feet in openmouthed shock, like Margaret Dumont after a Groucho Marx wisecrack.  This is racism!  This is sexism!  This is some sort of phobia!  I'm shocked, shocked to find facts being spoken in polite company!  No one is really shocked, of course.  This is simply a form of bullying.  The Left has co-opted our good manners and our good will in order to silence our opposition to their bad policies.  The idea is to make it seem impolite and immoral to mention the obvious.

The post-Weinstein Golden Globes was an exercise in hypocrisy.  This year's Golden Globes were meant to be a defiant, vibrant celebration of a post-Weinstein industry, an awards ceremony about so much more than meaningless awards.  We were promised a reckoning, the leveling of a male-dominated industry that institutionalized the rape, abuse and harassment of women for decades.  Like so much Hollywood product, advance buzz was greatly exaggerated.  Not one actor or actress, on the red carpet or on stage, made direct reference to their industry's greatest monster — the one they boast of slaying yet still want to appease.

The War on Driving to Come.  At some point in the future, be it years, decades, or a century hence, the federal government will seek to ban driving.  This, I'm afraid, is an inevitability.  It is inexorably heading our way.  The dot sits now on the horizon.  As is common, the measure will be sold in the name of public health.  "Now that robots can do the work," its bloodless advocates will explain, "there's no need for human involvement."

Spy corruption began with W.  Blame George Walker Bush for Obama's political abuse of the nation's spy agencies.  Sharyl Attkisson, an Emmy-winning investigative journalist, wrote in the Hill, "10 times the intel community violated the trust of US citizens, lawmakers and allies."  Her list began with President Bush 43.  And it began before 9/11.  In fact, it was one of his first acts as president.

Exiting NAFTA — The Myth of Global Markets.  If the U.S. were to exit NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement), the price you pay for most foodstuff at the grocery store would drop 10% in the first quarter and likely drop 20% or more by the end of the first year.  Here's why:  Approximately a decade ago the U.S. Dept of Agriculture stopped tracking, and reporting, U.S. consumer food prices.  The food sector joined the ranks of fuel and energy in no longer being measured to track inflation and backdrop Fed monetary policy.  Not coincidentally this was simultaneous to U.S. consumers seeing massive inflation in the same sector.

MAGA Success IS The Existential Threat.  In the larger analysis, Donald Trump and the Make America Great Again (MAGA) proposition is a daily reminder that citizen inspired government can eliminate the decades-long notion of politics as a profession.  There are hundreds-of-thousands of people within the institutional system known as politics.  Each member carving out a specialty and selling their expertise as necessary within the opaque organization known as government.  From city council, through state legislature and into federal representation, the primary selling point of each participating member is to declare their operational skill within the institution.  [Indeed], the professional political enterprise is so accepted as ordinary you can even go to college and earn a degree in how to be a politician.  Why?

A funny pattern emerging from Russia.  Russia has been engulfed in a sludge of news stories about supposed collusion with the Donald Trump presidential election campaign, none of which is holding water.  In fact, the unpleasant sense is emerging that the Federal Bureau of Investigation might have cooked the fiction up as a pretext to Get Trump.  It's unfortunate, because President Trump's desire for good relations with Russia was one of the better reasons for voting for him and it's obvious domestic politics is blocking that.  But beyond that, another Russia is emerging, one redolent with the winds of war, which Russia-watchers should pay attention to.

Teaching children about the evils of communism.  It's not easy to teach children about the evils of communism.  The vile ideology's long and bloody history of violent repression and murder does not make for a kid's story.  Nonetheless, children should be taught to reject communism early on since the proponents of this ideology purposely prey on them from an early age.  Luckily, there is a solution.

Sally Yates, One of the Biggest Frauds of the Year.  Drunk on the ruling class's praise of her subversive hackery at the Justice Department, Sally Yates evidently conceives of herself as a very august presence in American public life.  How else to explain her state of the union-style address in USA Today this week?  The piece is full of third-rate partisan cant dressed up as deep thoughts on "who we are as a country."  Yates has taken it upon herself to inform us of America's "core values."  Full of the usual jargon about "inflection points" and laughable liberal sanctimony ("our country's strength comes from honoring, not weaponizing, the diversity that springs from being a nation of Native Americans and immigrants of different races, religions and nationalities"), the piece is only notable for its audacious hypocrisy on the subject of "apolitical law enforcement."

Some Real Talk For Conservatives About 2018.  [Scroll down]  We owed Roy Moore nothing — he owed us loyalty, which he failed to show when he refused to drop out and make way for an undamaged candidate.  His determination to make this race about "clearing his name" cost us a Senate seat.  If he wanted to clear his name, there were courtrooms for that.  Instead, we got stuck with a guy we knew was a doofus even before he admitted he was a skeevy doofus.  Weird candidates lose.  The claims of illegality against him are shaky, but based on his own admissions, the best case was this guy scammed on high school girls in his thirties.  Okay, legal or not, that's going to turn people off.

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.  People know almost without having to be taught, that the second amendment isn't about hunting.  That's why tyranny will ultimately fail.  The more the deep state tyrants try to squeeze the people, the more guns and ammunition they buy.  Now to be sure, they have to be willing to use them, but that time will come.  It's a peaceful, longsuffering people.  But they can be pushed hard enough to crack.  I don't know whether the revolution will be televised or not, but I'm certain that parts of America won't have power, so many people won't see it even if some do.

Are Anti-Trump Conspirators Using HAM Radio to Communicate?  Christopher Steele, the former MI6 spy, was hired by Fusion GPS in April, 2016.  Months later, Mrs. Ohr joined Mr. Steele at the opposition research firm, after being hired by Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson to investigate then-presidential candidate Donald Trump.  Additionally, her husband, Bruce Ohr, reportedly met with Mr. Steele during this time period, and with Mr. Simpson after President Trump's victory.  It is not clear if Mrs. Ohr ever used her HAM license, or if she herself owns the equipment to do so, but what is interesting, is the 1970s technology, when blended with modern day communications, can create an untraceable protocol for clandestine transmissions.

The Editor says...
For those of you unfamiliar with ham radio, the transmission of encrypted messages is generally illegal.  The use of the ham radio bands in connection with any illegal activity is itself illegal, too.  Speaking to business associates about business is also prohibited.  And chatting across town from one's car, which was once a novelty, is now done by cell phone.  The only reason that I can imagine for Mrs. Ohr to get a ham radio license — if her intent was to communicate secretly and send data files without using the (presumably wiretapped) telephone — is to make it easier to buy transmitting equipment without raising suspicion.  The proprietors of ham radio shops tend to ask for your callsign when you buy anything — especially anything with a transmitter in it.  Incidentally, the "ham" in ham radio is not an acronym and is only capitalized by people who don't know much about it.

Who Really Lost in Alabama.  The Alabama Senate election was about everything except Alabama.  And in the end, Alabamans stayed home and let the inevitable turnout tide of passion politics take its course.  Minority voters rallied to Obama.  Republicans stayed home.  And the GOP is now holding on to a bare one-seat Senate majority.  The Democrats had abandoned Alabama, along with much of the South.  They weren't interested in Doug Jones until they smelled weakness.  And they still aren't interested in representing Alabamans now.  They just want another Senate seat to bring them closer to blocking and impeaching President Trump.

5 Things to Know About Doug Jones' Victory Over Roy Moore in the Alabama Senate Race.  [#4] McConnell and establishment Republicans dodged a bullet.  Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) urged Moore to step aside after the sexual assault allegations.  As late as Tuesday, McConnell remained confident the U.S. Senate Ethics Committee would investigate the allegations against Moore should he win the election.  There was a great deal of speculation as to whether, if Moore won, the Senate would even admit him. [...] Indeed, Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) announced that he would resign from the Senate last week, in what many interpreted as a ploy to make the Democratic Party seem more morally pure than the Republican Party.  Moore's loss frees the GOP from the albatross of having a senator with these sorts of charges against him.  Had he won, Democrats would have used Moore as a symbol of alleged pedophilia with which to smear the GOP.

What is Hollywood going to do about this serial sexual harasser?  Obviously, the sexual abuse scandals that are now roiling Hollywood did not start recently.  But how far back do they date?  To answer that question, this investigative reporter tracked down the most flagrant and notorious of Hollywood's sexual predators.  I refer, of course, to that undeniable stinker, Pepé Le Pew.  Unashamed and uninhibited, Pepé Le Pew actually filmed his serial assaults.  True, many of his victims were of his same stripe, but on more than one occasion his arrogance and recklessness led him to cross the species-line.

Rebellious Jurors Make the World a Better Place.  After criticism by some local officials of a new program that refers people caught with four ounces or less of marijuana for fines and community service, El Paso, Texas, Police Chief Greg Allen turned out to be a surprise defender of bypassing the usual criminal justice rigmarole of booking, mug shots, and jails.  While careful to emphasize that he's no fan of drug legalization, Allen says it's a waste of his officers' time to put hours into an "an arrest that has no end result of a conviction because of jury nullification."  This is only the latest evidence that rebellious jurors are putting limits on how badly government officials can treat the rest of us.

Pearl Harbor:  Hawaii Was Surprised; FDR Was Not.  On Sunday, December 7, 1941, Japan launched a sneak attack on the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, shattering the peace of a beautiful Hawaiian morning and leaving much of the fleet broken and burning.  The destruction and death that the Japanese military visited upon Pearl Harbor that day — 18 naval vessels (including eight battleships) sunk or heavily damaged, 188 planes destroyed, over 2,000 servicemen killed — were exacerbated by the fact that American commanders in Hawaii were caught by surprise.  But that was not the case in Washington.  Comprehensive research has shown not only that Washington knew in advance of the attack, but that it deliberately withheld its foreknowledge from our commanders in Hawaii in the hope that the "surprise" attack would catapult the U.S. into World War II.  Oliver Lyttleton, British Minister of Production, stated in 1944:  "Japan was provoked into attacking America at Pearl Harbor.  It is a travesty of history to say that America was forced into the war."

100 Years of Communism, 100 Million Deaths, and the Morally Bankrupt Death Cult of Che Guevara.  It's time for the final installment of my series commemorating the evil impact of 100 years of communism. [...] Today we're going to wrap up the series with a look at Che Guevera and contemplate how a mass-murdering racist and homophobe became a cultural icon.

Leftwing Evangelicals:  An Oxymoron?  Donald Trump has been president for a year, yet my social media newsfeed and email inbox still overflow with stupefied leftwing evangelicals who hate Trump (literally) and loathe the conservative Christians that voted for him.  So then, where was the outrage from the same better-than-thou Chardonnay-swirling leftwing evangelical crowd when Christians voted for Obama?  It's obvious that their condemnation has less to do with evangelicalism or Christianity and more to do with their political leanings.  Otherwise, when Obama was in office, they would have expressed a little of that righteous indignation they currently can't control when Obama's policies harmed Christian bakers and nearly sent the Little Sisters of the Poor to the poor house.

If Roy Moore wins.  Senate Republicans will have decisions to make.  First, they must decide what to say.  Members who believe the most serious allegations against Moore and don't think the passage of nearly 40 years matters should feel free to say Moore is unfit for the Senate and thus should resign.  Once they say so, they will have done as much as Democrats did to John Conyers and Al Franken.  And much more than they did to Bill Clinton.  But if they declare Moore unfit, they should be prepared to explain why they consider Donald Trump fit for the presidency.  The allegations of sexual assault against Trump were much more recent than those against Moore.

A Time for War:  The Gathering Storm.  [Scroll down]  All the really bad stuff that is happening is happening to those who are conjuring the storm onto Trump, and not so much the other way.  This guy Strzok?  He has destroyed himself, his credibility, and his career.  Along with his FBI honeypot.  It appears that Andrew Weissman has done the same thing.  Look at James Comey.  He's losing.  Andrew McCabe is as well.  The FBI will be purged.  The Clintons have lost their power.  They are no more than a corrupt, ugly footnote to history.  No power, with little future.

Washington Post Against Enforcing Logan Act Before It Was For It.  The Washington Post, whose pages include numerous articles supporting the idea that President Donald Trump or his advisors violated the Logan Act before his inauguration, once dismissed the law in an editorial as an irrelevant atavism when used to criticize the acts of prominent Democratic officeholders. [...] The government has never successfully prosecuted anyone for violating this law.

10 Characteristics of False Flags.  In this video, Melissa Dykes of Truthstream Media breaks down the 10 common characteristics of false flags to help better understand why the official story of Vegas shooting is suspect at best.  [Video clip]

The Editor says...
The video clip is 20 minutes long, but well worth your time.

Ted Kennedy Made Secret Overtures to Russia to Prevent Ronald Reagan's Re-Election.  Sen. Edward "Ted" Kennedy had "selfish political and ideological motives" when he made secret overtures to the Soviet Union's spy agency during the Cold War to thwart then-President Ronald Reagan's re-election, a Reagan biographer said in an interview with The Daily Signal.  When they came to light years later, Kennedy's secret contacts with the Russians through their KGB spy agency in the early 1980s didn't cause nearly the tizzy that Russia's alleged interference with this year's election has for President-elect Donald Trump among liberal activists and reporters.

Obamacare Mandate Repeal Is the Most Important Civil Rights Victory in Years.  After the humiliation of failing to keep their defining promise to repeal Obamacare, the Senate turned to tax reform, which also looked sketchy due to deficit projections.  But then the clouds parted and the stars aligned with the discovery that repealing the Obamacare mandate would save the government this $340 billion.  Talk about a win-win.  Here was a way to kill the most hated (and crucial) part of Obamacare and pass tax cuts.  And that is exactly what happened — the American people won a sweet two-fer:  lower taxes and freedom from a fascist mandate.

Roy Moore and the Fire This Time.  What began as a targeted hit on Roy Moore in his Senate race against a faceless Democrat with the generic name of Doug Jones has now turned into a blazing ammo dump, littered with the bodies of Hollywood celebrities and politicians in both the United States and Britain.  And yet, despite the best efforts of Gloria Allred, Moore is not only still standing, he is probably again leading in the race.  A pair of recent polls has Moore up over Jones by anywhere from two to seven points, and only Democrats will be surprised if Moore wins on Dec. 12.

Freedom Is a Right, Not a Gift from the Government.  We use the term freedom in political, economic, social, and religious contexts.  But what exactly does it mean to be free?  The answer to this question is crucial because different conceptions of liberty entail different political ideals, and different models of government.  A good starting point to explore what it means to be free is with the distinction introduced by the early 19th century intellectual Benjamin Constant.  In an 1819 work titled "The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with that of the Moderns," Constant offered two antagonistic ideas of what it means to be free.

Void the Non-Disclosure Agreements That Conceal Congressional Misconduct.  Our public officials are supposed to be accountable and transparent, especially when they are expending public money.  It is thus outrageous that Congress has made this cozy arrangement to sweep under the rug malfeasance by members of the club.  There is no legal or policy reason to refrain from legislation that would out the lawmakers involved in misconduct settlements — regardless of the type of misconduct (I wouldn't limit it to sexual episodes).  To the contrary, the other parties — I prefer to describe them as "victims" rather than "survivors" — should be permitted to speak publicly if they wish to do so.  If not, their privacy ought to be respected.  We can argue about what procedures should apply in the future; but to the extent that these existing non-disclosure arrangements guarantee confidentiality, it ought to be up to the victim whether or not to remain anonymous.  Meanwhile, the growing assumption of secrecy in government operations is very disturbing.

Alabama Sen. Candidate Roy Moore's Vietnam Army Buddy Knew Him to Be 'An Altogether Honorable, Decent, Respectable, and Patriotic Commander and Soldier'.  A man who served in Vietnam with Alabama Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore said in an editorial published the day after Thanksgiving that he knew Moore to be one of the better men with whom he served.  In what YellowHammerNews termed "an open letter to the voters of Alabama," former Army officer Bill Staehle of Asbury Park, New Jersey told Alabama voters just what sort of person he feels Moore is, based on his close personal relationship during one of the most trying times in their lives — a time of war.  Mr. Staehle, who was a captain in the 504th Military Police Battalion in the 1970s, begins his testimonial with a strong endorsement of Moore's character, at least as he knew him 45 years ago.

Shaky Allegations Against Roy Moore Are Not Enough to Disqualify Him.  Any commentary I have thus far made about the Roy Moore scandal has been on social media, and that has centered primarily on mocking the media's hypocrisy while also noting my thoughts on individual aspects of the story.  The big question, though, the question of whether or not the allegations add up to something serious enough to knock Moore out of Alabama's Senate race, I have saved until now.  It may no longer be fashionable to wait for all the facts before expressing an opinion, but when it comes to something as deadly serious as a man's reputation and allegations of child molestation, call me a fuddy-duddy.

"Stealin' Be Ok, No Big Deal" — LeVar Ball Showcases Mentality Behind His Son LiAngelo Ball Shoplifting in China.  After watching this bizarro interview with his father I can completely understand why LiAngelo Ball thought it would be perfectly okay to shoplift in China and live a life beyond the boundaries of ordinary moral behavior.  Somehow this guy thinks he's making a point that will benefit his son — epic fail.  The father of the UCLA basketball player who was arrested in China for shoplifting sunglasses appears on CNN to explain why he feels President Trump did nothing to help his son get released from Chinese authorities.

Time to Give Thanks to White Males.  While every other demographic group is coddled by the media, it is still PC to ridicule white males, partly because they are a benign majority who don't complain much.  This Thanksgiving seems an opportune time to give them thanks for forging a country that beckons the world's tired, huddled masses, and to appreciate their overall magnanimity in sharing our abundance.  The loony left, forever futile in foisting the discredited socialist tenet of equal outcomes upon unequal contributors, purports that white privilege explains discrepancies in achievement.  Actually, through their invention, brilliance, and industry, whites wrestled comfort and plenty from nature's tight grasp.  Guilt-ridden apologists, effete elites, and the race-hustling grievance industry may discredit Western Civilization and rewrite American history, but through our beneficence America's poor are comfortable, compared to the most of the earth's population.  Our bottom 99 percent comes "surprisingly close" to being in the top 1 percent of household incomes worldwide.

The Ultimate Argument for Roy Moore.  The reason why the bipartisan ruling class of officials, corporate executives, educators, the media, entertainment, etc. demand Roy Moore's political scalp is that it fell on Moore to be the focus of a pivotal effort to detach the Republican Party from that ruling class.  It has nothing to do with what he may have done four decades ago, and everything with the threat that his election now poses to their power to run the country while de-legitimizing the rest of Americans and their culture.  Had it been anyone else, the degree of hostility would have been the same, the charges possibly different but just as fiery and equally beside the point:  which sector of the population shall have its power enhanced, and which diminished?

McConnell doesn't get to play Roy Moore's judge, jury and political executioner.  American jurisprudence is well-known for its basic premise of "innocent until proven guilty."  In a court of law, a criminal defendant must be found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt to be convicted of a crime.  That defendant walks into the court presumed innocent until that presumption is rebutted by evidence that a judge or jury finds convincing beyond a reasonable doubt.  A political campaign may not be a courtroom, but nonetheless Americans have an innate sense of fairness and due process.  Americans believe that due process is a precept applicable in many walks of life, including the workplace, which is why unions, for example, negotiate contracts that include binding arbitration clauses.  Why?  Because we want to believe that in most every aspect of life there is a semblance of due process.

Moore yearbook signature fraud.  [Scroll down]  The rest of the add-on is numbers or printed text, which cut down the forger's work, but the numbers, particularly "77," are a dead giveaway that the sentiment and the lighter blue add-on text were written by two different people.  Also, does the story behind this inscription pass the "smell test"?  If you saw the yearbook of a charming waitress on the countertop, would you pick it up and start writing in it without being asked to?  For a waitress you knew only in a business environment, would you write a really mushy compliment and end it with "Love"?  Instead of signing it with only your first name, which would be appropriate with the familiarity that goes with "love", would you sign it with your full name and abbreviated title, then print (not write cursively) a date that duplicates the date in the message, followed by the location?  Would you identify yourself as a "D.A." when you are only a deputy district attorney?

A Fair Hearing by a Jury of His Pervs.  On Twitter, Thomas Wictor has made a credible analysis establishing that the one piece of non-testimonial record against Moore, a yearbook notation purportedly by Judge Moore in 1977, is a forgery made with two different inks, and the "D.A." after his name (at a time when he was not district attorney) are the initials of his law clerk, who signed the court paper used as the forgery template.  Gloria Allred, notorious for sitting with unpersuasive sobbing women as she daubs their tears and peddles incredible tales, repeatedly refused to answer Wolf Blitzer's questions about whether the signature was a forgery and has said she never even asked her client, Mrs. Wilson, whether she actually saw Judge Moore sign it.  Moore has demanded the yearbook be turned over for forensic examination and Allred says she'll turn it over only to a (nonexistent) Senate Committee for its investigators to study.

A special counsel must investigate the Russia dossier, explain why Obama's FBI was involved.  For the past year, as our government has been mired in both an aimless and fruitless investigation into accusations of collusion between the Russian government and the 2016 Trump Presidential campaign, Democrats have insisted that Congress follow where the evidence leads in this investigation.  My Democratic colleagues are absolutely right.  Congress should follow where the facts lead.  However, they're leading in a very different direction than the mainstream media narrative might suggest.  With regard to the original purpose of the investigation, Congress has held multiple hearings and interviewed dozens of witnesses looking into allegations of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.  There is nothing there.  It's time to move on.

Attacking Judge Moore's Morality Is a Dirty Leftist Trick.  Judge Moore is hated by Leftists and establishment Republicans because he is an outspoken, character-driven Christian conservative; a faithful courageous defender of our Constitution, principles and values which have made America great.  Moore elected to the U.S. Senate would be extremely helpful to Trump draining the swamp and making America great again.  Judge Moore's unwavering commitment to biblical morals and support of Trump's agenda makes Moore the last person fake news media, Hollywood, Democrats and RINO Republicans want to see in the U.S. Senate.  Therefore, it is not surprising that Leftists and RINOs are clamoring for Moore to drop out of the race; claiming Moore is morally unfit to serve.  These same people told us president Bill Clinton['s misbehavior] in the White House was none of our business.

The Real High Ground in the Moore Case.  [Bill] Clinton of course was guilty.  He admitted it.  But Democrats — and many Republicans — defended him, and the Senate refused to convict him for perjury and suborning perjury after his impeachment.  Now some senators want to expel Moore before the election.  Phooey.  That's virtue signaling.  Absent an admission of guilt between now and Election Day, he deserves the support of every Republican and of every conservative.  Vote for Moore and be a conservative, or vote for someone else and be a liberal.  Anything else is nonsense.

Judge Moore's Wife Kayla Moore:  We Are Gathering Evidence of Money Being Paid to Accusers.  Judge Roy Moore is running for US Senate in Alabama to replace Jeff Sessions.  Judge Moore has NEVER been accused of inappropriate sexual conduct in his 38 years of public service before the charges this past week. [...] On Monday [11/13/2017] Roy Moore's wife of 30 years Kayla Moore wrote that they are gathering evidence the accusers are being paid to speak out against her husband.

Are We Sure About Roy Moore, Or Do You Just Hate Him?  The swiftest pile on over Roy Moore has come not from Democrats, but from a bunch of Republicans who have hated his guts for years.  And now it's pay back time.  Look, I know I'm going to get set on fire for this piece, but I think it needs to be said.  If the allegations are true, Roy Moore needs to step aside.  But how do we know?  I have to tell you that this seems like a political miracle for the Democrats with a most convenient timing and most convenient pile on.  To listen to most, if Roy Moore is guilty he needs to step aside and if he is innocent he needs to step aside and clear his name.  Moore's opponents have constructed the argument in such a way that the only way forward is for him to get out of the race.  That's awfully convenient for a lot of people who hate him for political reasons.

With or without a trial?
Senate GOP campaign chair:  Moore should be expelled if elected.  Senate Republicans escalated their calls for embattled Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore to leave the race — with Majority Leader Mitch McConnell saying he believes the women who have accused Moore of sexual misconduct and the chair of the GOP's campaign arm endorsing an effort to expel Moore should he be elected next month.  "I believe the individuals speaking out against Roy Moore spoke with courage and truth, proving he is unfit to serve in the United States Senate and he should not run for office," said Sen. Cory Gardner of Colorado, the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee.  "If he refuses to withdraw and wins, the Senate should vote to expel him, because he does not meet the ethical and moral requirements of the United States Senate."

The Persecution Of Judge Roy Moore Shows Why The GOPe Must Be Defeated.  Former Democrat pollster Pat Caddell has referred to Republicans and Democrats as, respectively, 'the stupid party' and the 'corrupt party.' That labeling gets more appropriate every day, as evidenced by the way the dysfunctional GOP establishment is helping along the persecution of Judge Roy Moore, its Alabama Senate candidate.  As you'll remember, Judge Moore ran in the Alabama Primary against one of Mitch McConnell's swamp creatures, Luther Strange.  McConnell and his fellow New Tories spent $30 million dollars on the campaign (an absurdly large amount in Alabama) to get him in, but the people of Alabama knew exactly who Judge Roy Moore was, and weren't impressed.  And he won by a substantial percentage.

Trump is the Next Target after Roy Moore.  There's a reason why President Trump says that the fate of Senate candidate Roy Moore will depend on whether the charges against him are proven to be true.  Trump knows that if they get rid of Moore, using charges that obviously cannot be proven, he's their next target.  Sex-gate will follow Russia-gate.  In this atmosphere, women charging sexual harassment are easy to find, even if their charges cannot be proven.  The men are assumed to be guilty as charged.  One can argue that everything but the kitchen sink has already been thrown at Trump and he has survived nonetheless.  But since the election we have seen that the allegations of sexual harassment have been cast as a major blight on American society, making it more likely that "new" accusers against Trump will be found and that a new variation of the "scandal" will be used to cast a pall over the presidency.  The same members of the GOP establishment lined up against Moore will be called upon to dump Trump.

Roy Moore for Senate?  I agree with Paul [Mirengoff] that the Washington Post's allegation that Moore tried to seduce a 14-year-old girl 38 years ago is more likely false than true, particularly given the gaping hole in the accuser's story that has been attested to by her own mother.  Beyond that, I question whether a newly-surfaced, 38-year-old allegation should ever — short of murder or something nearly as heinous — be grounds for defeating a political candidate.  There is a reason why our criminal laws include statutes of limitation.  After decades have gone by, it is often impossible to prove (or disprove) an allegation.  The accuser in the present case remained silent for 38 years, during most of which time Moore was a prominent figure in Alabama politics.  Now, a few weeks before a U.S. Senate election, at the importuning of a team of reporters from the Washington Post who are obviously determined to bring down the candidate, she sees fit to accuse Moore.  One of the kinder words we apply to this sort of conduct in the law business is "estoppel."  It is much too late to dredge up an accusation from the 1970s.

Troy Has Fallen.  Don't Let Helen Trick You.  Today, we Americans find ourselves sinking into swamp after swamp of institutional corruption, from Washington's Russia eruptions to Hollywood's frisky lust to academia's sheer madness.  A question repeats ad nauseam:  How do they get away with this stuff?  How did gropers and pederasts run amok in our nation's media for decades without being challenged?  How did a web of state operatives, lobbyists, agents, and propagandists fool so many people with disinformation for so long without being caught?  And at last, how did colleges that were conceived as lights of reason and character formation plummet into such unreason and depravity with nobody to stop them?  It isn't the wickedness that staggers the mind, since most people understand the existence and reality of evil.  It is the evasion of justice.

JFK murder is a mirror maze that won't be solved by a few more documents.  Last week we came close to a milestone as President Trump released all but the last few hundred public documents related to the Kennedy assassination.  Considering that the assassination took place 54 years ago, and we live in what is touted as a transparent society in which the people are sovereign, it's not really much to be proud of.  But, on the other hand, when you realize that the Warren Commission had originally sealed many of the documents from its original investigation for 75 years, people my age are lucky we didn't have to live till 2039 to see what the government thought we couldn't handle.

Dems Are Loath to Weaponize Russia Probe Indictments.  The indictment of Donald Trump's former campaign chairman and the guilty plea entered by a former low-level foreign policy adviser seemed to hand Democrats a weightier cudgel with which to club the president's party this week.  But even though special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia collusion probe is picking up steam, Democratic strategists and campaign operatives are urging party members to tread carefully.  Research in the form of focus groups, polling, and on-the-ground conversations conducted by various Democratic groups suggests that reaction to GOP policy will drive their voters more effectively than the ongoing Russia investigations, however newsworthy they have become.  Democrats figure that the eventual conclusions reached by Mueller and congressional committees will speak loudly for themselves.  In the more immediate term, many Democrats argue the party will be more successful in its electoral efforts by focusing on economic issues that matter to everyday voters.

What is Mueller Investigating?  And Why?  This morning's Minneapolis Star Tribune reported, in a story that doesn't seem to have gotten a lot of national attention, that Robert Mueller's ever-widening investigation has ensnared Vin Weber, a former Minnesota Congressman and long-time Washington lobbyist: [...] Mueller's operation is leaking on a more or less daily basis.  Isn't that illegal?  Aren't grand jury proceedings supposed to be secret?  Maybe the Attorney General should appoint a special counsel to look into possible crimes associated with leaks by Mueller's staff.

The Cunningness Of The CIA's JFK Assassination Cover-Up.  [Scroll down]  It was one of the most brilliant and cunning ruses in history.  They get the body out of Parkland by force, in violation of Texas law, and put it in the hands of the military in Maryland, which conducts a secret fraudulent and bogus autopsy.  Lyndon Johnson telephones Dallas District Attorney Henry Wade on the night of the assassination and orders him to shut down any investigation of a conspiracy because it might lead to nuclear war.  As soon as Oswald is assassinated, the FBI orders Wade to turn over all his investigative files to the FBI.  At the same time, Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach and FBI Head J. Edgar Hoover both write secret memos and reports saying any further investigation must stop immediately.  Lyndon Johnson gets Earl Warren and Sen. Richard Russel to join the Warren Commission by telling them that the assassination could lead to World War III.  Johnson appoints former CIA Director Allan Dulles, who Kennedy had fired as a result of the CIA's regime-change operation at the Bay of Pigs, to the Warren Commission, thereby guaranteeing that there will be no investigation of the CIA.  Then keep all the records secret for decades, when many people won't care anymore who killed President Kennedy.

It's Starting To Look Like Putin's Real Goal Was To Drive Americans Crazy — And Guess Who's Helping.  Here's a thought experiment.  What if Russia's goal in its machinations before the November election wasn't to get President Trump elected, but to sow discord and dissent in the U.S.?  If that's the case, Russia's investment has paid off handsomely, and blame for that rests not with Trump, but his political enemies.

Harvey Weinstein Set Off The Left's Version Of The Televangelist Scandal.  It didn't stop with Harvey Weinstein.  Of course it didn't.  We all knew he was just the tip of the iceberg.  The scandal of powerful men using their position to force their attentions on young women in more or less disgusting ways hasn't even stopped in Hollywood.  It is now spreading to the political media, where it is about to cause a similar devastating loss of moral credibility. [...] Here is just a partial list of the miscreants who have been outed in the past few weeks.

Of Course It Matters That Team Clinton Funded the Dossier.  [Scroll down]  My sense is that Russia was playing both sides in the 2016 presidential election.  Its goal was not to influence the outcome — an achievement the Russians understood to be beyond their capability.  Rather the goal was to undermine the credibility of our democratic system and, in the words of James Comey, to "freak people out." [...] The Russians have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams, thanks to the unwillingness of Hillary Clinton and her backers in the mainstream media to live with the result of last November's presidential election.

Swamp Central:  U.S. State Department.  In the long process of draining the D.C. swamp, the executive department to watch is State, whose leadership has long enjoyed a revolving-door relationship with the Bush and Clinton political dynasties, the CIA and the Department of Defense.  For the swamp draining to be real and lasting, changes must be reflected not just around the edges, but in the heart of the swamp as well, and it must not simply pander to domestic populist priorities like immigration; it must restore respect for the common foundation of all civilization: authentic marriage and the natural family.  The true litmus test for making America — and the world — great our response to the culture-destroying "gay" agenda, and the true measure of our national sanity is whether we stop trying to force the world to normalize it.

Roger Goodell Fell for Mainstream Media's Fake Reality and Destroyed NFL (Possibly Forever).  Thanks to George W. Bush's terrible second term, two unbelievably awful Republican opponents in John McCain and Mitt Romney, not to mention the charisma and impressive political skills as the most leftwing senator in the country, Barry O won two national elections and did so by impressive margins.  The problem is that America's so-called Smart People misread these victories.  And by "Smart People," I am, of course, sarcastically referring to Democrats, the imbecilic Republican establishment, and the corrupt national media — all of whom deluded themselves into believing that Obama's victory meant that the country had not just moved to the left, but to the far left.  Buoyed by this mistaken belief, not only did the Democrat Party move to the far-left (Warren, Bernie, Hillary 7.0, etc), so did the media.

America Has Built the Most Comfortable Civilization in the World.  Agatha Christie in "At Bertram's Hotel" makes a comment about Americans liking their rooms warmer in winter, and needing air conditioning in the summer.  There was a faint sneer to the words.  Americans, you know, like to be comfortable, and aren't hardened, easy-going travelers like the rest of the world.  They don't put up with discomfort and inconvenience with a smile.  For some reason, this is held against us.  The thing is, you stack all your cathedrals, all your palazzos, the broad expanses of European plazas, of arches and columns and ancient paintings, and they're all very fine, very impressive, very worth seeing.  But you can't have them and ease and comfort in the same day.  Because nowhere in Europe, no matter how much you're paying (unless you are at the very top of the tree and paying multi-millionaire type of money) will you find the consistent comfort and ease of American life.

The Mythical Far Right.  Few ideas are as silly or destructive as the idea that there is an "ideological spectrum" that has at one extreme Nazis and fascists and at the other end communists.  There is no "far right" that connects in any way with conservatism.  The communists and Nazis are not simply totalitarians, but totalitarians who believe in almost identical values.  That is why Orwell in 1984 could describe an Inner Party that everyone understands but fits nowhere on an "ideological spectrum."  Moving too far in the direction of Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater never, ever leads to totalitarianism, but moving too far in the direction of Hillary Clinton or Nancy Pelosi always leads to totalitarianism.

America Divided: It Starts With the Democratic Party.  Five political worldviews are currently vying for supremacy in the public square:  identity politics, progressive class-based redistributionism, libertarian anti-statism, reform conservatism, and Trumpist populism.  Despite some tensions, the first two co-exist in the Democratic Party.  The other three are jostling for control of the Republican Party.

Are the California wildfires Jerry Brown's Katrina?  Nobody knows with certainty the cause(s) of the Northern California wildfires that have overwhelmed the capacity of governments to in any way contain them.  A few theories exist.  NASA blames lightning, but I am not sure how much credence NASA deserves.

The Editor says...
If the wildfires were caused by lightning, why are they confined to California?  Is there no lightning in Mexico or Oregon?

Who Would You Want For A Boss — Mike Pence or Harvey Weinstein?  This isn't a difficult question.  Unless you live in Hollywood, and you were willing to accept this sexual abuse because it was Harvey Weinstein.  So long as he said all the right things, gave the right people money, and supported all the right causes, he continued to prey on women.

Humanity and Mr. Killer Paddock.  First of all, I keep reading that somehow it's unique in human history that men gather innocent human beings together, pen them up, and then slaughter them in large numbers.  The tragic fact of human nature is that mass killings of totally innocent human beings are not at all unusual.  Genghis Khan swept across Europe and Asia killing by the hundreds of thousands when it had to be done by hand and not by machines.  His victims were as innocent as could be.  In World War II, the Nazis killed Jews and Russians by the millions, making no distinction at all between the men and the women, the children and the adults.  A common way for them to do this was to unload cattle cars filled with Jews, line them up in fields, make them dig their own graves, then machine gun them.  The earth would still be rising and falling for days after the "burial."  Even before that, in World War I, the Turks killed one and a half million Armenians by shooting and starvation and exposure, and the world said nothing.  The Führer was inspired.  Stalin killed by the tens of millions, almost all civilians.  Not only did no one stop him, but many in the elite circles in the West thought of him as a hero.

An Unreal Existence.  At the end of the 20th century people believed in the truth.  While they had several truths, — liberalism, conservativism, classic Communism of the kind once espoused by Che Guevara and in places a naive form of apocalyptic Islam — at least each believed the world's problems could be solved if their truth should triumph over the rest.  The clash of civilizations since September 11, 2001 has left every culture wounded and guilty in its own way.  Western civilization, dominant through the modern era appears to be destroying itself in self-hatred, literally choosing extinction.

Stephen Paddock's 'secret life'.  My guess is that the "secret life" [Stephen] Paddock led was part of a life plan he absorbed from his father, who twice lived a life on the run from police under phony identities he manufactured.

False flag in Vegas shooting?  Stephen Paddock, 64, has been named as the Las Vegas shooter.  He is dead.  He killed 58 people at a concert and wounded 515 others.  In the Congress, calls are rising for new gun control laws..."  But, as it turns out, the evidence suggests there were multiple shooters in the Mandalay Hotel.  Paddock may or may not have been one of them.  The overall operation was designed to invoke widespread horror and fear, and usher in new restrictions on gun ownership. [...] [T]he background of the purported shooter, Stephen Paddock, gives no indication of any competence with auto weapons, gives no indication he could have dealt with the problems and challenges of using such a weapon — and on top of that, his state of mind at the time, as an non-professional, would have been unstable, to say the least.  Any reasonable law-enforcement group investigating this mass shooting would certainly keep its options open, regarding other perpetrators.  But that is not what is happening here.  The books are closed on this case.  There is no going back.  The desired result has been achieved.  One shooter, mass killings.  End of story.  Objective achieved.  That rush to judgment and "closure" is also a prime feature of the false flag.  It has to be.

The bitter fruit of Hefner's life's work has helped poison American families.  Hugh Hefner didn't invent pornography, and it would no doubt be thriving today even if he hadn't founded Playboy magazine those many years ago.  After all, man is fallen, and somebody would have filled that depraved niche in American life.  Hefner, however, played his part, and the part he played was immensely destructive to our nation's cultural, moral, and spiritual fabric.  Hefner mainstreamed porn, he put it in millions of homes, and he even glamorized it — recasting one of America's most pathetic industries as the playground of the sophisticated rich.  He then grew to a ripe old age, consorting with women young enough to be his granddaughters.  He was America's most famous dirty old man.

Hugh Hefner Was A Creepy Old Pornographer.  So Why Are Leftists Celebrating Him?  Let's be clear about one thing:  Hefner's attempt to glorify the "swinging" lifestyle was a dressed-up version of pure hedonism.  While he said he liked to listen to jazz, talk about Nietzsche, and be surrounded by beautiful women, he's only famous because of the last element:  without publishing pictures of bare breasts, Hugh Hefner would have been a nearly-anonymous, seedy-type trying to hit on women who could pass for his granddaughters.  Hefner is iconic only because our culture has been so degraded. [...] The media may pretend that Hefner's "sophistication" is the reason they're praising him today, but it's his obscenity and his open hatred of traditional morality that really turned them on.

Tom Cruise's Latest Film Fabricates History to Attack President Reagan.  Ronald Reagan, we were told in the 1980s, brought to the White House a worldview suffused with America-boosting Hollywood cliché and informed by dodgy facts.  Liberals blanched when Tom Cruise amplified this voice in the Reaganite Top Gun.  Three decades on, the charge is being trotted out again, only this time it is Cruise who is making it, in a film suffused with America-bashing Hollywood cliché and informed by dodgy facts.  Cruise plays Barry Seal, a real-life Louisiana TWA pilot-turned-drug smuggler for the Medellin Cartel who got rich in the 1970s and 1980s before he was eventually busted.  Desperate, he volunteered to turn informant for the DEA and earned the wrath of the drug lords after photographing some of them with cameras the CIA had installed on his plane.  All of this is shown in American Made, but as far as I can tell, most of the rest is fabricated.

Igor, bar the door.  Shared values can't exist in a world where each ever splintering group seeks its own "safe space" only a step ahead of the pursuing harpies of cultural appropriation.  "Divide and conquer" couldn't live in the same town as "we are the world" forever.  Sooner or later the global project had to square off against identity politics and it looks like the hyphens are winning.

That Shooting At Georgia Tech Was Suicide By Cop.  What with all of the other rioting going on all over the country, you're to be forgiven if you missed the latest mayhem breaking out around Georgia Tech this week.  It resulted from the shooting of a student there by the name of Scout Schultz on Saturday night [9/16/2017].  Schultz reportedly "identified as neither male nor female" but based on the pictures and some of the local reporting I'm going with male because I can't be bolloxed with writing an entire column while dancing around the use of pronouns. [...] Since it was a student being shot by the police, the New Normal dictates that people have to immediately take to the streets.

The NDAA is Fatally Flawed and Threatens National Security.  Looking at some of the early Christmas gifts buried deep on the National Defense Authorization Act for both liberals like Elizabeth Warren and our enemies like North Korea and Iran, it's almost hard believe Republicans won an election in November.  Somehow, deep in the fine print almost no one in Washington ever reads, are a series of provisions snuck in to the NDAA by Senator Warren and Obama Administration holdovers at the Defense Department that will actually make America less safe and grow government bureaucracy.

Is Google attempting to cover up an inconvenient hurricane truth?  Since nobody else seems to want to stick their neck out, this old fool might as well do it and point out the obvious: those who have shouldered the heavy lifting in the disaster and rescue work in South Texas and South Florida during our hurricane events have been — with plenty of exceptions, of course — those hated white males the left loves to disparage. [...] If you care to take the time to review the endless stream of videos out there from these disasters, particularly of the widespread flooding from Harvey, one truth quickly jumps out at you: the Americans driving those boats and operating other rescue vehicles are far and away mostly white males, and a disproportionate number of those being rescued are people of color.  Yes, there are numerous Hispanics and some blacks among the rescuers, but the undeniable reality is that the bulk of that huge rescue team was lily-white — and, even worse for liberals, Southerners, which represents a truly inconvenient truth for all those rabid progressives who would have the world believe that Southern White Males are all vicious racists, most of whom have freshly laundered white-sheet KKK attire hanging in their closets.

Flu shots are the greatest medical fraud in the history of the world.  My independent atomic elemental analysis of flu vaccines, published in the summer of 2014, proved that flu vaccines contain over 50 ppm mercury, an extremely toxic heavy metal linked to kidney failure, birth defects, spontaneous abortions and neurological damage.  This finding has never been refuted by anyone.  In fact, it was affirmed by vaccine proponents who insisted that it is perfectly safe to inject pregnant women, young children and senior citizens with mercury even though the flu vaccine insert itself readily admits there is no scientific evidence whatsoever to support the safety and efficacy of the vaccine in such groups.  Believe it or not, there are still millions of people, doctors, pharmacists and even journalists who do not yet realize there is a very high concentration of mercury in influenza vaccines given to pregnant women, children and senior citizens.  Most people, you see, have been lied to by the media which has stated over and over again that mercury was removed from all vaccines.  That's simply not true.

Electing to Investigate Voter Fraud.  Broward County Election Supervisor Brenda Snipes' non-efforts to prevent voter fraud are typical of Democrat officials.  She sounds like your run-of-the-mill, corrupt Democrat capo from Philly or Pittsburgh whose primary objective is maintaining Democrats' power without regard for the rule of law or maintaining a civil society.  Both social norms and the Constitution are targeted by the nihilist, communist left/Democrat Party for annihilation. [...] Leftist apparatchiks like Snipes are vital to the Joey Stalins of the Democrat Party, the malevolent Schumer and abortionist Pelosi.  Snipes most likely considers Antifa to be a community organizing group; in fact, it is — like ACORN and Black Lives Matter — violent, anti-American, communist, and darlings of the mainstream media.

Climate Change Sermon at Hurricane Relief Concert.  Last night our favorite celebrities held a benefit concert for victims of Hurricanes Harvey and Irma.  So kind, right?  Well it didn't take long for those self-righteous stars to turn a charity night into a political statement because, why let a good tragedy go to waste, right?  [Video clip]

Houston, We Have a Problem.  Houston / Harris County has two enormous "dry reservoirs," along with several hundred (regular) reservoirs, bayous, stream beds and other infrastructure designed to collect the water of torrential rainfalls to prevent flooding.  The two dry reservoirs, being dry, do not help the city survive periods of drought, as the rest of the system does.  They are only to temporarily hold the waters of massive rainfalls.  One of these two dry reservoirs is Addicks Reservoir, within which is Harris County Bear Creek Park.  Normally, the land of this reservoir is used for recreation.  For example, park land.  Also, athletic fields.  The other dry reservoir is Barker Reservoir.  Within this reservoir is George Bush Park.  This park offers a mix of amenities similar to that offered by Bear Creek Park.  The two dry reservoirs and the rest of the water control system were put into place following the floods of 1935.  The system was supposed to contain the rush of water associated with massive downpours perhaps even the size of Hurricane Harvey.  But, over time, the city sold pieces of land constituting its reservoir system, reducing the capacity of the system and, of course, the city failed to maintain its (mere earthen) dams.  So, over time, the capacity of the system to absorb torrential rainfall was severely diminished.

Flashback — Admitted Occultist Sally Quinn Ridiculed Sarah Palin's Christian Faith.  Back in 2009, when journalist/socialite Sally Quinn used the pages of the leftwing Washington Post to blast former-Governor Sarah Palin's Christian faith, all we knew about Quinn was that she was a committed atheist (this is someone the Washington Post thought should run its religious section).  What we did not know about Quinn, because she did not want us to know, is that while The Queen of Pro-Science could not bring herself to believe in God, what she did believe in was the occult, the dark arts, voodoo, and the power of the hex.  Quinn believes so strongly in her own witch-like powers, she is certain that she is responsible for the deaths of three people, three innocent people who died after Quinn hit them with a hex.

The Real Reason the US Navy Keeps Hitting Merchant Vessels.  [Scroll down]  Our Navy should now be something like I described back in 2000 — lots of drones, surface, subsurface and air, being controlled by nodes which take the info back quickly to centralized areas for decisions on action.  The weapons can be delivered by drones as well.  Why we are still dropping iron bombs on top of targets before they are softened up is beyond me.  Iron bombs have their place, and so do manned aircraft, but they are truly expensive to lose.  We need to do better.

With Hurricane Irma, Private Volunteers — Not Gov't — Again Lead Way In Relief.  As with Hurricane Harvey in Texas, Hurricane Irma has severely tested Americans' generosity and willingness to help their fellow human beings in a time of need.  And they have once again passed the test with flying colors.

The Great Hate Flood of 2017.  [Scroll down]  Who knew?  Apparently not the legions of leftist fanatics who openly salivated at the idea that thousands of white redneck bigots would be drowning in Texas last week.  So eager were they to revel in the idea of a PMS-enraged Goddess punishing these inbred racists with a hurricane and flooding, they didn't check to see that the area getting walloped went solidly blue in the 2016 elections.  The blood-red parts of Texas — where all those foul-spirited subhuman Republican white rednecks live, the ones who put Trump over the top and gave him the nation's second-largest electoral prize, those morally retarded mutant throwbacks who live and breathe on pure fumes of hatred — were mostly untouched by Harvey's destruction.  Can you imagine these progressive sadists' bitter moral agony when informed that there would be no rainbows in Houston until the storms had taken a rainbow coalition of human lives?  Can you picture the tears that fell sadly to the ground when they realized that not only white people would be dying?

Stop Blaming Houston's Libertarian Zoning For Hurricane Harvey's Destruction.  The media is determined to blame Houston's urban developers for the hurricane's devastation.  That isn't a comprehensive, balanced understanding of the situation.

Did Joe Arpaio receive a fair hearing from an unbiased judge?  My position on the pardon of Sheriff Joe Arpaio is that it was a reasonable exercise of the president's pardon power.  Not pardoning the sheriff would also have been reasonable, in my opinion.  Indeed, as I said in my post on the subject, I don't like presidential pardons.  Absent overwhelming evidence that the person getting the pardon did not commit the offense for which he was convicted, my preference is no pardon.  The Arpaio pardon does not meet that standard.  However, Arpaio's offense arises from his efforts to combat a serious problem of lawlessness — illegal immigration — that the federal government refused to take seriously.  Arpaio was filling a void created by the feds, a void that inflicted hardship on the people Arpaio was elected to serve.  In addition, political animus by those who opposed Arpaio's efforts to fill the void left by the feds appears to have driven the legal case against him.

Warning: The Race War Is Being Engineered.  [T]he corporate media (which is owned by a handful of corporations) have the power to influence your thinking and, as a result, keep you afraid or angry.  The media (and the people behind it) are working together to create conflict.  To stir the pot.  To stoke the flames.  In reality, for the average American these issues truly represent a small slice of the issues which are of immediate threat to their freedoms and livelihood.  While I believe all people should oppose low-level, primitive thinking such as racism and bigotry, we should be hesitant to let these stories and pundits play on our fears and push us into violent action.  Also, we should remain skeptical and be aware there are infiltrators and provocateurs involved with promoting these fears.

Does the Left Know Something's Coming Involving Guns?  This sounds a little "out there," but we live in a time when what is going on beneath the surface dwarfs what we see as the end result of someone's planning.  So what if the discordant calls for gun control are because those politicians, anarchists, and activists (though I repeat myself) have foreknowledge of some kind of planned escalation of their brand of "protest" and are setting the stage for disingenuous "I told you sos'?  What if they have something of a timeline along which they either believe that things will happen or will make things happen, to escalate the blitzkrieg of media and hysteria by which they effect "change" — meaning a coup?  What if they and the media are in bed together on this, too, and have prepared their stories and narratives ahead of time? [...] Seeing the unprecedented dishonesty we have seen over the last nine years, practiced by unethical zealots who see their opportunity to gain full control over the wealth of an entire nation, is this too ridiculous to imagine?

The Insatiable Left.  Steve Bannon, the wily provocateur who helped push President Trump across the finish line in the bloody 2016 presidential contest, has resigned from his position as White House Chief Strategist. [...] Democrats are quicker to hop on opportunity than rats looking for scraps in a dumpster.  But even some Republicans couldn't help jumping on the "fire Bannon" band wagon.

The human cost of hate, and the high price of love.  If life were as simple as the mainstream media makes it out to be, then we would have the luxury of never having to think about anything.  We could all march in lockstep from birth to death, never disagreeing, never finding nuance, never having to worry about the other side — because there wouldn't be another side.  Of course, there are such simple societies, but come to think of it, they are simply horrible.  I'm talking about the nations, cultures and religions that don't tolerate diversity of opinion, ethnicity or religion.  I'm talking about Germany under Hitler, China under Mao, Russia under Stalin, Cambodia under Pol Pot, the Islamic State under al-Baghdadi, Korea under the Kims.  In each of those cases, the people have been told what to think — and variance from those instructions often has meant a death sentence.

Navy's Report on Fitzgerald Collision Is Evidence Of Corruption.  Two months after the USS Fitzgerald's June 18 collision with a freighter in the Sea Of Japan, the Navy announced that the ship's commanding officer, executive officer, and senior enlisted man were being relieved of their positions. [...] The Fitz's damage control fiasco may be a small reflection of the OOD's failure on the bridge.  What was that officer doing before the collision that so diverted his/her judgment, and after the collision that it took him/her 14 minutes to sound General Quarters?  Drugs?  Sex?  What kinds of people and policies are in at the controls in today's Navy?  Unfortunately, the Navy is giving us one more example of how America's ruling class deals with its failures:  indict formal scapegoats, issue long reports that sidestep the key issues, and close the matter by promising to "continue the investigation."  That is why serious persons assume that official reports are cover-ups.

Apple Funds Left-Wing Hate Group.  As has been documented many times, the Southern Poverty Law Center is a left-wing hate group that has blood on its hands.  I don't know whether [Apple CEO Tim] Cook shares SPLC's hateful agenda, or whether he is just a naive stooge.  Either way, Apple has aligned itself with some very bad actors.

The Left Is Doing Exactly What White Nationalists Want.  It wasn't long ago that Americans were being told repeatedly not to overreact to Islamic terrorism, because that would only serve as a terrorist recruiting tool.  That's worth remembering now, in the wake of the white supremacist attack in Charlottesville, Va. [...] Liberals and the press should know that wildly exaggerating the size and influence of these racist miscreants only serves as a powerful recruiting tool for more disaffected whites to join their ranks.  Ignoring these idiotic marches, in contrast, will starve these people of what they want more than anything else — attention.

One Easy Way Democrats Can Stop Neo-Nazis.  In Dallas, a black nationalist activist shot and killed 5 police officers at a Black Lives Matter anti-police rally.  Instead of condemning BLM, Barack Obama defended a racist hate group whose role model is Assata Shakur, a wanted black nationalist cop killer, at the funerals of the murdered officers.  The left killed civil rights and replaced it with black nationalism.  The racial supremacism of black nationalism that killed those officers is everywhere. [...] But racism is a two-way street.  So is violence.  Extremists feed into each other.  You can't legitimize one form of racism without legitimizing all of them.  The media may advance this hypocritical position.  Obama used the shameful "reverse racism" euphemism that distinguishes between black and white racism.  But propaganda and spin don't change the physics of human nature.  Either all racism is bad.  Or all racism is acceptable.

Trump Was Right to Condemn Violence on 'Many Sides' in Charlottesville.  President Donald Trump reacted to Saturday's [8/12/2017] violence in Charlottesville by condemning violence "on many sides."  His critics pounced, saying that he should have specifically condemned violence by white supremacists, and that by not doing so, he in fact condoned such violence.  The critics are guilty of a double standard, and of exploiting the violence for political gain, widening America's divisions at a time when national unity is the only proper course.

Is Charlottesville What's Really Going On in the USA?  [Scroll down]  [T]he Klan, although it's the most famous and features the ever-popular David Duke, is not the only organization of wretched white supremacist nut cases.  There are a number of others.  So for the sake of argument, let's say there are as many as 100,000 white supremacists in America today. (This is undoubtedly a vast exaggeration, but let's use it, as I said, for the sake of argument.)  Meanwhile, since the 1920s, our population has more than tripled to some 325 million.  Using the figure of 100,000 white supremacists (not many of whom made it to Charlottesville fortunately), this puts the percentage of white supremacists in the U.S. at a puny 0.03%.  Terrible people, yes, but no epidemic by any stretch of the imagination.

Skokie and Charlottesville:  Compare and Contrast Nazi marches.  Those who have followed the origins of the Charlottesville riot know that this same Supreme Court decision [National Socialist Party v. Skokie] was held to apply there, too, as the ACLU once again rode to rescue of the rights of Nazis to the same free speech protections as groups favored by public sentiment.  The two marches are linked in their DNA by a common ancestor, the ACLU.  So what was different this time?  Clearly, it was the fact that unlike 40 years ago, the Left is prepared to violently prevent the exercise of First Amendment rights.  Yes, the Nazis are repugnant.  They were repugnant forty years ago, too, and if anything, more so because they targeted a community that was home to many Holocaust survivors.

Celebrate the WWII Ending Atomic Bombs for the Millions of Lives Saved.  Like their soldiers on these islands [Saipan, Iwo Jima, Tarawa, Guadalcanal], the 73 million Japanese prepared to defend to the last man, woman, and child their almost 146,000 square mile homeland.  Everyone who could fight was being trained and armed; even children were taught to fight with spears.  The death toll promised to be horrendous.  The American forces anticipated 1,000,000 casualties including at least 150,000 dead.  The atomic bombs convinced the Japanese to surrender saving American lives and avoiding the extinction, or near extinction of the Japanese people.  While the death toll from the atomic bombs was high, Hiroshima 80,000 and Nagasaki 40,000, they were not extreme in WWII.  The March 9-10, 1945 bombing raid on Tokyo took about 100,000 lives, the raids on Hamburg took about 42,000 lives, the raids on Dresden took 25,000 lives, raids on London took perhaps 50,000 lives.  Compared to the perhaps 60-70 million Japanese that might have died in the invasion of Japan, the death toll from the atomic bombs was low and a small price to pay for the lives saved.

Silencing ALL opposition voices:  Inside The Media Matters Playbook.  Even to casual observers, it has been obvious for months that the left is orchestrating a tightly-coordinated campaign to undermine and delegitimize the current presidential administration.  As an extension of the decades-long campaign to wrestle the narrative away from conservatives, independents and centrists, they're smearing right-leaning commentators with anything they can find. [...] So, what exactly do they want?  Nothing less than complete control over political discourse in America.

While Trashing Trump, Apple Is Selling Its Soul To Do Business In China.  Tech giant Apple Inc. is increasingly caving to the demands of communist China in order to stay in a market where it is losing ground and advancing authoritarian objectives in exchange for short-term profits and, potentially, long-term losses.  China is Apple's second-largest market and could eventually become the company's biggest market, but Apple's China sales are declining.  As the company struggles to maintain a share of the Chinese market, it has increasingly kowtowed to Beijing, delivering blow after blow to internet freedom, human rights causes, and fair-market practices.  At the same time, its leadership continuously criticizes the American president while harping on progressive causes at home.

Is America on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown or Civil War?  [Scroll down]  Can the Deep State co-exist with an awakened populace, even a partially awakened one?  Increasingly, beneath all the leaks and counter-leaks, the missing emails and accusations, what we are looking at is a sclerotic system that has become increasingly built on self-preservation and not on the people's will, in fact is largely disinterested in and disconnected from that will.  Call [Michael] Savage an extremist or whatever you want, but the truth is we are clearly on the edge of something explosive.  The number of leaks is astronomical and they seem to come from everywhere, including our intelligence agencies, the FBI, and inside the White House.

Sanctions, Smoke and Mirrors from a Kindergarten on LSD.  The latest US sanctions and the Russian retaliatory response have resulted in a torrent of speculations in the official media and the blogosphere — everybody is trying to make sense of a situation which appears to make no sense at all.  Why in the world would the US Senate adopt new sanctions against Russia when Russia has done absolutely nothing to provoke such a vote?  Except for Rand Paul and Bernie Sanders, every single US Senator voted in favor of these sanctions.  Why?!  This is even more baffling when you consider that the single biggest effect of these sanctions will be to trigger a rift, and possibly even counter-sanctions, between the US and the EU.  What is absolutely clear is that these sanctions will have exactly zero effect on Russia and I don't think anybody is seriously expecting the Russians to change anything at all in their policies.  And yet, every Senator except Paul and Sanders voted for this.  Does that make any sense to you?

Stop Calling Jesus a Socialist.  To make Jesus of Nazareth a socialist is to give credence to an alternative account in which he is useful only when he speaks of someone else's finances.  The socialist structure demands giving without first inspiring generosity and getting without gratitude, but as for the Kingdom of Heaven, the object of its judgment is the inner life, ignoring status, and calling to account the conduct of the slave as a slave and the master as a master.  It is her witness to this judgment that makes the church a body of grave opposition to those like Bernie Sanders.

We All Need to Admit that America Has a Tattoo Problem.  If America can be divided into those who don't have tattoos and those who do, the two groups seem to be rapidly approaching equilibrium.  About one in five Americans have tattoos, and among 18-29 year-olds the latest figures peg those with ink at 40 percent.  Speaking of percentages, the Air Force is so hard up for recruits that it recently eliminated its "25 percent rule."  Like all military regulations, the 25 percent rule is painfully exact, but loosely stated, it meant that you weren't eligible to serve, much less join a bomber crew ferrying around nuclear weapons, unless you were capable of exercising good enough judgment not to cover more than a quarter of your body in tattoos.  Back in the good old days, the problem was getting tattoos after you joined the military.

Why No Warning Label on Marijuana?  The federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act requires all drugs in the United States to be shown safe and effective before being marketed in the United States.  Now that the manufacture and sale of marijuana is legal in Colorado, California, and six other states, why hasn't the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) required warning labels on marijuana?  The FDA has plenary powers, including the outright prohibition of the marketing of unsafe drugs.  It has similar statutory authority to issue an order recalling drugs, although recalls are normally done voluntarily by drug manufacturers.

Procter & Gamble's Identity-Politics Pandering.  Once upon a time, brothers-in-law William Procter and James Gamble sold candles and soap.  Their 19th-century family business grew into the largest consumer goods conglomerate in the world — launching the most recognizable brands on our grocery shelves, including Tide, Pampers, Crest, Nyquil and Old Spice.  Now, Procter & Gamble want to conquer a new market:  identity-politics pandering.  Industry marketers aren't satisfied with selling useful products people want and need.  They're hell-bent on transforming successful businesses into social justice busybodies.

That's Just Your Opinion:  Moral Relativism and the Death of Liberty.  The protection of individual liberty is the core purpose of American government, built into our nation's framework.  As I've aged, I've come to believe that this is the fundamental distinction that separates the American idea from the rest of the world.  And I've come to understand that to destroy our notion of individual liberty requires the institution of this silly notion of moral relativism, where your opinion and mine are equal simply because we have opinions and a vote.

Russian dossier operator Fusion GPS in business of doing dirty deeds for corrupt dictatorships.  The secretive Washington firm that commissioned the sensational anti-Trump campaign research dossier also advised corrupt Venezuelan officials accused of conducting a lucrative money laundering scheme, a respected international human rights group told lawmakers probing the Russian election-meddling scandal.  Thor Halvorssen, head of the New York-based Human Rights Foundation, told the Senate Judiciary Committee in written testimony that Washington-based political intelligence firm Fusion GPS operated a campaign against journalists who threatened to expose a multibillion-dollar fraud involving faulty South American electric power plants, the laundering of its proceeds in U.S. banks and a kickback scheme to pay off Venezuelan officials.

Combat Veteran:  War Is No Place For The Gender Confused.  Combat veteran J.R. Salzman said Wednesday morning [7/26/2017] in the wake of President Donald Trump's military transgender ban that a war theater is no place for the gender confused.  In a tweet series, Salzman recounted his experiences in Iraq in 2006, when he was stationed at an isolated firebase in the blazing heat and experienced constant stress from the intense nature of his job.

The CBO's Cryptic Approach To Scoring Laws Undermines Public Confidence.  Efforts by Republican lawmakers to repeal the Affordable Care Act in recent months have repeatedly collapsed after the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) scored the various bills using a closely guarded analytic process done entirely behind closed doors.  As Republicans released proposed legislation, the CBO announced its views about its effect on the federal budget and how it would affect the number of people without health insurance but didn't provide a clear account of how those numbers were reached.

David Axelrod, son of communists, suddenly worried about Trump's meeting with Putin.  David Axelrod, President Obama's former political strategist, is stroking his chin about President Trump's supposed "second" conversation with President Vladimir Putin of Russia, coming at the G-20 in Berlin a while back. [...] Would that be the same David Axelrod whose family was found by journalist Paul Kengor to be full-blown, card-carrying communists when young David was growing up in Stuyvesant Town on Manhattan's Lower East Side?  The same ones who were Soviet dupes, as Kengor found, and in tight with now revealed KGB agent I.F. Stone?  Communists so tight in the inner circle of communists that they were buddies with Obama's Communist Party mentor, Frank Marshall Davis?

Mueller's Investigation Must Be Limited and Accountable.  How much goalpost moving should be tolerable in the Trump-Russia collusion investigation? [...] The investigation is a moving target because of its slippery vocabulary.  It has been discussed and analyzed through the prism of "collusion" and "counterintelligence."  When we think of an "investigation," the connotation is a criminal proceeding — crimes, penal law, grand juries, subpoenas, warrants, arrests ... prosecution.  In that thicket, the terms "collusion" and "counterintelligence" are outliers.  The former is a vague term that blurs the legally salient lines between mere association and conspiracy — that is, the difference between innocence and guilt.

Philly Archbishop Decries Vatican Article Attacking U.S. Christians as 'Willfully Ignorant'.  In a hard-hitting essay, Philadelphia Archbishop Charles Chaput has joined the dozens of Christian leaders who have denounced the ignorant and insulting article published last week by the Vatican-vetted journal, La Civiltà Cattolica.  The essay by papal confidants Father Antonio Spadaro SJ and Rev. Marcelo Figueroa paints an offensive caricature of conservative Christians in the United States as politically ambitious racists who promote an "ecumenism of hate" and long to impose a theocratic state. [...] The Archbishop also makes the politically incorrect but undeniably accurate observation that the goal of much gay activism today goes beyond mere equality for the same-sex attracted and extends to a desire to "punish those who oppose the LGBT cultural agenda," something publicly acknowledged by gay activist Tim Gill last month.

U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer Releases NAFTA Objectives.  It cannot be overstated how critical this is.  Please, please, understand.  There are trillions of dollars at stake.  All political opposition to President Donald Trump will increase in exponential severity as the dates of these renegotiated trade deals draws closer.  There are trillions of dollars at stake.  The entities outlined below will throw everything at the current administration in an effort to secure a better financial outcome for their interests.  Multinational Corporations, Wall Street interests and Multinational Financial stakeholders (mostly banks and foreign governments), have lobbied DC politicians for decades to create trade outcomes favorable to them.  It is, at its core, the financial and policy cancer that has distributed America's physical and financial wealth globally.  Additionally, multinational corporate media are part of this entire process and are stakeholders in the outcomes.

Trump-Hatred Is All About Islam.  One and a quarter billion people, roughly a fifth of the world's population, cannot make the leap from tribal society into the modern world.  Their anguish and rage is a source of continuous instability and an occasional threat to the security of Western countries.  Western leaders from George W. Bush to Pope Francis I struggled to avoid a clash of civilizations, praising Islam as a religion of peace.  Trump, by contrast, told Muslim leaders in Saudi Arabia May 21 that the onus was on them to extirpate terrorists from their countries and mosques.  Trump isn't seeking civilizational war.  He's giving Muslim leaders fair warning and a chance to avoid it.  That is what the whole kerfuffle is about.

Fox News Takes a Sharp Left Turn.  If any doubts remained that the Fox News channel is continuing to swerve from its conservative roots, they were erased on July 16, 2017 when Ezekiel Emanuel, M.D., a principal architect of Obamacare and a barely hinged spin doctor for the Democrat socialist left, appeared on the channel's signature weekly program Fox News Sunday in his new role as a paid contributor.  During the program, the ever arrogant Emanuel jumped on the Resist Trump bandwagon and suggested that President Trump is worthy of being impeached.  Hired last February primarily as a health policy analyst (he is a physician and professor, after all), Emanuel is now providing opinion not only on medical subjects but on political ones, as well.

Russia Didn't Interfere In U.S. Election To Help Trump, But To Destabilize America.  A still unidentified Democratic Party donor paid for the factually challenged dossier that almost sunk the Donald Trump campaign.  The dossier was created (and perhaps written) with the support and assistance of unregistered foreign agents of the Russian government, according to the Senate Judiciary Committee.  The offer by an obscure music publicist to Donald Trump Jr. to share compromising information on the Clinton campaign was, as will be shown below, most likely a Russian operation.  I conclude that Russia's interference in the 2016 election was not to help Trump but to throw the American political system into chaos and threaten its foundations.  Russia boasts one of the most effective and ruthless political operations in Washington.  A flamboyant man-about-town ambassador sits at the top hobnobbing with the American political aristocracy.  Russia's diplomats, spies, and PR experts lobby Russian interests and recruit the powerhouses of American political influence to plead their cases and use hired guns to sling dirt and promote "disinformation" about opponents.

Were Democrats Working With The Russians?  Because of left-wing outrage and media obsession, the nation has focused on whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russians to influence the American election.  In the hype and hysteria, we have been distracted from an obvious issue.  If, as the Obama Administration claimed, the Russians merely wanted to undermine American trust in the democratic process, would not they work both sides against each other?  It is looking more and more like that may be the case.

This isn't Watergate.  This isn't treason.  And there's still no smoking gun..  Russia did not swing the election to Trump.  He won because Americans, including hundreds of thousands who had voted for President Obama eight years previously, thought he was a more compelling candidate than Clinton.  Trump did a better job speaking the language of solidarity to the working class.  Get over it, and pick a better candidate next time.

The Next Right-Wing Populist Will Rise to Prominence by Attacking American Higher Education.  Republican voters may disagree on policy and principle, but they can agree on whom they don't like:  Radical professors, race-obsessed provocateurs, gender-studies grifters, anti-Israel fanatics, weak-kneed administrators, disgusting libertines, angry feminists, and illiberal student protesters.  Conservatives can get on board with this critique.  They have long railed against the liberal bias of colleges and its effect on America's young.

Thanks to the Constitution, the left's biggest problem is the American people.  In this country, voters and juries decide, not government officials.  Or media.  Or pundits.  That's by design.  The Founders' design.  Politics has always been a blood sport.  More than a few of the things in the Constitution (some more are most of the Bill of Rights, the prohibition on ex post facto laws, and the bar against bills of attainder and corruption of the blood) were expressly put in there specifically to prevent things from getting out of hand — such as when one faction got control of the executive branch of the government.

Global Warming Skepticism is Part of the Final Phase of the American Revolution.  [Scroll down]  Marshall McLuhan's global village was realized through the electronic village of the Internet.  The power of the Internet and thereby its threat to the power elite who want total government control.  The mainstream media and their political masters were end run by the people ignoring them and seeking facts evidence and information from fellow citizens.  Internet success and power were confirmed when the power elite and media tried to participate by creating websites. [...] For the first time in history, the people had access to and control of information.

How Did Trump Earn an Unprecedented Progressive Backlash?  It may not be traditionally presidential, but the Trump mode is to nuke those who first attacked him, in an effort to create a sort of deterrence.  CNN, to take one example, or Barack Obama to take another, at least knows that their smug, chic Trump putdowns will receive a reply in a manner that is neither smug nor chic.  Trump in Samson fashion is quite willing to pull the temple down on top of himself, if it means his enemies perish first.  Trump's agenda so far is an encapsulation of various conservative initiatives of prior presidents.  Remember, Trump did not promise to make "America great" but rather "American great again."

The Democrats' Latest Plan:  Commit Political Dissidents Like Trump to "Psychiatric" Disposal.  The former Soviet Union possessed many imaginative mechanisms to deal with the problem of enemies of the people who obstructed the path to socialist utopia — now known as "social justice."  One of those mechanisms was the practice of confining individuals who were thinking the wrong thoughts to insane asylums.  Indeed, if you caused any trouble for the commissars, a good inoculation of neuroleptics (powerful drugs used to "quiet" the symptoms of schizophrenia), forcibly administered through a tube in the nose, could do wonders in bringing your politically incorrect behavior to a halt.  Dissidents such as Natalya Gorbanevskaya, Pyotr Grigorenko, Vladimir Bukovsky, Alexander Esenin-Volpin and Joseph Brodsky were all among the brave freedom-fighters who bore the brunt of the Soviet practice of institutionalizing dissidents in mental hospitals and force-feeding them mind-shattering drugs.

CNN Is Breeding a Post-Millennial Generation of MAGA-Loving Rebels.  It has become crystal clear that CNN still has no clue why Hillary and the establishment lost.  Much of the post-election reflection has focused on Trump's popularity with the white working class, with whom the president's populism and protectionism resonated.  Most, however, have ignored the reactionary post-Millennials who, despite holding liberal values on many issues, voted en masse for Trump.

Masterpiece Cakeshop Is Fighting for the First Amendment.  For one thing, no matter how many times people repeat it, the case isn't about discrimination or challenging gay marriage.  But when the news first broke, USA Today, for example, tweeted, "The Supreme Court has agreed to reopen the national debate over same-sex marriage."  The headline (and story) on the website was worse; it read, "Supreme Court will hear religious liberty challenge to gay weddings."  Others similarly framed the case.  (And, don't worry, "religious liberty" is almost always solidly ensconced inside quotation marks to indicate that social conservatives are just using it as a facade.)  There is an impulse to frame every issue as a clash between the tolerant and the closed-minded.  But the Masterpiece case doesn't challenge, undermine or relitigate the issue of same-sex marriage in America.  Gay marriage wasn't even legal in Colorado when this incident occurred.

Making It Up As You Go Along.  Ten years ago one could predict what the official (and unofficial) story would be in any situation.  By contrast today's headlines are often absolutely contradictory, a situation that has made it hard for pundits to write anything intelligent about current events.  Some have given up or seemingly had a nervous breakdown.  This randomness is telling because it is indicative of a narrative in disarray.

Don't Read Too Much into the Drop in Refugee Arrivals Under President Trump.  A sharp decrease in FY 2017 refugee admissions under President Trump compared to those under the Obama administration has been reported recently.  The drop could easily be interpreted as a sign of policy change and tougher screening measures brought about by Obama's successor.  But the numbers are not quite as telling.

Trump Russia probe gets special counsel but not Hillary, not IRS? Time to investigate the investigators.  The American people want justice to be blind.  They want equal justice and equal protection for everyone.  But Mr. Comey's actions continue to call his impartiality, and the impartiality of the Holder and Lynch Justice departments, into question. [...] Throughout 2015 and 2016 there were calls from Congress for a special counsel in the Clinton email scandal.  Again the Justice Department refused, even after it was revealed that Attorney General Loretta Lynch met privately with Bill Clinton less than a week before the FBI interviewed Hillary Clinton.  No special counsel was established, even after some unusual Justice Department immunity deals were revealed, including those designed to protect Secretary Clinton's chief of staff Cheryl Mills, and Bryan Pagliano, who set up the email server in the first place.  This is the type of unequal justice that Americans despise.  No special counsel in the IRS targeting investigation.  No special counsel for the Clinton email investigation.  But if it's about protecting Mr. Comey's reputation and hurting President Trump, then of course there has to be a special counsel.

The Environmentalists' Human Shields.  What was it that took humanity out of a life that was "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short?"  It was cheap power.  It was the ability to heat your home AND cook your food, not having to choose between the two, on a modest income.  Not filling your lungs with smoke from burning wood or animal waste.  Not having to spend back-breaking hours chopping and carrying that wood.  Not losing days from your work and years off your life through those poisonous inhalations and hard labor.  Cheap power is what made modern life possible.  It made everybody's life better, but especially the poor (which is the case for so many other life-changing achievements of capitalism).  It is truly remarkable that "liberals" and "Progressives" champion the most regressive energy policies imaginable.  Higher energy prices generally and electricity prices specifically mean deprivation, hunger, suffering and even death.  And it means these things especially for the poor because the rich are, well, rich.

Whole Foods: America's Temple of Pseudoscience.  My own local Whole Foods is just a block away from the campus of Duke University.  Like almost everything else near downtown Durham, N.C., it's visited by a predominantly liberal clientele that skews academic, with more science PhDs per capita than a Mensa convention.  Still, there's a lot in your average Whole Foods that's resolutely pseudoscientific.  The homeopathy section has plenty of Latin words and mathematical terms, but many of its remedies are so diluted that, statistically speaking, they may not contain a single molecule of the substance they purport to deliver.

That Was Quick:  Reports Say Mueller Granted Comey Full Immunity Even Before Investigation Began.  Thus far, over the course of the utterly fraudulent "Russian Colusion" investigation, Democrats have accidentally uncovered crimes by Obama's attorney general Loretta Lynch and his FBI director James Comey.  And, as an added bonus, they may have also instigated brand new investigations of Hillary Clinton's suspicious activities.  So, by all means, let's continue this charade.

The Curse of Our Times.  The reign of electoral politics in our lives — the endless talk about things that aren't going to get done, and likely wouldn't get done right if they did get enacted through maneuvering and compromise — is the curse of the times.  The whole political system under which we live and obsess may have to crash for us to get the point.  And if that happens, we still may not understand, so inveterate are our habits of reaching out to the political fraternity for resolution of every grievance, the fulfillment of every hope.  We don't understand that politicians are people just like the rest of us:  no smarter as a class, no better tuned in to the realities of the day for having attended law school.

The Treasonous Secession of Climate Confederacy States.  After President Trump rejected the Paris Climate treaty, which had never been ratified by the Senate, the European Union announced that it would work with a climate confederacy of secessionist states.  Scotland and Norway's environmental ministers have mentioned a focus on individual American states.  And the secessionist governments of California, New York and Washington have announced that they will unilaterally and illegally enter into a foreign treaty rejected by the President of the United States.  The Constitution is very clear about this.  "No state shall enter into any treaty."

Russia's Last-Minute Hacking Was Meant to Burn President Hillary.  To the disappointment of Trump's biggest haters, the NSA leak provides no evidence that Russia changed any votes.  And that makes sense, as Russian altering of the tally in favor of their preferred candidate Donald Trump would be sufficient justification for war — one Russia would lose against the U.S.  The Kremlin sought instead to create the perception among Americans that the election may not be authentic in order to push their secondary election effort:  Undermine the mandate of Hillary Clinton to govern, should she win.

Should a liberal gun control activist have a Navy warship named after her?  Hillary Clinton plans to attend the launching ceremony of a warship.  And not just any warship, but the USS Gabrielle Giffords, named for the liberal congresswoman who was shot in the head.  For Hillary, every decision is still about wimmen and grrrls.  But her decision raises the larger question about whether it is appropriate to name a warship after Giffords.  After all, Giffords was viewed as a helpless victim.  That doesn't make for a very intimidating name for a warship.  Giffords is called a hero because she survived.  Does surviving make her a hero?  I think surviving makes her a survivor.  I think Giffords would have been a hero if she had been shot while doing something heroic.  But Giffords was just giving a liberal speech.

'Free' Government-Funded Health Care.  [W]hat should government-supplied healthcare target?  This is hardly hair-splitting if government must pay for curing "an illness."  What makes this question so timely is that "illness" has been expanding so that what was once a non-medical, purely personal infirmity is now a "sickness" that deserves medical attention.  Indeed, countless "sins" now warrant government-paid doctor treatments.  Examples of this expansive "medicalization" include obesity, sexual dysfunction, multiple addictions — gambling, alcohol and drug abuse, sexual behavior such as exhibitionism and child molestation — and crimes such as shoplifting (kleptomania). Millions of youngsters once chastised for being fidgety are now diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder and medicated with Ritalin or Adderall.  How about people who experience episodic but not debilitating depression?  Surely occasional "being blue" is common but does everyone now have an unalienable right to Prozac?  Even violent criminal behavior can be a genetic disorder and thus possibly reversed by brain surgery, not incarceration.  Innumerable mental conditions may be troublesome, but are they "illnesses" demanding treatment?

Thinking the Unthinkable Regarding Germany.  Without deploying a single division of panzers, today's Germany has succeeded in what no previous German regime has done: unifying Europe into a single economic and political entity; one, moreover, dominated by Germany.  In so doing she has extended her economic and social policies across the continent, from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean, Baltic and Black Seas.  With every incremental encroachment on their national sovereignty, other European nations have been compelled under threat of sanction to open their borders, to accept unprecedented and destabilizing refugee flows from the Middle East and to acquiesce to economic rules and restrictions dictated by unelected bureaucrats in Brussels, under the increasing control of Berlin.  Today the United Kingdom is threatened with economic reprisals for daring to leave the European Union.  What will happen, once the EU has its own army, to European nations who wish to leave in the future?

Self-Government Not Climate at Issue in Paris Agreement.  For our purposes here, it is less interesting to debate whether or not climate change is natural or man-made, or whether the worst-case scenarios offered about its supposed effects are realistic.  Those are questions of judgment and they are not the issue at hand.  Instead, we want to focus on the legitimacy of these kinds of international agreements and how they are made under the United States Constitution.  In other words, who gets to make the judgments discussed above?  And who decides what the United States should do in response to potential climate change?

Ted Kennedy Created USSR Back Channel To Help Negotiate Against President Reagan.  While the MSM obsesses about Russia trying to set up a back channel through Jared Kushner in order for National Security Adviser-designate General Flynn to talk to Russian Generals about Syria.  This is not the first time a president-elect has opened a back channel. [...] President elect JFK sent his brother Robert Kennedy to establish a back channel with the Kremlin via a Russian spy operating out of the United States.  Even before he was elected Richard Nixon sent Robert Ellsworth, a longtime aide and personal friend, to relay Nixon's thoughts on non-profileration and geopolitical issues to Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin and Soviet Charge d'Affaires Yuri Cherniakov.

Something Is Deeply Wrong in the U.S. Intelligence Community.  Many high-profile Trump critics, irresponsibly in our view, have been giddily cheering the onslaught of leaks designed to damage the Trump administration.  Reasonable people can debate the merits of leaking in certain circumstances.  But the recent unauthorized release by U.S. intelligence services of sensitive information relating to the Manchester bombings has no imaginable justification.  As Leonid Bershidsky writes in Bloomberg, it can only be understood as the product of a dangerously arrogant and unaccountable intelligence community.

The Democrats' Second Secession & America's New Civil War.  The idea that creates the identity "American" is summarized in America's official motto:  e pluribus unum — out of many, one.  It took a Civil War and two hundred years of sacrifice and struggle to achieve a polity that approached this ideal.  If one political faction is now able to redefine the ideal to conform to its own sectarian beliefs, the country we have known will cease to exist.  But that is just what the current creed of the Democratic Party — "identity politics" — entails, and is why the current divisions in our political life seem so intractable.  Identity politics is, in fact, the antithesis of the American idea.  It is a reversion to tribal loyalties.  It regards diverse origins — colors, ethnicities, genders and classes — as primary, and proposes a hierarchy of privilege based on them, which it justifies as a reversal of past oppressions.

Strong Enough.  Trump voters are far greater in diversity of class, background, and concerns than the left believes.  Most Trump voters decided their vote for a host of reasons, but high among them was given to his being strong enough.  The one thing the Democratic/media collusion is misjudging is this: they aren't changing the minds of Trump voters.  Polls show this conclusively.  MSNBC just did a piece in North Carolina and were shocked to learn Trump voters haven't been swayed.  For all the breathless daily Trump gotchas, the ones where they think they have Trump in full retreat, they aren't changing the electorates' mind.  Trump voters are staying the course.

The Real Constitutional Crisis is the Appointment of Special Counsel Robert Mueller.  Rod Rosenstein's appointment of Robert Mueller to investigate wholly unsupported claims of "links and/or coordination between the Russian government and ... the campaign of President Donald Trump" poses the most serious threat to American constitutional government and domestic peace since the Civil War.  The only reason anyone is still talking about this subject, let alone investigating it pursuant to an order originating at the highest levels of the United States Justice Department, is that the media propaganda arm of the Democratic Party has refused to stop headlining it, despite a total lack of evidence of criminality after continuous investigation for over half a year by multiple agencies of the United States government.

Oops: Looks like Robert Mueller has a major conflict-of-interest issue as special counsel.  Jenna Greene, writing at Litigation Daily (subscription required), describes a significant hurdle faced by former FBI director Robert Mueller in serving as special counsel in the nonsensical "Russian collusion" investigation.

Not On Our Soil.  Video of the incident is jaw-dropping.  About a dozen people protested Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan — arriving at the ambassador's residence after a White House visit — from across the street, separated by police from Erdogan's forces.  Then guards suddenly rushed en masse past the D.C. cops to beat up the demonstrators.  The neutral language of press accounts can obscure the truth of what happened.  The two sides didn't really "clash" or "engage in a violent confrontation," as is often reported.  There was an overwhelming aggressor — the thuggish security personnel of the head of state of, amazingly enough, a NATO country.  The guards repeatedly kick in the face a man who had been thrown to the ground.  They put a woman in a headlock.  Dressed in black suits, they behave like drunken British soccer hooligans or anti-fascist agitators.  Clearly, assaulting innocent people is a core competency.

Here's How Congress Can Fix the Way We Investigate Presidents.  The controversies over President Trump's firing of FBI director Jim Comey, and over the appointment of a special counsel to oversee the Russia investigation, are yet another reminder that our existing process for investigating political figures is broken.  To fix that process going forward, Congress should create a new cabinet-level inspector general charged with handling investigations and prosecutions of political cases, including those involving the president and other high executive-branch officials.  In general, the executive branch needs new cabinet departments like it needs a hole in the head, but this one would actually do some good without significantly expanding the federal government.  And unlike prior innovations in this area, it could be designed to work comfortably within the framework that the Constitution provides for the enforcement of the law.

10 Crazy Conspiracy Theories That Became Conspiracy Facts.  The internet has obviously had a profound effect on conspiracy theories, simultaneously helping and hurting the cause.  While a world of information is at people's fingertips, so too are alternate worlds of manufactured propaganda.  While the Internet may appear to be a democratized, unfiltered path toward facts and truth, it is easily manipulated.  Powerful corporations pay a lot of money to have their dirty laundry buried in the search results underneath contrived puff pieces.  With nearly the entire mainstream media apparatus at their disposal, the government is a maestro at this practice. [...] Unfortunately, there are those who seek to lie and invent fictions for monetary gain and fame.  Disinformation, propaganda, and dishonesty exist at all levels of society.  However, sometimes conspiracy theories turn out to be true.

Guess who is warning the Democrats' base to back off on Russia?  OK, gang, time to move along — other stuff is more important.  That's the logical strategy for the Democratic Party leadership to signal the base that the Russia conspiracy narrative has served its purpose and belongs in the Memory Hole.  You don't want to go farther out on the limb of an unfounded charge dreamed up to explain away the failure of Hillary and her campaign henchpeople to pull off the expected victory.

Huge Arms Sale to Saudis Makes Trump-Russia Collusion Ridiculous.  Why?  It should be obvious but I'll state it anyway.  Not very long ago Ronald Reagan built up U.S. armaments not to go to war with the Soviet Union, but to bankrupt it out of existence.  It worked.  The same thing is going on here, as anyone with the proverbial pulse should notice.  Selling three hundred and fifty billion in advanced weaponry to Saudi Arabia is not just aimed at the obvious target — Iran.  It is also aimed at Iran's big brother Russia.  And there is no way that relatively impoverished oligarchy can possibly keep up, not in the long run anyway.  They don't have the rubles.

The malicious and dishonest media really are, as Trump says, 'enemies of the people'.  The whole point of the Trump campaign was the need for radical but centrist reform.  He was midway between the Sanders left and the Cruz right.  But he mobilized the angry and politically incorrect traditionalists, and much of the working and middle class, and attacked the deferences to both Wall Street and organized labour (especially the teachers' unions), as well as the appeasement of the societally self-hating and faddish academics and Hollywood.  At his heavily attended rallies, he singled out the national political media for its almost relentless disparagement of him and his followers, and for the soft ride it had given to the Obama regime, which — despite the great breakthrough of having a non-white president — was unsuccessful in almost every field.

Why Robert Mueller should resign as special counsel.  Robert Mueller has a serious conflict of interest that should disqualify him from serving as special counsel.  He has had a long and close relationship with someone who will surely become a pivotal witness — James Comey.  No one doubts Mueller's sterling credentials.  That is not the issue.  He is imminently qualified.  The problem arises in his duty to fairly and objectively evaluate the evidence he gathers.  How can Americans have confidence in the results if they know the special counsel may harbor a conspicuous bias?  They cannot.

If the President Is Not the Subject of a Criminal Investigation, Then Say So.  Well is he, or isn't he?  Almost everything in a counterintelligence investigation is classified.  And much of what goes on in a criminal investigation is secret, kept confidential by investigators and prosecutors.  But there is one thing that need be neither classified nor otherwise concealed from the American people:  the status of the president.  Is the president of the United States the subject of a criminal investigation?  If he is not, then the Justice Department and special counsel Robert Mueller owe it to the country to say so.  There is no reason to be coy about it.  In fact, because a president under criminal suspicion would be crippled, his inability to govern detrimental to the nation, it is imperative to be forthright about his status.

By What Right Do We Bear Arms?  The constitution is a covenant by which men have agreed to live together.  We derive our authority to bear arms from God, in whose image we are made, and who Himself made war when necessary, and thus we are to protect that image.  This is His immutable law.  If the covenant within which we live does not reflect God's laws, it is an abomination and dishonors God.  It is null and void.  Second, to the extent that it does, when we fail to live within the framework of that covenant it is null and void.  Therefore, if the government breaks covenant with the people, the government has declared itself null and void before God.

There's something wrong with President Macron.  The problem is this.  So you have an IOU, as it were signed jointly by the 27 members of the EU.  Where would you present it for payment?  Athens, Riga, Bucharest? or Berlin?  Not a difficult question.  The good Germans would pay you and it would then get added to the list of intra Eurozone liabilities, which is called Target 2 and is already out of control.  Italy already owes €400 billion under the Target 2 system, accounting for almost half Germany's creditor position.  If Italy defaulted, Germany would be liable for 33 percent of this figure, assuming it could get others to cough up.  That is €133 billion, before we have eurobonds.  Eurobonds mean borrowings by the unsuccessful countries of Europe guaranteed by Germany.

Protesters spell out 'RESIST' at Trump golf course.  A Facebook Group for the organization describes them as "a group of concerned citizens that realize the Trump administration's agenda will take America backwards, and must be stopped."

The Editor says...
Why yes, I would be delighted if President Trump could "take America backwards," to the years before a multi-trillion-dollar national debt; the era of currency based on the value of gold and silver rather than paper and politicians' promises, and coins were made of genuine silver; the era when construction projects had higher priority than endangered snails and bugs; the good old days when the DDT truck came down every residential street in the summertime and got rid of all the mosquitos; the years when lawyers and prescription drugs could not be advertised on television, and everything on TV was rated G and was broadcast in English; the pre-calculator days when clerks knew how to make change for a twenty; the days when nothing good would happen to you if you sneaked into this country; the days when homosexuals were not allowed in the military; the days when your privately-owned business could not be compelled by the state to participate in a homosexual wedding; the years when tattoos, marijuana, illiteracy, fatherlessness, homosexuality, atheism, food stamps, prostitution and abortion each carried an embarrassing stigma.  Yes, if the country is going off a cliff, let's take it backwards.

It's Time To Tone It Down On Health Care.  Fact #1:  Nothing has happened, nothing at all.  Despite the shock and awe, regardless of proclamations of "insurance for everybody" on the one hand or doomsday on the other, the AHCA has not impacted the health care of a single American in any way, shape, or form.  If you had insurance yesterday, you will still have it tomorrow, and the premiums won't change next month.  If you have a doctor now, that provider will still care for you next weekend.

People Who Don't Believe In The Constitution Think We're Facing A Constitutional Crisis.  If you are a Constitutionalist, and you believe in the original intent of the words written in the Constitution, the Left for the past few decades has been trying to tell you that the document is outdated and that it has to be interpreted as a living document to still be relevant.  It is an annoying argument because it makes something so simple as the meaning of words into an abstract interpretive dance where anything is possible.  So then it only makes sense that these very same people who, let's face it, have no regard for the Constitution or what it's stood for since the founding of our country would now say Donald Trump violates it at every turn.

Follow the Lies.  [Carl] Bernstein is saying that if you want to find the truth, first you've got to figure out who is lying to you.  This goes much deeper than simply calling out false claims in print, a practice I applaud even when it's done poorly, because it's always revealing.  Either a lie gets exposed or the biased reporter does.  You find the roadmap when you go a step further, and realize that one side of a dispute may be lying continually, as a strategy.  It might be a public safety union trying to snow the public about a failing pension.  It might be a prosecutor ruining an official's future with charges motivated by politics.  They're relying on the same thing — superficial news coverage.

Does Anyone In Washington Even Care That We Are 20 Trillion Dollars In Debt?  There has been a tremendous amount of talk about the spending deal that was just reached in Congress. [...] But what nobody is really talking about is that this deal actually increases spending at a time when our debt has been absolutely exploding.  We added more than a trillion dollars a year to the U.S. national debt during Obama's eight years in the White House, and our debt binge actually accelerated toward the end of his second term.  In fact, the national debt increased by more than 1.4 trillion dollars during fiscal 2016.

Trump's Executive Order on Religious Liberty Is Worse Than Useless.  Fresh on the heels of a budget deal that fully funds Planned Parenthood, Donald Trump has signed a religious-liberty executive order that — if reports are correct — is constitutionally dubious, dangerously misleading, and ultimately harmful to the very cause that it purports to protect.

The Myth of the Military-Industrial Complex.  The idea of a military-industrial complex originated with President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who warned in his farewell address of the increasing coziness between the state and vendors of war: [...] Though I like Ike, his warning was way off the mark:  the Democratic-entitlement complex is the real Leviathan threatening the integrity and spirit of America.  In fact, while defense spending as a factor of GDP has steadily declined, welfare and entitlement spending has ballooned to nearly four times what it was when Ike began his second term.  Social Security and Medicare alone consumed nearly three times more money than defense last year.

The "UniParty" Congress Deserves No Quarter.  This is no small thing, to restore a republic after it has fallen into corruption.  I have studied history for years and I cannot recall it ever happening.  It may be that our task is impossible.  Yet, if we do not try then how will we know it can't be done?  And if we do not try, right now, it most certainly won't be done.  The Founders' Republic, and the larger war for western civilization, will be lost.

With This Budget Deal, The Swamp Wins.  Shortly after announcing a $1.1 trillion — with a "t" — spending deal to fund the federal government's domestic and military programs for the next five months, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called it a "very good deal for the American people."  House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi said it "reflects Democrats' values to protect health care, environment and education."  Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said that "we now have an agreement that both sides should support," praising the negotiations as "bipartisan and bicameral every step of the way."  The New York Times gushed that the bill "could serve as a template for putting together the next round of spending bills."  When you hear talk like that, grab on to your wallet, because it means big-spending business-as-usual reigns in Washington, which is precisely what voters sent Republicans and Donald Trump to Washington to end.

Is Marine Le Pen a 'Far-Right' Candidate?  [Scroll down]  In other words, those looking to cherry-pick easy comparisons to American politics have their work cut out for them.  Except in one regard.  For decades, critics of America's mass immigration have argued that the social upheaval such policies produce is dangerous and destabilizing.  But the topic became radioactive for reasonable politicians, creating an opening for unreasonable ones among the working-class constituencies most affected by immigration.  This is precisely what has happened in France.  Interviews with Le Pen voters tell this story over and over again.  They bemoan the great "replacement" of not only workers but also customs, traditions, and lifestyles brought by waves of immigrants.

Why We Have a Second Amendment:  Venezuela Plans to Give Firearms to Loyalists So They Can Purge Growing Resistance.  After enduring shortages of food and medicine for years, as well as a total collapse of their currency, the people of Venezuela have had enough.  Last week it was estimated that 2.5 million people marched against the Maduro regime, which had previously tried to strip away the powers of the opposition-led parliament.  It's estimated that as many as 6 million people may have taken to the streets to protest throughout the country.  In the lead-up to the protest, which had been planned for weeks by opposition political parties, President Maduro issued an alarming proclamation that didn't receive nearly enough press.  He promised to expand the nation's armed militia, and hand out firearms to as many as 400,000 loyalists.

The Rise Of Anti-Whiteness.  In his renowned dialogue, Sophist, Plato refers to a common trend in which philosophers intentionally distort the truth so that it appears accurate unless viewed from the proper angle. [...] Liberals are promoting a similar kind of trend today.  Many liberals have even begun to claim that reality is subjective, going so far as to label species, gender and biologically masculine and feminine qualities as social constructs.  Unfortunately for these deluded escapists, reality is not subjective.  No matter what you believe, the mere fact that you believe it does not make it true.  On the contrary, the lens through which you are viewing the world is malformed.

Who Is Obama?  Ex-President Barack Obama is the mystery man of American politics.  Given the absence of a viable paper trail, nobody can say for sure who he is.  He manifests for us as a figure of multiple identities: a Christian, a Muslim, a secularist, a socialist, a humanist, an intellectual, a man of the people.  His lack of definable substance, his inner absence, has been an important political advantage.

Bulk Cash Pays for the Wall.  In the hyper-charged debate over the merits of building "the wall" along the U.S.-Mexico border and its funding impact on a possible government shutdown, I would like to propose a solution.  The focus has largely been on contraband and illegal immigrants going north.  We largely ignore the other side of the equation; i.e. illicit proceeds — mostly in the form of bulk cash — flowing south.  If we could recover just a few percentage points of the tens of billions of profits from the sale of drugs and other transnational crimes (TOC) that annually flow south across the border, we could pay for the wall.  Moreover, targeting the illicit proceeds should be palatable to both Mexico City and Washington DC, and may serve as a basis for enhanced U.S.-Mexican cooperation on illicit trafficking and related TOC.

How Progressives Cherry-Pick Science They Like.  It's hard to think of a better way to undermine the public's faith in science than to stage demonstrations in Washington, D.C., and around the country modeled on the Women's March in January.  The Women's March was an anti-Trump festival.  Fine.  I found it vulgar and demeaning to women, but it's a free country.  Science, however, to be respected, must be purely the search for truth.

Hold the celebrity enablers of Venezuela's hellhole accountable.  What holds Venezuela together these days?  According to the New York Times, this state is held together only by an encircling ring of death-squad gangs, who serve as its enforcers.  These are the community organizers known as 'colectivos' who ride and circle around menacingly on motorcycles, and shoot randomly into crowds to generate terror.  I saw them myself in Caracas in late 2005, and they were scary.  Now, they are engorged with drug cash and legitimized by the state.  Who could have imagined that this tontons macoute situation would be the logical conclusion of Chavista socialism?

A physicist's take on the March for Science.  Like wizards uttering a magical incantation, lobbyists routinely invoke the existence of a "scientific consensus" to lend an aura of infallibility to their political stands. [...] There is enormous room for improving science education in our nation's public schools, colleges, grad schools, media, and — yes — political institutions.  But the March for Science — lobbyists claiming that supporting the scientific method is equivalent to supporting their political agendas — is a very big, very public step in the wrong direction.

Before Demanding Donald Trump's, Let's Look Into Susan Rice's Tax Returns.  Show us the tax returns.  No.  Not Donald Trump's tax returns.  Geraldo Maddow already made a fool of herself with those on MSNBC.  Show us Susan Rice's tax returns. [...] Susan Rice is different.  From 2013 to 2017 her official salary was paid for by taxpayers.  That of course represents a very small portion of her net worth.  When she signed on as Obama's National Security Advisor her net worth was around $20 million.  When she left office somehow her net worth had doubled to nearly $50 million — a succession of pay raises that increased her government salary from $172,000 per year in 2014 to $176,000 certainly doesn't account for the extra $30 million she made as National Security Advisor.

Is America Really Ready for a Second Korean War?  North Korea is a place of tyrannical horror, ruled by a backward regime that oppresses its own people on a scale seen nowhere else in the world.  That regime sustains itself in part by maintaining a permanent war footing, putting its immense but antiquated forces on hair-trigger alert and promising ultimate devastation in the event of conflict.  While we can bomb, say, an al-Qaeda gathering in Yemen without risking immediate catastrophe, any assault on North Korea would represent a gigantic roll of the dice, with the fate of entire cities hanging in the balance.

Same Leftists Who Spent a Century Eroding the Constitution Suddenly Worried About Preserving the Constitution.  Conservative Review Editor-in-Chief Mark Levin wants you to be aware that the Left is starting to notice the headway conservatives are making toward an Article V Convention of States to amend the Constitution.  And liberals are fighting back with lies to block any chance of it.  Earlier this week, Levin addressed a Huffington Post article by Fred Wertheimer, titled "The Battle to Preserve the Constitution," that demagogues an Article V Convention of States as a "constitutional convention" where the Bill of Rights could be repealed ... or some other such nonsense.  The reality is the Left fears any changes to the Constitution that would rein in the massive federal government, and obstruct its agenda.  "We know the Left wants to leave things as they are because the Left wins," Levin said.  "The federal government represents their ideology."  But, as Levin discusses, there are some on the Right who are spreading misinformation about an Article V convention as well.

After Trump's Syrian Attack, China Suddenly Gets Very Concerned About North Korea's Nukes.  Keen observers have noted that the missile attacks on the Syrian air base were launched as President Trump sat down last week to dinner with China's President Xi Jinping.  No doubt Xi immediately recognized that this president, unlike the previous one, acts quickly to make sure bad situations don't get worse.  What does this have to do with North Korea?  Plenty.  Despite their at times rocky relationship, China is the totalitarian communist North Korean regime's main patron and protector, accounting for over half the North Korean nation's trade and much of its food and energy supplies.  Strive as it does for self-sufficiency, without aid from China, North Korea would soon starve.

The Legacy of George Soros Part 11.  Here in the United States, Soros is planning what can only be called sedition.  His plans, if they come to fruition will end in the violent overthrow of our way of government.  Harkening back to his days within the Nazi regime, Soros is financing his present day "brownshirts" — the black clad anitfa crowd.  Nothing more than ignorant thugs, the were created for only one purpose, they are the street animals who will create the violence, the looting, the burning to shut down any other voice.  They realize that law enforcement, academics in charge and others in position of authority will continue to be cowed and allow them to just destroy anything and anyone who gets in their way.  Obama was complicit in this, but it is Soros who is funding the various factions to work together.

The Legacy of George Soros Part 1.  [Scroll down]  Placed in charge of the entire Soros Foundation Network and the Open Society Network was Aryeh Neier.  Neier was one of the creators of the Students for a Democratic Society,(SDS) a large socialist radical group of the 1960's.  The main goal of the SDS was the overthrow of America, its democratic institutions, and the decimation of the culture that the United States was based on.  After leaving the SDS, Neier worked with the American Civil Liberties Union serving some time as the national executive director.  After his time at the ACLU, Neier founded Human Rights Watch in 1978. He spent a great deal of time at both the ACLU and the HRW promoting the idea that the Un9ited States is an oppressive nation, and one of the worst violators of human rights in the world.  The Open Society Institute has given over $100 million to the HRW alone, and over $8 million to the ACLU.  There are other monies that the Open Society Institute has given to those that follow the Soros idea of "open society" including such organizations as The American Prospect, Media Matters, Columbia School of Journalism, National Public Radio, Pacifica Foundation, Pro Publica.  And the Washington Post.  In all Soros has spent more than $48 million funding journalism schools, media outlets, and industry organization such as unions.

The Legacy of George Soros Part 8.  [Scroll down]  In 2004, Soros turned his attention to the United States.  He then made a profit of over $1 billion on the housing trade collapse through a series of bets on the market.  Funneling money through organizations such as the Tides Foundation, Center for American Progress, and The Democracy Alliance to bypass election laws in one way the Soros can fund a myriad of organizations that will give him political power.  Democrats go along with his agenda to continue to receive the assets that Soros provides.  Among the higher politicians that have received funding from Soros are Joe Biden, Barack Obama and the Clintons.

See also:
Part 2   Part 3   Part 4   Part 5   Part 6   Part 7

The Democrats' Weakest Trump Talking Point.  America's role as the world's only superpower does obligate it to act when the international order is threatened by atrocities.  The leader of the free world can and must send a message to rogue regimes that they can't use weapons of mass destruction with impunity.  But this doesn't mean that everyone affected by those governments automatically gets a ticket to enter the United States.

We should be cheering the likely end of the Senate filibuster, not mourning it.  The Senate filibuster is the modern descendant of the Senate's one-time tradition of unlimited debate.  Unlike in the far larger House of Representatives, where every speech is of limited duration, a senator who has the floor can keep it until overcome by exhaustion or an irresistible call of nature.

Winning the Civil War of Two Americas.  When John Edwards touted the "Two Americas" during his presidential campaigns before his political career ended in disgrace, it was still a metaphor.  It stopped being a metaphor at the end of last year.  If you doubt that, you can watch Tom Perez, the head of the Democratic National Committee, yelling that President Trump didn't win the election.  There is a huge difference between opposing the winner of an election and denying that he won it.  It's the difference between opposition and rebellion.  Democrats have not recognized a single Republican presidential victory this century.  There is no real reason to think that they will recognize a third one.  We can safely assume that the third or fourth Republican to win the White House, no matter who he is, will face the same treatment.  A two-party system can't function if one party denies the legitimacy of elections won by the other side.

The Nasty Truth About the CIA.  Why have a war in Central America?  Why invent Daniel Ortega, a liberal politician from Nicaragua as a dangerous dictator?  Could it be because arming "contras" used planes that accidentally came back loaded with cocaine?  When the CIA took over oil operation services in the Gulf of Mexico around that time, the boats that came into New Orleans and other ports, were "tasked" with carrying "medical supplies" to Honduras to support the covert was on Nicaragua.  They came back loaded with, wait for it... cocaine as well.  Every discussion was "cocaine" and how to use CIA technology to avoid police, jam radars, find missing bales of drugs or how to keep America's allies in Colombia from killing each other off and ruining business.  Miami became the center of the drug universe, where the warriors fighting communism sat in hotel lobby's with umbrella drinks, heading to the toilet every few minutes to stoke themselves up on cocaine.  Money moved in trash bags, too tiresome to count, some say they only weighed it.  That money bought Washington and was a key aspect of White House policy, and the cover operation to sell weapons to Iran through Israel and Saudi Arabia, then use this as a front to launder billions in cocaine cash in what became known as "Iran Contra."  There was no "Contra," only cocaine and the cash it brought and the American cities inundated with crack cocaine and a descent into addiction and crime that continues today.

The Sovietization of American Politics.  Strong arm rule, political surveillance and the show trial threatens to replace the orderly alternation at power which characterized elective government.  Watching the Beltway is now disturbingly like watching an unfolding power struggle at the Kremlin.  Richard Arenberg writing in the Hill asks:  "is there any hope of pulling out of the "nuclear option" death spiral before the Senate inflicts permanent damage upon itself and the Supreme Court?"  There's growing concern the acrimony will permanently poison the atmosphere by locking both parties into a cycle of retaliation.

The Watergate-sized scandals rocking the Trump and Obama administrations.  Did Donald Trump collude with Russia to defeat Hillary Clinton?  Did Barack Obama politicize law enforcement and intelligence-gathering to spy on Trump and destroy his presidency?  Those are extraordinary questions, all the more so because the race to answer them is happening on parallel tracks.  The usual partisanship has become a winner-take-all war to paint the other side's president as guilty of un-American conduct.

Why We Must Abolish the U.S. Department of Education.  In this video, The New American's correspondent Alex Newman, an educator and the co-author of a book on education, explains why it is essential that the unconstitutional and highly damaging U.S. Department of Education be shut down.  [Video clip]

It's the Democrats who Collude with the Russians.  Vladimir Putin is shrewd, calculating, and fairly predictable.  If he were serious about influencing the outcome of the November 2016 U.S. presidential election, he would not have favored the relatively unknown and impulsive Donald Trump, who had no history of doing favors for Putin or Russia.  It is far more likely Putin would have chosen to help Hillary Clinton — the known, predictable, progressive candidate with a history of helping Russian interests.  By doubling down on drama rather than facts, leaders of the Democratic Party show disdain for nearly half the country who voted for Trump and a seditious inclination to destroy his presidency.

The Russian Farce.  In March 2012, in a meeting with President Dimitri Medvedev of Russia, President Barack Obama thought his microphone was either off or could not pick up the eerie assurances that he gave the Russian president:  "On all these issues, but particularly missile defense, this, this can be solved, but it's important for him [Vladimir Putin] to give me space."  Medvedev answered:  "Yeah, I understand.  I understand your message about space.  Space for you ..."  Obama agreed and elaborated, "This is my last election.  After my election, I have more flexibility."  Medvedev finished the hot-mic conversation with, "I understand.  I will transmit this information to Vladimir, and I stand with you." [...] Barack Obama naturally wanted to continue a fourth year of his reset and outreach to Vladimir Putin, the same way that he was reaching out to other former American enemies such as the Iranians and the Cubans.  Yet Obama was uneasy that his opponent, Mitt Romney, might attack him during his reelection campaign as an appeaser of Putin.

Breast Cancer Trends:  Why Do Women in These 5 States Opt for Unneeded Mastectomies?  Doctors agree that too many U.S. women who are diagnosed with breast cancer opt to have both breasts removed.  Now a new study shows where they live has a strong effect on that decision.  Young women in five states — Nebraska, Missouri, Colorado, Iowa, and South Dakota — were much more likely than other women to have preventive mastectomies. [...] Just as other researchers have found, they saw a big increase in the number and proportion of women opting to have the other breast removed, even though there was no sign of cancer in the second breast.

The Editor says...
If you had cancer in one lung, would you have both lungs removed, just to be on the safe side?  Articles like this tell me one thing:  Some people watch too much television.  Especially the syndicated shows that are based on hypochondria.

The Election Wasn't Stolen by Moscow.  The notion that Russian efforts succeeded in stealing the presidential election from Hillary Clinton has no basis in fact.  As both Comey and Admiral Michael Rogers of the National Security Agency affirmed, there is no doubt that the Russians undertook activities designed to undermine faith in American democracy.  It is equally true that the Putin regime preferred to see Trump rather than Clinton elected president of the United States.  But the notion that these dots must somehow connect in a plot between Trump and Putin to steal the election requires faith in the sort of discredited claims (such as the Steele dossier) and conspiracy theories that Democrats laughed at when they were put forward by the far Right against Obama.

Levin: House Intel Committee Asked Comey None of the Important Questions.  "Pointless."  "Useless."  Those are the words Conservative Review Editor-in-Chief Mark Levin used to describe Monday's House Intelligence Committee hearing on investigations into the Trump campaign and its alleged ties to the Russian government.  The Committee neglected to ask the important questions, explained Levin.  He went back, through the media reports that suggest members of the Trump campaign were surveilled by the government, and demanded to know why FBI Director James Comey and NSA Director Admiral Mike Rogers were not asked about these reports and the source of these leaks.

George Soros's Organizations Foment Political Violence And Use US Taxpayer Dollars To Do It.  [Scroll down]  While the letter is only concerned with USAID funding Soros's money-making ventures, Soros is involved in many areas of conflict.  He has kept the conflict in Ukraine going and has tried to bring down Hungary's government.  His organizations have been banned in Russia... something that doesn't look like a bad idea.  Under the Clinton and Kerry reigns at State, Soros's Open Society became the de facto face of American foreign policy in many places.  It did not serve us well.

Is George Soros On The Ropes?  Although multi-billionaire hedge fund tycoon and international political pot-stirrer George Soros lost big with the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States and the victory of the Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom, he stands to lose further ground, politically and financially, as the winds of political change sweep across the globe.  Soros, who fancies himself as the master of placing short put options on stocks, often cleaning up to the tune of billions of dollars in the process when the stock values collapse, has been dealt a few financial body blows.

Precedent: Right After 1992 Election Bill Clinton Fired U.S. Attorney Jeff Sessions.  As liberals react in horror over Trump Attorney General Jeff Sessions' decision to ask for the resignation of 46 Obama-appointed U.S. Attorneys, an inconvenient fact has also surfaced.  Jeff Sessions himself was fired by a newly elected president in 1993 when Bill Clinton won his first term in office.  The Department of Justice announced on Friday that U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions asked for the resignation of 46 U.S. Attorneys who were appointed during President Barack Obama's regime.

Steve King States the Obvious, Unleashes Fury.  Kudos to [Rep. Steve] King for standing up for Western Civilization.  Even if few have the spine to say it, everyone who has spent more than a minute thinking about it understands that a society cannot be sustained by importing massive numbers of foreigners from an alien civilization rather than having babies of its own.  This is especially obvious when that alien civilization has been vehemently hostile for 1,400 years, and the foreigners are ostentatiously uninterested in assimilation.  Just because David Duke agrees with him does not mean he is wrong.  King is in for a storm, and deserves every patriot's support.

Anne Patterson? What Could Possibly Make Secretary Mattis Think That's a Good Idea?  When we first saw the news reports that Defense Secretary Mattis was considering former Obama appointee Anne Patterson for undersecretary of policy we thought it was simply fake news.  However, apparently it is not.  Anne Patterson is a severely toxic entity and was considered the epicenter of dangerous political policy because she gave legitimacy to the extremists within the Muslim Brotherhood.  Specifically due to her role in supporting the Brotherhood's former candidate turned President, Mohammed Morsi in Egypt, Anne Patterson should forever be dispatched into the waste-bin of failed mid-east policy.

What is Going On (Part II)?  Closing the gold window in 1971 and allowing politicians to run up the national debt from $400 billion (34% of GDP) to $20 trillion (106% of GDP), while making $200 trillion of unfunded entitlement promises, has been the result.  Total credit market debt has risen from $2 trillion in 1971 to over $65 trillion today.  Total global debt has surpassed $217 trillion, or 325% of global GDP.  The only way to make these disastrously horrible decisions seem palatable has been to produce inflation at prodigious levels in order to make the debt appear payable.  It's not. [...] Of course, the pliable public has been convinced government debt doesn't matter because we owe it ourselves, or some such nonsense.

Obama Wiretapping?  Trump Colluding?  We Are Headed Down a Rabbit Hole.  When he was Ronald Reagan's secretary of state, George Shultz was once asked about the CIA's disavowal of involvement in a mysterious recent bombing in Lebanon.  Replied Shultz:  "If the CIA denies something, it's denied."  Has there ever been a more dry, more wry, more ironic verdict on the world of espionage?  Within it, there is admission and denial, smoke and mirrors, impenetrable fog and deliberate obfuscation.  Truth?  Ask the next guy.  Which is why my default view of espionage is to never believe anyone because everyone is trained in deception.  This is not a value judgment; it's a job description.

Senator Ted Cruz Wants to Revoke Citizenship of Americans Who Turn to Terrorism — Why Aren't We Already Doing This?  Cruz is talking about the soon to be introduced Expatriate Terrorist Act (ETA) of 2017, which would allow the U.S. government under certain circumstances to revoke the citizenship of Americans who knowingly join or provide material support to foreign terrorist organizations.  Of course, the idea isn't new.  Not only has such a bill been floating around Washington for some time, for over a year President Donald Trump has been talking about better vetting to prevent terrorists from getting into the country in the first place.  But the Texas Senator says that working to prevent Muslim terrorists from getting into the U.S. is only part of the equation of combating terrorism in at home.  The other half of the problem is composed of home-grown terrorists — those the media often erroneously call "lone wolf terrorists — who turn to terror right here inside our own borders.

Conspire With Russia to Swing Presidential Election?  It's Been Done.  The Democrats' allegations against Jeff Sessions, one of the most upright men in Washington, are ludicrous.  I don't understand how anyone can think they amount to anything.  But if the Democrats want to talk about collusion with the Russians, by all means let's have that conversation.  Chris Adams takes us on a walk down memory lane.  In 1983, Ted Kennedy — the "liberal lion of the Senate" — tried to enlist the Soviet Union, our most bitter enemy, in the Democrats' effort to defeat President Ronald Reagan's re-election. [...] If someone is going to investigate the executive branch's relationship with Russia, he should start with Barack Obama's pledge to Russian President Dmitri Medvedev that he would sell out the United States in his second term.

The truth (and nothing but the truth) about leaks.  The leaks of confidential communications from within the White House may be a pain in the neck for the president, but they are not criminal.  And generally, a boss can look at an employee's cellphone, as long as the employer of the boss and the employee owns the phone — except when the employer is the government.  The Fourth Amendment insulates government employees from governmental reach into its employees' cellphones.  Absent an employee's waiving his Fourth Amendment rights, the government may not seize work-related (governmental) or personal phones without a search warrant.  Can the media publish these leaks?  In a word, yes.  The media may publish anything that is of material interest to the public, notwithstanding its level of secrecy or how it was acquired.

Why Should it be a Firing Offense to Talk with the Russians?  On the surface, the complaints against [Attorney General] Sessions are the work of an embittered Democrat establishment still desperate to pin something impeachable onto Trump and to punish Russia for what it deludes itself into thinking was a Russian hacking role that secured Hillary Clinton's defeat.  Never mind that Clinton was a bad candidate and that Trump got the votes in the critical swing states. [...] That's the situation we have in Washington as Democrats seek ever new ways to target Trump by hitting Sessions.  They aren't interested in national security, and they never have been.  If they were, they'd have halted the presidential candidacy of Hillary Clinton, who was found to have committed the Mother of All Security Violations in illegally securing a private server to handle her State Department email.  They didn't.

An Endangered Species:  The Democrats Remain Seated.  Give the Democrats some credit.  They were nimble enough to choose someone who's not going to be running for office again to give the Democratic response to Trump's tour de force.  A truly unenviable assignment.  (The equivalent military assignment would be guarding a dog house in the Aleutians in January.)  I only listened to the first half of what former Kentucky governor Steve Beshear had to say.  It sounded like he had found a copy of a campaign speech Hillary Clinton had delivered in August and was reading it off the teleprompter.  Adding incoherence to irrelevance, at one point Beshear said, "I'm a proud Democrat, but first and foremost, I'm a proud Republican and Democrat, and mostly American."  The only sensible reaction to this is, "Huh?"

In Congress speech, Trump stood to unify while Democrats sat to divide.  The optics could not have been starker — President Donald Trump stood before America with an overarching message of unity.  Meanwhile, Democrats sat firmly planted in their chamber chairs, still seething from their electoral pummeling.  As Trump delivered promises of soaring optimism, Democrats almost appeared disappointed — for their aims of regaining electoral control sunk as hopes for America's future lifted.

Just in time for Trump, George W. Bush lifts embargo on criticizing successors.  George W. Bush broke his policy of not attacking a sitting president.  Bush did not criticize or attack Obama but has joined the Opposition Party (Democrats and mainstream media, aka Fake News Media)'s war against Trump.  Bush acted like a punching bag during his second term.  Obama blamed Bush for every problem, but Bush remained silent. [...] It is disappointing to see that Bush finally ends his silence not to criticize Obama or Bill Clinton, but to criticize Trump because Trump criticized the same media that attacked Bush mercilessly.

The Democrats Became The Party of Hate Tonight.  President Trump gave a good, presidential speech tonight.  It wasn't Reagan.  But it [surely] wasn't The Donald of June 2015 either.  He hit the right message, the right tone, and most importantly, exposed the Democrats as the party of hate.  Democrats behaved like petulant children by sitting and grimacing against public opinion, while Trump gave the most inclusive and bipartisan speech he's ever made.

The intelligence community vs.  Trump.  We're watching a low level coup, America.  Right now, the Wall Street Journal is reporting that intelligence agents are withholding information from Donald Trump because they fear it will be given to the bad guys.  The New York Times is reporting Donald Trump is about to send in a friend to clean house.  The intelligence community is concerned.  This is all going to end badly.  Just about all of us were wrong about where 2016 would lead and now we can all see the worst case on the horizon.  The left is in a nonstop state of agitation calling for mass resistance.  Trump supporters are looking to settle scores.  Democrats have every incentive to play up unproven allegations that the Russians tampered with the election.  Republicans have every reason to play up the theory that the intelligence community is out to get the President.

Logan Act Is Too Vague to Prosecute Flynn.  Or Anyone.  The resignation of National Security Adviser Michael Flynn grew out of Department of Justice concerns that he had violated the Logan Act, a law from 1799(!) that bars private citizens from engaging in international diplomacy.  The law as written applied to Flynn even though he was working for the president-elect when he engaged in a phone call with Russian ambassador to the U.S.  But there's a more serious problem, which should be kept in mind in case there's an investigation of whether Donald Trump violated the law:  It is probably unconstitutional.  Enacted by the Congress that brought you the Alien and Sedition acts, the law is too vague for enforcement. [...]If a criminal law doesn't clearly specify what actions would be criminal, it's unconstitutional to apply it.

Danger Signs: 5 Thoughts On NSA General Flynn's Ouster.  [#4] Democrats, As Always, Aren't Interested In Truth.  Democrats are mostly interested in pillorying Trump.  If this same thing had happened under Barack Obama, Democrats would have defended him with alacrity.  They didn't seem to care that UN ambassador Susan Rice lied to the American people, or that someone lied to her; they didn't seem to care that President Obama was happy to parlay with the Russians leading up to an election, and reached out to the Iranians before he took office in 2008.  They're just interested in targeting Trump.

The Oroville Dam in California.  Constructed in 1968, the Oroville Dam in California was built with an emergency spillway; should water levels on the reservoir side rise faster than could be released in controlled fashion, the lower walls of the spillway were designed to allow overflow to be shunted harmlessly to the side of the main waterway.  Until this winter, we have never had to wonder whether or not this spillway was going to work as advertised, because until this winter, the Oroville Dam has not once encountered enough rainfall to test the design.

Why is it okay to silence Betsy DeVos but not Elizabeth Warren?  Either the Left has suffered severe cognitive dissonance or there's an underlying double standard when it comes to sexism.  Judging from the treatment of Republican women in Trump's America, it seems the latter is more likely.

Government May Protect Our Unalienable Rights — It Doesn't Grant Them.  One of the most common misconceptions about the U.S. Constitution is that it grants rights to individuals.  This myth is perpetuated by those who fail to understand the Constitution in context, and by activist judges who proceed from the premise that if the government (through the Constitution) grants rights, then the government can likewise take them away.  This is precisely what the Bill of Rights expressly forbids.  There is a difference between rights and privileges.  Rights, as the Founders recognized in the Declaration of Independence, are those "unalienable" aspects of our humanity that set people apart from all other beings.  These are rights that cannot be sold, bought, abridged, or otherwise infringed at the government's whim — including life and liberty.  The Declaration specifically acknowledges that rights are endowed by our Creator, not our government.

Which is better: a president who criticizes the police or one who criticizes Nordstrom?  President Trump is being criticized for making critical comments of Nordstrom, which just dropped his daughter's product lines.  Nordstrom claims that it is dropping her products due to economic reasons, but it is a big coincidence that Nordstrom, TJ Maxx, Marshalls, Neiman Marcus, and other retailers are dropping Trump products just as President Trump took office. [...] One wonders:  if President Obama had sold an Obama-branded marijuana cigarette, would stores in California and Colorado be as quick to drop his product line when he became president?  Probably not.

The Editor says...
That's a bit of a non sequitur, because department stores don't sell cigarettes.  But I believe privately-owned department stores have the right to sell whatever clothing they can, since they have an obligation to the stock-holders to make a profit.  The addition of political turmoil doesn't help sales.  Moreover, in my opinion, the Trump clothing line and all other avoidable exploitation of the Trump brand for profit should have been suspended when Donald Trump won the presidential election, just to avoid the appearance of impropriety.

The Challenge To Trump's Executive Order Limiting Visas is Motivated by "The Money".  President Trump is waging a multidimensional battle against all entities who stand in opposition to American interests.  In addition to the content of Trump's policy, pay close attention to the timing of delivery and the sequencing within the policy delivery.  With the outline of the visa suspension as lead-in toward a security policy, President Trump is also now entering economic policy phase 2.  It is all connected.

Senator Wyden Must Resign.  The shocking revelation:  Senator Wyden has been, for more than a decade, a willing accomplice to a plot to undermine the American political order and to overthrow the Constitution by infiltrating agents of radicalism into the highest reaches of the federal judiciary.  The nefariousness of this undertaking cannot be overstated.  The monsters advanced to positions of power with Senator Wyden's assistance include dangerous extremists whose ideology "represents a breathtaking retreat from the notion that Americans have fundamental Constitutional rights."

How to Create a Fascist Dictatorship.  Creating a fascist dictatorship is far easier than it may seem.  You are watching the rise of fascism in America, although the story the fake news media is telling you isn't the truth.

'Alternative facts': A common legal term.  It has been rather shocking to observe the recent tidal wave of derision hoisted upon President Trump's senior adviser, Kellyanne Conway — shocking not because the derision is the deserved blowback for a foolish, embarrassing utterance, but because the derision has been so spectacularly off base.  The phrase "alternative facts" is used in law and is known to most lawyers.  I presume that this includes Ms. Conway, who received her degree from George Washington University Law School.  It therefore seems eminently possible that Ms. Conway knew exactly what she was saying.  Before we move on to some nonlegal examples of alternative facts, here is but one of many ways the concept can be employed in an actual case.

My Vote for Waterboarding.  Along with President Trump, I too would like to see waterboarding return as a tool for getting information from captured enemies.  My support for this comes from my personal experience of being waterboarded while I was in the Marine Corps. [...] In my humble opinion, waterboarding is not torture.  It is an effective technique, albeit an extremely terrifying and dehumanizing technique, that will make anyone sing the truth like a canary.  Torture, to me is something permanent, like cutting off fingers or dislocating and relocating body joints over and over inducing extreme pain, giving one a disability for life.

Trump's Exclusion of Aliens from Specific Countries Is Legal.  [Scroll down]  Federal immigration law also includes Section 1182(f), which states:  "Whenever the President finds that the entry of any aliens or of any class of aliens into the United States would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, he may by proclamation, and for such period as he shall deem necessary, suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or nonimmigrants, or impose on the entry of aliens any restrictions he may deem to be appropriate" (emphasis added). Section 1182(f) plainly and sweepingly authorizes the president to issue temporary bans on the entry of classes of aliens for national-security purposes.  This is precisely what President Trump has done.

Mexico threatens to take your ball and go home.  Mexico is America's third largest trading partner.  The United States last year bought $60 billion more from Mexico than it sold.  On top of that, Mexicans in America — both legal and illegal — sent home $25 billion in what are called remittances.  How much of this is welfare money (which includes food stamps and other handouts) is unknown.  Between trade and remittances, doing business with the United States represents one-quarter of the Mexican economy.  Mexico represents 1.4% of the U.S. economy.

It's No Revelation That Intelligence Agencies Are Politicized.  Furor has arisen over President-elect Donald Trump's charges that our intelligence agencies are politicized.  Spare us the outrage.  For decades, directors of intelligence agencies have often quite inappropriately massaged their assessments to fit administration agendas.  Careerists at these agencies naturally want to continue working from one administration to the next in "the king is dead; long live the king!" style.  So they make the necessary political adjustments, which are sometimes quite at odds with their own agency's findings and to the detriment of national security.  The result is often confusion — and misinformation passed off as authoritative intelligence.

Mayor de Blasio budgets $1B to fix NYCHA roofs, but critics say it's not enough.  Mayor de Blasio will unveil a budget Tuesday [1/24/2017] that includes a promise to spend $1 billion over the next 10 years to fix leaky roofs in public housing across the city.  The preliminary budget also includes more money spent on new school classrooms and millions more to repave miles of beat-up city streets.  De Blasio will reveal his $84 billion budget plan along with a 10-year strategy for longer-term city building projects going forward, paid for by floating bonds.

The Editor says...
In other words, the city will borrow money from 15- or 20-year municipal bonds, to fix potholes and leaky roofs that may need repairs again next year.  This makes no sense.  Would you take out a 20-year loan to fix the leaky roof of your own house?

National unity is no longer possible.
America's Second Civil War.  Liberalism — which was anti-Left, pro-American, and deeply committed to the Judeo-Christian foundations of America, regarded the melting pot as the American ideal, fought for free speech for its opponents, regarded Western civilization as the greatest moral and artistic human achievement, and viewed the celebration of racial identity as racism — is now affirmed almost exclusively on the right and among a handful of people who don't call themselves conservative.  The Left, however, is opposed to every one of those core principles of liberalism.  Like the Left in every other country, the Left in America sees America as essentially a racist, xenophobic, colonialist, imperialist, war-mongering, money-worshipping, moronically religious nation.  Just as in Western Europe, the Left in America seeks to erase America's Judeo-Christian foundations.

Inaugural shows 'The Resistance' is an attack on democracy.  At a time when the nation set out to celebrate the peaceful transfer of authority, activists on the left descended on the nation's capital to show just how fragile that can be.  They rioted from the night before the inauguration until well after Donald Trump's oath of office, all before Trump had a chance to implement even one of his policies.  Any exercise of American freedom must include the right to demonstrate.  Freedom of speech, and the freedom to petition for redress of grievances, come first in our Bill of Rights for a very good reason.  A self-governed nation must have ways to hold elected officials accountable, and the existence of peaceful, law-abiding demonstrations can assure us of the health of our liberty.

President-Elect Trump Should Never Release His Tax Returns.  Last week Senator Elizabeth Warren introduced a bill that would require President-elect Trump and future presidential nominees to release their last 3 years of federal tax returns.  This bill is a partisan ploy — the only co-sponsors are Democrats — and it is clearly meant to shame President-elect Trump, who did not release his.  And there are demands for Trump Cabinet nominees to disclose their tax returns, which will inevitably be leaked.  But it is worth pointing out that the idea that releasing tax returns somehow promotes rational discourse in election campaigns or confirmation hearings is nonsense.  To begin with, the oft-repeated claim that presidential candidates have released their tax returns since Watergate is absolutely untrue.

Abolish The CIA.  Every American who looks at the CIA objectively or in a balanced way and judges it by any number of criteria, such as moral, legal and pragmatic, should reach the conclusion that the CIA should be abolished.  JFK wanted to break it into a million pieces.  Trump is right to dismiss its intelligence reports about DNC hacking.  The CIA war on Trump shows us immediately that the CIA is a rogue organization within the U.S. government and a severe threat to America.  The CIA is an internal threat to the rule of law and to the government that it supposedly serves.

Common Sense — 2017.  Thomas Paine was born in 1737 in Britain. [...] The same common sense Paine used to argue against a tyrannical, oppressive hereditary monarchy applies today when judging our corrupt, authoritarian, co-opted government.  His themes of society as a blessing, government as evil, and revolution as inevitable are as applicable today as they were 241 years ago.  As we approach Trump's inauguration it has become clear the ruling elite feel threatened and are using their control of the media, intelligence services, military, and financial system to try and undermine his presidency before it begins.  As their fake news propaganda falls on the deaf ears of disgusted Americans, their next ploy will be violence, war or assassination.  The vested interests have no intention of relinquishing their power and wealth, just as King George and his Parliament had no intention of allowing the colonies to form an independent republic.  If you thought voting Trump into the office of the president constituted a victory, you are badly misreading historical precedent and the inevitable paths of Fourth Turnings.  The fight is just beginning.

Taxicab Confessions.  The attention given to the opinions of people from the world of entertainment — essentially actors and pop stars — irritates me.  Actors strike me as unlikely gurus because those who spend their lives imitating others are unlikely to have firm principles or even personalities of their own.  In practice, moreover, the opinions of actors and pop stars are drearily uniform:  When it comes to bad things that might cause suffering, they are always against them.  I cannot imagine why anyone should take any notice of what such people say — except, of course, that being kept constantly entertained is the main purpose of many people's lives, and they naturally assume that those who entertain them are therefore of immense importance and authority.

Bogus Vietnam Charges against Nixon.  [Scroll down]  Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger saw that South Vietnam could defeat the Viet Cong if it were powerfully enough assisted by American air power against the North Vietnamese.  In April 1972, between Nixon's historic visits to China and to the Soviet Union, the North Vietnamese made their supreme play and launched an all-out invasion of South Vietnam.  There were only 28,000 U.S. ground forces in-country, and they were used entirely to defend air bases.  But Nixon finally put an end to Johnson's insane bombing halt of March 1968 and launched 1,000 air strikes a day on North Vietnam, moving up to 1,200 a day during his visit to the Soviet Union, so there could be no doubt about his seriousness.  The North Vietnamese failed, decisively defeated by the South Vietnamese, assisted by heavy American air support — which it was always Nixon's intention to reapply when the North Vietnamese violated the Vietnam peace agreement of 1973, which the Soviets and Chinese twisted their arms to sign, so cunningly had Nixon and Kissinger triangulated that relationship.  This was why Nixon submitted the peace agreement as a treaty to the Senate: to secure Senate approval of its enforceability.

Jared Kushner, Beware of Jamie Gorelick.  Some recent highlights.  In 2014, it was revealed that the George Soros-funded Urban Institute had an officially sanctioned role in the vetting of non-profits that seek tax-exempt status through the IRS.  [Jamie] Gorelick was the vice-chairman of the Urban Institute board.  In 2011, she represented Duke University in its attempt to squash a suit by lacrosse team members whose lives had been turned upside down by false rape accusations that the university aided and abetted.  In 2010, Gorelick represented BP in the Deepwater Horizon oil mess.  It gets worse, much worse.  In 1993, as deputy attorney general under President Clinton, Gorelick served as "field commander" for the horrific government assault on a religious community in Waco, Texas, that left more than eighty dead, twenty of them children.  In 1995, she went on to pen the infamous "wall" memo that prevented the FBI and CIA from sharing information in the run-up to September 11.

The Four Key Truths of the WikiLeaks Mess.  [Scroll down]  Fourth, there is still no evidence that the Russians changed the outcome of the election.  It is true that Julian Assange is anti-American.  It's likely true that the Russians worked to disrupt and influence American public debate, and it's possibly true that they did so to elect Donald Trump.  But it's still wildly speculative to claim that Russian actions were decisive.  The Russians didn't hack voting machines.  They didn't change vote tallies.  Any "fake" news stories were lost like tears in the rain of news.  The WikiLeaks revelations were but one small part of an election cycle that sometimes seemed to feature not just a scandal per day, but a scandal per hour.

To the FBI, CIA and NSA: Where Were You When We Needed You?  While failing utterly to provide evidence (let alone persuasive evidence) that Russia intruded into the DNC's email system, today's intelligence report is not without interest.  The most notable sections of the report are those that tie Russia's government to a series of left-wing propaganda campaigns in the U.S.  No member of the Occupy movement, for instance, can read the report without squirming.  If true, it vindicates what we conservatives have been saying for decades, going back to the unilateral disarmament and nuclear freeze movements of the 1950s through 1980s.

Russia "Hacking" and the Intel Credibility Gap.  At a hearing today [1/5/2017], Rep. Joe Donnelly (D-Indiana) today said it was "astounding" that anyone would question the credibility of our intelligence agencies.  That comment defies the factual record.  It's not that Americans don't appreciate our many honest, hardworking intelligence professionals.  But there are concrete examples of false information promulgated by some U.S.intelligence officials under Democrat and Republican administrations.  That's why it would be imprudent to blindly accept, without question, everything our intelligence officials say or, for that matter, everything any government claims.  In fact, one need look no farther than a lead witness at today's hearing on Russian election hacking:  Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.  In June 2013, Clapper provided false testimony to Congress denying existence of a National Security Agency (NSA) secret, massive data collection program.

Is Julian Assange Telling the Truth about the WikiLeaks Hack?  Imagine you are Julian Assange and ... [#1] You know for a fact that Moscow was not the source of the WikiLeaks e-mails.  What do you do?  In this case, it seems most likely that you would simply tell the truth, that Russian intelligence was not behind the leak.  [#2] You know for a fact that Moscow was the source of the WikiLeaks e-mails.  What do you do?  That is going to depend a great deal upon your personal commitment to the truth and your integrity. [...] [#3] You don't know whether Moscow was the source.  That does not seem to me implausible, either.

Election Interference? The U.S. Has Done It In 45 Countries Worldwide.  Russia's attempt to sway the 2016 election continues to consume American politics as the Obama administration struck back with a series of punishments targeting Russia's spy agencies and diplomats.  The White House on Thursday [12/29/2016] moved to expel 35 suspected Russian intelligence operatives from the U.S. and impose sanctions on the Kremlin's two leading intelligence services in response for what the U.S. says were a series of cyberattacks conducted by Russia during the presidential campaign.  For the time being, Russian President Vladamir Putin has indicated that he won't immediately retaliate, though that could change.

The CIA's Dirty Tricks Against American Democracy.  There is an easy way to determine who is a faithful Democratic Party hack in the media and who on the left maintains at least some independence from the party line.  Long-time Democrat Bill Moyers thinks it's an open-and-shut case that Russia's Vladimir Putin intervened in the election to help Trump and that our democracy is in peril.  The Intercept thinks the evidence is weak, and that the CIA may have some other reason for "squaring off directly against Trump."  What could that possibly be?  Could it be that CIA Director John Brennan fears that Trump as president could order an investigation into what the CIA has been up to under President Obama?  What could that be?  Could the CIA have been interfering in foreign elections, and if so, could such efforts have provoked Russian retaliation?

I Guess 'Fake News' Only Comes on Facebook and Is Written in Macedonia.  Who did you hear more about in the past few weeks?  Texas elector Chris Suprun, who announced in the New York Times that he wouldn't vote for Donald Trump?  Or Robert Satiacum, the Washington state Democratic elector who announced months ago that he wouldn't support Hillary Clinton?  Did the coverage in the mainstream media leave you with the impression that there would be more faithless Republican electors or more faithless Democratic electors?  Call me crazy, but I think the mainstream media was much more interested in Suprun's preening and Larry Lessig's implausible claims of significant GOP defections than any reports of dissention in the ranks among Democrats.  They overhyped one side of the story and largely ignored another, because one story made them feel good and the other made them feel bad.

Does anybody else notice something odd about this pic?  Don't underestimate body language.

CIA and the Wizard of Oz.  An anonymous CIA official tells The Washington Post and The New York Times that Russia hacked to elect Donald Trump.  Gives zero details.  The CIA refuses to meet with the congressional intelligence committees.  After a week of media echoes that the voters were victims of "fake news" conspiracies including from the Russians, The Hill reports:  "Poll:  More than half of Americans bothered by Russian interference in election." Hence John Podesta, Hillary's campaign manager, formerly President Obama's senior counselor, was on firm public relations grounds when he contended that the 2016 elections were not "free and fair."  Presto:  America's electoral repudiation of the ruling class is on the skids toward delegitimization.

Are Europe's 'Extreme Right' Parties Really So Extreme?  The European left — lost for so many years in a blind, virtue-signaling multiculturalism — now has to come to grips with the fact that maybe all cultures are NOT equal, that some cultures truly are racist, sexist, and homophobic and are governed by a religious ideology that seeks to rule the world with no separation of mosque and state and human rights virtually non-existent, the very things the left claims it abhors.  And those same leftists don't know how to handle this contradiction.  So they blame those who do and call them neo-Nazis.  Ironically, those called neo-Nazis and the like are often the most open-minded people, seeking to preserve Europe's gift to humanity, the Enlightenment.  Such a person is the extraordinary Geert Wilders, recently found guilty of "discrimination" by a Dutch court and now the odds-on favorite to be the next prime minister of that country.  The Dutch are in many ways the most honest people in Europe.  Wilders — no shrinking violet — has already tweeted out in no uncertain terms that Angela Merkel has blood on her hands for what transpired in Berlin.  She does.

America as Animal Farm — Again.  Since his days fighting for the loyalists during the Spanish Civil War, the left-wing Orwell had become an increasingly outspoken enemy of Communism.  After the defeat of Nazi Germany, when Stalin renounced all his wartime assurances and steamrolled Eastern Europe, Orwell came to see state socialism under authoritarian auspices as the greatest threat to human freedom. [...] His 1945 novella Animal Farm — initially difficult for Orwell to publish and deeply hated by Western leftists — was an allegorical warning to liberals of the dangers of left-wing propaganda.  Words and phrases changed their meanings — again and again — to serve a tyrannical agenda.  The assorted creatures of Orwell's fictional barnyard frequently wake up to new commandments posted on the barn wall by their Stalinesque pig leaders, with yesterday's edicts crossed out or modified — and soon to be forgotten.

Of Course Russia Meddles in Our Elections — But the 'Hacking' Claim Is a Farce.  To begin with, it would be shocking if the Russians had not attempted to meddle in our election.  Historically, they've done it countless times (I assume, every time).  That's what hostiles do, they make mischief when and where they can.  Democrats, moreover, conveniently forget that they've historically welcomed such mischief-making — such as when Jimmy Carter pleaded with Leonid Brezhnev for Soviet help in the futile effort to defeat Ronald Reagan in 1980 and when Ted Kennedy pleaded with Yuri Andropov for Soviet help in the futile effort to defeat Reagan in 1984.  If the American intelligence community (IC), after considered chin stroking, had concluded that there had been no Russian attempts to meddle in the presidential election, I imagine most taxpayers would say we want our $50 billion per annum back — a reaction that may be warranted in any event given the IC's propensity to politicize its reports and to miss major developments from Pearl Harbor to 9/11, and from the rise of jihadist Iran to the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Exclusive: What If the Convicted "Serial Rapist Cop" Is Innocent?  Today [12/10/2016] is the one-year anniversary of the verdict in the Daniel Holtzclaw case.  I'm reposting my feature op-ed from last week.  Several radio talk show hosts have given me time to make my case (Pat Campbell in Tulsa, Chris Morales in Enid, and Lee Matthews in OKC).  Oddly, local journalists in Oklahoma City have reported on our screening today in Enid — but none of them have reached out to speak with me directly about my findings.  Instead, they keep quoting the accusers' social justice advocates expressing their outrage — and police brass who have denigrated our work ad hominem as a "business project" without addressing a single exculpatory point of fact or evidence that we have introduced.

Street Cop reveals Positive attitude toward Armed Victims.  A Georgia police officer from Atlanta wrote an opinion piece in the Newnan Times-Herald.  The piece vigorously defends armed self defense.  It is clear that the officer is a street officer, and not one confined to his desk. [...] Police are individuals.  They tend to be more cynical than most, probably from dealing with the worst in society as a regular part of their job.  But most of them attempt to do the best they can at their job, most of the time.  Most of them do not see maximizing the number of people in prison as their job.  Most see their job as maintaining order and the rule of law.  Police and armed citizens are natural allies.  Both are pushing to maintain the rule of law.

25 Cities On the Brink of Disaster:  "Don't Be Here When Things Get Violent, Unsafe and Fragile".  Dallas, Texas just suspended pension payments for some of its civil servants, a sign that financial insolvency could create an epidemic during the next crisis.  Several states, like California, have over promised benefits to state employees in the pension programs, without ever planning to pay for them.  If people lose it, Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego and the whole of the surrounding areas could simply erupt.  Similar problems have left Detroit, Michigan and Puerto Rico, the commonwealth island, extremely vulnerable to bankruptcy and economic apocalypse that could contaminate the nation and global within hours.  If a natural disaster, such as a hurricane, hits the East or Gulf Coast, tens of millions of people could be caught up in traffic, locked in cities without food, and desperate to cling to order and survive.  Likewise, if a major earthquake hit the West Coast, millions could be displaced and left without many options.  That's when things turn ugly.

Ted Kennedy Secretly Asked The Soviets To Intervene In The 1984 Elections.  Earlier this week, 47 Republican senators published an open letter informing the leaders of Iran that any nuclear deal with the United States that failed to be approved by the Senate would likely expire in 2017, once President Barack Obama's term ended.  You can read the full letter [elsew]here.  The letter enraged progressives, who immediately began accusing the senators of treason for having the audacity to publish basic constitutional facts about how treaties work.

Fake News Is Unreal.  Of course, social media didn't win the election for Trump, information did.  Social media was just the vessel, and if your entire foundation is built on lies, information is your enemy.  The phony capitalists at Bloomberg had hoped the free market might correct this horrible problem but now realize "There might be a need for the state to step in."  The president himself has claimed we need a "curating function" to handle this "wild-wild-west-of-information flow."  Later he complained to Rolling Stone that we are getting information from "completely different sources." [...] Barack is ultimately calling for the abolition of facts and suggesting America take up some kind of state-run media the way Britain and Canada have.  "If you're looking for fake news, you might want to check in on the people trying to shut it down."  I've lived in both those countries.  The scariest thing about state-run propaganda is how well it works.

Scientists Should Stop Mixing Their Work with Politics.  [Scroll down]  Leading up to the election, and particularly after Election Day, this tension was exposed in an ugly way, and not one that reflects favorably on the scientific community.  It isn't their political opinions that are objectionable, it is how they abandon the very evidentiary principles that should guide not only their professional conduct but also their political commentary, particularly if they are a taxpayer-funded scientists opining on social media for the world to see.  They make accusations without proof, sweeping conclusions they cannot support, and predictions for a dystopian future that do not reflect reality.

Workers beware:  Here come state-based retirement plans.  Under the Affordable Care Act, millions of Americans lost the health insurance they liked.  Now, the same could happen with their retirement savings.  In August, the U.S. Department of Labor issued a little-known rule that allows states to set up retirement plans for private sector workers.  States that do so must also require employers — typically those with five or more employees — that don't offer their own retirement plan to offer the state-based option. [...] But a shift to state-based retirement plans will be bad news for workers and taxpayers.

"Before political correctness, our soldiers were free to fight back."
How American Soldiers Used Pig's Blood and Corpses to Fight Muslim Terrorism.  A century before American soldiers fought Muslim terrorism in the Middle East, they fought it in the Philippines.  Their attackers were Moro Muslims whose savage fanaticism appeared inexplicable.  A formerly friendly Muslim might suddenly attack American soldiers, local Muslim rulers promised friendship while secretly aiding the terrorists and the yellow left-wing press at home seized on every report of an atrocity to denounce American soldiers as murderers whose honor was forever soiled.  Much of what went on in that conflict, including the sacrifices of our soldiers, has been forgotten.  The erasure has been so thorough that the media casually claims that the American forces did not use pig corpses and pig's blood to deter Muslim terrorists.  Media fact checks have deemed it a "legend".  It's not a legend.  It's history.

Force the Media to Win Back Our Respect.  Reforming the media would require more imagination and mostly be a matter of style and protocol.  For reasons of symbolism, Trump should skip the White House Correspondents' dinner.  It has descended into a strange Neroian feast, where left-wing Hollywood celebs and the denizens of WikiLeaks fame meet to treat, and in turn hear, the president as if he were a fellow Las Vegas carnival barker.  It is a relic whose time came and went a long time ago There is no reason in this rapidly changing digitalized world to follow antediluvian customs of rewarding the New York Times or the Washington Post, or NPR, or PBS with blue-chip perks at press conferences or first claims on interviews.  They have not proved disinterested or competent in their reporting and should have to re-earn the esteem that they customarily take for granted.  WikiLeaks reminds us that CNN, the Washington Post, and Politico offer no more disinterested opinion journalism than do Rush Limbaugh or the Drudge Report — though the legacy media do spend far more to reach far fewer.

The States' Trump Card against the Fed.  It's hard, and it's never been done in the 229 years we've had the Constitution — not until now.  By using their Article V power, in 2017, the states, and the people, will, for the very first time, exercise their sovereignty.  And it is full sovereignty, plenary, unlimited. [...] The federal courts do not have jurisdiction over the states when they are exercising their Article V powers, and the president has no involvement whatsoever.  The third branch, Congress, has only a ministerial role to play.  The only discretion Congress has is in selecting the time and place of the Amendment Convention, and of choosing the method of ratification — by the state legislatures or by state conventions.  In order to organize a two-thirds supermajority, the States may choose to meet in a preliminary Convention of States.  This was last done in 1861, in Washington.  State delegations assembled to try to avert the Civil War, but they didn't have enough time, and they failed.

Opposing viewpoint:
Here Be Dragons:  Dangers Of A Constitutional Convention.  [Scroll down]  Article Five [of the US Constitution] has no instructions about the workings of a constitutional convention.  It sets forth requirements for calling a convention (two-thirds of the states must ask the Congress for a convention) and how proposed amendments arising from a convention are to be ratified, but that's all.  Article Five's silence practically guarantees lawsuits on every aspect of a convention's operation.  Some say their state legislatures have passed bills that would limit the convention to consideration of certain issues.  However, it's possible that these issues would vary from state to state, plus Congress may choose to add or delete issues in its call for a convention.  And once the delegates are seated and the doors to the convention hall are closed, no-one can predict what will happen on the floor.

Is Pope Francis Resurrecting the Nefarious Liberation Theology?  Instead of finding inspiration in Pope Francis's latest pronunciations, Catholics should be worried.  His latest political and economic ideas are a throwback to the 1970s, when Latin America was in full swing with "liberation theology," a brand of Catholicism inspired by Marxist doctrine.  This school of thought claims that theology must be grounded on more than just philosophy and scripture in order to defend the poor here on Earth, according to Juan Carlos Scannone, an Argentinean priest who greatly influenced the Pope's thinking.

WaPo: Say, maybe Hillary was the boat anchor rather than Trump.  During this past election cycle, the media did their best to Akinize Donald Trump in Senate and House races across the country.  Every time Trump said something outrageous or offensive — and Trump did provide plenty of that material — media outlets would challenge Republicans to repudiate Trump.  The assumption was that, as happened in 2012 with Todd Akin in Missouri, Trump would become a boat anchor for the GOP and lead to massive down-ballot losses.  How'd that work out in 2016?

Awards show?  The AMAs were a political hit job on President-elect Trump.  The music industry suffered a melt down on national television during the American Music Awards — launching into unhinged, profane tirades directed at President-elect Donald Trump and his wife, Melania.  Do not be fooled, folks.  This was not an awards show.  It was a political hit job on the president-elect.

America's real hate-crime epidemic is killing cops.  For all the hysteria on the left about a supposed outbreak of hate-filled violence in the wake of Donald Trump's election, a truly deadly series of hate crimes has prompted precious little outrage.  One police officer was murdered and three others wounded Sunday in four separate ambush attacks in three different US cities.  These weren't violent confrontations that spun out of control:  All but one were shot while sitting in their patrol cars.  The other was gunned down and killed in an ambush outside police headquarters.  As William McManus, chief of police in San Antonio — where Detective Benjamin Marconi, a father of three, was killed in cold blood — said:  "The uniform was targeted."

Here's How the 'Hamilton' Cast Reacted When Hillary Clinton Attended their Show.  The conservative and liberal worlds lit up in a firestorm when Vice President-elect Mike Pence attended a performance of "Hamilton"' on Broadway this past week. [...] No matter where you fall on the topic of the "Hamilton" cast being right or wrong for their actions, it's clear that Democrats received a very different reception from the Broadway cast when they visited during the election.

Some stars of Hamilton haven't voted in years despite clash with vice president-elect Mike Pence.  Some members of the cast of Hamilton, who delivered a message to Vice President-elect Mike Pence about their fears of the new administration, have abstained from voting for years, records show.  There are no records available for this year, so it's unclear if the cast members voted in 2016, but years prior show many were absent on Election Day.

'Hamilton' and the implosion of the American left.  The Democratic Party's alienation from the rest of America was on full display at the Richard Rodgers Theatre on Friday night.  And the left seems completely oblivious to how ridiculous it looks to the rest of the United States.  Professors at Yale and Columbia universities and other elite schools postpone exams and cancel classes for students who could not deal with the election results.  Kids in Washington schools cut class with tacit approval from administrators to march in protest of the results of a free and fair election.  School officials in Montgomery County offer grief counselors to "help students process any concerns or feelings they have about the election."  (Funny, I don't recall anyone canceling exams or offering my kids grief counselors when Barack Obama was elected).

Judge Jeanine Scorches Cast of Hamilton:  "Out and Out Reverse Racism and Teed Up Hate".  Judge Jeanine Pirro did not stay silent about how ridiculous the cast of Hamilton acted and treated Mike Pence.  She ripped into them and she held nothing back.  [Video clip]

Tolerance is easier to preach than practice.  The reactions to a couple of news stories last week provided ample evidence of just how divided we are as a nation, and how unforgiving we have become.  Example No. 1 was the front-page story on Wednesday [11/16/2016] about the resignation of Gil Jordan as executive director of the Northwest Montana Historical Society.  Gil had served admirably in that capacity for 12 years, and helped to convert the Museum at Central School from merely a historic building into a building full of history.  Gil and his wife, Kimberly Pinter, who had been office manager for the historical society, announced last week that, following the election of Donald Trump, they had decided to resign and "focus on other priorities."  In a letter they wrote to "friends and family," Gil said that, "I am unwilling to carry on with business as usual as if nothing catastrophic has occurred."  Say what you will about Jordan's politics, it is certainly a rare and thus newsworthy occurrence when someone in the public eye takes such a serious course of action over a national election.  And unlike those national celebrities who said they were going to move to Canada if Trump won, Jordan actually acted on his principles.  Kudos to him for having a core belief system.

The left attacks Jeff Sessions on his past, but excuses Keith Ellison.  President-elect Donald Trump has nominated Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions as attorney general.  Expect the left to use Mr. Sessions' past statements on race as ammunition against him, while ignoring his record since then.  Also expect those same people to make the argument that Rep. Keith Ellison's controversial past statements are a non-sequitur in his bid to become chairman of the Democratic National Committee.  Indeed, it's already happening.  The Nation tweeted of Mr. Sessions' AG pick:  "Jeff Sessions was too racist to be confirmed by Republicans in 1985," speaking of his failed confirmation hearings to be a federal judge that year.

The Editor says...
Former Democrat Senator Robert Byrd, who was once an officer in the Ku Klux Klan, was unavailable for comment.

One more product to boycott:
Massive Stewardship Fail — PepsiCo CEO Tells Trump Supporters to Take Their Business Elsewhere.  This will not end well for shareholders of stocks in PepsiCo.  Macy's business model collapsed after they took a similarly adversarial position toward candidate Donald Trump in 2015.  Now that Donald Trump has won the presidency, PepsiCo is following the same path as Macy's.  Business organizations, and various boards of directorship, who hire these insufferable political activists within their corporations, are fools for allowing their shareholders to be put at risk by their Chief Executive Officers.

Why celebrity endorsements didn't help Hillary at all.  Donald Trump had Scott Baio and a "Duck Dynasty" star.  Hillary Clinton had Jay-Z and Beyonce, Katy Perry and Bruce Springsteen, Clooney and Leo, Lena Dunham and Amy Schumer, among many, many other A-listers who hosted glittering fundraisers, who raised hundreds of millions of dollars for her.  One takeaway:  celebrity endorsements in presidential politics don't matter anymore.  Another, more likely and long-term:  They hurt.

Panic Amid The Department of Richard Windsor.  99.99% of the American electorate have yet to fully grasp of the scope of the 2016 election.  99.99% of Americans have sparse comprehension toward the meaning of 8 years without a federal budget — when contrast with a reality of a $986 billion (that's billion with a "B"), "stimulus" bill that has been re-spent (used as an executive slush fund), and intentionally hidden behind the curtain of the UniParty.  99.99% of Americans have no cognitive concept of what is possible, because the water-carrying media never discussed the ramifications of an absent federal budget.

5 Ways Trump Shows How To Win Elections.  [#2] Media and Celebrities Don't Matter:  The first rule of Republican politics is to look in the mirror and ask, "Are we trying to be Democrats?"  Twice Obama's big glittering machine of celebrities, media and memes rolled over hapless Republicans.  Republican operatives desperately wondered how they could run against Oprah, Beyonce and BuzzFeed.  How were they supposed to survive being mocked by Saturday Night Live and attacked by the media?  The answer was to find voters who weren't making their decisions based on any of those things. [...] The mediasphere matters most when you care about it.  When you don't and when you focus on voters who don't either, then it ends up as weak and impotent as it did in this election.

Roll Up Your Sleeves, Deplorables.  We do not have time to sit on our hands in our basket and bask in the thrill of victory.  We must begin right now to crystalize and articulate what we will demand of our newly elected Republican government — from the White House to the Congress — and be prepared to hold all of their feet to the fire.  Come January, it will be time for them to deliver.  A Supreme Court justice like Scalia?  The end of Roe and judicial games with marriage, "gender," and toilets?  Abolishing the Department of Education?  A patriotic, non-interventionist foreign policy?  A border?  Gun-owner rights?  An attorney general who doesn't persecute state and local law enforcement?  Trade deals that benefit Americans?

Celebrities, Have the Grace to Fulfill Your Promises.  Before any election, some celebrities threaten to leave the country if a Republican is elected.  Barbara Streisand, Whoopi and Cher are perennials, but they always weasel out.  Cher threatened to move to Jupiter — more dramatic, but easier to gainsay.  Miley Cyrus, whose fame results from being the example usually cited when someone speaks of the decay of society and examples of bad taste and no manners.  Samuel L. Jackson is famous for being in every movie ever made.  Other than that, there were some comedians I've never heard of, actors in dramas I have never seen.  All are welcome to depart, they will not be missed, and if they would refrain from giving their political opinions publicly, it would be deeply appreciated.  We really don't care what you think.

Trump's huge election night changes US politics forever.  Of course, we're seeing desperate and pathetic efforts to declare the results illegitimate.  For example, Paul Krugman of The New York Times said last night that Hillary Clinton's loss was due to conscious efforts to suppress the African-American vote.  That idea is beyond preposterous and intellectually deranged.  What we saw was a national wave that turned blue states red, not a case in which voter ID laws and efforts to restrict early voting changed the balance of a state or two. [...] The other facile explanation is that James Comey is at fault for making public his examination of the new e-mails two weeks ago.  If true, the fault goes back to March 2015, when Hillary Clinton's illicit homebrew server became a matter of public knowledge and she began a Nixonian effort to lie and cover up and hide the evidence of her reckless behavior.

The Blackmail State.  This presidential campaign appears at times to be a race to the gutter.  Both Donald Trump and Bill Clinton have been accused of having sexual relations with minors.  These allegations of sexual impropriety have raised some disturbing questions about the level of corruption in our society.  Perhaps more serious than the possible sexual perversion is the undermining or our judicial system.  The case of Jeffrey Epstein, billionaire financier and convicted pedophile, illustrates this point.

If Hillary wins, we'll have chosen our leaders for the rest of our lives.  I don't know who will win, but let's say it's Hillary.  In that case we'll have elected the head of America's natural governing party.  We'll have chosen our leaders not only for the next four years but for the rest of our lives.  It won't matter if from time to time the Republicans hold one branch of Congress, given the way in which Obama has shown how a Democratic president can rule as an autocrat.  And why will the Democrats keep the White House?  Because the Republican Party of the NeverTrumpers, the party of a narrow right-wing ideology, will have died.  It had a good run for 160 years but everything has to come to an end, and the GOP is no exception.  But it's not Hillary that will have killed it, nor Trump either.  Instead, its last gasp was the Romney debacle of 2012.

Columbia Journalism Review's Truth Problem.  While Trump is being criticized for saying he would keep the media and the nation in suspense as to whether he would accept the results of the election, the hard fact is that Al Gore spent two months not accepting the election results.  Florida law provides for an automatic recount.  Gore got that.  It did not go in his favor.  He requested a hand recount in several Democratic counties.  The fight in the courts thus began when Gore resisted obeying the results of the automatic recount.  The Secretary of State certified Bush the winner on November 26th.  The very next day Gore contested the certification in a Tallahassee circuit court.  In other words, ignoring the certification from the duly authorized Secretary of State Harris, Gore did exactly what Trump's critics find so appalling:  he simply refused to accept the election results.

It's official:  Venezuela is a dictatorship.  All this year, as they trudged through an unprecedented economic implosion, Venezuelans have been gearing up for what was meant to be the defining political event of the year:  a referendum on whether to recall our increasingly loathed authoritarian president, Nicolás Maduro.  The tense buildup suddenly ended Thursday as five separate (and supposedly independent, but c'mon now) lower courts approved injunctions to suspend the recall, closing down Venezuela's last best hope for a peaceful solution to its long-running political crisis.  Even for battle-hardened Venezuelans, it all came as quite a shock.

None of the above for president.  Oh, there is a basket of deplorables out there, all right — to borrow a phrase from one of the presidential contenders.  But it's not among the voters.  It's the deplorable presidential choices voters have been handed this election year.  Our political system has over the years been skewed by a host of rules and timetables designed to kowtow to regional sensibilities (Hello Iowa!) and partisan needs (welcome to Super Tuesday).  This year we are paying the price for all of that.  With all the great talent this nation has produced, the voters are left with a choice between two of the most distrusted presidential candidates ever to share space on one political ballot.  Fully two-thirds of American voters have said they distrust both Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton and her Republican counterpart Donald Trump.  And frankly we can't blame them.

The Editor says...
This year, the voters' two choices are worse than ever.  We can select either an incompetent centrist bloviating "loose cannon," or a lying corrupt left-wing radical baby killer with more accumulated baggage than JFK Airport.  The voters have an important decision to make.  The Boston Herald's noncommittal editorial isn't helpful.

James O'Keefe Says Donna Brazile's Head May Be Next to Roll.  Having already gotten Democrat operatives Scott Foval and Robert Creamer (Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky's husband) to "resign" after the release of the first two parts of his recent sting, James O'Keefe just hinted that he's got bigger fish to fry: [...] The MSM has been dismissing the videos that sunk Foval and Creamer with weak nonsense about them being "low-level" and "unknown," despite the fact that Creamer is married to a member of Congress.  If Brazile is forced to go, look for a lot of unfounded attacks on O'Keefe designed to distract.  Brazile has her current job because her predecessor was forced to step down under scandalous circumstances.

Revolt Against the American Aristocracy.  The current aristocracy in America came to power in the 1960's.  It was a major shift in the power elite, away from the military, captains of industry, and religious leaders.  It became heavily concentrated in media elites, educators, bureaucrats and lawyers.  It was a deliberate infiltration of institutions and the seizure of power from the people and the states; concentrating it in unelected and unaccountable institutions.  The rise of network TV, the fairness doctrine imposed by the FCC, and the takeover of virtually all national media by doctrinaire "progressives" meant that the "progressive" gatekeepers in the media decided who could be nominated, who could win elections, what issues were important and what were not.  The "progressives" decided what candidates were acceptable for the Supreme Court.  The aristocracy had shifted from a limited government with a "military industrial complex" to an unlimited "government/media/bureaucracy" complex.  The new grouping held the military in contempt.  The core of its ideology disdained Christianity, limited government, "consent of the governed", honor, truth, and accountability.  The most desirable things in its value system were celebrity, unaccountable and unlimited sex, wealth and political power.

Blue Lives Matter Is Asking All Americans To Boycott Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream.  Ben & Jerry's went beyond making a statement in support of civil rights when they actively accused law enforcement of widespread racism.  By spreading these false and misleading statements, Ben & Jerry's lends an appearance of legitimacy to the baseless claims that police officers are killing men based on the color of their skin.  This message has inspired the assassination and attempted assassination of police officers, and it costs officers their lives.  Black Lives Matter is made up of political organizations with political goals that most of Ben & Jerry's customers would disagree with, including disrupting the "nuclear family" structure (see Black Villages), taxpayer-funded reparations for black people (see Reparations), and the elimination of charter schools (see Invest-Divest.)  If you are unfamiliar with the Movement 4 Black Lives website we linked to, that's the coalition of over 50 Black Lives Matter organizations which is receiving $100 million in donations to push their political goals.

Blue Lives Matter encourages nationwide boycott of Ben & Jerry's.  A week ago, ice-cream makers Ben & Jerry's endorsed the "Black Lives Matter" movement.  On its website, a letter written to their customers, Ben & Jerry's spelled out their support.  In response, "Blue Lives Matter" said they are calling on all Americans to send a message — boycott Ben & Jerry's.

16 Times Democrats Tried To Prosecute Their Opponents.  [#5] Gov. Rick Perry:  In 2013, Rosemary Lehmberg, a Texas district attorney for Travis County and a Democrat, was arrested for drunk driving.  A video of her booking, in which she's visibly under the influence and slurring her words, went viral.  Former Gov. Rick Perry tried to remove her from office by threatening to "veto funding for a statewide public corruption unit that she headed unless she resigned."  Democrats tried to get him prosecuted in retaliation.

Acts of War Cannot Go Ignored.  On Sunday night [10/9/2016], as Americans were transfixed by the spectacle of the second presidential debate, events occurred off the coast of Yemen that remind us of the kind of challenges with which a president must contend.  Two ballistic missiles were fired at a U.S. destroyer in international waters from the part of Yemen controlled by the Houthis, an Iranian-back militia.  The missiles did not hit the USS Mason, although it's unclear if they had some internal defect or whether the ship defended itself with its suite of missile-defense systems.

Columbus Day and what Native Americans really need.  The two million Indians in this country are the poorest racial group.  They have higher rates of gang violence than blacks or Hispanics.  Indian women are raped at 2.5 times the national average.  Indian children are abused at twice the national average.  And suicide is the leading cause of death for American Indian boys aged 10-14. [... But] the reason that American Indians are where they are today is not because of events that occurred 500 years ago or even a century ago.  It is because of policies perpetrated in Washington today.  American Indians are poor because people who live on reservation don't have property rights.  Their land is held in trust by the federal government — which means they cannot buy it or sell it or develop it as they wish.  They can't even get a mortgage to buy a home, which is why reservations that have hundreds of millions of acres also have housing shortages and why people are stuffed into overcrowded trailers.  Indian reservations contain almost 30 percent of the nation's coal reserves west of the Mississippi, 50 percent of potential uranium reserves, and 20 percent of known oil and gas reserves.  Those resources are estimated to be worth nearly $1.5 trillion.  But the vast majority of Indian lands with natural resources remain undeveloped because of federal regulations.  In fact, just about every aspect of the lives of people on reservations is micromanaged by the 9,000 employees at the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

About Last Night.  My favorite line of the night came from Megyn Kelly when among the many sins she accused Donald Trump of was "Rating women by her looks."  But isn't that what she does every time she looks into her makeup mirror?  Runner-up was delivered by longtime Clinton operative Paul Begala, when he dutifully played up the Dems' talking point in calling Trump's boorish talk proof of his having committed "sexual assault."  Yet not a word from Begala about the presence of Juanita Broaddrick in the debate hall last night.

Obama Lets Putin Get Away With Anything Except Attacking Democrats.  Here is what the Democratic establishment seems to think:  This time Vladimir Putin has gone too far.  He has dared to publish secrets from the Democratic Party's inner sanctum that are designed to put a Republican in the White House.  Judging from the administration's swift reaction, Obama thinks that Putin's affront is worse than all others.  It cannot go unrecognized and unpunished.  Vladimir Putin has invaded Georgia, annexed Crimea and redrawn European boundaries by force, caused 10,000 war deaths in eastern Ukraine, shot down MH17, pumped secret money into right and left-wing parties in Europe, and bombed relief convoys in Aleppo.  He has suffered few consequences for his international outlawry because the West plays along with his game of plausible deniability.

Clintons playing prude [is] the height of hypocrisy.  Just imagine if every American's private conversations were secretly taped over the course of their lives — without their knowledge or consent — and then they were released to the public in a political smear campaign just weeks before the election.  No one would be able to run for public office.

The Sun Is Setting on America as Founded.  The United States has evolved into a Euro-socialist democracy.  It now has the following in common with the failing states of Europe:  1) socialist and socialist-lite political parties, 2) no checks and balances between the executive and legislative branches, 3) uncontrolled immigration, legal and illegal, with the vast majority of immigrants refusing to assimilate, 4) overwhelming national debt and insolvent cradle to grave social programs, 5) escalating limitations on speech, religion, gun rights and assembly, and most significantly, 6) increasingly secular and agnostic societies.  The republic the founders bequeathed future generations is no more.  But that is what the American populace has chosen.

He should know.
Obama: Trump would do 'lasting damage' to the nation.  President Obama is waxing nostalgic for the Republican Party that nominated presidential candidates like Mitt Romney and John McCain, and told Democrats in a new fundraising email that Republicans in the old days wouldn't have sought to reverse as much of his work as Donald Trump.

The Editor says...
Republicans in the old days wouldn't have had so much to repair.

Better internet access won't pull people out of poverty.  A recent report from the Brookings Institution looked at data from the American Time Use survey and concluded that less-educated Americans were spending more time on screens and less time on "active leisure" than their better-educated counterparts. [...] The authors run down a quick litany of the problems associated with screen time:  "Prolonged time spent watching television is associated with poorer health, such as type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease.  Playing computer games, browsing the Internet and other forms of sedentary leisure may contribute to obesity.  Such screen time is also associated with lower grades and lower levels of personal contentment among youth."  The researchers acknowledge that "many of these impacts may not be due to the screen time itself, but to the lack of the activity that it displaces.  More time spent in front of a screen inherently means less time doing other things."

Why No Self-Respecting Woman Can Vote for Hillary.  Hillary Clinton is the very opposite of the smart, independent female role model once hoped-for as the first woman president.  For nearly five decades she has defended her serial predator and accused rapist husband whose despicable behavior she denied while behind the scenes she viciously trashed his victims and often ruined their lives.  Hillary conducted her own personal war on women against the very same women her own husband had already savaged.  And now she wants us to believe her whole life has been about helping women and children.

Clarence Thomas Is Conspicuously Absent In The New Black History Smithsonian.  Justice Clarence Thomas, the second black man to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court, is practically absent from the new National Museum of African American History and Culture.  Anita Hill, the woman who accused Thomas of sexual harassment, however, is given prominent billing in the museum.

Follow The Money, The Trans-Pacific Partnership Payoff.  Of the 262 Companies that lobbied feds on TPP, 82 gave to [the] Clinton Foundation:  The Combined Giving of these companies was between $21,382,082 [and] $67,615,000.

Heather Mac Donald Fact-Checks Hillary Clinton on Systemic Bias and Stop-and-Frisk.  [Scroll down]  [C]avalier claims are being made about stop-and-frisk — an investigative method in which police, upon observing suspicious behavior, stop a person to ask questions and pat the person down to check for weapons.  While Trump endorses the practice, both Clinton and Lester Holt suggested that it has conclusively been found unconstitutional by the courts; and Clinton insists that it is also ineffective.  The claims are based on a ruling by a single, agenda-driven judge (who was actually removed from the case, as Ed Whelan explained at the time).  But, as Heather relates, the Supreme Court sanctioned stop-and-frisk in the 1960s, so "[n]o federal judge would have the power to declare pedestrian stops unconstitutional."  Moreover, Stop-and-frisk remains a lawful and essential police tactic.  Criminologist David Weisburd examined the practice in New York City and found that it reduced crime in shooting hot spots.

Nailing the networks.  Political cartoonists are in a tough, very competitive business, having to be many more things than just gifted artistically.  They must be politically intuitive in an absolutely up to the minute manner so that their creative gifts can evoke at least a chuckle and more hopefully a gleeful belly laugh from a far more sophisticated audience than those artists who draw for the funny papers.  One of the best of the current lot is Antonio Branco, who has an uncanny ability to come up with imagery that conveys more truth and insight into our current political state than the wisest of political pundits could impart in several paragraphs of sage observations.

It's time to send Muslim terrorists a message:  Deport the Rahami Family.  The Rahami family came to America from Afghanistan as refugees.  They made life miserable for their neighbors.  When the police tried to bring some order, they cried Islamophobia.  Two of the Rahamis have posted in support of the Muslim Brotherhood, Al Qaeda and other Islamic terror groups on social media.  The third actually built and planted bombs to kill Americans.  He terrorized two states, tried to kill and maim countless Americans and then shot it out with police.  Ahmad Khan Rahami, the central figure in the terror case, brought his wife here from Pakistan and she departed days before his attack.  His mother left for Pakistan a few weeks before his bombing spree.  The media, eager for a story of redemption, has widely broadcast the claim that Mohammed Rahami, Ahmad's father, told the FBI that he was a terrorist.  But that was years ago.  And Mohammed didn't turn in his son because there was a terror plot, but because he attacked family members.

Prepare For a Massive Racial Onslaught From The Professional Left.  Hillary Clinton is in a complete state of electoral collapse.  Her polling is far worse than what the media is capable of propping up.  Once the professional left cross a particular desperation threshold, what follows becomes predictable; this will be similar to Brexit's "Operation Fear" only with a traditional American-left-wing twist, the use of race to drive the needed division.  Before laying out substance for this tripwire prediction, we cannot emphasize enough how important it is to grasp the scope of what they are going to attempt to pull off.

The Federal Reserve and Its Murky Role in the US Election.  First of all, the financial picture in America today and throughout the world looks much as it did in 2007, just as the global financial crisis was about to hit.  A careless statement by the Fed chair could spark a new crisis.  Second, the US is just about to elect a new president.  Again, a careless word from Yellen could hurt the Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton.  Although chairs of the Federal Reserve are supposed to remain above the political fray, everyone knows that Yellen is a Democrat and knows how to toe the party line.  Many Americans are troubled by this prolonged lull before the promised hike in the Fed's benchmark rate.

The Two Clinton Nuclear Bombs.  North Korea has let it be known that this test has allowed it to produce standardized nuclear warheads "able to be mounted on strategic ballistic rockets" so that it can "produce at will and as many as it wants a variety of smaller, lighter and diversified nuclear warheads of higher strike power."  Kim doesn't just want a nuke.  He wants a lot of nukes.  And at the rate he's going, he will have them.  And the man to thank for all that is Bill Clinton.

Cashing in on presidential prestige.  The president, as he prepared to leave office, was dead broke.  So broke, in fact, that he had to take out a loan to get him through the transition.  Bill Clinton in 2001?  No, Harry Truman in 1953 — and the resemblance ends there.  Back then, although Truman had only a monthly Army pension of $112.56, he was adamant about not employing his presidential service to cash in.  As biographer David McCullough relates, Truman turned down a new Toyota; a Miami real estate development company's offer of "not less than $100,000" to come on board; an array of consulting gigs.  "I could never lend myself to any transaction, however respectable, that would commercialize on the prestige and dignity of the office of the presidency," Truman later wrote.

The Sinister Side of a Cashless Society.  Some on the left are proposing the elimination of currency bills larger than $10.  This may seem like an insignificant matter, but if adopted, the proposal would be a giant step in the direction of totalitarianism.  By forcing Americans to use an electronic means of payment, government would gain the power to monitor and manipulate every aspect of one's finances.  Washington would know what you buy, where and when you buy it, where you travel and eat, and whom you associate with.  Granting government this kind of power is madness unless you're one of the political elite.  They seem to be lining up in favor of a cashless society.

China's Insult and Obama's Climate Kowtow.  Obama downplayed the insult, telling reporters "not to over-crank the significance."  Maybe that makes sense in the bubble-world of the Ben-Rhodes-foreign-policy narrative, where the tide of war is forever receding, the arc of history bends toward justice, the oceans rise and fall at the command of Obama's pen and phone, and the echo chamber, on cue, applauds.  But China's reception was an insult, pure and simple.  No one need study the tea leaves to understand that this was a gesture of gross disrespect, seen around the world, putting the American president in his place — especially as compared with the warm reception for Russia's President Vladimir Putin.

The Day The Lights Go Out And The Trucks Stop Running.  At some point a major national emergency will strike, and when that day arrives we could suddenly be facing major power grid and transportation disruptions.  Are you prepared for that?

Is the impeachment of the next president an inevitability?  Bizarre and increasingly troubling as this political year has been, the worst may lie ahead:  2016 could come to be known as America's inevitable impeachment election.  Based on their prior and present conduct, there is a high likelihood that either a President Donald Trump or a President Hillary Clinton could end up being impeached and possibly convicted and removed from office.  The country is rushing headlong toward an almost certain constitutional crisis next year.

A Candidate's Death Could Delay or Eliminate the Presidential Election.  The presidential election could be delayed or scrapped altogether if conspiracy theories become predictive and a candidate dies or drops out before Nov. 8.  The perhaps equally startling alternative, if there's enough time:  Small groups of people hand-picking a replacement pursuant to obscure party rules.  The scenarios have been seriously considered by few outside of the legal community and likely are too morbid for polite discussion in politically mixed company.  But prominent law professors have pondered the effects and possible ways to address a late-date vacancy.

How the Clintons Gave American Foreign Policy its Muslim Tilt.  The Clinton role in the rise of Islamic irredentism has now come full circle.  Bill Clinton might get the credit for the original Muslim tilt.  Bosnia (1992-95) set the table for a series of interventions that gave birth to the so-called Arab Spring and any subsequent triumphs of Islamofascism.  Ironically, Bill Clinton could be both righteous about civil wars in the Balkans and oblivious to genocide in Rwanda simultaneously.  Muslim lives matter, Black Africans, not so much. [...] When Donald Trump claims that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton created ISIS, his rhetoric might be figurative, but the underlying truth is literal.

Maybe borders aren't the worst invention ever.  "Borders are the worst invention ever made by politicians."  Those were the words of Jean-Claude Juncker, president of the European Union's European Commission, at the Alspach Media Academy in Austria last Monday [8/22/2016].  Nonsense, most readers will surely think.  But it's worth thinking a bit more about where Juncker is coming from, and the implications of his statement in what is, in Europe as well as America, a fraught political year.  Juncker comes from Luxembourg, a 998-square mile country wedged between France, Germany and Belgium, where he served as prime minister from 1995-2013.  If you look up Luxembourg in lists of world economic statistics, you'll find it rated No. 2 in gross domestic product per capita.  That's thanks to what Juncker called politicians' worst invention ever, borders.

Why Would Russians Hack Democrats?  It seems dubious that the Russians had anything to do with leaks about Democrats, and we have well-founded hypotheses for the real perpetrators.

The Coming Free Speech Apocalypse.  In America you can say just about any offensive thing imaginable, directed at just about any group or person imaginable, and you'll be okay.  Add to that the strong protections for political speech that statute and Supreme Court precedent have established, and America is almost unique among the nations of the world in terms of freedom of expression.  We have it good.  But that might not always be the case.  In fact in the very near future American free speech may be sharply curtailed.

The Left Refuses to Learn.  People increasingly tend to believe what they see, hear and read in the media without scrupling to perform any fact-checking on their own initiative, in this way contributing to a culture perhaps best described as an amalgam of frivolity and delirium. [...] This sort of thing is going to keep happening and, what is worse, will become customary, if not universal.  It is made possible by the plague of ignorance and intellectual torpidity that has descended like a cloud of locusts on the mental horizon of a once privileged but now vassal culture that no longer wants to think for itself or to work for the truth.  Who wants to work when you can get free stuff, whether cell phones or gratuitous pseudo-knowledge?

Who Got Us Into These Endless Wars?  [Scroll down]  To the CFR, America's role in the world is to corral Russia, defend Europe, contain China, isolate Iran, deter North Korea, and battle al-Qaida and ISIS wherever they may be, bleeding our country's military.  Nor is that all.  We are also to convert Syria, Iraq, Libya, Yemen and Afghanistan into pro-Western preferably democratic countries, and embrace "free trade," accepting the imported merchandise of all mankind, even if that means endless $800 billion trade deficits, bleeding our country's economy.  Otherwise, you are just an isolationist.

Gary Johnson's Campaign to Make Hillary President.  This is the summer of Gary Johnson.  The former New Mexico governor who has been steadily drifting left over his career is now doing his best to make Hillary Clinton into President Hillary Clinton.  Back in 1999, Johnson rejected overtures from the Libertarian Party for a presidential run.  "I'm a Republican, and I'm not going to run for President.'"  Both parts of that statement proved to be lies.  Libertarian and non-libertarian supporters see a principled politician in Gary Johnson.  But Johnson has always been a political chameleon, shifting his colors to win elections.  Gary Johnson is now desperately courting Bernie Sanders voters.

Sorry, Tim Kaine Is No Centrist.  Yes, he's reportedly a nice guy who, in interviews, describes himself as "boring." But to call him a centrist is a stretch.  He supports curbs on the Second Amendment.  He likes ObamaCare.  He wants more federal government involvement in education and is OK with income redistribution through the tax code.  He backs the government's unscientific war against "climate change."  And, with Obama, opposed the job-creating Keystone XL pipeline.  These are not centrist stances.

Venezuela Reaches the End of the Road to Serfdom.  A lefty correspondent who believes that I have been unfair to Senator Bernie Sanders — specifically, that I have given insufficient attention to the "democratic" part of his so-called democratic socialism — writes:  "You should write about those millions of souls trapped in the Canadian, Icelandic, Danish, and other democratic-socialist gulags."  But, of course, there are no Canadian and Danish gulags.  Then again, Canada and Denmark are not socialist countries.  This is a truth the Left, and some of the Right, insists on refusing to learn.

We'll Survive.  It's not great to be living through the worst presidential matchup ever.  And it's not a cheerful thought that one of these two horrendous candidates is very likely to be our next president. [...] Trump has shown he has nary a clue as to how to make America great.  Clinton has produced not a whit of evidence that she has ever brought about significant beneficial change.  It is likely to be a rough four years.  But we can and will survive.

Let's Roll:  Why Standing Up to a Terrorist Is Your Best Self-Defense.  After the carnage like we've witnessed in American cities such as San Bernardino and Orlando, and more recently in Europe, the national conversation tends to shift temporarily back toward gun control legislation and how to best protect ourselves in the homeland from future terrorist attacks. [...] This change includes an overdue re-examination of how unarmed civilians should respond during these events, including how federal, state, and local authorities tell the public to respond.

Political elite:  Self-interest disguised as principles, public service for personal profit.  Up until recently, our permanent, professional political class was largely content spending their entire careers living off of taxpayer revenues, while, at the same time, finding new ways of squandering our hard-earned cash on projects and services meant more to ensure their reelection than providing any tangible benefits to their constituents.  Concomitantly, they expanded the reach of the federal government, further limiting our liberty with laws designed to consolidate their power and justify their useless existence.  Apparently, life as public parasites was simply not enough.  The new paradigm for the permanent, professional political class is public service for private profit.

Not Knowing.  [Scroll down]  By striking at Hillary's aura, the Russians may be attempting the same thing.  Democratic voters looked up to her to protect and defend the nation because that's what presidents do.  By hacking Hillary and humiliating her, Putin has sent the message that she cannot even defend herself — and what's the use of a president who can't defend herself?  This is why the Taliban target the chiefs of police and the district heads to show the populace that their leaders are vulnerable, that no protection can be expected from them.  The same threat logic is being applied by Putin.

Democrats admit they have no evidence of Putin link to disastrous leak.  [Scroll down]  Thousands of emails were leaked to Wikileaks Friday [7/22/2016], likely courtesy of a hacker who refers to himself as 'Guccifer 2.0,' who says he's not Russian and is a solo actor.  However, Crowdstrike, the DNC's cybersecurity firm, noted back on June 14 that analysts had discovered that two separate Russian intelligence groups had gained access to the DNC's networks.

The Editor says...
It is entirely possible that one or more entities gained access to these emails, in addition to "Guccifer 2.0" and the Russians.  It is also possible that "Guccifer 2.0" is a Russian or a team of Russians, but even so, hackers are not mutually exclusive.

Lion Ted.  While I have at times been critical of Cruz, in general I am a fan.  I endorsed him in the 2016 election, and nothing from last night causes me to reconsider that endorsement (quite the opposite).  What's more, Cruz's decision shouldn't have been a surprise to anyone paying attention to the post-election statements from either the senator or his team.  In various conversations with people close to the campaign in recent weeks, they were unanimous that they did not expect Senator Cruz to ever endorse Donald Trump, and certainly not at the convention.  And Senator Cruz's team went out of its way when they were given a speaking slot to indicate that an endorsement was not required of them in exchange for it.  Frankly, it was gross political malpractice by the Trump team to allow Cruz to deliver his speech essentially unvetted, yet, given other gaffes made at the convention, it's hardly surprising.

The Long Fall of Debbie Wasserman Schultz.  As Debbie Wasserman Schultz made her unceremonious exit as chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, what was most remarkable was what you didn't hear:  practically anybody coming to her defense. [...] Few Democrats will miss Wasserman Schultz, who was widely seen as an ineffective leader.  She was a poor communicator whose gaffes often caused the party headaches; a mediocre fundraiser; and a terrible diplomat more apt to alienate party factions than bring them together.

Florida Woman Causes Disaster.  [Debbie] Wasserman Schultz is very bright, in the sense that the very bottom of Carlsbad Caverns is bright, and very sharp, in the sense that a brass doorknob or a stick of warm butter is sharp.  Her greatest hits are the stuff of legend:  Chris Matthews asked her to explain the difference between being a Democrat and a socialist (such as Bernie Sanders) and she was lost as last year's Easter eggs.  She has suggested that Republicans want to deport all women from the United States.  She tried to use House rules to keep members of Congress from calling Obamacare "Obamacare."  Like Joe Biden, she literally does not know what "literally" means.  She complains that if Republicans who opposed the GM bailout had their way "we would be driving foreign cars."  Her Infiniti SUV was made in Tochigi, Japan.

Flag should not bend to terrorists.  Back on the Fourth of July, the Daily Inter Lake published an Associated Press story about how flying the U.S. flag at half-staff had become a common occurrence.  As the story said, "some have questioned whether the country has lowered the bar on the lowering of the flag."  That got us to thinking about how often we have lowered the flag outside our office over the past six weeks — multiple days for the terror attack in Orlando, again for the ambush and murder of police officers in Dallas, then once again for the terror attack in Nice, and most recently for the police murdered in Baton Rouge.  While all of those instances provided more than enough reason to show mourning and respect for the dead, it has started to seem to us as though lowering the flag every few days is tantamount to a form of surrender to terrorism — both domestic and foreign.  Should we really be acknowledging the sick work of inhuman murderers and terrorists?  Or should we vow to stand tall and unbowed before the threat of bad men?

Why Trump is right about NATO.  As is always the case, NATO is a euphemism for American combat resources, troops and funding.  The 28 countries that comprise NATO are all committed to common strategic goals and safeguarding freedom, but for too long these countries have relied on America's military power and force projection without meeting their own obligations.  NATO imposes a goal on member nations that at least 2 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) goes to support defense — a direct benefit the alliance.  Only five of the 28 countries are meeting that obligation and the United States assumes the disproportionate share of the funding burden at 3.6 percent of GDP.

Engineered Chaos And Fear The New Norm In America As Many Assume The "Reality" Of Staged Events.  There was a time when there was actually a sense of normality all around us and there was a sense of justice and accountability at the government level even if it was mostly the perception of it. [...] There was even a time when you could comfortably plan on traveling pretty much anywhere in the world, especially here in the United States for business or pleasure without having to deal with the prospect of "terrorism" or another psyop mass shooting, terror truck drivers, snipers or lockdowns.  You also didn't have to worry about a violent police state, checkpoints, surveillance cameras, killer robots, government spying and 24/7 fear, death and destruction being put out by the mainstream media news.  There was a sense of order, in other words, that many of us still remember and we remember exactly what it felt like.  Obviously you can't miss something or yearn for the days you've never experienced.  This disconnect that the younger generation has to what some may refer to the good old days is important in the grand scheme of things because this chaos is all they know and it is a grand example of learned helplessness.  For the first time in modern American history we have a generation that doesn't know what order, calmness and peace looks like.

I'm Writing in Ted Cruz's Name for President.  Like many of my fellow constitutional conservatives, I oppose both Hillary Clinton and her old donor Donald Trump.  I oppose a catastrophically corrupt, race-baiting, plutocratic socialist who serially undermined American national security and lied to the faces of the families of Benghazi victims, and I also oppose a borderline-deranged, Kremlin-tainted, quasi-fascistic, fraudulent orange cult leader.  As between Ebola and HIV, I choose neither.  I am firmly both #NeverHillary and #NeverTrump.  In May, I posted a "#NeverTrump Cheat Sheet," which I thought best represented the options available for those of us committed to opposing both of these Big Government jokesters.  It is time to revisit those options.

The War On Cops.  There is no more important book to read right now than Heather Mac Donald's clear-eyed, riveting new work The War on Cops:  How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe. [...] [The book] begins by noting that crime is skyrocketing in cities across the United States as "the most anti-law-enforcement administration in memory draws to a close."  This isn't, however, "the greatest danger in today's war on cops.  The greatest danger lies, rather, in the delegitimization of law and order itself."  If we don't begin to counter the present lies about law enforcement propagated by the Black Lives Matter movement and facilitated by a complicit media and by the "academic victimology industry," Mac Donald concludes, civilized urban life will break down — which we are already beginning to witness.

20 Examples of What It Would Look Like if White Privilege Really Existed.  [#1] We'd see frequent discussions on whether bumbling white dads or negative portrayals of southerners on TV and in movies were unfair to white people. [...] [#5] There wouldn't be an option to press 2 for Spanish. [...] [#8] Every year we would celebrate White History Month and on the final day, we would hold a Miss White America pageant on White Entertainment TV.

New York City needs a leader like Dallas police chief David Brown.  Mayor de Blasio and Police Commissioner Bill Bratton could learn a thing or two from Dallas Police Chief David Brown.  The man is a bona fide leader, someone who has the respect of his officers, his city — and now the entire nation.

Dallas: The Target Is Order.  Dallas was not just another attack by a lone shooter against defenseless civilians.  Rather, it was a highly symbolic act against those who defend order.  The target was order.  The target was the uniforms and badges the officers were wearing.  Those who died were merely representatives of order.  They were the defenders of the principles and institutions around which society agrees to be organized.  Defending this order is made more difficult by the fact that the Dallas massacre was directed against an order of things that is decaying.  As society unravels, the order that once united us as a people is also coming apart.  Our political leadership no longer strongly defends society's core principles.

Obama's Agenda of Anarchy.  To understand what we are witnessing, it must be first made clear that the murderous attacks on the police have little to do with the questionable deaths of black men by police.  Their deaths are being conveniently exploited by individuals and groups whose plans were set in motion decades ago under different pretexts.  We must remember that we've seen this type of "orchestrated chaos" before, specifically in the late 1960s during the radicalization of students and young people across college campuses.  Protests, sit-ins, and armed takeovers of campus offices by the radical left were increasing and blamed, in part, on the Vietnam War.  Other reasons existed as well, including many of the same anti-Capitalist, anti-American sentiments we are seeing today.

What's a Reasonable Number of Blacks to Shoot?  Barack Obama's position on police shootings seems to be that more blacks get shot by police than their percentage of the population tells us is reasonable.  In other words, about 45 a year is okay, any more is racist. [...] This is how insane this discussion has gotten.  Obviously blacks get shot at a higher rate than whites because their crime rate is higher, and not just by a smidgen.  But the liberal elite can never say that, can they?  Because they cannot believe how the police (working class, generally white, maybe college educated maybe not at state schools, often sons of police themselves, military veterans in large measure and frequently seen kneeling on a black guy's head in order to get a pair of cuffs on) cannot be bigoted.  So therefore they must be.  This is called a Divine Fallacy — I cannot imagine how something may be true therefore it's false.

The working classes vs. the smirking classes.  Put it all together and what do people see?  Politicians who send boys into battle mendaciously; who flood the country with immigrants because they want cheap gardeners and nannies; and who force low-income people to rescue wealthy bankers and bondholders from the consequences of their own errors.  Don't get me wrong, I haven't softened in my attitude to Trump.  He remains a vainglorious, dishonest boor, whose policies would do the most damage to the people he promises to help.

American Socialists Are Trying To Start A Race War So They Can Shut Down The Government And Declare Martial Law — Don't Take The Bait.  For the past several weeks there has been a lot of talk about the so-called "Black Lives Matter" protests, and how the protests seems to be growing in violence and less and less being done to deal with them.  President Obama, as expected, appears useless to stop the violence and even siding with the violence by his same refusal.  There is a lot of talk about "racism," "discrimination," and the usual language.  There are even calls for black to take over southern states and create their own country and "kill all the white people." [...] This brings to mind something I learned a long time ago from the Russian communist literature.  That is, the issue is never the issue, but the issue always is the revolution.

It's Déjà vu All Over Again.  The pace of recent events, from the outré presidential election, the "exoneration" of career criminal Hillary Clinton by the FBI, and the shooting of multiple police officers in Dallas during a "Black Lives Matter" protest, is reminiscent of '68; the country barely had time to process one enormity when the next once occurred.

The American Left Has Won.  The Democrats in the House of Representatives recently staged a theatrical sit-in ostensibly demanding that they, as an oppressed and victimized minority, be allowed to vote on additional gun control measures.  This childish attempt to mimic the demonstrations attendant to the union organization drives of the early 20th Century and the civil rights movement of 1960's was produced by myopic fools who do not seem to understand that they have won.  They now control virtually all levers of power in the federal government, dominate one major political party and fully intimidate the other, and are successfully altering society as a whole.  They have defeated "the man."

Our Eternal War For Independence.  There are two visions of how men are meant to live today, just as there were in 1776.  Revolutions and wars may occasionally clarify these visions, but they do not permanently resolve them.  New governments are quick to adopt old tyrannies.  Freedom is a popular rallying cry for rebels.  But few rebels wish to be rebelled against.  That is what made America unique.  That is what still does.  We were not meant to be a society of sinecures for public servants.  We did not come into being to be ruled by bureaucrats.  Our birth of freedom was not meant to give way to the repression of a vast incomprehensible body of regulations administered by an elite political class in Washington D.C.

After "Brexit," Can We Exit a Few Things Too?  Is Brexit the first victory in a larger freedom movement?  Can we get out of a system that creates money out of thin air to benefit the ruling class while impoverishing the middle class?  Can we get out of a central bank that finances the wars that make us less safe?  Can we exit Executive Orders?  Can we exit the surveillance state?  The PATRIOT Act?  Can we exit NDAA and indefinite detention?  Can we exit the US worldwide drone program, that kills innocents overseas and makes us ever-more hated?  Getting out of NATO would be a good first move.  This Cold War relic survives only by stirring up conflict and then selling itself as the only option to confront the conflict it churned up.  Wouldn't it be better to not go looking for a fight in the first place?

Why Our Leaders Won't Name The Enemy.  [Scroll down]  The real reason that our leaders won't name the enemy is that they don't like us and they don't trust us.  Running through their heads are nightmare scenarios like Brexit and Trump.  They see their job as shepherding us away from our "worst impulses" toward a proper role within the global community.  They are quite capable of recognizing Islamic terrorism for what it is.  They may not be terribly bright, but people in their positions have more than enough access to information for the conclusions to be inescapable.  But they are determined not to allow Islamic terrorism to disrupt their larger plans for us.  It isn't another 9/11 or 7/7 that worries them, but a resurgence of nationalism in response to it.  That is why they will lie, mislead and even criminalize any dissent.  Their response to every Islamic terrorist attack is to make us feel responsible, ashamed and helpless by transforming Muslims into the victims.  For these same reasons they will push mass Muslim migration no matter what the terror risks are.  They will champion the hijab, even though they know it harms Muslim women.  Why?  Because these policies undermine our values and transform our countries.  And that is their overriding agenda above all else.  That is what we are up against.

What's really behind the ongoing push for gun control?  All modern governments are organized crime legitimized by the police power of the state.  There is illegal crime and there is legal crime.  We tend to accept government crime because it has made itself politically legal and politically palatable with such propaganda myths as "democracy."  All economic power, political power and religious power are vested in the state.  The state manages the system backed by police power.  Police power is civil and military.  The German state under Adolf Hitler was organized crime protected by visible military power, whereas American so-called democracy is a police state without the jack boots and the swastika.  Police power in a modern "democracy" appears more benevolent because it is more subtle or more invisible.  But police power is ever present.  It normally isolates and prosecutes enemies of the state, radiating its presence through the controlled media for public obedience.  This type of police state is accurately described as benevolent totalitarianism.  Sometimes, however, it misfires and rears its despotic head in actions like Waco and Ruby Ridge.  All national states have one thing in common.  They want all uncontrolled arms of the people confiscated.

That's it.  I've had it.  The United States of America is not a democracy; it is a Constitutional Republic.  However, when we don't teach our history, instead choosing to revise it; when we don't teach civics, instead choosing to create a generation of subjects, mindless drones, and not citizens — we cannot keep the Republic.  The reason is we don't even know what a Republic entails, and as Franklin once quipped, we then get the government we deserve.  We live in a representative Democracy, and our representatives in political office are selected to represent and be accountable to us — that is a Constitutional Republic.  But what happens when we're too ignorant to know the difference between that which we were created to be, and that which we are becoming — a Constitutional Monarchy?  We find ourselves not being governed, but rather being ruled, by a class of political elites enabled by a complicit media and entertainment elites.

Johnson's Rise and Imminent Fall.  After a contentious convention fight, former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson has emerged the presidential candidate of the Libertarian Party.  As a successful two-term governor, he is far and away the most qualified LP candidate in decades.  Johnson's vice president, former Massachusetts governor Bill Weld, shares the gravitas.  With two able governors on the ticket, it feels like the stars are aligning for libertarians.  They've ditched the nerdy book clubs, begun taking hygiene seriously, and attracted two accomplished executives to lead the party.  In a year when both major nominees are loathed, the LP is poised for major gains.  So could this be the year when the duopoly that controls Washington's welfare-warfare apparatus is finally busted?  Don't count on it.

America Needs Nuclear Weapons — and the World Needs Us to Have Them.  Since the end of World War II, it has been axiomatic that nuclear weapons are a central pillar of U.S. foreign policy, enabling America to resist not only far-flung threats to its security but to advance its interests globally.  Upon entering office and throughout his presidency, President Barack Obama in various pronouncements made clear his intention to overturn this link between foreign and military policy.  During a visit to Hiroshima, Japan in May, the president intoned that there needed to be a "moral revolution" to rid the world of nuclear weapons.  Obama's perspective coincides with an era in which the United States is fighting "small wars" against adversaries incapable of inflicting the type of catastrophic damage against the United States or its allies that guided U.S. nuclear policy in the Cold War era.

Libertarian ticket has nothing but good things to say about Obama and Hillary.  [Matt] Welch thinks the error here was in Johnson and Weld straining to seem "nice," which isn't a terrible strategy when you remember that the two major-party candidates this year are widely viewed as dirtbags.  But I don't know.  Johnson has winked at anti-Trump conservatives periodically during the campaign but he seems to be betting bigger on Bernie Sanders's large idealistic progressive minority, emphasizing in interviews how very much he and Bernie have in common.

The Persistence Of Washington Delusion.  Jonathan Rauch has a cover story in The Atlantic — "How American Politics Went Insane" — which is getting positive links from a lot of otherwise intelligent people. [...] The steady decline of confidence in institutions that began with Watergate and Vietnam is due to real failures of the elite leadership class.  These failures undermined confidence not just in capacity to do good but in capability to represent interests.  The list is familiar to you by now:  Impeachment.  9/11.  Iraq.  Katrina.  Congressional corruption.  Financial meltdown.  Failed stimulus.  Obamacare.  Stagnant wages.  Diminished hopes.  But oh, the party establishment was doing good?  These middlemen Rauch puts on a pedestal — they were responding and managing and running things well?  No.  They were looking out for the interests of people other than those they were elected to serve.  They were responding to the donor class and to the party leadership — the very people Rauch views as responsible balances against the populist tendencies of the electorate.  Let's be clear:  Rauch's argument requires you to believe elites were doing just fine running the country until about 2010.  Rauch's darkest day comes in 2011, when earmarking was banned.  But there's no data to support the contention that removing earmarking contributed to any level of American political insanity.

The War on Stupid People.  Few will be surprised to hear that, according to the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, a long-running federal study, IQ correlates with chances of landing a financially rewarding job.  Other analyses suggest that each IQ point is worth hundreds of dollars in annual income — surely a painful formula for the 80 million Americans with an IQ of 90 or below.  When the less smart are identified by lack of educational achievement (which in contemporary America is closely correlated with lower IQ), the contrast only sharpens.  From 1979 to 2012, the median-income gap between a family headed by two earners with college degrees and two earners with high-school degrees grew by $30,000, in constant dollars.  Studies have furthermore found that, compared with the intelligent, less intelligent people are more likely to suffer from some types of mental illness, become obese, develop heart disease, experience permanent brain damage from a traumatic injury, and end up in prison, where they are more likely than other inmates to be drawn to violence.  They're also likely to die sooner.

National security profiling is a no-brainer.  While everyone's undies are in a bunch over Donald Trump's proposal for a Muslim immigration moratorium, it is undeniable in a time of "heightened alert" — when violent jihadists have no problem targeting their enemies here and around the world — that national security profiling is imperative to our survival.  Yes, that means taking politically incorrect criteria such as ethnicity, nationality and religion into account when battling radical Islamist throat-slitters, suicide bombers and hijackers who incinerate children on airplanes traveling to Disneyland, plant bombs in their shoes, underwear, soda bottles and belts, and shoot up concert halls, restaurants, malls, Army bases and social services centers.  Yes, that means unapologetic government tracking of Arab and Muslim foreign students, high-risk Muslim refugees, Muslim chaplains serving in the military and in prisons, and Arab and Muslim pilots and flight students.  Yes, that means taking immigration status into account to apply increased, common-sense scrutiny of temporary visa holders from jihadist breeding grounds.

Is the era of big infrastructure over?  One issue where the leading Democratic and Republican presidential candidates seem to agree is the need for improved US infrastructure.  And many economists think that the combination of need and cheap financing makes a big round of new investment a no brainer.  But what kind of infrastructure investment?  Fixing roads, improving an airport here or there, upgrading schools — that kind of thing?  Or is it time for a megaproject ... or two or three?

The Wages of Non-Judgmentalism.  There is a fundamental contradiction at the heart of daily American life.  It's one that undermines the role that citizen sentinels are obliged to serve in the collective effort to combat low-tech aspiring terrorists who may be operating independent of a foreign or domestic extremist network.  At once, Americans are supposed to be vigilant and unafraid to express to authorities their fears when they believe someone is behaving abnormally and may represent a threat.  At the same time, however, society frowns on those who are perceived as judgmental.  Since social pressures to avoid being seen as hypercritical, paranoid, or — worst of all — bigoted are acute, and the rewards for keeping an eye out for the next terrorist plot are virtually non-existent, the vigilant are often inclined to keep their concerns to themselves.

Hillary Born a Female, but What Difference, at This Point, Does It Make?  Could it be possible that an increasing number of voters are tiring of liberals stuffing identity politics down our throats? [...] The left's preoccupation with race, gender, income level and other pet causes necessarily compromises the nation's best interests.  But that's nothing new, from its environmental activism to opposing voter identification laws.  You would think the electorate would be waking up to the dangerous seduction of identity politics as the presidency of the first black president of the United States approaches its long-awaited end.  Americans might want to ask themselves whether it was really worth it.  Did this obsession with skin color justify electing an untested, stunningly divisive ideologue to the highest office in the land?  Wouldn't it have been wiser to elect someone not hellbent on fundamentally transforming America?

Clinton vs.  Trump:  The Best Argument For Limited Government Yet.  Unless something earth shattering happens between now and November, the public's choice for president will be Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump.  Has there ever been a better case for cutting back the size and scope of the federal government?

No, not Trump or Clinton.  Voters really do have another choice.  The Libertarian Party nominated two socially tolerant but fiscally conservative former governors, Gary Johnson and Bill Weld.  Weld?  Isn't the former Massachusetts governor just another Republican? [...] Johnson added that his running mate was "pro-gay, pro-choice and pro-medical marijuana at a time nobody else was talking about this stuff."  But Weld also supported the Iraq War, saying that George W. Bush had "grown in office."  As Massachusetts' governor, he backed the drug war and restrictions on gun ownership.

The Editor says...
I watched some of the Libertarian Party's national convention on a satellite feed, and it appears to me that the Libertarians are essentially a two-issue party:  They want to legitimize homosexuality and legalize marijuana.  As much as I abhor Hillary Clinton and reject Donald Trump, I still won't vote Libertarian.  The Libertarians don't appear to understand what it takes to maintain liberty.

The existential despair of Hillary Clinton vs.  Donald Trump.  Millions of Americans detest the idea of choosing between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.  Perhaps you're among them.  You may think that both presumptive nominees are unfit for office.  You may loathe the way their candidacies are warping the personalities of your friends and family, particularly on social media.  Perhaps you simply feel that each of these candidates is somehow undeserving of the time and energy that is required to vote.  You might also feel some pressure to suck it up and vote for "the lesser of two evils."  Well, I have a simple message for you:  Don't.

The False Comparison of Trump to Hillary.  [Scroll down]  Most obviously, Donald Trump is a private citizen who has never held public office.  He is a businessman in a world where decorum and class often aren't as important as sharp elbows and tough negotiating skills, where making a profit is more important than consistency or sparing people's feelings. [...] Hillary Clinton is in a very different line of work from Trump's.  Her whole life has been spent as what we laughably call a public servant.  In other words, she is supposed to be working not for profit or her own status and enrichment, but for the public weal. [...] But while Trump's character flaws have been assets in his profession, Hillary's arrogant sense of entitlement, relentless money-grubbing, chronic mendacity, and obvious dislike of people other than her minions all undercut her claims to be a public servant, and help explain why she has serially failed at that role.

Muhammad Ali, Tool of Hucksters.  The idea that a professional fighter or a football player is a victim is only true to the extent that many are immature, uneducated, and thus exploitable by schools, coaches, promoters, managers, corner men, fight doctors, and arena entrepreneurs that could care less about a jock's health, especially after the athlete ceases to be a cash cow.  Knowing when to quit required a maturity and wisdom that Mohammed Ali never achieved. [...] Ali could have used his last years to illuminate the hazards of head trauma in sports like hockey, football, and especially boxing where "knockout" is literally the harbinger of senior years as a diminished soul, if not a vegetable.  Ali might also have used his celebrity to condemn the "knockout game" (aka "polar bear hunting"), a popular punk pastime where gangs of black teens punch random white elders to render them unconscious.  Ali did neither, but he did have time for magic tricks and overpriced autographs.

Reflections on Muhammad Ali.  [Scroll down]  Right after winning the title, Ali did something that set his life on a controversial trajectory from which it would never deviate:  [Cassius] Clay announced to the world that he had become a follower of the Nation of Islam religion and had changed his name to Muhammad Ali, rejecting forever, as he put it, "my slave name."  The great majority of people in America had never even heard of Islam or the Muslim religion.  Many were confused by his actions and put off by his angry denouncements of "white" American culture and society. [...] Muhammad Ali was indeed a fascinating and charismatic figure, and perhaps the "Greatest" boxer of all time, as he was only too quick to point out.  But he was a multi-dimensional figure, not all of it good by any means.

PC police are running amok.  The good news is that 58 members of the Mass.  House were willing to go on record last week and publicly declare that it's probably not the wisest idea to allow convicted male sex offenders open access to female toilets and shower rooms.  The bad news is that there are 160 members of the Mass.  House — and 92 of them don't want to prohibit Level 2 and 3 sex offenders from exercising their God-given civil rights to take a bubble bath with your teenage daughter.

Gary Johnson:  I Agree With 73% of What Bernie Sanders Says.  Gov.  Gary Johnson, the Libertarian Party candidate for president, said that he agrees with 73 percent of what Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) says, citing that libertarians agree with socialism as long as it's voluntary.  On Tuesday [5/31/2016], a caller from Arkansas on CSPAN's Washington Journal questioned Johnson about Sanders, saying that people she knows want Sanders to win the nomination.  She suggested that Johnson and Sanders could sit down together.  This was after she called Johnson a Republican, and Johnson said he wanted to "draw a line of distinction" between being a Republican and being a Libertarian.

10 Reasons Why You Should Oppose TPP and TTIP.  [#1]  Sovereignty will be lost.  The Trans-Pacific Partnership and Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership constitute an all-out assault on, and an existential threat to, America's sovereignty and independence.  Even if all of the glowing economic predictions and rosy job promises of the TPP/TTIP promoters were true — and as we show below, there are many good reasons to disbelieve this prosperity propaganda — would it really be worth sacrificing our national sovereignty and independence for these purported benefits?  Would it be worth sacrificing our liberty and our Constitution?  Would it be worth subjecting ourselves and our posterity to the rule of international bureaucrats and judges?  Those are not idle, speculative questions; they go to the core of what the TPP and TTIP are all about.

Leftist Lies on the Decision to Bomb Hiroshima.  The President recently visited Hiroshima Japan, site of the first atomic bomb ever used in combat.  The bombing took place on August 6, 1945.  It was followed three days later by a second bomb on Nagasaki.  Although he was very careful not to explicitly "apologize" for our use of atomic weapons — mindful of the harsh backlash that awaited him should his trip be perceived as yet another "Obama apology tour" — the tenor of President Obama's remarks left little doubt as to where he stands on the issue. [...] The March 1945 firebombing of Tokyo resulted in far greater casualties than either atomic strike in August 1945, yet the modern anti-nuclear war faction has let that one pass completely.

A Leader Without a Moral Compass.  The moral equivalence movement, with its moral relativism, and the fatuous history taught in our institutions of post-secondary (no longer higher) education have come to a head in the obscenity committed by President Obama in Hiroshima.  The atomic bomb was not some kind of "evil" as the president consciously chose to portray it, but the source of victory that brought Japan's barbaric aggression to an end.  Even so, it required two bombs to accomplish this and the putting down of a potential revolt by Japan's young officers who chose to fight on to the death.  Those in their sinecured warrens burrowed in the groves of academe who teach that the bomb was evil have never taken an instant to read the Japanese order of battle on the eve of the atomic attacks.  Our intelligence totally underestimated the strength of the Japanese army in Manchuria or Japan's navy.  An invasion of the islands would have resulted in hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of casualties of military and civilians.

Signals Intelligence Indicates Wall Street Dropping Hillary Clinton.  [Scroll down]  Who the alternate candidate doesn't really matter.  The reasoning we have continually evidenced within expanded explanations about the Congressional Legislative Agenda being dictated by Wall Street interests.
  •   The influences who control the legislative agenda have already put in place, convinced and paid for, the politicians needed to advance their interests (the legislative priorities).
  •   Those interests don't care about who occupies the White House so long as that occupant is incapable of derailing their objectives.
  •   There is only one current candidate who is a risk to that Wall Street goal, Donald Trump.  The second candidate, be it Hillary or Bernie, does not represent the same risk.
  •   Bernie cannot disrupt the legislative agenda because he is external to the party structure who currently control the construct (Leader McConnell and Speaker Ryan).
  •   Only Donald Trump can disrupt the agenda because he would also carry an electoral mandate and allegiance with elements inside structure of the party apparatus.

If You Don't Want To Get Nuked Don't Bomb Pearl Harbor.  President Obama has kowtowed to the Japanese and Western liberals by promising at the site of the Hiroshima nuclear bomb "we shall not repeat the evil."  People who agree with this sentiment ought to do two things.  First they should read the essay — Thank God for the Atom Bomb — war historian Paul Fussell wrote on how he felt when, as a 21-year-old second lieutenant in the US army, he and his comrades heard the news that Japan had been nuclear bombed into surrender.

Thank God for the Atom Bomb.  [Scroll down]  The Japanese plan to deploy the undefeated bulk of their ground forces, over two million men, plus 10,000 kamikaze planes, plus the elderly and all the women and children with sharpened spears they could muster in a suicidal defense makes it absurd, says Alsop, to "hold the common view, by now hardly challenged by anyone, that the decision to drop the two bombs on Japan was wicked in itself, and that President Truman and all others who joined in making or who [like Robert Oppenheimer] assented to this decision shared in the wickedness."  And in explanation of "the two bombs," Alsop adds:  "The true, climactic, and successful effort of the Japanese peace advocates ... did not begin in deadly earnest until after the second bomb had destroyed Nagasaki.  The Nagasaki bomb was thus the trigger to all the developments that led to peace."

The Shift To A Cashless Society Is Snowballing.  Love it or hate it, cash is playing an increasingly less important role in society.  In some ways this is great news for consumers.  The rise of mobile and electronic payments means faster, convenient, and more efficient purchases in most instances.  New technologies are being built and improved to facilitate these transactions, and improving security is also a priority for many payment providers.  However, as Visual Capitalist's Jeff Desjardins explains, there is also a darker side in the shift to a cashless society.  Governments and central banks have a different rationale behind the elimination of cash transactions, and as a result, the so-called "war on cash" is on.

I'm Here Because We Bombed Hiroshima.  All-out war is often a choice between something horrific and something even more horrific.  Making these decisions surely weighs upon the consciousness of wartime leaders.  Harry Truman struggled with the decision but ultimately believed he had made the correct call.  Oppenheimer, the physicist who headed the weapon design lab at Los Alamos during the war, was a staunch leftist who later became a peace activist.  Yet, he too went to his grave supporting the creation of the bomb.

Yes, Dropping Atomic Bombs On Japan Was A Good Thing.  Last week, President Obama announced that he would be visiting Hiroshima.  It would be the first time a sitting president has done so.  Of course, we've entered another arena of liberal debate:  were the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki ethical/justified/moral?  The answer is yes to all three.

My uncle leveled Hiroshima.  We're not sorry.  Millions of Americans have a personal or family connection to World War II.  One is Salon columnist Camille Paglia who, in answering a letter from a reader in her April 21 column, mentioned her father's service during the war, explaining how he and his Army unit, which was slated for an invasion of Japan, were "spared from certain decimation by the two atomic bombs and Japan's surrender."  Paglia's father was among many thousands spared because of President Harry Truman's decision to launch a nuclear strike against Imperial Japan.  His order to attack Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, was carried out in no small part by my uncle, Maj.  Tom Ferebee.  He was the bombardier aboard the Enola Gay, the B-29 that dropped the first atomic bomb, and that in doing so, ushered in the nuclear age.

This nation does not need the draft.  After 23 years of military service, it is clear to me that a universal draft is not essential, and indeed would be harmful to our national security.  Asking everyone to serve would be a disaster. [...] What are you going to do when 40 thousand people [refuse to serve?]  Are you ready to put thousands in prison if they refuse?  How much will that cost?  What if they run off to Canada again?  What are you going to do?

Researchers believe two mega tsunamis wiped out ancient shorelines on Mars.  According to a new published paper in Nature Scientific Reports by Planetary Science Institute, senior scientist J. Alexis Palmero Rodriguez said some kind of bolide impact triggered the enormous waves and completely wipeout any kind of shoreline features which scientists have been struggling to identify.  "For more than a quarter century, failure to identify shoreline features consistently distributed along a constant elevation has been regarded as inconsistent with the hypothesis that a vast ocean existed on Mars approximately 3.4 billion years ago," Rodriguez said.

The Editor says...
Set aside what the "experts" say for a moment and use your head.  A tsunami involves the sudden movement of a lot of water.  In this case, they say the tsunamis were triggered by "some kind of bolide impact."  What's a bolide?  Google says it's "a large meteor that explodes in the atmosphere."  (What atmosphere?)  And this meteor was so big that it caused two tsunamis.  There was so much water involved that it destroyed every trace of the shoreline.  Then the water disappeared.  It's all gone.  All of it.  So where did all the water go?  Here's my answer, and my answer is every bit as plausible as the article above:  Mars today is exactly the way God made it.  Just accept it, and stop trying to concoct these elaborate, implausible and incredible (i.e., not credible) alternative explanations.

Why Don't Republicans Name the Enemy?  In The Wall Street Journal last week, two influential billionaires — former New York city Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a very moderate Republican, and Charles G. Koch, the libertarian chairman and CEO of Koch Industries, Inc. — wrote an op-ed piece decrying the suppression of free speech taking place at universities across America.  You have to salute their good intentions.  But as well-intentioned and accurate as their critique is, the Bloomberg-Koch column is largely useless.  Why?  Because they assiduously avoid identifying who or what acts are causing our universities to mimic fascist institutions, namely: ruining dissenters' careers; penalizing dissenting students; not hiring dissenting professors; disinviting the few invited speakers with whom the majority differs; shouting down dissenting speakers; students and faculty occupying and taking over college administrators' offices, etc. [...] Why don't Bloomberg and Koch mention the words "left" or "progressive" or "liberal" even once?

Underestimating Missile Defense.  It is exactly things like the ballistic missile defense program that are needed to expose how empty Putin's aggressive rhetoric really is while reassuring out allies in Eastern Europe of American support.  For the reality is that Russia, bellicose threats and all, is increasingly a paper tiger militarily.  With its science and industry in a precipitous decline presently, Russia is forced to import between 80% and 100% of its computer equipment, 95% of industrial robots and 100% of advanced metal-cutting machines and tools.  According to a defense ministry report from the end of 2015, the percentages of Russian forces equipped with 'modern' weapons are as follows:  land forces — 35%, navy — 39%, air force — 51%.  And the situation is hardly better with Russia's nuclear arsenal.  There have been numerous reports by Russian nuclear specialists casting doubts on its very functionality, because the plutonium in their warheads has not been replaced in over twenty years.

Three Problems With the Big Bang.  [Scroll down]  The first is the Horizon Problem.  If we look far out into space, billions of light years away, we see photons with the same temperature — roughly 2.725 degrees Kelvin.  If we look in another direction, we find the same thing.  What a coincidence!  In fact, when astronomers look in all directions, no matter how distant, they find that all regions have the same temperature.  This is incredibly puzzling, Siegel says, "since these regions are separated by distances that are greater than any signal, even light, could have traveled in the time since the Universe was born."  The Big Bang offers no explanation for this fascinating quirk.  Yet another quirk unexplained by the Big Bang is the Flatness Problem.  Almost all the evidence collected by cosmologists indicates that the Universe is flat.  Like a sheet of paper on a desk, spacetime shows almost no curvature whatsoever.  Within the context of the Big Bang, this seems extremely unlikely.

The Editor says...
Seemingly well-educated scientists have gone to great lengths to concoct an explanation for Creation, but even the latest and most refined version of their story has deal-breaking holes in it:  Most obviously, who created the Big Bang?

The Pentagon's Medal Inflation.  [Scroll down]  There has been a jarring addition to U.S. military uniforms since the end of World War II.  Seventy years ago, high-ranking officers wore relatively few ribbons or medals — and awards for valor were rare.  Go back farther to the Civil War, and it was common for officers to not wear military decorations at all.  But for the modern officer, it's now possible to perform one's duties without being a hero and still have a chest full of ribbons that are indecipherable to all but the most dedicated students of phaleristics.  Most of all, the typical Twenty-first Century American general is a walking wall of multi-colored "great job" ribbons, none of which are awards for valor.

Ten Reasons Moderates Should Vote for Ted Cruz.  [#2] Only Ted Cruz Can Stop Donald Trump.  So, GOP voters need to rally around their best candidate remaining, and not surrender to despair.  That means first stopping Trump.  In order to win the nomination on the first ballot at the Republican convention, you need 1,237 pledged or committed delegates.  Only Trump still has a chance to get that — and only Cruz can beat him in the places needed to stop Trump.

The Federal Debt Violates the Constitution.  President Obama has doubled the national debt and added an additional $4.2 trillion to debt through the Quantitative Easing program.  Both of these actions are unprecedented.  The issue that needs to be discussed is the extent to which Federal debt, at any level, is allowed by the Constitution.

Hiroshima and 'Unwarrantable Self-Abasement'.  Next month, Obama will be in Japan for the G-7 Summit.  There are rumors that he will visit Hiroshima and formally apologize for the U.S. dropping atomic bombs on that city and Nagasaki in August 1945.  Maybe that's why John Kerry didn't apologize during a recent visit to the Hiroshima memorial, but merely set the stage for Obama by lamenting the suffering and calling for a "world free from nuclear weapons.  The debate over whether or not Truman should have authorized dropping the bombs is an old one.  And any objective evaluation of the decision shows that it was correct, for it shortened the war and saved millions of Japanese and American lives.  More interesting than rehashing what should be a settled debate is the ideological prejudices and moral incoherence of those who continue to want the U.S. to express regret for swiftly ending a war it didn't start and paid for with nearly 112,000 lives.

The horrors of Hiroshima in context.  [Scroll down]  Tens of thousands of Americans had already died in taking the Pacific islands as a way to get close enough to bomb Japan.  On March 9 and 10, 1945, B-29 bombers dropped an estimated 1,665 tons of napalm on Tokyo, causing at least as many deaths as later at Hiroshima.  Over the next three months, American attacks leveled huge swaths of urban Japan.  U.S. planes dropped about 60 million leaflets on Japanese cities, telling citizens to evacuate and to call upon their leaders to cease the war.  Japan still refused to surrender and upped its resistance with thousands of Kamikaze airstrikes.  By the time of the atomic bombings, the U.S. Air Force was planning to transfer from Europe much of the idle British and American bombing fleet to join the B-29s in the Pacific.  Perhaps 5,000 Allied bombers would have saturated Japan with napalm.  The atomic bombings prevented such a nightmarish incendiary storm.

Everything That HBO Isn't Telling You About the Anita Hill Story.  Mark Paoletta was a lawyer in the Bush White House working on the confirmation of Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas. [...] "Confirmation" portrays Hill as a reluctant witness who the Senate just finds and contacts out of nowhere.  "Anita is the person, in my opinion, who set this rumor in motion," Paoletta said.  "We know, based on an independent investigation, that she called a friend in Washington who was a well-connected lawyer... and released her to spread this rumor.  It seems that the timing of this movie aligns well with the war on women narrative that many presidential candidates have been campaigning on.  "In my view, it was 'let's drop [the movie] into the middle the 2016 presidential election year and help Hillary Clinton'," he said.

Call it Fascism.  In a few words, fascism is crony capitalism with a suppression of civil liberties.  Labor and proletarian elements are suppressed, but a sop of social legislation is enacted to keep the lower classes from outright revolt.  The degree to which social concessions are made determines whether the fascism is leftist or rightist.  Mussolini was more to the right.  The Peróns ended up being leftist.  In all cases, the philosophy is statist.  Fascism is not the free market capitalism of Adam Smith by any means.  Smith opposed government interference.  Fascism can be viewed as much a form of leftism as rightism — depending on one's point of view.  This is a statist envelope where all groups:  rich, poor, unions, capitalists are brought under state control.

GOP-Passed Solyndra Subsidies Use Enron-Style Accounting to Fuel Federal Housing.  What happens when you mix green energy social engineering with the affordable housing agenda?  You get the worst elements of venture socialism that led to our economic collapse.  You also get a bill from your GOP Senate pushing this very left-wing ideal of central planning.  To begin with, the Republican-led Senate is pushing a dubious energy efficiency bill at a time when they should be focusing on bold and popular conservative legislation, especially pertaining to homeland and national security.

More than just removing the W keys from all the keyboards:
Obama is leaving IEDs for the next President, just as Clinton did to Bush.  When Bill Clinton left office, he left a burgeoning recession on George W. Bush's doorstep.  That wasn't the only thing he left Bush.  He left Bush Osama Bin Laden.  Clinton has openly boasted that he could have killed Bin Laden and chose not to try.  In fact, Clinton had numerous opportunities to kill Bin Laden.  But there's more.  Under Bush Bill Clinton buried an IED.  The IED was a house of cards built upon lousy mortgages and trash securities sold as high value.  And it was all legal, thanks to Bill Clinton.  Clinton pushed Fannie to 51% subprimes, made predatory lending legal and coerced bankers to make bad loans.  Worst of all, bowing to Wall St. he opted not to regulate derivatives on the advice from his Wall St. pal Robert Rubin.  That house of cards finally fell in 2007 when the economy slowed and people began to default on their mortgages.  People still blame Bush, but it was Clinton buried the IED in 1998.

Why There Is No Reason to Believe Facebook's Promise Not to Influence Voters Against Trump.  Gizmodo has revealed what everyone knew already:  that Facebook's employees are biased against presidential contender Donald Trump.  In response, the social network has hurriedly insisted that it's a "neutral" platform and won't use its considerable power to influence the election.  But who really believes them?

Is NATO worth preserving?  NATO is certainly no longer aimed at keeping a huge Soviet land army out of democratic Western Europe, as was envisioned in 1949.  The alliance has been unwisely expanded from its original 12-nation membership to include 28 countries, absorbing many of the old communist Warsaw Pact nations and some former Soviet republics.  NATO may have meant well to offer security to these vulnerable new alliance members.  Yet it is hard to imagine Belgians and Italians dying on the battlefield to keep Russian President Vladimir Putin's forces out of Lithuania or Estonia.  Today's NATO pledges to many of its newer participants are about as believable as British and French rhetorical guarantees in August 1939 to protect a far-away Poland from its Nazi and Soviet neighbors.

Anti-Encryption Bill is an Affront to Privacy, Technological Security.  In recent months, the government has regularly been unable to underscore technological security and privacy in the digital sphere, as more and more tech companies turn to encrypting their data.  From the Apple case to the recent WhatsApp encryption overhaul, individuals have witnessed a glimmer of hope that their privacy may once again be protected from government interference.  However, this consumer privacy is in danger once more as Congress seeks to nullify the system of encryption.

Cruz Isn't Cheating Trump, He's Outwitting and Outworking Trump.  There's something else about these delegate fights that have taken place over the weekend where Cruz has just skunked Trump.  It isn't even a contest.  It is fascinating to watch.  And, of course, the Trump people think that games are being played and that tricks are being pulled.  But that's not happening.  This is just somebody who understands the system using it. [...] Now, what happened in Colorado is, I'm sorry to say, it's not a trick.  What happened in Colorado is right out in the open.  Everybody's known how Colorado runs its affairs.  Everybody has known.  Nobody just chose to look at it.  It's no secret that Colorado was gonna have a convention and they're gonna choose their delegates before the primary.  It's not a secret.  It's just nobody leaked it.  Nobody talked about it.  Nobody bragged about it.  So it was left to be discovered by people who didn't know.  And it turns out that people on the Trump campaign didn't know.

The sugar conspiracy.  Robert Lustig is a paediatric endocrinologist at the University of California who specialises in the treatment of childhood obesity.  A 90-minute talk he gave in 2009, titled Sugar: The Bitter Truth, has now been viewed more than six million times on YouTube.  In it, Lustig argues forcefully that fructose, a form of sugar ubiquitous in modern diets, is a "poison" culpable for America's obesity epidemic.  A year or so before the video was posted, Lustig gave a similar talk to a conference of biochemists in Adelaide, Australia.  Afterwards, a scientist in the audience approached him.  Surely, the man said, you've read Yudkin.  Lustig shook his head.  John Yudkin, said the scientist, was a British professor of nutrition who had sounded the alarm on sugar back in 1972, in a book called Pure, White, and Deadly.

Nullifying the Republican Primaries.  Certain turbo-charged words have been used, such as "steal," as in stealing the nomination from the frontrunner.  But isn't the nomination something that is awarded or conferred, not something that is seized?  Should a nominee think that he "owns" the nomination?  As far as I'm concerned, a party should be able to replace a nominee at any time if he/she proves unfit or unelectable.  Some have said that if convention delegates choose someone other than one of the candidates who ran in the primaries, that the voters would be "disenfranchised."  But the voters exercise their franchise in the general election.  Some have opined that bringing in some "savior" who hasn't run in the primaries would subvert the "democratic" process.  But there's little that is "democratic" in the primaries.  Is it "democratic" to have primaries and caucuses spread out over months?

Americans Aren't The World's Rent-A-Cops.  As Americans have sacrificed blood and treasure to safeguard ourselves against our enemies and defend our interests, we also have protected any number of other nations and served their interests.  Not unfairly, we have looked upon these as "free riders" and thought of ourselves as fostering in them a kind of international welfare dependency.  From time to time, Americans have called for these people to make greater efforts on behalf of common goals and, if they do not, for us either to stop protecting them or to "make them pay" for the protection we provide.

Ted Cruz Thinks Islamic Terrorists Are Actually Responsible For Islamic Terrorism.  There are many factors we can blame for the rise in Islamic terrorism in recent years:  Racism.  Income inequality.  White people.  Offensive editorial cartoons.  Racists.  South Park.  America.  Christians.  Did I say racism already?  Well, that's the main one:  racism.  One thing that is not a factor in Islamic terrorism is the ancient and beautiful religion of Islam.  That has nothing to do with any of this, because #NotAllMuslims run around stabbing and bombing and otherwise inconveniencing non-Muslims.  I blame myself, and you should blame yourself too.  Unless, of course, you're a Muslim.

The War Against Cash, Part III.  Although it doesn't get nearly as much attention as it warrants, one of the greatest threats to liberty and prosperity is the potential curtailment and elimination of cash.  As I've previously noted, there are two reasons why statists don't like cash and instead would prefer all of us to use digital money. [...] In general, they don't talk about taxing our savings with government-imposed negative interest rates.  Instead, they make it seem like their goal is to fight crime.

German Banks Told To Start Hoarding Cash.  German newspaper Der Spiegel reported yesterday [3/3/2016] that the Bavarian Banking Association has recommended that its member banks start stockpiling physical cash.  Europe, of course, has been battling with negative interest rates for quite some time.  What this means is that commercial banks are being charged interest for holding wholesale deposits at the European Central Bank.  In order to generate artificial economic growth, the ECB wants banks to make as many loans as possible, no matter how stupid or idiotic.  They believe that economic growth is simply a function of loans.  The more money that's loaned out, the more the economy will grow.  This is the sort of theory that works really well in an economic textbook.  But it doesn't work so well in a history textbook.

Sweden Begins 5 Year Countdown Until It Eliminates Cash.  How much louder can the "ban cash" calls get?  Recall it was just last year when we catalogued the growing cacophony of crazies for whom banning physical currency is the only way to ensure that depositors can't simply reassert their economic autonomy under a low or zero rate regime. [...] Now, the excuse given for banning big bills is that it combats crime.  And maybe it does.  But in the end the rationale is simple:  if there are no more physical banknotes, people have no economic autonomy.

Suggestions for [the next] Presidency: Issue $500 Bills.  When I graduated high school, in 1969, a $20 bill had about as much value as a $100 bill today.  Inflation has taken a toll.  In 1969, $500 and $1,000 bills were still in reasonably common circulation.  They had been issued up until 1945.  With the turn toward ever increasing government snooping and tracking of financial transactions, the bills were taken out of circulation with an executive order by President Richard Nixon.  It is long past due to bring the $500 bill back into common use.  The European Union issues 500 Euro bills.  Cash is useful for preserving privacy and transportation of value to those who wish to avoid the electronic trail that follows digital transactions everywhere.  All it took to remove the bills from circulation was a simple executive order.  That is all it would take to bring them back.  But more should be done.  The insane tracking of every one's financial transactions should be scaled back.  The forfeiture laws that allow legal theft of property need to be revised or repealed.

An Open Letter to the Conservative Media Explaining Why I Have Left the Movement.  [Scroll down]  I cannot for the life of me understand how conservatives of all people convinced themselves that the solution to the 9-11 attacks was to forcibly create democracy in the Islamic world.  I have even less explanations for how — 15 years and 10,000 plus lives later — conservatives refuse to examine their actions and expect the country to send more of its young to bleed and die over there to save the Iraqis who are clearly too slovenly and corrupt to save themselves.

For Democrats, Immigration Is About Winning Elections.  We have all witnessed the waves of illegal immigrants this administration invites with its brazen defiance of already-on-the-books immigration laws and its abject refusal to secure borders in the name of national security.  To the left, it seems immigration is nothing more than a game and illegal immigrants are the pawns they use to manipulate the system to win elections.  No wonder they vehemently oppose requiring proof of citizenship or even photo IDs to ensure voting integrity.  Even still, here in America there is this thing called the rule of law whereby only citizens get to vote.  Despite what Democrats say, that is not discriminatory nor is it disenfranchising.

Media vs. Democracy: The Case of Poland.  Why is America the cornucopia of invention?  Why did America give birth to modern industry?  Why was it Americans, and no others, that gave the world controlled flight?  Why did an American dream up the assembly line?  What inspired our geniuses to invent electric power and electric lighting, atomic energy, the telegraph, the telephone, electronics, motion pictures, television, transistors, the microchip, cell phones, robots, GPS, weather satellites, and the internet?  Masterpieces of creative art, all.  Who was it that discovered new ways of marketing and of rapidly delivering products anywhere across the continent and across the world?  What took us so rapidly to the moon when we decided it was necessary?  Why do we have overwhelming dominance in science and in Nobel Prizes? [...] One answer to this puzzle lies in a unique combination of peoples and circumstances.  In this nation there has long been a collision of cultures, ideas and genetic stock and a subsequent melding together of these human riches.  All our people were drawn to this nation by the simple idea of liberty.

Why I am Supporting Ted Cruz for President.  I managed to sneak into a Ted Cruz rally Wednesday night [3/2/2016] in suburban Kansas City.  Upon leaving, I no longer counted myself among the uncommitted.  I and thousands of others in this overflow crowd had to be thinking the same thought, "Why would a conservative vote for anyone else?"  That is not to take anything away from the other candidates.  This is easily the best Republican crop in anyone's memory.  Even the remaining go-along, get-along candidate, John Kasich, would make for a better president than the five go-along, get-alongs the Republicans have nominated since 1988.

The Road to Autocracy.  Autocracy is the most natural form of government, and historically the most dominant form of political organization.  There are more democracies in the world today than ever before, but most are autocracies or so-called hybrid governments that cannot objectively be called democratic.  Perhaps the most obvious way that America is exceptional is that there is no real autocratic domestic antecedent to our republican form of government.  The American Revolution took place mostly because the British king had not exerted his authority on the colonies, and we revolted when he did.  America has never truly been under the thumb of an autocratic regime, except for the brief period between the end of the Seven Years War (1763) and the Revolution (1776).

Cash is the currency of freedom.  Former Treasury secretary Larry Summers wants to get rid of the $100 bill.  But I think he has it exactly backward.  I think we need to restore the $500 and $1000 bills.  And the reason is that people like Larry Summers have done a horrible job.  Summers wrote recently in The Washington Post that the $100 bill needs to go.  The reason, he says, is that it's a favorite of criminals, along with the 500 euro note, which is likely to be discontinued.  The New York Times editorialized in agreement, writing:  "Getting rid of big bills will make it harder for criminals to do business and make it easier for law enforcement to detect illicit activity. ... There is no need for large-denomination currency. Britain's top bill is the 50-pound note ($72), which has been perfectly sufficient.  The United States stopped distributing $500, $1,000, $5,000 and $10,000 bills in 1969.  There are now so many ways to pay for things, and eliminating big bills should create few problems."  Reading this got me to thinking:  What is a $100 bill worth now, compared to 1969?

Robert Reich: Ted Cruz is even more dangerous than Donald Trump.  Cruz is more fanatical.  Sure, Trump is a bully and bigot, but he doesn't hew to any sharp ideological line.  Cruz is a fierce ideologue:  He denies the existence of man-made climate change, rejects same-sex marriage, wants to abolish the Internal Revenue Service, believes the 2nd amendment guarantees everyone a right to guns.  He doesn't believe in a constitutional divide between church and state, favors the death penalty, rejects immigration reform, demands the repeal of Obamacare, and takes a strict "originalist" view of the meaning of the Constitution.  [#2] Cruz is a true believer.  Trump has no firm principles except making money, getting attention, and gaining power.  But Cruz has spent much of his life embracing radical right economic and political views.

The Editor says...
Thank you, Mr. Reich, for reminding me of several good reasons to vote for Ted Cruz.  Maybe the reason Ted Cruz "doesn't believe in a constitutional divide between church and state" is because that's not in the Constitution!  Perhaps Senator Cruz "believes the 2nd amendment guarantees everyone a right to guns" because that's exactly what it says!  Senator Cruz isn't an extremist, Mr. Reich.  If you like the IRS and you support homosexual marriage, you are out of step with the American mainstream.

Countering Sanders's College Scheme.  Instead of transferring wealth from taxpayers to colleges, which are top-heavy with administration and overpaid, underworked professors, why not pay any American of any age before retirement for passing proficiency tests equivalent to college degrees in useful areas like science, math, computer science, and languages?  This stipend could be very attractive, even if it were significantly less than what a college degree in that subject might cost.  All Americans, whether working or at home, could have a strong incentive to actually learn, and the education process could be by whatever means is most effective.  This would also encourage lifelong learning, which is really what our nation needs to be competitive in global commerce.

Our Once and Future Caudillos.  History demonstrates that once caudillos come to power, their most likely successors are other caudillos.  Obama is a caudillo.  And so would be Clinton, Sanders, or Trump as president.  It is easy to mock caudillos, whether they hail from Latin America (where the term originates) or other backwaters of the underdeveloped world.  But on balance, this is the model that has dominated international governance since nationalist revolutions between the 18th and 20th Centuries superseded monarchal dynasties.

1924 Newspaper Article Outlines Six Goals of the Illuminati.  Of course, these days the concept of the Illuminati is much less a shadowy secret society bent on world domination than a cruel inside joke MTV has played out with borrowed symbolism.  But back in 1924, people were very worried about the Illuminati's plans to take over the world by destroying it.  [An] article in the June 21, 1924 edition of the Joplin Globe laid bare the six "principles" or goals of the Illuminati:  First, the abolition of government.  Second, the abolition of patriotism.  Third, the abolition of private property rights.  Fourth, the abolition of all rights of inheritance.  Fifth, the abolition of religion.  Sixth, the abolition of the family relations.

Republicans Can Get More Black Votes.  Blacks still do not appear to be buying what the Republican Party is selling.  And the key point is they should be.  Any company selling a product that blacks clearly should be buying, but are not, would make major-league efforts to try and understand what is going on.  This is how Republicans must handle this.  For instance, 26 percent of blacks say that the Democratic Party favors the rich and 65 percent say Democrats favor the middle class and the poor.  In contrast, 80 percent of blacks say the Republican Party favors the rich and 15 percent say Republicans favor the middle class and the poor.  I think the truth is just the opposite.  It is Republicans who are promoting the kinds of ideas and policies needed to help low-income Americans move up the ladder.  Republicans don't favor the rich.  They favor those who want to get rich.  Why is this not getting through?

Yesterday Men.  America is long overdue for an overhaul of its political system.  The yesterday men of both parties are like guests who won't leave.  Eventually, they have to be made to leave.  That's what we're seeing today.  The wrecking ball is swinging, preparing the way for what comes next.  If Trump and Sanders are a clue, the future of American politics may look more like the 19th century than the 20th.

Deranged Central Bankers are Blowing Up the World.  It is now self-evident to any sentient being (excludes CNBC shills, Wall Street shyster economists, and Keynesian loving politicians) the mountainous level of unpayable global debt is about to crash down like an avalanche upon hundreds of millions of willfully ignorant citizens who trusted their politician leaders and the central bankers who created the debt out of thin air.  McKinsey produced a report last year showing the world had added $57 trillion of debt between 2008 and the 2nd quarter of 2014, with global debt to GDP reaching 286%.

Capitalism Is Freedom; Socialism Is Slavery.  Socialism requires the intervention and control of the marketplace by an overwhelmingly powerful centralized government.  It penalizes high achievers, rewards laziness and stifles choice.  Socialism is a government regulation that stops you from creating a successful business.  It's the Bureau of Land Management or the EPA making arbitrary decisions about what you can do with your own land.  It's the IRS taking the money you busted your butt to earn and giving it to people who didn't work as hard as you did.  Almost every socialist policy requires taking resources from someone who's earned them and giving them to someone who hasn't.  Even programs that are supposed to be self-funding rarely are because the juice is never quite worth the squeeze.

Do customers still want landlines? Telecom industry doesn't want anyone to hear the answer.  The deregulation lobby operates on faith — the faith that government regulation is unnecessary because the magic of competition is all that's needed to keep consumer prices under control.  But is it so?  California has been running a sort of laboratory test of this theory since 2006, when the state Public Utilities Commission deregulated telephone landline prices.  The PUC's rationale was that competition from wireless, cable phone service, and voice-over Internet protocol (VoIP) carriers such as Vonage had become strong enough to keep landline rates in check.

Trump and Sanders: The Founders' Worst Nightmare.  As many European and American intellectuals have lamented, no serious socialist or communist party has ever succeeded in the United States.  There is a reason why Bernie Sanders comes from a tiny state and represents a caucus of one.  Our Constitution's separation of powers and federalism raises too many barriers for any movement to take over all of the levers of government and impose an ideology on the United States.  Even if they get too carried away by the latest intellectual fad or passionate anger, the American people have the handbrake of the Constitution to stop them from making a catastrophic mistake.

Ever Looked at Ted Cruz's Resume?  Say what you will about Ted Cruz, but the Senator from Texas is the only man in the current presidential field who has spent his entire life defending the United States Constitution.  He went to the Senate promising he wasn't going there to make friends, but instead pledged to rattle the cages of the establishment.

America is a Nation Headed For a Fall.  [W]hen was the last time America decisively WON a war and achieved all of our objectives?  If we don't count small excursions like Grenada, that would be WWII.  We may have the best military in the world, but our ridiculous rules of engagement and meddling politicians have become more of a problem for our troops than the enemy.  Additionally, the rule of law no longer exists in America in a meaningful way.  Well-connected Democrats like Hillary Clinton can break the law with impunity while Republicans like Scott Walker and Rick Perry have to face politically motivated prosecutions.  Meanwhile, our government openly encourages illegal aliens to laugh at our laws while liberal judges ignore the Constitution and base every ruling solely on their ideology.  Justice is supposed to be blind, not just politics by another means.

Time for Chelsea Clinton's Easy Ride to End.  When precisely did Chelsea Clinton complete her transition from a White House kid whom journalists agreed to treat as off-limits to a public figure deserving of the full scrutiny of the press corps?  The unsettling answer to the question appears to be, "Not yet."  The soon-to-be 36-year-old occupies the status of an American princess — Diana on the Potomac, if you will.  The press covers her, of course, attempting to ask her substantive questions, but mostly she exists to grace the covers of magazines — Fast Company and Elle most recently — and be treated to lighter-than-air puff pieces.

The Peace of Submission.  During the Cold War, the Soviet Union funded "peace movements" throughout the west — because for the Soviets "peace" meant "the absence of opposition".  In our time the new peace movement is Islam.  And so we are told today, from the podium of a mosque with "extremist" "links", that the very word Islam means "peace".  Actually, it means "submission" — ie, the absence of opposition.  The only difference between then and now is that instead of being chanted by scrofulous hippies protesting outside a Nato air base the old line's being peddled to us by the President of the United States.

Sanders has "no social skills, no sense of humor".  "Bernie has no social skills, no sense of humor and he's quick to boil over," said Chris Graff, who covered Sanders for 25 years as Vermont's AP bureau chief.  So he's pretty much the same angry leftist you keep seeing yelling at the screen.

The Conservative Case for Ted Cruz.  Prior to winning that senate seat with conservative grassroots and TEA Party support and becoming the first Hispanic to serve as a senator from Texas, Cruz was also the first Hispanic — and the longest-serving person in Texas history — to hold the office of Solicitor General of Texas.  Cruz joined the George W. Bush campaign in 1999 as a domestic policy adviser and advised then-candidate and Governor Bush on a wide range of policy and legal matters, including civil justice, criminal justice, constitutional law, immigration, and government reform.  During the Bush administration, Cruz served as associate deputy attorney general at the DOJ and as a policy adviser on the Federal Trade Commission.

Cruz the Moderate.  Here is an outline of Cruz's positions, in the order that the website presents them:
  •   Restore the Constitution and roll back the federal government to the functions the Constitution sets out and return power to the states and the people
  •   Defend the Second Amendment
  •   Secure the border, enforce the immigration laws, prevent any increase in legal immigration while unemployment remains high, and restore state authority to cope with immigration problems
  •   Rebuild our military and defend our national interests, and exert leadership on the international stage
  •   Stand with Israel
  •   Defend religious liberty and resist the pressure to make to non-religion into a compulsory national faith (and, in indirect language, oppose gay marriage and abortion)
  •   On the economic front:  adopt a flat tax, embrace regulatory reform (including reining in EPA power grabs), repeal ObamaCare, use all our energy resources, support a stable dollar and a rules-based monetary regime, and protect Internet freedom
  •   Eliminate large swathes of the Federal government, including the IRS and the Departments of Energy, Education, Commerce, and HUD, along with other special-interest-based governmental units, and undertake a broad program of governmental reforms

The Case for Ted Cruz.  Since Ted Cruz walked onto the national stage, he has been consistent in leading the attack against the corrupt Washington Establishments of both parties.  Redolent of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.  He has done that with a level of articulate intelligence and perception virtually unprecedented in Washington.  I served President Reagan in the White House Office of Policy Development, and I have studied his speeches and writings for years.  Cruz embraces the same three dimensional political and policy framework as Reagan — fearless, consistent, free market economics, Peace through Strength National Defense, and Traditional Values Cultural Conservatism.  On issue after issue, I can see no difference between Reagan and Cruz in any of these dimensions.

Next President Must Flush Out Administrative State.  Picture your dream scenario for 2016:  your favorite Republican candidate becomes president and the more conservative candidates win Senate seats.  For good measure, let's continue dreaming and toss in the resignation of Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan as a viable political outcome for 2016.  We are all set and ready to restore our republic, right?  Not so fast.  First, as we've noted before, the courts will continue to illegally grab power from the other two branches and invalidate many of our priorities, especially as it relates to immigration.  But more fundamentally, the next president will immediately be confronted by the "fourth branch of government" — the administrative state.  Even when Republicans win the White House, the various departments and agencies that actually run government serve as a collective fourth branch and a fifth column countermanding any semblance of the conservative agenda.

Natural Born Citizens and the Presidency.  The recent controversy over the eligibility of Ted Cruz for the office of the Presidency is one of those conundrums embedded in the U.S. Constitution.  That august document is full of ambiguous words and phrases that challenge even the strictest and most principled interpreters.  The phrase "natural born citizen" could mean any number of things.

You Do Not Understand Sarah Palin.  In fact, Sarah Palin's endorsement of Trump makes sense, and fits both her politics and her personality.  Yes, she has been the iconic symbol of conservatism and the Tea Party, whereas Trump seemed perfectly happy to go along with Obama and the Clintons until a few years ago.  But just as Palin has never let herself be defined by the Republican Party, she has never felt bound by ideological checklists, either.  She is a conservative, but she is anti-establishment first.  Palin became the governor of Alaska in 2005 by running against the establishment of both parties.

Sarah Palin Just Threw Away Years of Goodwill as a Principled Conservative.  Much of Palin's popularity with tea partiers and conservative activists comes from her willingness to be a strong voice for conservative principles, and sadly, today's endorsement stands in direct contradiction to many of Palin's own words over the years.

The 'will of the people' means us — this time we must enforce it.  I confess that I haven't watched the most recent GOP debates.  I prefer reading the transcripts online and determine from the responses who impresses me the most.  I loathe the nitpicking and snarky remarks made by both the candidates and the moderators but what depresses me the most is the audience reaction to them.  The hoopla, cheering and booing indicates to me that there is an unserious tenor to the entire process.  Does anybody realize what is at stake if we again choose an even worse president than the one in office now?

Ted Cruz is Natural Born under Originalism.  The people who question whether Ted Cruz is eligible to be president under the Natural Born Citizen clause fall into two categories: the sincere and the opportunists.  This essay is for the sincere.  Those who sincerely believe Ted Cruz is not a natural born citizen may be fed up with the Constitution being violated by the political class.  Fed-up Americans may share my view that the Constitution is America's supreme, paramount and fundamental law governing government, i.e., the law over government itself.  Like me, they may see government as America's biggest lawbreaker — with no close second.

Phyllis Schlafly Makes the Case for President Trump.  In an exclusive hour-long sit down interview with Breitbart News, 91-year-old conservative icon and living legend Phyllis Schlafly declared that Donald Trump "is the only hope to defeat the Kingmakers," and detailed why she believes Trump alone will return the government to the people.  She warned that if immigration is not stopped:  "we're not going to be America anymore."

'Father Of Conservative Activism' Endorses Ted Cruz.  Countering 91-year-old Eagle Forum founder Phyllis Schlafly's surprise support for Donald Trump, very much connected to her concerns about the long-term effects of immigration on the American electorate, Leadership Institute founder and president Morton Blackwell has now enthusiastically endorsed Iowa frontrunner Ted Cruz.  In November, Blackwell wrote an article on the influential Red State website contending that "Several candidates now running appear to be more conservative than anyone Republicans have nominated for president since Reagan," yet conservatives "haven't yet come close to uniting."

Every Muslim Will Bow Before Jesus.  It is, indeed, our great hope and prayer that every Muslim — every human being — might surrender self and come to the saving knowledge and grace of Christ Jesus, who, alone, is "the way and the truth and the life."  For, "No one comes to the Father except through [Him]" (see John 14:6).  To be sure, it is the express desire of both God the Father and Christ His Son that each and every Muslim on earth should abandon Muhammad's broad path to perdition, turnabout and move toward Christ's narrow path to eternal life.

The Bitter Clinger Party.  Ask yourself this:  Which side do you want to be on?  The proactive self-defense bitter clingers, or the side that is so delusional it thinks the government can actually protect and care for them?  Yes, it's an easy choice for sane people, for only crazy folks put their faith and trust in the current leadership of the United States.  When you take the liberal media (most all of television, movies, news outlets, and internet influence), the Executive Branch, liberal judges, the recent actions of the Supreme Court, EPA, DOJ, IRS, and other rogue agencies out of the picture — the majority of America is held together by Bitter Clingers!  And while they cling to their guns and religion (and the constitution) they also comprise a force of millions and millions who are near the breaking point of a revolution aimed at not just voting the liars and scoundrels out of office — but ignoring the many unconstitutional directives that have been vomited out of the White House, the SUPCO, and the aforementioned agencies.

Constitutional Scholars Explain Why Ted Cruz Is Eligible to Be President.  Donald Trump says questions about whether Ted Cruz is eligible to be President of the United States could become a "big problem" for the Canadian-born Republican candidate.  But among legal scholars, there's a consensus:  He's eligible to occupy the Oval Office.  The Texas senator, who was born in Calgary, Canada, to an American mother, has been widely viewed as meeting the "natural born citizen" requirement of the United States Constitution.  And most legal experts agree — including former Solicitors General Neal Katyal and Paul Clement.  "An individual born to a U.S. citizen parent — whether in California or Canada or the Canal Zone — is a U.S. citizen from birth and is fully eligible to serve as President," the bipartisan duo wrote in a Harvard Law Review article in March 2015.

(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Born Citizen.  Donald Trump must be feeling Ted Cruz nipping at his heels.  Having at one time declared Cruz's birth in Canada a nonproblem, Trump now professes himself troubled by the question of his eligibility for the presidency.  Does Cruz's birth on foreign soil render him something other than a "natural born Citizen" as required by Article II of the Constitution?  Trump now claims to have heard that Cruz's foreign birth to an American mother may raise a constitutional problem. [...] Cruz was born in Canada to an American mother.  If he was born an American citizen, as he was, rather than naturalized, he should be good to go.

Ted Cruz, Natural Born Citizen.  Senator Ted Cruz is wise to laugh off Donald Trump's intimation that his constitutional qualifications to serve as president may be debatable.  The suggestion is sufficiently frivolous that even Trump, who is apt to utter most anything that pops into his head, stops short of claiming that Cruz is not a "natural born citizen," the Constitution's requirement.  Trump is merely saying that because Cruz was born in Canada (of an American citizen mother and a Cuban father who had been a long-time legal resident of the United States), some political opponents might file lawsuits that could spur years of litigation over Cruz's eligibility.  The answer to that "problem" is:  So what?  Top government officials get sued all the time.  It comes with the territory and has no impact on the performance of their duties.  Indeed, dozens of lawsuits have been brought seeking to challenge President Obama's eligibility.

Ryan: Trump or Cruz would 'absolutely' be better than Obama.  Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) says both Donald Trump and Ted Cruz would make better presidents than Barack Obama.  When asked by Yahoo News's Katie Couric if the country would be better off with a President Trump or a President Cruz, Ryan replied, "Yeah, absolutely."  "I think any one of these men or women running for president in the Republican primary would be a far better president than Barack Obama.  Absolutely," he said.

The Editor says...
Almost anyone would be a better president than Barack H. Obama, the worst president in our country's history.  For example, Sean Hannity.  Phyllis Schlafly.  Mary Lou Retton.  Anybody!

Vote for the Candidate Both Sides Fear.  It's as Limbaugh says: the left and the establishment right will always tell you who they fear the most.  Sure, they hate both Trump and Cruz.  The hatred for Trump is understandable, from their standpoint.  He makes Republicans look bad.  He's intolerant and generally causes them embarrassment.  But the antipathy for Cruz is born of fear.  They fear the end of the government gravy train if he gets elected.  They fear that with Cruz at the helm, Americans may just discover they don't actually need Washington involved in every facet of their lives.

It Has Come to This.  The United States of America that we grew up in, and in some cases fought for, no longer exists.  I would like to write something stirring in defense of our Constitution, but it isn't under attack.  It is simply ignored.  Some have proposed that we have a Constitutional convention to add new amendments.  What would that accomplish?  Would our present Federal government respect a set of new amendments when they don't respect the old ones?  What good does it do to insist on one's rights as a citizen, when in fact mere citizenship has lost its meaning?  Americans have no rights officials in Washington feel bound to recognize.  Both Republicans and Democrats overrule majority opinion as a matter of course.  They do not doubt for a moment that they are the best and brightest, and that our voting franchise is merely an antiquated inconvenience.  My elected representatives represent no one but themselves.

The sum of all fears.  Many Americans are angry that politicians of both parties seem to have placed their careers ahead of their responsibility to take care of the nation.  As Ronald Reagan said, we are just one generation away from losing it all.  That's because democracy and equal rights are not the norm in the world.  They must be fought for and maintained if we wish to pass them on to our descendants.  Yes, we want immigrants to come to America, but we want them to come respecting our laws (otherwise what are laws for?), to learn English, our history and values and to become — as earlier immigrants did — fully American without hyphens.

These Are The Most Persecuted People in the World.  The most persecuted group in the world today is Christians.  Christians in Nigeria, Egypt, Syria and other nations are murdered, raped, kidnapped, enslaved and persecuted on a daily basis.  The reason for the vast majority of all of this violence is that they are Christian among Muslims.  But their abuse does not stop with the violence.  The perpetrators of violence are measured in the thousands, but the greatest abuse is at the hands of those who should demand that the violence stop.  The silence in the face this persecution is denial and justification.  The persecutors are few, but the deniers are in the billions.

Post-Obama, Cruz is the best candidate to repair our damaged Constitution.  Ted Cruz is the only candidate who has shown absolute fealty to the Constitution.  If anyone is going to repair the damage to each citizen's core relationship with government — which means returning to pride of place the Constitution's checks and balances, thereby limiting the Supreme Court's and the President's increasingly unchecked powers — it's going to be Ted Cruz.  He understands that, as president, his job isn't just to carry out policy, it's to preserve and protect the United States, right down to repairing the tattered constitutional fabric Obama bequeaths to the next White House occupant.

Tom Friedman's Utopia: Breathing the Air in Red China is Like Smoking 40 Cigarettes a Day.  The free market is often blamed for pollution.  The the unbridled greed of capitalists is the reason rivers flow red, forests are felled, and air is made hard to breathe.  And historically speaking there is some truth to this.  However what is often left out of this critique is the degree to which governments encourage environmentally damaging actions.  Almost invariably serious environmental degradation happens as a result of a lack of property rights.  (In one form or another.)  This is not always true by any means but it is generally true.  Those areas where no one has any responsibility, where no one is held accountable, are often the most polluted.  Oceans, rivers, remote rain forests are all commons and as such are abused.  Such abuse can also happen in instances where the responsible party is the government too.

Obama's Phony War Against ISIS.  For good and for ill, fighting from the air has been perhaps the defining aspect of America's warmaking.  We invented "precision" daylight bombing against Germany in WWII. We pioneered firebombing and nuclear bombing against Japan in that same conflict.  We developed laser-guided munitions for use against high-priority targets while fighting North Vietnam, and even more precise GPS-guided munitions for our 21st century wars.  We build the best bombers, the best fighters, and the smartest bombs.

'We are at war with militant Islam!' A rookie senator notes what many fear to say.  Have you felt frustrated, angered, maybe even frightened for yourself and family by the lack of credible leadership — real stand-up, follow-me leadership — from the so-called leaders of both political parties?  Has the thought crossed your mind that the two parties' leading candidates for president are not really up to the deadly serious task of commander-in-chief, of keeping our country safe.  Watch Ben Sasse in the video [in this article].  He's not running for anything.  He voices precisely what so many of us have been thinking and fearing and, occasionally, hoping.  Many in Washington will not like what he says.  Good!  Sasse is not attacking either of the you-know-who's or the other over-sized narcissist who addressed the country Sunday night.  He's a fellow American, simply laying out in clear, unvarnished candor the facts of where we as a nation are.  In danger, serious long-term danger.

The Ugly Truths the Democrat and Republican Establishment Seek to Conceal From Us.  [Scroll down]  They're all indifferent.  The political goal is more power for them and their friends, mostly economic power.  More ability to extract from you by force and threaten you with jail or worse if you try to resist.  More power over your daily life.  More power to tell you that you must bake a cake for gays (because your religious convictions don't matter) but if your religious convictions are Muslim then they do matter and must be protected because that's where one of the big reservoirs of oil and undeveloped people that can be exploited in the future reside.  They literally don't care if you get blown up or shot and it doesn't matter if they're Democrat or Republican.  They don't care if you live under a freeway overpass because your health "insurance" that you are forced to buy covers so little that you have to spend $6,000 before one dime is covered, and you don't have $6,000.  They don't care that a Christmas Party was shot up by a couple of Islamic Nutjobs who they could have identified if they did care and in fact they shut down an investigation on "civil rights" grounds that probably would have identified the shooters years before.

Let's kill them first.  As world leaders grapple with how to respond, just as they did after the recent Paris attacks, they must resist the tendency to further bolster the police state at the expense of individual freedom.  Throughout history, war and the fear of war have been used by governments to expand their power at the expense of citizens' property and liberty.  The American Revolution was a striking exception to this trend where individuals took to defending their property and their liberty from an organized enemy who wanted to take both.  A strategy of engaging individuals in the fight against today's terrorism can be similarly successful.

The kind of president we need.  Many Americans are mad as hell at our political leaders — both Republican and Democrat — and are giving voice to their anger through the likes of Donald Trump and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).  The anger is understandable.  The federal government is paralyzed, unable to tackle any of the major problems facing our country or even accomplish basic functions such as enacting annual budgets for federal departments and agencies.  The anger derives equally from governmental ineptitude, arrogance and corruption, and self-serving politicians more concerned with getting reelected than with the nation's future.  The next president will face major domestic problems, as well as the challenges posed by Iran, Russia, China, North Korea, terrorism and a Middle East in turmoil.  What kind of qualities should we be looking for in a new chief executive?

The Real 2016 Election: The Bipartisan Political-Media Establishment vs. the American People.  The 2016 election is not a contest between the Democrat and Republican ideologies, nor is it a choice among various approaches to address the nation's problems, but something far more fundamental.  It is a battle between the entrenched power of the bipartisan political-media establishment versus the rights and liberties of the American people.  It is a conflict between those who want to adhere to the Constitution and the rule of law and the party leaders and a biased media, who wish to continue the practices of political expediency and crony capitalism.  It is a decadent system the political-media elite created and continues to nurture, one that benefits a few at the expense of the many.  There are only two issues that matter for the 2016 election: the political-media establishment is hopelessly corrupt and, although we have elections, we no longer have representative government.

Paris climate change meetings: Best estimate for progress? Zero.  Highly anticipated international climate negotiations began Monday [11/30/2015] in Paris, aiming to finalize commitments from all countries to reduce their greenhouse-gas emissions.  Countries submitted in advance their final plans (known as "Intended Nationally Determined Contributions," or INDCs), which means the potential progress from a global agreement can be estimated already.  Unfortunately, though claims of success are already pouring in, the best estimate for that progress is approximately zero.

In Memory of a Patriot — Alan Caruba.  In recent years, we have seen greater and greater attacks on freedom and liberty, yet even with the lamp of freedom seeming to grow ever dimmer, there are many even today who work to keep that lamp aglow.  One such person was writer Alan Caruba.  A New Jersey native, Alan's career included public relations and print journalism, and later became quite active writing articles for the internet.

Armed militias and concealed carry: It is Lexington and Concord time.  Thomas Paine wrote in the "Rights of Man" (1791):  "The fact, therefore, must be that the individuals, themselves, each, in his own personal and sovereign right, entered into a contract with each other to produce a government:  and this is the only mode in which governments have a right to arise, and the only principle on which they have a right to exist."  That is, government is a construct of and accountable to its citizens and whenever the actions of government are contrary to their interests and well-being, citizens have the right to defy or dissolve the government.

Dallas Mayor Who Fears White People Lives In 92 Percent White Neighborhood.  Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings has said that he is more afraid of "white men" than Syrian refugees.  Despite his fear of whites, however, the mayor manages to get by living in a ritzy neighborhood that is more than 92 percent white and only 1 percent black.  The former CEO of Pizza Hut, Rawlings lives in the prestigious Preston Hollow neighborhood, which D Magazine described as "almost entirely lily white" as part of a feature piece titled "Why are the Best Neighborhoods in Dallas Still Segregated?"

The Editor says...
That's not exactly a mystery.  The best neighborhoods in Dallas are still segregated because if they weren't segregated, they wouldn't be the best neighborhoods in Dallas.  Anybody can move into a 92% black neighborhood (for example, a mile south of the Cotton Bowl) and take their chances.  Houses are cheap in those areas, except for the constant cost of maintaining strong fences, scrubbing graffiti, picking up the neighbors' trash, feeding and training your big hungry dogs, and keeping bright lights turned on all night.  You might also need surveillance cameras, burglar bars, a monthly alarm-monitoring service, and an ample supply of 12-gauge ammo.

When will our leaders face up to the truth that the EU is a gigantic sham?  What is left of the European idea?  Whatever indeterminate reassurances emerge from however many EU "summits" on security and shared intelligence, everybody must know that Paris was the end.  The disastrously uncoordinated response to the refugee crisis had already discredited the notion that this was a unified federation in which all member states had an equal voice.  The grand verbiage of solidarity and cooperation simply dissolved when faced with a global humanitarian disaster — precisely the sort of event which the whole edifice was originally constructed to avert.  And then, with Paris, it became horrifyingly obvious that the open borders policy — the most sacred of the EU founding principles — was unsustainable.

National security issues expose the danger of amateur candidates.  National security has emerged as a central issue in the 2016 presidential election. That's probably bad news for the Republican Party's front-runners.  Ben Carson and Donald Trump have failed to exhibit a command of the issues and have made a series of gaffes on the campaign trail which expose their lack of knowledge and perhaps even call into question their fitness for office.

Anti-Liberty Politicians.  After a terrorist attack, it's natural to ask:  What can politicians do to keep us safe?  One thing they could do is actually focus on keeping us safe rather than devoting so much time, energy and hot air to the many things government does instead of protecting lives and property.

What's Actually in the Trans Pacific Partnership?  Here's a quick summary:
  •   A legislative body superior to Congress
  •   A vehicle to pass Obama's climate change treaty
  •   Increased legal immigration
  •   Reduced patent protection for U.S. pharmaceuticals
  •   Quotas on U.S. agricultural exports
  •   Increased currency manipulation
  •   Reduced U.S. power

The First Amendment Is Dying.  Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; Unless we're talking about a white chocolate-paneled cake for a gay wedding or perpetual funding for 'women's health' clinics, because it's the 'right thing to do.' [...] Or of the press; unless the press invades safe spaces designated by mobs or writes about incorrect topics at incorrect times.  And to petition the Government for a redress of grievances; unless they are members of pre-designated special interests groups, they should report to the IRS before doing so.  That's pretty much the state of the First Amendment today.

Black intellectual admits why liberals fear Ben Carson.  There is not too much excitement in the black community for the 2016 presidential campaign.  This time around, the Democrats have given blacks a choice between an old white woman and an old white man.  Boring.  Or they can choose the intelligent, highly successful black neurosurgeon running as a Republican.  In fact, Dr. Ben Carson's life story better aligns with black Americans than does President Obama's.

What Size Cement Shoes Does Jeb Bush Wear?  Jeb is a big government progressive.  He, like his brother, undoubtedly agrees that the federal government cannot do without a single dime, or even one less employee — that the federal budget can never be cut. [...] Jeb and Hillary are like two peas in a pod.  Both candidates are bought and paid for.  It's been said of Hillary thousands of times — big money donors, domestically and internationally, are literally purchasing the White House in the form of the election of Clinton.  The same can be said of Jeb.  These Superpac mega-donors don't give hundreds of millions of dollars because they like Jeb's campaign promises.  They, like the Clinton donors, are buying access and influence.

A Letter To Rand Paul: Stop Using Fake Founding Fathers Quotes.  Four months ago, we brought to your attention that your first two books contained several quotations incorrectly attributed to our founding fathers.  In The Tea Party Goes to Washington, you write eloquently of the need to limit government, quoting Thomas Jefferson as saying, "My reading of history convinces me that most bad government results from too much government."  But Jefferson never said this.  In Government Bullies (an e-book best seller!), you argue against tyranny and oppression, quoting James Madison as saying, "If tyranny and oppression come to this land it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy."  There's no evidence Madison ever said or wrote this.

The 20 Best Quotes From Ted Cruz.  Ted Cruz is the living embodiment of what a conservative Republican in Congress is supposed to be.  While the Republican leadership was bowing to Obama, breaking campaign promises and attacking its own supporters, Ted Cruz was at the point of the spear, fighting for the American people.  Cruz is intelligent, eloquent and he has proven over and over again that he's willing to stand up, speak out and fight back.

End the Civil Rights Commission's Reign of Error.  Everywhere you look, someone is accusing governments of abusing the rights of people crossing their borders. [...] If we know anything about the human-rights community, it's that it often combines lofty idealism with dubious anecdotes and shifty statistics that undermine its genuine concerns.  Take the U.S. commission's report:  On close examination, it is a dubious farrago of abuse claims used to lobby for a preferred pro-immigrant and pro-union outcome.

The Democrats' Preoccupation With Inequality.  Material inequality is the predominant concern of the Democratic Party.  Indeed, material inequality has been the predominant concern of the left since Karl Marx. [...] In a free society, wealth is not a pie — meaning that when a slice of pie is removed, there is less of the pie remaining.  And the poorer members of society have the ability to improve their economic lot.  Through hard work, self-discipline, marriage and education — and with some degree of good luck — the poor can join the middle class and even the wealthy class.  The latter is generally the case in America.

Thinking About Giving Some Money to Ben Carson? Read This First.  It's easy to like Ben.  It's a little harder to like John Phillip Sousa IV (yes, the great-grandson), Vernon Robinson, and especially Bruce Eberle.  But they're going to get a hefty percentage of whatever you fork over for Dr. Carson.

Why Socialists Shouldn't Cite Sweden as Success.  When Bernie Sanders and his ilk hold up Scandinavia as an exemplar, they are really thinking of a couple of decades beginning in the early 1970s when Sweden and others got their full Sanders on.  In Sweden, the effective marginal tax rate topped 100 percent in some circumstances.  There is a reason that IKEA founder Ingvar Kamprad fled the country in 1973.  Sweden instituted a scheme to confiscate corporate profits and hand them over to labor unions.  The idea was, in the words of a Swedish economist, to have "a market economy without individual capitalists and entrepreneurs."  This was about as logical as it sounded — and delivered predictable results.

A Marxist Farce in Vegas: Commentary on the first Democratic candidates' debate.  [Scroll down]  In fact, I can't find anywhere just how many attended.  It must have been very, very bad.  The attendance was the first thing you saw on the Republican debates.  Only 61 out of 354 seats for the press were filled.  Not even the local press showed, much less national and international.  They didn't want to die from sheer boredom.  I lived in Vegas for over 20 years... drag queen shows had far better attendance.  In fact, I'll bet that's where a lot of the Dems were.

Why Republicans Need to Nominate Ted Cruz.  For years, the most conservative elements of the party have complained about nominees such as Bob Dole, John McCain and Mitt Romney, seeing those Republican leaders as pragmatists who didn't deeply hold conservative principles and weren't worthy of the label "Republican."  According to those conservatives, the GOP loses when "squishy" Republican nominees don't offer voters a sharp contrast, and because of that, millions of conservative voters sit at home, unexcited with the choices offered.

Cruz Has a YUUGE Pick for Speaker.  Yesterday [10/12/2015] on the campaign trail, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) was asked who he would want to be Speaker of the House.  Unlike Chris Christie, who said it doesn't matter, Cruz put forth a name that conservatives could love.

Restarting the Engines.  Washington seems unable to do anything at present.  The Republican inability to lead an impeachment is matched by the impotence of the president and his party actually get anything done.  Obama's failures have not only created a crisis abroad, they have created a crisis at home in the form of political paralysis.  At least the Republicans are in the process of determining, through the process of rebellion, what the future of their party will be.  The Democrats are a long way from resurrection, having yet to die as a party, though they have managed to rot.  For the moment, both wings of the Washington elite are out of money, credibility and moves.  It will take some time to shake things out.

Let States Build Their Own Highways.  The inability of Congress to come together to pass a transportation package has frustrated the myriad special interests whose lobbyists want assurances that the dollars will keep flowing for years, and not just months, to come.  And the media, which seldom miss an opportunity to push the "crumbling infrastructure" narrative, treat the matter as just another lamentable example of congressional gridlock inhibiting progress.  But the real source of the dysfunction is the fact that Washington is so involved in state and local transportation funding decisions in the first place.

Trans-Pacific Trade Deal Is Complete — Final Agreements Reached Today.  Wall Street wants the TPP deal.  The Obama administration wants the TPP deal.  The U.S. Chamber of Commerce wants the TPP deal. [...] The TPP deal is exceptionally bad for U.S. manufacturing and jobs.

Ben Carson stands firm. What nerve!  Ben Carson has done it now.  First he had the temerity to say that Islam is in conflict with our Constitution.  And now he won't back down.  Doesn't he know Republicans are supposed to cave, cower, and crumble after standing for truth and that anyone, irrespective of their political leanings, must not criticize Islam?  How dare Ben Carson commit blasphemy.  How dare he ignore the president's warning that "the future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam!"

Pope Francis' fact-free flamboyance.  Pope Francis embodies sanctity but comes trailing clouds of sanctimony.  With a convert's indiscriminate zeal, he embraces ideas impeccably fashionable, demonstrably false and deeply reactionary.  They would devastate the poor on whose behalf he purports to speak — if his policy prescriptions were not as implausible as his social diagnoses are shrill.  Supporters of Francis have bought newspaper and broadcast advertisements to disseminate some of his woolly sentiments that have the intellectual tone of fortune cookies.

The Pope's Marriage Endgame.  It's been 18 months since Pope Francis invited Cardinal Walter Kasper to raise anew the argument that divorced and remarried Catholics should be allowed to receive communion.  That invitation touched off a civil war within the church's hierarchy, pitting cardinal against cardinal, theologian against theologian; the conflict has reverberated across books, speeches, and op-ed pages, and it's dominated the church's synod on the family, whose second meeting looms this fall.  It's clear that this was all intentional:  That Francis wanted a big internal argument over marriage and communion, that he deliberately started this civil war.  The question that remains unanswered, though, is how the pope intends to finish it.

Why Should We Pay for 'Happy Birthday'?  Believe it or not, "Happy Birthday to You" is still protected by copyright.  It's a lucrative copyright.  Warner Music Group allegedly earns $2 million per year from this 19th-century song.  Whenever the birthday melody is sung on television or a film, or even in a public performance (including restaurants and possibly senior citizen centers), money is due to the copyright holder.  The use of the song in a film is rumored to cost as much as $10,000.  The steep price tag has inspired some filmmakers to look for less expensive alternatives.  Don't be surprised if you see a birthday scene on screen with revelers singing "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow" instead.  That song, dating back to 1709, is in the public domain.

America is being bullied into sympathizing with 9/11 attackers.  In the days and weeks following Sept. 11, 2001, we were a nation united in agony.  We bore a common resolve to defeat the forces of evil that hit us, and hit us hard.  "Never again!" we cried in unison.  I remember walking down a New York City street, debris still swirling in the air from the destroyed World Trade Center, and seeing women and even men hugging heroic cops, firefighters and other first responders.  Now, one is just as likely to see a man or woman in uniform spit upon or cursed at by the very people whose lives they protect every day.

Politicians Have Chosen Political Expediency Over Backing Their Police Departments.  As of this writing, there have been 23 police officers gunned down in the line of duty this year.  That is not even taking into account the ones killed in car accidents, injured while directing traffic, dealing with domestic violence, a hostage crisis or any of a myriad of other dangerous situations they face every day.  Police go into neighborhoods where the streets are ruled by violent gangs and the next person they face could be some drug crazed junkie with a knife or some street hardened teenager who wants to make a mark in his upside down world by killing a cop.  Mayors of major cities have chosen political expediency over backing their police departments.

Hussman: Get Out Before It's Too Late.  John Hussman's weekly letter provides sound advice for anyone looking to avoid a 50% loss in the next 18 months.  The market has been overvalued for the last three years and now sits at overvaluation levels on par with 1929 and 2000.  The difference is that fear has been overtaking greed in the psyches of traders.  The average Joe isn't in the market.  Only the Ivy League MBA High frequency trading computer gurus are playing in this rigged market.  The 1,100 point crash last Monday [8/24/2015] is what happens when arrogant young traders, fear and computer algorithms combine in a perfect storm of mindless selling. Suddenly the pompous risk takers became frightened risk-averse lemmings.

Lessons in disaster for the next Katrina.  Who can you trust when disaster strikes?  Not the media.  And definitely not the government.

The Federal Reserve: A Solution in Search of a Problem.  The Federal Reserve opened its annual symposium in Jackson Hole, Wyo., Thursday [8/27/2015].  Its experts have assembled to discuss "inflation dynamics."  Concurrently, another group of economists and financial experts is meeting just down the road.  They're discussing monetary policy, as well, but they're considering questions never raised at Fed symposia — questions like:  "Do we really need the Fed?"  It's a question worth asking.  America's monetary system is the Achilles heel of the world's economic system.  Something is seriously wrong when trillions of new dollars are created out of thin air to bail out big banks, "stimulate" the economy and buy government debt.  And something is dangerously wrong when the political establishment is afraid even to discuss it.

Why US must keep a close eye on Russia's plans for the Arctic.  "The North Pole is Ours!" read the headline of Rossiiskaya Gazeta — the Russian government daily newspaper of record — on May 20.  In today's circumstances of heightened tensions with the West, Vladimir Putin needs victories, which may also make the country less pragmatic and more concerned about identity politics and symbols.  Against that context, we have the most significant physical event on our planet since the end of the last ice age is taking place today — the opening of the Arctic.  Activity in all the high north is likely to continue to increase, together with fish stocks and pursuing fishing fleets migrating farther north.

Market's wild ride: Are Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders partly to blame?  Everyone is pinpointing China, the Fed, Europe and other international turmoil for the market crash over the past week.  And justifiably so.  China has roughly tripled its debt burden over the last six years to more than $20 trillion.  Investors are starting to suspect a worst case financial scenario that Beijing is starting to resemble the U.S. — circa 2008.  And Janet Yellen is a modern day Hamlet at the helm of the Federal Reserve with her daily wavering:  to raise or not to raise (interest rates).  But another overlooked factor behind the fear mania is the narrative that our major political candidates are laying out to American voters in recent weeks.

The Coming Collapse: Fed Lunacy is to Blame.  Dr. Hussman presents his case against the Federal Reserve as clearly as anything I've ever read.  Bailing out criminally negligent Wall Street banks with taxpayer money, allowing fraudulent accounting to cover up insolvency, printing $3 trillion out of thin air and handing it to the Wall Street banks, penalizing savings while encouraging consumers and corporations to go further into debt, and gearing all of your efforts towards creating stock, bond, and real estate bubbles, is the height of lunacy — unless you are a captured entity working on behalf of a corrupt status quo.

Presidential Candidates Comparison. 

The Left, Not Fox News, Has Made Us All Crazy.  Since Fox's creation in the mid-90s, the media has become less and less interested in disguising its liberalism, which has, ironically, ensured Fox's continued success.  Certainly, the escalating polarization is lamentable and it seems particularly pronounced among older Americans.  My parents watch a lot of Fox News, as do my in-laws.  Frankly, the majority of people over 60 that I know watch a lot of Fox News.  However, are Fox News viewers victims of a "conspiracy" to brainwash them?

Office Beasts: Venomous Employees a €10 Billion Problem in Germany.  The daily life of the modern office worker is an ordeal with ever-changing trends.  Sometimes workers are overstimulated to the point of burnout.  At others they are understimulated to the point of boredom.  Bookshelves are crowded with literature on employee psychopathology.  But one phenomenon is often overlooked when people research the daily office life that takes place between the meetings and the water cooler:  toxic workers who contaminate the workplace and make things a nightmare.

Hiroshima And Nagasaki: Still Justified 70 Years Later.  Aug. 6 marks one of America's most important anniversaries, remarkable for what happened on that date in 1945 and for what did not happen subsequently.  What did happen was that the Enola Gay, an American B-29 bomber, dropped Little Boy, a uranium-based atomic bomb, on the Japanese city of Hiroshima.  That dramatic act hastened the end of World War II, which concluded within a week of the Aug. 9 detonation of Fat Man, a plutonium-based bomb, over Nagasaki.  These are the only two nuclear weapons ever used in warfare.

In Defense of Incivility.  The elites always talk about civility in politics.  That is a way to control the citizenry, by shaming them into silence when focused anger would serve the Republic better. [...] The last thing we need in American politics is more civility.  What we need is more focused anger.  Anger begets debate and debate begets change.  This is Donald Trump's real contribution to the 2016 presidential contest.  Patrick Henry did not say, "Give me civility or give me death!"  Liberty is often messy and yes, uncivil.

Willingness to Fight: Ted Cruz Has Earned a Second Look From Us All.  I like Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) a lot as a Senator, but I have never been a huge fan of his candidacy for President — at least until now.  Generally speaking, I prefer governors to Senators, and I have an especial wariness for first term Senators.  Additionally, I have questions about Cruz's ability as a coalition builder and I know that he is a polarizing figure, even within the conservative movement.  However, episode three billion in the GOP Failure Theater tour, this time featuring Planned Parenthood failure theater, has pushed me into the camp that makes me want, more than anything, to see a Presidential candidate who is willing to fight and show the cowering squishes who run this party how it is done.

Thank God Mr. Cruz is in Washington.  When I lay my head on my pillow at night which candidate winning the White House will cause me to sleep the most peacefully?  Who is most likely to remain true to their promises to We the People; fight to repeal ObamaCare, end the invasion of our borders, defend life and traditional values?  Who believes in Conservatism enough to throw a lifeline of inspiration to those drowning in the treacherous deep dark sea of Obama's welfare state America?  Who will pray as the song says, "Lord lift us up where we belong" as Americans?  Currently, I believe that candidate is Sen Ted Cruz.

Can hipster Christianity save churches from decline?  [H]as the cool-church movement done anything to reverse trends of declining church attendance, particularly among young people?  Most evidence suggests the answer is no.

Is Social Liberalism Winning? Don't Believe The Spin.  The end of the Supreme Court term was depressing for conservatives.  The double-whammy of a 50-state mandate for gay marriage and the upholding of ObamaCare sounded the alarms for religious freedom.  All that unease is measurable.  Credit the Washington Post for doing precisely that.  The polling team has just reported, "Liberals have won a string of victories on gay marriage and health care reform this year, but a new Washington Post-ABC News poll finds a large majority of Americans are unhappy with where the nation is headed on social issues."

The exceptional campaign timing of Ted Cruz's ferocious floor speech.  During a speech from the Senate floor on Friday, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) blasted Majority Leader Mitch McConnell in direct terms on an arcane topic.  "What we just saw today was an absolute demonstration that not only what [McConnell] told every Republican senator, but what he told the press over and over and over again was a simple lie," Cruz said.  "We know now that when the majority leader looks us in the eyes and makes an explicit commitment, that he is willing to say things that he knows are false."

Truth is an existential threat to the US government.  The United States is not a constitutional republic.  It is an oligarchy controlled by wealthy financiers who hire politicians to pass legislation beneficial to them and employ journalists to keep the citizens ignorant and compliant.  Neither the Democrats nor the Republicans believe in democracy.  It is simply an ideological contest between two different forms of totalitarianism based on big government, where they represent only themselves in their pursuit of personal power and profit.  Over the last hundred years, the Democrat Party has moved farther and farther to the left, evolving from populism to Marxism and developing an operational model resembling that of the mafia.  Its leaders are a gaggle of coffeehouse communists and unindicted felons, who seek the lifestyles of the rich and famous while practicing the politics of Joseph Stalin.  The Republicans are democratic only in the sense that they are willing to sell their votes to the highest bidder, where their political power and, ultimately, compensation from their rich donors increase proportionally with the expansion of government.

Why So Many People Regard Obama Positively.  This essay attempts to comprehend why, despite his policy failures at home and abroad, scandals, and lies, many Americans continue to approve of Obama's job performance and regard him favorably as a person.  At least five major factors seem to play a part:  (1) Americans' views of the presidency; (2) Obama's racial make-up; (3) his party affiliation; (4) the mainstream media's (MSM's) bias on his behalf; and (5) Americans' tendency to accord very low priority to politics.

The Editor says...
I would add #7, America's dumbed-down public education system that no longer teaches civics or the contents of the Constitution, and promotes left-wing propaganda including the supposed benefits of affirmative action, and #6, Americans' very short memories and even shorter attention spans.

How to Win a Nobel Prize.  I really haven't the foggiest idea how the Nobel Prize is awarded but it used to make sense.  Now the rules have apparently changed because to win the Nobel Peace Prize, you just have to be the right color.  It also helps if you promote a global warming hoax that will make you a billionaire; and to win this once prestigious award you have to write a convincing bogus autobiography.

Coburn Shreds Opponents of an Article V Convention: We "have a runaway convention right now".  During his time in the House and Senate, Tom Coburn developed a reputation fighting the excesses of Washington.  Now retired from public office and back to living in Oklahoma, he has added his powerful voice to a growing movement urging states to force a convention to amend the Constitution in order to rein in the federal government.  "The Congress, the courts, and the president ignore the Constitution we have today and our Founders knew we would eventually get to that point, and they gave us a method... to amend it to keep the federal government limited in its scope and its jurisdiction," Coburn said in an interview with the Washington Examiner.

Disregard For the Law is America's Greatest Threat.  Barbarians at the gate usually don't bring down once-successful civilizations.  Nor does climate change.  Even mass epidemics like the plague that decimated sixth-century Byzantium do not necessarily destroy a culture.  Far more dangerous are institutionalized corruption, a lack of transparency and creeping neglect of existing laws.  All the German euros in the world will not save Greece if Greeks continue to dodge taxes, featherbed government and see corruption as a business model.  Even obeying so-called minor laws counts.  It is no coincidence that a country where drivers routinely flout traffic laws and throw trash out the window is also a country that cooks its books and lies to its creditors.

The Revenge Of The Lost Boys.  [Scroll down]  But the truth of the matter is that Dylann Roof (at least from what we know) isn't that different from so many other young, mostly white men over the past 30 years or so who have lashed out against their society in different ways.  Although mass killers understandably seize our imaginations and dominate the media, and not all dysfunctional young males are violent and not all of them gain the publicity they crave.  Some are terrorists, others are murderers, and some are merely vandals.  A few are traitors and deserters.  What they all have in common is their gender (male), their race (most are white), and their youth (almost all under 30 at their peak destructiveness).  Beyond this, they seem to share little beyond a stubborn immaturity wedded to a towering narcissism.

Athens on the Potomac.  Financial experts in New York, London, and Brussels have tut-tutted Greece's economic travails as Athens considers its future with the European Union.  Why did they borrow so much money?  How can they ever pay it back?  Do they think that much debt is sustainable?  Instead of pointing fingers at the innumerates running Athens, they should consider our own situation.

Asleep for the last 60 years? Wake up — and brace yourself.  It does not shock me that younger people — let's say those born after 1970 — do not share my nostalgia for a world gone by.  Tantalized by a future that is beckoningly seductive — and about five seconds away — it is not surprising that they do not have time to absorb, analyze or appreciate the "distant past" of the 1940s and 1950s, let alone the five centuries from the dawn of the Renaissance to the rescue of Europe from the barbarism of the Nazis in the Second World War.  But what does surprise me is how easily members of my generation and those older than me have betrayed their own experience, their own history, and their own culture for the sake of instant gratification, avoidance of responsibility, and the exhilarating sense of belonging that come from joining the age-old rebellion against God.

De-Confederatizing the U.S. won't solve anything.  The Civil War was an awful time of American history.  It pitted brother against brother, neighbor against neighbor, friend against friend, and state against state.  Around 620,000 Americans died in the war, more than any other conflict the U.S. has been involved in.  It's something which will hopefully never happen again.  Which is why those calling for the destruction of Confederate monuments are wrong.

The 5 Best Thomas Paine Quotes From 'Common Sense'.  "Common Sense" was a short work but had an enormous impact on colonial America's decision to break its ties with Great Britain.  Paine was an English defector to the American cause.  Born in 1737, he immigrated to America in 1774 after leading a life of disappointment in England.  He initially settled in Philadelphia under the tutelage of Richard Bache, Benjamin Franklin's son-in-law.

Five True Lies Republicans Should Tell In 2016.  Our readers don't really need to see another column, post, or podcast about how the Supreme Court and the Obama administration has wrecked the America we used to know, and we're past the time where we wallow in grief about how the country is lost.  It's not lost.  The fight isn't over until conservatives say it's over.  Are you really going to just sit there and let a bunch of high-school losers who found religion in campus cultural Marxism destroy the greatest society in world history?

America's Destiny in the Balance.  I am an immigrant to this country and a displaced survivor of a war that destroyed a continent.  A war fomented by men, beginning the 1920's, who also adhered to the same basic tenets espoused by Barack Obama and his fellow travelers.  I have seen and experienced the end product of their narcissism and megalomania.  Based on firsthand knowledge I can attest to the existence of God as well as his helping hand.  God has given the people of the United States one last opportunity, through the circumstances of the election of Barack Obama, to rescue the last best hope of mankind.  There will be no divine intervention — it is for the people, in their free will, to decide.  If the citizenry chooses to maintain its present course, God will turn his back on this nation as he has done with much of Europe and the Middle East.

Pope Francis, The Earth Is Not My Sister.  The pope thinks we should view the earth as our sister.  I don't, mainly because I have a sister.  While my sister and I have had our disagreements over the years, I haven't spent my entire life trying to stop her from killing me.  In the opening words of "Laudato si," Pope Francis quotes a prayer of his Namesake-of-Assisi:  "Praise be to you, my Lord, through our Sister, Mother Earth, who sustains and governs us, and who produces various fruit with coloured flowers and herbs."

The Editor says...
Worshipping the earth is idolatry, which is the forte of the Catholic church.  And if idolatry is their forte, superstition is their five-te.

Is Ted Cruz Too Smart to Be President?  People who question Ted Cruz's "electability" are missing the point.  The question isn't whether or not he can win, but what happens to us if he doesn't.

Mass Insanity is Creating a Snowflake Generation.  Today's children will grow up in a dangerous world in which the forces of order are staging a disorderly retreat before the geopolitical ambitions of dictatorships on the one hand and the pornographic fantasies of blood-crazed religious fanatics on the other.  There are real monsters out there and homework isn't one.  If kids are not taught to manage daily life, they certainly won't be able to face the ordeals that await them as adults.

Port insecurity: Is it going to be terminal this time?  It was 2006, just five years after the 9/11 terror attacks and in the midst of two wars being waged by the United States against two Islamic fundamentalist terror groups — al-Qaida and the Taliban.  Yet President Bush thought it was no problem to put Dubai Ports World of the United Arab Emirates in charge of our major East Coast ports.  Fortunately, Congress said NO in thunder back in the days when Congress still hadn't ceded all or most of its constitutional authority over to the presidential branch.  That, you would hope, would be the end of it, but Mideastern potentates are apparently as persistent as Midwestern liberals.

Panic Before the Herd Does.  When everyone on Wall Street is using the same algorithms in their HFT supercomputers, and John Q. Public isn't even in the market, who will these supercomputers sell to when they all get the sell signal at the same time?  When that time comes, and it won't be long, I'll be munching popcorn and watching the festivities unfold.

Caitlyn Jenner Brought Out the Left's 'Speech Police' in Full Force.  Of all the many aspects of the "Caitlyn" Jenner story which bother conservatives, the one which causes me the most agitation is how the liberal "thought police" have attempted to censor any debate over the many issues related to this extraordinary tale.  It's not just that the vast majority of media coverage has been overwhelmingly celebratory.  That alone is annoying by default.  What is flat-out scary is that the many forces of the left have used media intimidation and political correctness to enforce the notion that enthusiastically honoring Jenner's transformation is the only acceptable reaction.

Why Bruce Jenner can never be a woman.  The celebration of Jenner "becoming a woman" is a fantasy.  It's artificial.  It's make-believe.  It's not authentic at all.  It's a mirage.  Jenner has always fantasized that he's a woman, dreaming of the possibilities of becoming what he imagines himself to be.  But possibilities in life are only fantasies when they aren't rooted in something real.  You can't become a woman without being a girl, complete with XX chromosomes that determine our sex.

Bruce "Caitlyn" Jenner Is Asking Too Much.  To me, this conversation is beginning to feel very 1984.  I have been told that I must refer to a man as a woman.  If I decline to do so, however politely, I am demonized as an oppressor, a bigot and a hater.  I have been told that I must use the female pronouns:  she, her, and hers, not the male pronouns, he, his, and him.  If I decline to do so, however politely, I am excluded from decent society.  I am classed with murderers.  I am very wary of any movement that demands that people change their everyday language and that demonizes those who decline to do so.  If we redefine a woman as a person who poses in a corset and shows substantial cleavage on the cover of Vanity Fair, what does that make a woman who has had a double mastectomy and dresses modestly and hasn't access to Vanity Fair?  My question is not rhetorical, it is not a joke, and it is not trivial.  Definitions get to the scaffolding of society and the essence of things.  If we don't answer this question now, it will become less and less of a joke as we proceed down this slippery slope.

The Editor says...
The Editor took the liberty (while he still has it) to alter the headline above.

Calling Bruce Jenner a Woman Is an Insult to Women.  Parents, be aware:  soon the magazine rack in the checkout line at the supermarket will feature this profoundly disturbing image of Bruce Jenner.  The picture is plastered right on the cover of the next Vanity Fair issue, and it shows Bruce dolled up in makeup and hair extensions, posing in a corset, with parts of his face, forehead, and throat shaved off for cosmetic reasons, and his chest enhanced by hormone pills, Photoshop, and silicone.  The idea is to make the 65-year-old grandfather look like a college girl, but the effect is that he looks like a distorted version of neither.  What he most closely resembles is a mentally disordered man who is being manipulated by disingenuous liberals and self-obsessed gay activists.  Far from having the appearance of a genuine woman, he reminds me of someone who is being abandoned to his delusions by a culture of narcissistic imbeciles.

Is it Time for Civil Disobedience of Kludgeocratic Bureaucracy?  Is there any way to reverse the trend toward ever more intrusive, bossy government?  Things have gotten to such a pass, argues Charles Murray, that only civil disobedience might — might — work.  But the chances are good enough, he says, that he's written a book about it:  "By the People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission."  Murray has a track record of making seemingly outlandish proposals that turn out to be widely accepted public policy.  His 1984 book "Losing Ground" recommended the radical step of abolishing all welfare payments.

It's the Obama Record that O'Malley and Sanders are Bashing.  Governor O'Malley made it official.  He is in and running for us, as he told the crowd:  "Our economic and political system is upside down and backward and it is time to turn it around"...  Senator Sanders said something similar a few days ago.  Who's been in the White House for seven years?  Whose stimulus didn't stimulate?  Whose "shovel ready" jobs weren't ready after all?  Who promised so much and didn't deliver?

Phoenix protests Islamism.  [T]he Phoenix protest demonstrated that constitutional America works.  In Baltimore, 486 were arrested; in Phoenix, 0.  In Baltimore, 113 officers were attacked and injured; in Phoenix, 0.  In Baltimore, vandals and thugs inflicted $20 million in damage to their neighbors.  In Phoenix, the vandal damage was precisely $0.  Indeed, it is the best of times, it is the worst of times.

'The News' [is] now planted progressive propaganda.  In October of 2008 Obama and the Dems threw the Fundamental Transformation of America up in garish, jaw-dropping neon lights and the world thereafter was never to be the same.  The communications world now digital gave an about-to-be-jettisoned America its first digital dictator.  Back then David Axelrod astroturfing portrayed Obama's promised Brave New World as an empty screen, one on which Obama could be projected in whatever image folk wanted him to be, history's first free phone and easy food stamp president.

Put ATF Out of Its Misery.  The ATF, as it's known, is charged with overseeing federally licensed firearms dealers, most of which are responsible and law-abiding — but not all.  Criminals know the difference, but even when the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives has figured it out, it has lacked the resources and leadership to crack down.  A new report by the Center for American Progress recommends that the ATF be merged into the FBI.  It's worth considering.  It would be hard to do worse than the status quo.

Art Activists File First-Amendment Rights Suit Against New York City.  A trio of art activists has filed a federal lawsuit against New York City claiming their First-Amendment rights were violated during a protest last year outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  The plaintiffs — Kyle Depew, Grayson Earle and Yates McKee — are members of the Illuminator Art Collective, a group that uses high-powered, mobile video projectors to broadcast images and political messages.  According to the complaint, New York City police officers seized the group's van-mounted projector as it was beaming "political speech" onto the side of the museum during an evening gala for billionaire industrialist David H. Koch on September 9.

The Editor says...
There is a similar group in the Dallas area, projecting left-wing environmental propaganda on the sides of buildings owned by companies they don't like.  The method is made possible by the use of a theater-size projector mounted in a car, which the group is sure to park on public property.  It is a mild form of eco-terrorism:  Just a little light-weight bullying to promote their cause.  It is also a form of vandalism.  Just because their graffiti is in the form of a temporarily projected image that does not leave permanent damage, it still defaces private property for the duration of their protest.

Should Cars Be Recalled Over Peeling Labels?  You may scoff, but this hypothetical is something that actually happened to tens of thousands of owners of Chevy Camaros (model years 2013 and 2014).  General Motors also had to issue a stop delivery order to dealers, notes Diane Katz, a research fellow at The Heritage Foundation, and instruct them to inspect the label on each sun visor.  If the label was prone to peeling, the entire visor had to be replaced.  I bring this up as an example of the real-world impact of regulations.  We don't always see it, but they exact a cost.

Save Obama (on trade).  That free trade is advantageous to both sides is the rarest of political propositions — provable, indeed mathematically.  David Ricardo did so in 1817.  The Law of Comparative Advantage has held up nicely for 198 years.  Nor is this abstract theory.  We've lived it.  The free-trade regime created after World War II precipitated the most astonishing advance of global welfare and prosperity the world has ever seen.  And that regime was created, overseen, guaranteed and presided over by the United States.

What Will the G.O.P. Cave On Next?  [Scroll down]  For years — in fact, to this very day — the left's poster boy for the monstrous injustice of the war on drugs was DeMarcus Sanders, whose life was ruined, so the legend goes, just because police found a single marijuana seed in his car.  And then you run a basic Google search and find out that DeMarcus was a known gang member who had already served time for shooting a rival gang member.  After that conviction, DeMarcus was arrested again, for who knows what — but copped a plea to possession of marijuana, the only charge we ever hear about in connection with his name.

Cities On Fire — Dallas/Garland.  How very appropriate that on May Day, May 1st (Commie Day), protests were staged in Dallas, Texas against immigration and police brutality.  Two groups joined forces for the protests:  Mothers Against Police Brutality and the Texas Organizing Project.  Their common stated goal was an end to law enforcement terrorizing their communities.  Translation... the federalization of our police forces.  The protests in Dallas were only violent in message, not deed, but they are setting the country on fire Constitutionally and figuratively.  This is not grassroots — it's staged.  Things are never ever what they seem anymore.

Conspiracy Theory as a Personality Disorder?  The treatment of "conspiracy theories" by the US intelligentsia is reminiscent of the Soviet commissions that labeled political dissidents mentally ill.

The Brains of the Operation.  [Scroll down]  That man is Utah's junior senator, Mike Lee, who is the author of a new and important book, Our Lost Constitution, which should — along with the Constitution itself — be required reading.  Not just for anybody seeking elected office in the United States but for any American who cares about good government, freedom, and leaving a worthwhile country for our children.  The book's subtitle more explicitly diagnoses the disease for which Sen. Lee offers a treatment (if not a guaranteed cure): "The Willful Subversion of America's Founding Document."

Why There Are No ISIS 'Lone Wolves'.  An ISIS call-to-arms posted online nearly two weeks ago mocked the term that the West uses for the terror group's members abroad — a big picture of a lone, grey wolf accompanied the text. [...] A "lone wolf" would be a jihadist taking it upon himself with no direct outside involvement — be it direction or support — to commit an attack.  But recent attacks have shown government's desire to rush to "lone wolf" judgment, be it to placate a nervous public, cover intelligence about wider plots or networks, or just save face for counter-terrorism efforts that let one slip through the cracks.  Government officials use the less alarming terminology that the U.S. suffered an attack from disaffected loners rather than the U.S. suffered an ISIS attack.

The Editor says...
It sounds to me as if the Homeland Security defenses are just for show.  The system appears to be full of holes, despite all the years of groping at the airport, frisking at the courthouse, and wholesale ingestion of everybody's email.  Well... everybody's email, that is, except Lois Lerner, Hillary Clinton, and Huma Abedin.  As far as I know, the only terrorist attacks that have been foiled have been the ones that the FBI set up as sting operations.  Actual terrorists, on the other hand, seem to have very little trouble entering the country or comparing notes at the local mosque.

As Ben Carson bashes Obama, many blacks see a hero's legacy fade.  [Dr. Ben] Carson has been a black icon since 1987, when he became the first person to successfully separate twins conjoined at the backs of their heads.  He was a rare and much-desired role model:  a black man who became known for his intellect, not for telling jokes or shooting basketballs.

Urge Your State Representatives to Support an Article V Convention.  Do you believe Washington, D.C., is broken?  Do you believe those in D.C. are willing or capable of curbing their own power?  Are you looking for a solution to reduce the size, scope and jurisdiction of the federal government, impose fiscal restraints and place term limits on federal officials?  A package of constitutional amendments — proposed by an Article V convention of the states and designed to curb the abuses of the federal government — would go a long way toward restoring the rightful power of state and local governments.

Conservative Leadership Project: A President for Such a Time as This.  First, we must be clear about our non-negotiables:  Life should be protected from conception to natural death.  Government should be limited to preserve individual freedom.  Policies that promote economic growth should be promoted.  Just to name a few.  Conservatives should anticipate that most of our potential standard bearers will speak to these principles regularly.  Yet that also creates a dilemma.  How do we differentiate between the candidates when many of them are going to be saying a lot of the same things?

House Republicans try to gut a key American principle.  The Civil War era's 14th Amendment, granting automatic citizenship to any baby born on American soil, is a proud achievement of the Party of Lincoln.  But now House Republicans are talking about abolishing birthright citizenship.  A House Judiciary subcommittee took up the question Wednesday afternoon [4/29/2015], prompted by legislation sponsored by Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) and 22 other lawmakers that, after nearly 150 years, would end automatic citizenship.

The Editor says...
The Washington Post writer is apparently horrified by this idea, judging by the headline.  I think it's a terrific idea that should have been implemented at least  20  50 years ago.

Smartphones Bringing Barbarians To The Gates?  A European hipster has broken new cultural low ground by defacing America's national parks and posting pictures of his operation on Instagram.  He joins Greenpeace, which was caught destroying the Nazca lines of Peru to create an ad for itself last February.  And further down the food chain is ISIS, which intentionally destroyed ancient artifacts last month to make recruiting videos.  What is it about these vandals that drives them to destroy the irreplaceable and post the images of it on the Internet?

Genocide Begins with Groupthink.  Mass exterminations generally involve two prerequisites:  1) a mandated program by a centralized state power, and 2) a well-coordinated, aggressive propaganda campaign that enlists public support in vilifying the targeted group.  It's also worth noting that war often serves as cover for genocide; the Armenian Genocide took place during the total war conditions of World War I.  Propaganda campaigns to dehumanize the victims are central to virtually every mass killing in history.

Obama Must Honor Armenia's Suffering by Calling it a "Genocide".  President Obama claims to be guided by morality and what he thinks are "American values" in his conduct of foreign policy. [...] However, Obama cannot even claim to seek the "moral path" in foreign policy if he fails to do what he promised during the 2008 campaign, and that is call the genocide committed by the Turks against the Armenians what it is:  a genocide.  Friday [4/24/2015] marks the 100th anniversary of beginning of the slaughter, which killed more than a million people.

For 7th year in a row, Obama breaks promise to acknowledge Armenian genocide.  This week is the 100th anniversary of what many historians acknowledge as the Armenian genocide — the Turkish massacre of an estimated 1.5 million Armenians[.]  And it's also the seventh year in a row President Barack Obama has broken his promise to use the word "genocide" to describe the atrocity.

Obama Literally Edits Out the Genocide, Marks 'Armenian Remembrance Day'.  The White House moments ago issued President Obama's annual statement to mark Friday's [4/24/2015] Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day, and as promised there is no genocide to be found.  In fact, the White House press release just called it "Armenian Remembrance Day."

Mark Steyn arrives at the ultimate campaign slogan for 2016.  As of this writing, there is only one candidate in the field who:  (a) is routinely attacked by the establishment fogies of both parties; (b) has never been forced to change his position on critical policy issues; (c) and has proven to be a formidable debater in every venue imaginable.  That man is Ted Cruz.

Mideast Disasters Multiply Thanks To U.S. Power Vacuum.  Iran and Saudi Arabia are spoiling for war in the country the Obama administration not long ago touted as an illustration of its successful policies.  The Mideast minus U.S. power equals mass bloodshed.

Conservative activists target Republican state lawmakers blocking Constitutional Convention.  Conservative activists pushing to amend the Constitution to rein in federal spending are preparing to delve into state legislative elections across the country, specifically targeting Republicans who are standing in the way of a convention of the states.  "Our attitude is if state legislators won't stand against Washington, D.C., then they need to be replaced by somebody who will," Mark Meckler, president of Citizens for Self-Governance and a leader of the state convention movement, told The Washington Times in an interview this week.

On the other hand...
A new constitutional convention: The right's worst idea.  [Scroll down]  The [Washington] Post immediately identified the obvious pitfalls associated with this plan.  The foremost among them for conservatives being the fact that participation in a constitutional convention will not be limited exclusively to those Americans who share their political values.  Liberals, too, will be inclined to litigate their cultural and legal grievances with the system at this convention.  Secondly, the scope of such an affair is likely to broaden extensively in relatively short order.  A balanced budget process will quickly become the least pressing priority for the conventioneers.  Finally, the Founders were so vague as to how such a gathering would operate that it could easily spiral out of the control of those in attendance, and that has the potential to usher in a very real and potentially violent constitutional crisis.

The Constitutional Convention Trap.  A dangerous idea has been circulating over the past few years:  that it is time to call a new Constitutional convention, to remedy the vast overreach of federal power.  But therein lies a treacherous trap:  such a body's powers cannot be limited.  The end result easily could prove the polar opposite of what those seeking revision intended

Downsize the Federal Government.  The size of the federal government has exploded over the last century.  The legislative and judicial branches of government have grown to serve the increased number of states and its growing population.  The size and scope of the executive branch has grown to reflect an expanded role of the federal government over the last 100 years.  Apparently the staffing of fourteen separate cabinet departments were not enough to manage the current executive branch, so Barack Obama felt the need to appoint a number of "czars" to focus on special emphasis areas.

Ted Cruz: 'I Was Not a Community Organizer'.  Ted Cruz is trying to put the comparisons with President Obama to rest once and for all.  "Unlike Barack Obama, I was not a community organizer before I was elected to the Senate," Cruz said during a Sunday appearance on CNN's State of the Union.  The freshman Senator turned Republican presidential candidate has come in for criticism from some in the party who see that résumé as too similar to that of Obama's.

Tom Cotton, tragic hero.  The snarky quip attributed to 19th-century French Foreign Minister Charles Maurice de Talleyrand — "It was worse than a crime; it was a blunder" — has recently been making the rounds to deride a letter written by Republican Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas and signed by 46 other senators.  They wrote to the Iranian theocracy that any agreement on nuclear proliferation negotiated with President Obama will not constitutionally bind the next administration — unless it is properly ratified by Congress.  Democrats were outraged.  They charged that Mr. Cotton's letter is a crime, a violation of the 216-year-old Logan Act.  That law bars unauthorized individuals from conducting negotiations with foreign governments.

Time to kick Obama Election Campaign Experts Out of Canada.  Fresh out of the Israel election, where they failed to dump Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in spite of millions of dollars, top Obama campaign experts are still in Canada working to topple our staunchly pro-Israel, Christian, conservative prime minister.  Why is the Obama campaign team working Canada?  Primarily because current circumstances make The Land of the Maple Leaf easy pickings.

5 Reactions to the Announcement that Ted Cruz will Campaign for the Republican Presidential Nomination.  Honestly, I'm sick and tired of the establishment (both the Democrat-Media Complex and the old, bloated, sputtering GOP crony capitalists) telling us who our candidates should be.  I support Ted Cruz for President.

Krauthammer for President.  The group I was with grinned at the sight and almost spontaneously said to each other:  "Why not Krauthammer for president?"  And why not?  He probably knows the issues better than any possible candidate on either side of the aisle and could discuss them more coherently.  And when it comes to a life story, does anyone contemplating running for president have one even roughly the equal of Krauthammer's?

Obama's 'Streisand Effect' Presidency.  [Barbra] Streisand hasn't exactly been a pop culture fixture over the last few decades.  In fact, if you're on the younger side, Streisand's fame extends primarily to an internet phenomenon, known as the "Streisand Effect."  In 2003, a photographer trying to document coastal erosion took a picture of Streisand's Malibu home from a helicopter and posted it online.  There was no attempt to specifically draw attention to Streisand's home; it was one of 12,000 pictures of the coast that the photographer took.  Nonetheless, Streisand sued to have the photo removed from the web.  Of course, the silly legal action ended up drawing more attention to the picture of her house than it would have if she'd just left it alone.  It became an internet meme.  People were posting photos of her house, just to spite her.

India Censors a Rape Documentary; the Streisand Effect Goes Nuclear.  We get a lot of laughs out of the so-called "Streisand Effect" — the phenomenon of someone trying to cover up or otherwise limit public knowledge of some already public aspect of their life, and in the process drawing far more attention to the situation than would have been the case if they'd just kept quiet in the first place.  When we're talking about a wealthy celebrity trying to suppress photos of their Malibu mansion — that's what the Streisand Effect is named for, by the way — at least a few chuckles seem entirely understandable.  But when governments unwittingly invoke the Streisand Effect via shortsighted, misguided, hamfisted attempts at censorship of important issues, it's difficult to find any humor on the stage.  So we now have the sorry spectacle of the government of India — at least in theory the world's largest democracy — petulantly and disastrously attempting to suppress the viewing of a BBC documentary exposing a nightmarish culture of rape within India itself.

Americans move government itself to No. 1 on their list of concerns.  Here we are after so many failed fixes and the partial-term senator is older but talking no wiser, recently proposing that the federal government underwrite two years of free college for everyone.  But the Democrat now faces a Republican-controlled Congress.  Little of his overblown liberal hooey is going anywhere legislatively.  And Obama seems to have turned to entertaining himself more, spending $2 million in taxpayer money this week to fly to Los Angeles for an appearance on a late-night show.  And also, of course, to raise some money for the party.

Treason in the U.S. Senate.  The letter to Tehran was written by Tom Cotton, a freshman Republican senator from Arkansas, who wants to prevent Mr. Obama signing an agreement with the mullahs unless he agrees to submit it for approval by Congress, and lays out his reasons why.  The angry Democratic senators and scholars (of dubious scholarship) cry treason, one of the most heinous of crimes.  Mr. Cotton's letter was actually little more than a letter to the editor, perhaps rising to the level of an op-ed, but something far short of a "negotiation."

Senators take a stand for the Constitution.  Just look what happens when a senator starts to act like one!  Sen. Tom Cotton, an Arkansas Republican, who has been a U.S. senator for less than three months, rattled the cage of the White House, the Democratic Party, and Iran's Ayatollah Khamenei, all with a single-spaced, one-page letter on the U.S. Constitution.  Addressed as "An Open Letter to the Leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran," the missive was signed by Cotton and 47 other Republican senators.  The avowed intent of the letter was to educate the Iranians on the nature of the American constitutional system, in particular the role of the U.S. Senate in ratifying treaties negotiated by the president.  The letter is entirely accurate and an appropriate elucidation of the constitutional separation of powers.

The Cotton Letter Was Not Sent Anywhere, Especially Not to Iran.  Before U.S. Senator Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) and 46 of his GOP colleagues are frog-marched to the gallows and hanged for treason, one vital point of confusion must be cleared up.  Say what you will about the Republicans' open letter "to the leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran."  The Cotton/GOP letter regarding Tehran's atom-bomb talks with Obama was not sent to the ayatollahs.  Had Cotton & Co. actually delivered their communiqué to Iran's mullahs — perhaps via a Swiss diplomatic pouch or something even more cloak and dagger — their critics would be on less swampy ground in calling them "traitors," as the New York Daily News screamed.  Either through befuddlement or deceit, many of the Republicans' detractors have echoed this gross inaccuracy.

Tom Cotton Proves: History is Wasted on the Old.  Bob Schieffer could barely contain his outrage at Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) for daring to warn the Iranian leadership that any nuclear deal would have to be ratified by the Senate, under the U.S. Constitution, to be binding.  As Cotton explained in his appearance on CBS News' Face the Nation, Iran is clearly not hearing that from the Obama administration itself, which is desperate to achieve "peace at any price," rather than using constitutional constraints as leverage to force a better deal.  It turns out that there is a precedent for this particular dispute — and a troubling one.

3 Charts That Demonstrate American Exceptionalism Remains Alive Despite Barack Obama's Best Efforts.  Pew Research Center surveyed people in 44 countries last spring and discovered that America was exceptional in ways beyond economic wealth and military power.

A war of Obama's making.  There's a war going on between the executive and legislative branches in which Obama has shown contempt for Congress' constitutional powers, and now, in response, Congress is showing contempt for the president's constitutional powers.  It's an unfortunate situation, but it's what Obama has wrought.

It's Time to Kill Daylight Saving.  Like millions of other Americans who have slogged through an uncomfortably cold winter, I'm looking forward to the change of season.  But Daylight Saving Time is an annual tradition whose time has passed.  In contemporary society, it's not only unnecessary:  It's also wasteful, cruel, and dangerous.  And it's long past time to bid it goodbye.

Why the US Southwest is fighting daylight saving time.  Nevada and New Mexico want to stay on daylight saving time, while Texas and Utah want to stay on standard time.

The Death of the American Dream in 22 Numbers.  For decades, the rest of the planet has regarded the United States as "the land of opportunity" where almost anyone can be successful if they are willing to work hard.  And when I was growing up, it seemed like almost everyone was living the American Dream.  I lived on a "middle class" street and I went to a school where it seemed like almost everyone was middle class.  When I was in high school, it was very rare to ever hear of a parent that was unemployed, and virtually every family that I knew had a comfortable home and more than one nice vehicle.  But now that has all changed.

I refuse to take the media's bait.  Americans believe our nation is facing some substantial challenges.  Government spending is out of control.  Terrorists seek to destroy our way of life.  Our economic recovery has been slow.  Our borders aren't secure.  The federal government has usurped powers that rightly belong to our states.  And every day across Wisconsin, and as I travel the nation, I hear from people who share with me their worries about — and their hopes for — our country.

Let's Just Kill 'Homeland Security'.  DHS oversees almost two dozen agencies and groups, including the Coast Guard, Customs and Border Patrol, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), immigration processing and enforcement, the Secret Service, and the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), the brave folks responsible for an endless series of junk-touching, drug-stealing, and kiddie-porn scandals.  Given all those fearsome responsibilities, you'd figure Barack Obama would be sweating gravy over even a partial shutdown of DHS.

Finally Cleared, Zimmerman Should Sue the DOJ.  "In all criminal prosecutions," reads the Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, "the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial."  In its dangling of George Zimmerman over the pit of judicial hell for the last three years, the Obama Department of Justice (DOJ) violated the spirit of that amendment for no better reason than to pacify the Democrats' increasingly bloodthirsty base.  Finally, on Tuesday of this week [2/24/2015], the DOJ announced that it had found insufficient evidence to pursue federal criminal civil rights charges against Zimmerman.  A White House so seemingly appalled by torture had no qualms about torturing Zimmerman needlessly for nearly three years.

Don't Just Shut Down the DHS — Get Rid of It.  The world's most useless government bureaucracy (and the competition is stiff) has got to be the Department of Homeland Security.  From its creepy name to its kluge of ill-fitting departments, this panicked overreaction to 9/11 is a disgrace to America.  Now someone's finally making the case against it[.]

Why is Congress all talk, no action?  Congress as a deliberative body, and as the instrument of the people's power, has for all intents and purposes ceased to exist.  The true function of the Congress today is that of the Lord High Treasurer, and Congress has turned spending money into an art form.  In other sectors this is known by names such as bribery or payoffs, but in Congress it is known as appropriations.  But other than spending money, what is Congress most known for?

The Dean of Snobs.  You don't have to ponder the polls these days to figure out which Republican presidential possibilites are in the ascendency.  All you have to do is see who is being attacked by liberals and the mainstream media.  Their latest target is Scott Walker.  Of course, Governor Walker has been under the gun for four long years by labor unions and their supporters.  But since the phony scandals trumped up by the opposition have not affected his popularity with voters, liberals are getting desperate for dirt that might permanently muddy his image.

A surprising number of presidents never graduated college.  Media and potential opponents are scandalized that Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker is considering a run for president even though he didn't graduate from college.  But if Walker (who dropped out of Marquette University in his senior year) won in 2016, he would be joining an exalted group that includes the two presidents most frequently named as the favorites of the American people.  Eleven presidents — exactly 25 percent — were not college graduates.  Most prominent on that list are George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, [...]

Why Washington Shouldn't Control Transportation Decisions.  Whether for pipelines, factories, refineries, cell towers, or freight rail, the private sector has demonstrated its prowess in prudent investment and proper management.  Private infrastructure spending is four times larger than all levels of government infrastructure spending put together.  Consumers get cell service, goods delivered, and energy transported when they need them and at a competitive cost.  Even when the private sector fails, as Ford did with the now ill-famed Edsel — it learns from its mistakes and moves on to something that consumers want.  Meanwhile, year after year, consumers of roads, bridges, and other transportation find themselves stuck in traffic or waiting on a delayed train.

Don't Authorize Obama's War.  The authorization for the use of military force against ISIS that the Obama administration sent Congress this week is not worthy of the name.  Its language is far more about what the president won't do against the terrorist army that controls much of Syria and Iraq — limits on ground troops and a sunset provision for the authorization after three years — than what he will do.  Congress should reject it.

Scott Walker Gets College Scrutiny That Media Failed to Give Obama.  David Fahrenthold's examination of Walker's college years in the Washington Post spanned more than 2,000 words, and in the end, there is little mystery.  Walker was an active member of the Marquette student body and has openly said that he decided to leave the university after being offered a full-time job during his senior year. [...] Unlike Walker, who was well known at Marquette and had a group of friends, Obama was a ghost at Columbia.  More than 400 classmates of Obama were contacted during the 2008 election, and not one said they remembered him.  The New York Sun described Columbia just before the 2008 election as a place Obama "rarely speaks about and where few people seem to remember him."  The record on Obama's Columbia years was sealed.

There's Nothing Shameful about Walker's Being a College 'Dropout'.  Already, a search for the words "dropout" and "Scott Walker" reveals the taunt to be a favorite of left-leaning sites that are angry with Walker for his education reform; while Twitter has a sizeable contingent of users who are convinced that the republic will fall if the "uneducated" "dropout" "loser" gets anywhere near the reins of federal power.

The Left Alinskies Scott Walker.  The Left is throwing just about everything in the book at Walker early on, trying to Romneyize him:  define him and put him so far back on the defensive that he can never recover.  With support from the MSM, which is now thrashing about trying to figure out why he left college, the progressive Left is perfectly following Alinky's Rule for Radicals No. 12:  "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it."  This is exactly what is happening today.

The Sad Death of Kayla Mueller: A "Useful Idiot" of Hamas.  [Scroll down]  The problem with the tributes, especially that made by President Obama, is that Mueller was not a simple human rights worker.  Nor was she, as Mr. Turnbull said, "the best of the good."  The truth is that Kayla worked in Israel and the Palestinian territories with the International Solidarity Movement, the same group that the late Rachel Corrie was part of.  The ISM placed Corrie in a dangerous situation, and falsely told the world that Israel's IDF had purposefully killed her in order to scare off foreigners coming to aid the Palestinian people.  The ISM, as anyone can easily find out, supports Israel's enemies, including Hamas, Hezbollah, and those in the Palestinian Authority who work for Israel's destruction.

Who Was Kayla Mueller?  A look at the writings of the ISIS victim shows her support and aid to Palestinian Arab terror groups, her acting as a human shield for them, and her active participation in anti-Israel protests.  Rachel Corrie did the same.

Ted Cruz knocks Obama, 'photo op foreign policy' in blistering speech.  Sen. Ted Cruz, Texas Republican, said Wednesday [2/11/2015] he hasn't seen a "seriousness of purpose" in confronting the Islamic State terrorist group, as the White House sent a request for the authorization for use of military force to fight the group to Congress for consideration.  In an approximately 30-minute speech at the Center for Security Policy's "Defeat Jihad" summit, Mr. Cruz also methodically picked apart recent comments from the president on religion, free speech and terrorism that have come under fire.

Hating the Duggars.  If you're not familiar with the Duggars, there are, well, 19 of them. The Duggars are devout evangelicals following what they believe is God's plan for their family and fertility.  They have their own reality TV show.  Actually, it's now 19 Duggars and counting, as some of the older children are having little Duggars of their own.  That mere reproductive fact infuriates a large number of very angry people on the left.  But to make liberals' nightmares worse, the Duggars display their lifestyle on a popular TV show broadcast by The Learning Channel (TLC).  That the Duggars have a platform, even as a mere bizarre curiosity to the 99.9% of people who have no desire to produce 19 children, is driving many liberals into fits of rage.  Once again jettisoning their professed sacred cows — tolerance, diversity, open-mindedness, and let's add freedom of speech, freedom of expression, and opposition to censorship — they're insisting the Duggars' show be canceled.  For many of them, this has become an obsession turned into a crusade, as they are hellbent in driving the Duggars off the air.

Dear World, We're Sorry.  We Americans elected and re-elected a used car salesman to the most important office on the planet, and everyone got a lemon.  The first time was because so many of our citizens have been conditioned to feel guilty about wrongs done before we were born; the second was because so many of us are simply stupid.  We have it good here in the United States, and this breeds contentment.  It also breeds ignorance.

The Time Is Right for Cruz Control.  These times call for someone who does not fear the media, the Democrats, oor the Washington/New York Republican establishment.  We need someone who will plant a flag and draw a line in the sand, and mean it.  These times require someone who realizes that the biggest threat to the country today is Washington — a realization that for too long America has been held hostage to "how Washington works," when it's Washington that should operate in light of how America works.

A Pocket Guide to the Liberty Amendments.  While electing a President who is a Constitutional Conservative would be a great start, it is unlikely to reverse a century-long march of progressive radicals bent on centralization of power in Washington.  An Article V Convention process is, in my opinion, the only way out short of civil unrest.

Obama's budget is 'the silliest thing since Monty Python'.  President Barack Obama's 2016 budget proposal is as silly as a comedy sketch, a Senate leadership aide told Daily Mail Online on Monday [2/2/2015].  'This $4 trillion budget is the silliest thing since Monty Python,' the senior staffer said, recalling the British funnymen's 'Ministry of silly walks' routine.  'The only think about it that isn't funny is that the president thinks it's serious.'

Ted Cruz and Climate Change.  If this is the best liberals can do to disparage Ted Cruz, the Texas Senator has a great chance of being our next President.

Fox News and French honor.  Seventeen French citizens are murdered in Paris in cold blood by homegrown terrorists — and the city's mayor expresses her outrage for ... Fox News? [...] So while we're on the subject of apologies, maybe French President François Hollande should offer one for his claim that the gunmen who murdered to avenge the Prophet Mohammed had "nothing to do" with Islam.  Really?  Nothing to do with Islam?  Or how about a larger apology to France's Jewish citizens, whom the government appears incapable of protecting?

A fantasy for tweens.  The state of the union is indeed strong, because even if you're just talking in relative terms, what nation on this planet is in better shape than ours?  Europe remains in crisis.  China is slowing down dramatically and arresting thousands.  Russia is a tinpot empire.  In Japan, more people expired last year than were born — a wildly dangerous death spiral.  Here, our economy is actually growing, oil prices are falling, consumer confidence is rising and if you have a 401(k), you're finally back to feeling pretty good about it due to the stock market explosion.

The Wrong Kind of Market Disruption.  Federal and state governments are using seemingly unlimited tax bases to compete with private businesses, disrupting the free market and even endangering troops, according to a new report.  The Business Coalition for Fair Competition, which represents a broad base of trade associations, released an analysis on Friday morning documenting 10 times public sector entities have hindered the free market by injecting government-backed entities into competition.  The U.S. Postal Service, for example, is looking to enter the grocery delivery business after losing market share to Fed Ex and UPS.  The guarantees of government support mean that it can charge inordinately lower prices, unfairly competing with private sector services, such as Pea Pod, according to the BCFC.

Why American Sniper Is One of the Greatest War Movies Ever.  It is a timeless American war movie that explores the necessity of having men who are — and bear the burden of being — really really good at killing bad guys.  In fact, this is easily one of the ten best American war movies of all time.

Pro-War on Terror Films Crush Anti-War on Terror Films at Box Office.  Anti-American films are costly box office bombs at a rate of nothing less than 100%.  On the flip-side, pro-American films make money.  Many are outright blockblusters [sic].  Moreover, almost every the anti-American film produced over the last decade has also been an artistic failure, while many pro-American films have garnered positive reviews.  Let me boil this down for the leftwing-impaired:  Lies make for lousy art and can't be sold to the public.  And here's another lie Hollywood was spreading a few years back — the lie that in an international film market, Americanism doesn't sell.

American Sniper Has Created a Cultural Moment: Here's Why.  At 9:30 p.m. on Saturday night [1/17/2015], a packed theater in Franklin, Tenn., was completely quiet.  As the credits rolled, some folks were filing out, but many more were standing, still looking at the screen, honoring the man whose life they'd just seen portrayed on the silver screen.  Before the movie, I'd never seen the parking lot so crowded.

Scott Walker, the un-academic?  In 1990, Scott Walker left Marquette University before graduation.  He is reportedly hoping to complete his degree now, but if he doesn't, he could become the first president since Harry S Truman to enter the White House without a college degree.  Some think his lack of degree could cost him his chances to get there, but we tend to think otherwise.  Considering the current state of most colleges (and of their graduates) this could be a point in his favor.  It might even make his career.

Thank gridlock for economic turnaround.  [I]f activist policies really have as big an impact on our economic fortunes as Washington operatives claim, I only have one question:  What policy did President Obama enact to initiate this astonishing turnaround?  We should definitely replicate it.  Because those who've been paying attention these past few years may have noticed that the predominant agenda of Washington has been to do nothing.  It was only when the tinkering and superfluous stimulus spending wound down that fortunes began to turn around.  So it's perplexing how the same pundits who cautioned us about gridlock's traumatizing effects now ignore its existence.

Time to stand up to a corrupt Congress.  Congress has recently shown that it does not have the ability, or the desire to govern properly and reduce excess spending.  The U.S. debt is steadily climbing due to a lack of congressional and executive self-control.  The burden of this debt will be carried by our children and our grandchildren.  This is a threat to our nation.  How can a country successfully compete with other nations if they cannot financially support themselves?  It is time to stand up to the corruption of Washington, letting the Legislative and Executive branches know that "We the People" are fed up with their egregious spending.

Hate Speech Leads to Hate Crimes.  Literally thousands of inciters have propagated a dishonest storyline of widespread police violence against blacks.  And what we've seen in recent months is only the current instance in a long history of incitement against the West.  A view of the West as enemy is cultivated in universities across the country as the cutting edge of moral thinking, with full rein given to a very un-academic manner of speech, replete with the colorful language of vilification.  From these heights, the same attitudes inevitably seep into other venues, including textbooks for much younger students.  The bulk of journalists and teachers do not believe in the full range of anti-Western ideology, but they accept it as an orienting guide.

Meet Bill Nye, The Anti-Science Guy.  I've never been a fan of Bill Nye "the Science Guy." Partly it's because I'm from a different generation.  I grew up with Isaac Asimov and Carl Sagan as my introduction to science, and Nye always struck me as a cheap substitute.  I find something condescending in his hyperkinetic manner, as if science couldn't actually be interesting and exciting in its own right, as if it could only be interesting if the guy trying to explain it to us is bouncing off the walls.  It all seems like Science for People with Attention Deficit Disorder.

The Editor says...
Almost all of the Saturday morning "E/I" television shows for pre-teens appear to be tailored for kids with ADHD.  It makes one wonder whether the frenetic TV shows are the response to ADD or its cause.

Should You Believe What They Tell You or What You See?  I'm sure my blood pressure would be lower and my mood better if I just accepted everything I was told by my wise, sagacious, Ivy League educated, obscenely wealthy rulers as the unequivocal truth.  Why should I doubt these noble, well intentioned, champions of the common folk?  They've never misled us before.  They would never attempt to use two highly publicized deaths as a lever to keep black people and white people fighting each other and not realizing all races are now living in a militarized police surveillance state supported by the one Party.  They would never use their complete control over the financial, political, judicial, and media organisms to convince the masses that voting for one of their hand selected red or blue options will ever actually change anything.  They would never engineer the overthrow of a democratically elected government, cover up the shooting down of an airliner, and attempt to blame their crimes on the leader of a nuclear power in their efforts to retain a teetering global empire.  They would never overthrow or wage economic warfare on countries that don't toe the line regarding the continued dominance of the petrodollar in global commerce.

CIA interrogation report: Democrats want to punish America, blame Bush.  In its ideological zeal to punish America, the outgoing Democratically-controlled Senate, plans to make public a report that, according to Fox News will examine "the alleged use of torture by the CIA."  Although the 6,000 page full report will remain classified, the 500 page summary is expected to be released to the public in coming days.  According to press reports from those who are familiar with the study, it is expected to portray the American intelligence community in the worst possible light.

I keep finding a new reason to love Ted Cruz every day.  In an era of Oligarchs and partisan mush, Cruz is a beacon of hope.  The Framers would be proud.  We need a Constitutional conservative with some testicular fortitude in the White House in 2016.  I see only three viable contenders at the moment:  Ted Cruz, Mike Lee, or Scott Walker.

A Government of Wolves.  [Scroll down]  It really doesn't matter what you call them — the 1%, the elite, the controllers, the masterminds, the shadow government, the police state, the surveillance state, the military industrial complex — so long as you understand that while they are dealing the cards, the deck will always be stacked in their favor.  Incredibly, no matter how many times we see this played out, Americans continue to naively buy into the idea that it's our politics that divide us as a nation.  As if there were really a difference between the Democrats and Republicans.  As if the policies of George W. Bush were any different from those of Barack Obama.  As if we weren't a nation of sheep being fattened for the kill by a ravenous government of wolves.

Congress [should] not invite Obama to give his next State of the Union.  Remember what Barack Obama said in his State of the Union message earlier this year?  Of course you don't.  No one does.  State of the Union reports may be required by the Constitution:  The president "shall from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union."  But that doesn't mean they have to be good, useful, relevant or can't degenerate into pathetic political polemics as Obama has transformed them in recent years.  The Great Uniter even turned one into a direct attack on Supreme Court justices sitting just feet in front of him.  The words "Obama" and "class" both have five letters.  But that's as close as they get.

Is It Time for an Anti-Federalist Party?  No wise and serious American, whatever his notional ideology, trusts the federal government. [...] It is the nationalization of standards that often creates the problem.  Anti-Federalism is the tonic.  The message of Anti-Federalism to voters in states with differing cultural values is simple:  do you want the voters of your state to decide policy, or do you want federal politicians making those decisions?  Politicians represent states, and which politicians can face voters and say that politicians from other states are better judges than they are for what is good for their state?  Anti-Federalism also taps into the simmering anger voters feel toward both political parties at the national level.

Britain's energy policy is a national disgrace, but Germany's is even worse.  In a shocking assessment, National Grid last week said that Britain's cushion of spare generating capacity had sunk to just 4pc, down from 17pc three years ago and its lowest level in five years.  And that's despite a series of emergency measures, including incentives to business to use less power, to deal with the looming blackout problem.

The Rule of Memo.  Turn now to the President's "executive action" on immigration.  What did he do?  According to a wide variety of media sources, the President issued an executive order. [...] Wow. Some executive order.  Except there isn't one.  Check the White House web site under the section "Presidential Actions."  The most recent executive order is one from October 17, on consumer financial transactions.  What the President signed on Friday, November 21 were two memoranda, setting up a task force and directing government officials to recommend improvements in the immigration system. [...] An executive order has the force of law.  The Office of the Federal Register assigns it a number and publishes it.  There is a permanent record; a place to go to find it.  None of this applies to the memo.

Thank a White Male.  Biting the hand that feeds is a core principle of Leftists.  For 150 years, they've sought to concentrate power in their own hands by exploiting the resentment of ignorant people against a system that has finally enabled mankind to spring the Malthusian trap.  Multiculturalism, with its simple-minded relativism, has broadened the scope of the party line.  Not only shadowy "capitalists" are vilified, but whites and males.  Ignorant people can now think well of themselves by opposing "racism" and "the patriarchy" — and by voting for an unqualified and deceptive poseur because, though a male, he is not white.  The first step parents can take to help spare America from being "fundamentally transformed" is to insist that history be properly taught.  This means, among other things, recognizing the accomplishments of a few men who've found cures for or relieved the symptoms of diseases that have killed and tortured humans for millennia.

More reason to love Mike Rowe.  Mike Rowe is a hero of mine, a tireless advocate of practical skills and knowledge who urges Americans to acquire a trade, rather than mindlessly go to college and acquire debt and a possibly useless degree.  The host of former cable TV hit Dirty Jobs and current CNN hit Somebody's Got to Do It, Rowe celebrates those who work hard and perfect their art at manual trades.

10 Examples Of The Social Decay That Is Eating Away At America Like Cancer.  It isn't just our economy that is crumbling.  Something is happening to America that no amount of money will be able to fix.  Everywhere around us we can see evidence of the social decay that is systematically eating away at the foundations of our society.  It can be found on the streets of our inner cities, in dark basements in extremely rural communities, in the most prestigious boardrooms on Wall Street, and definitely in the halls of power in Washington.  Bringing in an entirely different crop of politicians or printing gigantic mountains of money is not going to solve this problem, because it exists in the hearts of millions of ordinary men and women.  The truth is that we really need to take a good, long look at ourselves in the mirror, because we need to take a 180 degree turn as a nation.

Should Republicans Embrace The Obama Non-Enforcement Doctrine?  [Scroll down]  The Environmental Protection Agency, as now operated, probably does more harm than good.  A Republican president could suspend enforcement of all federal environmental laws, thereby putting the EPA out of business, and remit all environmental regulation to the states and to private actions sounding in nuisance and trespass.  This would result in a major improvement in the nation's environmental policies.  Or, if he preferred, the president could single out for non-enforcement some, but not all, environmental laws.

Cheating Aids the Ratchet.  Since the indignities of the Great Depression swept Franklin Roosevelt and his crack team of social engineers into the highest offices in the land, the Left's primary political strategy has been to pass as big an expansion of government as is feasible in their brief moments of ascendancy and then to dare the dissidents to take its fruits away when, eventually, they get back into power.

Don't Let Lame Ducks Spend Your Money.  On November 4, voters fired the Democratic majority in the U.S. Senate, replacing it with a GOP majority that campaigned against Obamacare and big spending.  But the Democrats who lost are still running the show.  These lame ducks lack the moral authority to govern.  They shouldn't be allowed to do any more than the bare minimum to keep government operating until January, when the new Congress meets.  Allowing Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to ram through an omnibus spending bill for the coming year, or make other key decisions, would be like letting your ex-spouse keep using your checkbook.  One of the first acts of the next Congress should be to outlaw lame duck sessions.

Welcome to EbolaCare — but the Website is Down.  A well known phenomenon in the animal kingdom is that when taking over a new pride, a lion will sometimes kill all the cubs.  We don't know exactly what kind of feeling drives him in this bloody act, but there's obviously a lack of attachment.  Suffice it to say the problem can be summed up thus:  it's not his family.  America's pride is falling.  And few things illustrate this better than the open-borders mentality that has allowed foreigners to bring diseases — most notably Ebola but also EV-D68 and others — into our country.

Lankford: Gruber's Comments Show 'Arrogance of Centralized Government'.  Sen.-elect James Lankford (R-Okla.) told "Fox News Sunday" that Obamacare architect and MIT professor Jonathan Gruber's comments reflect an "arrogance of centralized government."  "I think Gruber's comments show what is consistent in Washington, it's this arrogance of centralized government.  This administration really believes they're smarter than everyone else and they need to just create the policy and impose the policy, and states exist only to be able to carry out their wishes from the central government.  And I think that's exactly backwards," he said.

Muslim Brotherhood Overruns National Cathedral In DC.  100 years ago today, the last Caliph, or emperor of Islam, declared the last Jihad against the infidel — and today is the first time ever that the National Cathedral in the nation's capital will host Muslim prayers.  Most American's will have no idea that, as part of World War I, the then-Caliph of the Ottoman empire declared a Holy War against infidels, as was his right within sharia law and Islamic theology. [...] That statement by the last sitting head of what was the theocratic empire of Islam was the catalyst which led to religiously-fueled genocide against Christian Armenians and Assyrians.

Rev. Franklin Graham: Muslim Prayer Service at National Cathedral 'Sad to See'.  Reverend Franklin Graham, son of world renowned evangelist Billy Graham, said the Muslim prayer service on Friday at the Washington National Cathedral, an Episcopal church established under a charter granted by Congress more than 100 years ago, is "sad to see" because the church should only open its door for worship of "the One True God of the Bible."

The Editor says...
A church should open its doors to every drunk and prostitute and Muslim in town, but not to take over positions of leadership, even for a day.

Three reasons why the Rick Perry indictment must be dismissed.  A lot of us among the uneducated hoi polloi found the original indictment of Rick Perry over the use of his veto powers to be silly and unlikely to do well in the courts.  But at least in my case, I couldn't quantify exactly why.  It didn't sound right, but I'm not a lawyer and the courts often get up to all manner of monkey business which makes no sense to me.  But this week, constitutional scholar Eugene Volokh has done the hard work for the rest of us and identified three entirely separate reasons why this indictment isn't worth the paper it's printed on.

Bipartisan group of lawyers call for dismissal of Rick Perry's felony charges.  In the amicus brief filed at a court in Austin, the lawyers argue that two-felony count indictment against the Republican governor is constitutionally flawed.  "Reasonable people can disagree on the political tactics employed by both Governor Perry and his opponents.  But to turn political disagreement into criminal prosecution is disturbing," the brief said.

6 bills the GOP should pass.  The problem for Republicans is that because they do not have a veto-proof majority, they can pass bills but can't get them past President Obama.  It doesn't mean that they're doomed to futility.  They can pass three kinds of bills:  those Obama will want to sign; those he won't want to sign but will have to; and those he'll veto, but where a veto is unpopular.

Abandoned by party, is Mary Landrieu dead woman walking? Or is GOP overconfident?  [Scroll down]  Now, as Landrieu heads to a Dec. 6 runoff with Republican challenger Rep. Bill Cassidy, Democrats have already lost control of the Senate — a reality that won't be affected by the outcome of the runoff.  So while Landrieu still has a chance to win, one thing is absolutely certain:  She will not chair the Senate Energy Committee.  The entire rationale for her campaign collapsed on primary day.

Give Back the Senate.  The Seventeenth Amendment made the Senate utterly redundant.  Now it's kind of a retirement home for lifers; the House of Lords with six year terms that get further and further away from the people that elected them and who sit in a sort of royal court being serenaded by special interest groups in DC steakhouses.  The Senate was designed to protect the power of the states because the more power the states have, the less power the Federal government has — and vice versa.

Did Voters Really Choose Compromise And Conciliation?  [Scroll down]  Yet, though this was a referendum on Obama and his policies, and though both were repudiated, some pundits are claiming that America voted for an "end to gridlock" and a new era of compromise and conciliation.  How so?  If the American people were truly saying that, why did they vote to turn the Senate over to Mitch McConnell?  Why did they vote to send more Republicans to strengthen the hand of John Boehner and those in the House who had "shut down" the government?  Did America vote for the GOP to go back to Washington and work with Obama?  Or did America reward the GOP for promising to return and continue to oppose Obama's policies?  Is the answer not obvious?

The Republican Wave Debunked Four Myths About The Obama Era.  [#1] Sorry, Voters Don't Hate 'Obstructionism.'  If we're to believe the media-authored account of the last six years, the GOP has made rigid obstructionism of Barack Obama's policies its sole agenda item. [...] Where exactly have Republicans suffered?  After endless analysis of the Kentucky Senate race, Mitch McConnell, the architect of obstructionist strategy in the Senate, won re-election easily.  The reality is that Republicans have been generously rewarded from their tenacity in stopping post-Obamacare progressive policy.

Yes, Ted Cruz Can Be Born in Canada and Still Become President of the U.S..  Since our last article we published garnered such a big response, I thought I'd put forth another article on Ted Cruz that also looks at his eligibility.  Now before anyone gets the idea that we are endorsing Senator Cruz in a bid for the nomination for Republican Candidate for President of the United States, we here at CH2.0 will entertain any well written, thoroughly researched articles that purport his ineligibility.

The shiny object election.  The short-attention span generation has birthed the shiny-object election.  The theme of the 2014 midterms — to whatever extent one is discernable — has been an explosion of one crisis after another, each of which demands an enormous amount of media attention before fading for the next one.  From the Secret Service to ISIS, Ebola to immigration, mistreated veterans to Ferguson and race relations, candidates and the president have been forced to react to the controversy du jour.

When facing threats, we are unfortunately on our own.  The multiplying missteps by the Obama administration with regard to the Ebola "crisis" exposes a deep, dark secret our federal government keeps from you.  That secret is this:  Should the worst happen, you and your family are basically on your own.  As our government and its power to intrude into our lives and hamper our personal liberty escalates unchecked, its ability to protect us in a crisis is equally diminished by the growing weight of the bloated, entrenched and self-serving bureaucracy.

The Devil's Christianity.  It might be prudent to confess, before getting too far along with this essay, that I have nothing against Pope Francis except his politics.  It isn't that he's rude or selfish or uninspiring; anyone with half a brain knows that Pope Francis is one of the kindest and most exciting public figures we've had in a while.  I simply have a problem with him saying horrible things, like that he knows many good Communists.

Throwing the Intelligence Community under the Bus.  Earlier this month, President Obama asked the American people to use the midterm election as a referendum on his policies.  His comment:  "I am not on the ballot this fall... But make no mistake:  these policies are on the ballot."  He is completely correct, and looking at his failed policies toward combating terrorism, people should vote to send a message of opposition to the president.  Throughout his administration President Obama and the Democrats have made wrong decisions and have constantly thrown the intelligence community under the bus, while deceiving Americans.

Did you miss 'Indigenous People's Day'?  The man who made perhaps the most consequential voyage of discovery in human history is being buried in a wave of guilt about exploiting his find.  Christopher Columbus is one of the most unlovely characters in our history books.  But whatever his faults — and they were legion — he should be honored for opening an entire continent to settlement and resource exploitation.

You Can't Stop Genocide Without Killing Civilians.  By the time World War II was over entire cities had been devastated and hundreds of thousands of civilians had been killed by the Allies in one of the last wars whose virtue we were all able to agree on.  The civilians were not limited to enemy German and Japanese civilians, but included French civilians in occupied territory, Jewish prisoners and numerous others who were caught in the war zone.  To the professional pacifist these numbers appear to disprove the morality of war, any war, but they were the blood price that had to be paid to stop two war machines once they had been allowed to seize the strategic high ground.  There was no other way to stop the genocide that Germany and Japan had been inflicting on Europe and Asia except through a way of war that would kill countless civilians.

If Your Pastor Has A $60k A Year Clothing Allowance, You Probably Should Leave That Church.  As a 51-year-old I've had it with the Christian Glitterati obsessed with "success" using ministry as a means to get rich, wear Rolexes and play like they're Ryan Seacrest.  Our world is going to hell and the last thing we need is a preening pastor with a histrionic personality disorder.

On Nov. 4, Joe Biden Could Become the Most Powerful Man in the World.  Vice President Joe Biden is a complete idiot.  That truth, reinforced by a string of recent foreign policy gaffes, is supported by evidence too great to summarize in one article.  Suffice it to say that Uncle Joe's incompetence is stipulated by all political parties.  He apparently believes he still has a shot to be President.  There is no chance of that — but on Nov. 4, Biden could suddenly become the most powerful man in the U.S., and therefore the world.

The real scandal is a President who is so complacent about protecting Americans.  There is a theory in politics that once a leader has fired 50 or more people from his or her administration, he or she is finished. [...] Obama went a lot further than firing 50 people.  He managed to single-handedly alienate 200,000 employees in the American intelligence agencies by going on 60 Minutes and ruthlessly chucking them all under a bus over the rise of terror group ISIS.

No firing squad for these deserters, just EBT cards.  They used to deport illegal aliens. They used to shoot deserters.  But that was then and this is now.  So the three Afghan Army deserters who fled Camp Edwards and, after a short sojourn at a local strip club, took off for Canada, are now begging for political "asylum."  And we all know what political asylum means — instant welfare, forever.  Instead of going in front of a firing squad, or at least being sent back to Afghanistan to fight the Taliban, the deserters are likely to score EBT cards, MassHealth, WIC vouchers, Section 8 housing, free translators — the full Tsarnaev, in other words.

The Only Way Out: An Article V Convention of the States.  Former Comptroller General of the United States, David M. Walker, has been sounding the clarion call of economic disaster for the nation if spending is not reined in, and politicians refuse to deal with fiscal realities of unabated spending. He describes America as a "sinking ship" in a sea of our own debt. [...] Something must be done before the dollar and our entire economic system collapses entirely due to our calamitous accumulation of debt.  And the solution could be nestled in Article V of the Constitution.

The Obama Family Is Not From Chicago.  A few days ago Omar Gonzalez vaulted over the White House fence and made it all the way into the front door of the residence. [...] But the front door of the White House was unlocked.  The only possible conclusion is that the Obama family is not from Chicago.

Rand Paul vs. The Cowards.  If arming Syrian rebels is such a great idea, why was everyone in D.C. so terrified of a standalone vote on the issue?  Before Senators voted 78-22 to pass a continuing resolution that would fund government through Dec. 11 and avoid a government shutdown, Rand Paul asked that question — and some other uncomfortable ones — on the floor.  Call him is an isolationist if you like, but it'd be nice to hear some coherent answers.

The time may be right to salvage states rights.  States enraged by an Obamacare provision denying them subsidies unless they created insurance exchanges shouldn't have been surprised.  Congress routinely uses the power of the purse to twist states' arms until they submit.  It's worked for decades.  When states wanted federal highway funds in the 1970s, they first had to lower their speed limits to 55 mph.  A decade later, states were prodded into raising the drinking age to 21.  In the 2000s, federal education grants were made contingent on states adopting standards included in such programs as No Child Left Behind and Common Core.  Now, however, states increasingly are complaining and pushing back or ignoring federal laws and mandates they say are out of touch, excessively burdensome, or unconstitutional.

Ex-CIA director predicts US to have 5,000 ground troops in Iraq by December.  Former CIA Director Michael Hayden told Fox News Sunday [9/14/2014] that up to 5,000 American troops will be in Iraq by the end of the year.  He's basing that estimate on the number of support troops it will take to carry out the air campaign against ISIS.

Rick Perry could get rick-rolled again.  Hey, did you hear about the Republican governor running for president in 2016 who just hired two of the GOP consultants conservatives loathe the most? [...] One of the most respected thinkers in the conservative movement is Morton Blackwell at the Leadership Institute.  One of his tried-and-truisms is "personnel is policy."  If Mr. Blackwell is right, then what Mr. Perry has done here is very wrong.

Ron Paul: US Involvement in Iraq Made Things Worse.  The United States made things worse in the Middle East when it decided to go to war with the Iraq in 2003, especially in light of the rise of the Islamic State (ISIS), says former Texas Rep. Ron Paul.  "I've taken my cues from our early presidents and our constitution," Paul told J.D. Hayworth on "America's Forum" on Newsmax TV Friday [8/29/2014].  "They preached the gospel of non-intervention in the internal affairs of other nations, not to get involved in international consequences and that's all we've been doing," he explained.

Texas Democrats Are Pretty Happy About Depriving Gov. Perry of Some of His Firearm Rights.  Democrats even in Texas hate guns, and they really really hate Rick Perry, so the malicious indictment of him is a win-win.  Anyone under felony indictment is deprived of certain gun rights, and that now includes the governor of Texas. [...] Don't think they would be any less happy about depriving you of yours, if you happen to disagree with them.  The Democrats would indict every single Republican in the entire state if they thought they could get away with it.

What Cops Really Do.  [L]et us suppose that you, the reader, are an average white cop in, say, Washington, DC.  Let us further agree that you are not swatted-out, do not have ninja fantasies.  You are not evil and do not want to hurt anyone.  Evil cops exist, but you are not one of them.  You are just a real cop in the real city — not the city as imagined by the humid orchids who write editorials at the New York Times.  How will the world seem to you, a new cop just out of the Academy?

Valerie Jarrett: President Obama 'Doing His Job' Handling Ferguson Unrest.  President Obama is doing his job, according to White House senior adviser Valerie Jarrett, who is now defending his handling of the Ferguson shooting and the civil unrest that has followed.  "He's doing his job and there's no magic wand," she said.  "And there are no words that he can speak, alone, that will stop the violence."

The Editor says...
Really?  Obama puts a lot of stock in his speeches, like the time he claimed that his inauguration was "the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow."  Obama's supporters include those who say he is "a sort of god," and Mr. Obama is happy to let them say such things.  That can be dangerous (Acts 12:22-23).

The Upper and Nether Millstones.  Ironically Michael Brown and the paramilitarized Ferguson police department are two sides of the same coin.  They are the joint product of the politics of grievance and the growing expansion of government.  The taxes that made the mobs dependent also armed the paramilitary police that contain them.  You have one government department handing out Obamaphones and another handing out MRAPs to the cops.  HHS gives out Obamacare and the IRS enforces it.  A giant bureaucracy tasked with providing all "positive rights" rumbles on, even as progressive politics unleashes more 'community organizers' while erecting a giant political machine to meet those same growing expectations.  It calls to and answers itself.  The result on a community scale is Ferguson.  The result on a national scale is Barack Obama.

Texas Governor Rick Perry's Indictment [is] The Work Of Soros-Funded Minions.  Drape corruption charges around the neck of a successful governor and, however false, let them dangle there until the case gets dismissed, as it surely will.  And the aim?  To derail his plans to run for president.  It's a trick so old and practiced by the group that brought the complaint to the district attorney last year, Texans For Public Justice, that it took all of a minute to find the sordid template on a Google search.  According to Washington Post's Marc Thiessen, the group pulled this on another Texas governor, George W. Bush, as he prepared to run for higher office in 2000, and then on Perry in 2011.

Women and Children First?  To Hamas, women and children are expendable as casualties.  If the Israelis don't kill them, Hamas will.  And the Israelis have (wrongly) gone out of their way to avoid "civilian" Gazan casualties.  They don't seem to remember that but for the carpet- and fire-bombing of German and Japanese cities during WWII, the war might have gone on indefinitely.  Aside from destroying an enemy's capacity for making war, tens of thousands of Germans and Japanese civilians perished from Allied bombings.  The purpose of those bombings was also to destroy the enemy's morale and willingness to continue fighting.  The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki cost nearly 150,000 Japanese civilian lives.  But those bombings brought the Pacific War to an abrupt end.  The alternative was to invade Japan with conventional forces and incur even more horrendous casualties on both sides.

Washington is divided because it has abandoned federalism.  It may sound pedestrian to point out, but it's critical to restate why it's so important that our nation is called the United States of America, and not simply America.  The full name emphasizes that the Founders viewed the nation not as one monolithic entity but as a union of sovereign entities delegating limited powers to a central government.  To preserve this balance, the Founders put a number of checks in the U.S. Constitution, most notably creating the Senate, which allows for equal membership from every state, thus preventing states with larger populations from running roughshod over the interests of smaller ones.

Regulating the Roads, and Everything Else.  Aside from liberals in Washington and some at the New York Times, most economists agree that increased regulation strangles economic growth. [...] State planning that involves the coordination of tens of thousands, or millions, of different factors invariably fails.  As the ludicrous rollout of ObamaCare demonstrated, not even the most powerful computers can make provisions for the varying needs and circumstances of tens of millions of individual consumers.  Only the free market can do that.

I Aim To Misbehave.  The UK's top public doctor says the failure to find a cure for Ebola represents underscores "the moral bankruptcy of capitalism".  Does that mean we can expect an Ebola vaccine from a socialist country any day now?  Or one developed by the public doctor's public system?  That's not what he means.  What he might be referring to is the dramatic recovery of two missionary healthworkers in Liberia following the administration of the experimental Zmapp serum.

The Nuking Of Japan Was Tactically And Morally Justified.  About a year after the war ended, the "was it necessary?" Monday-morning quarterbacks emerged and began to question the military necessity and morality of the use of nuclear weapons on Japanese cities.  Since then, there have been periodic eruptions of revisionism, uninformed speculation and political correctness on this subject, perhaps the most offensive of which was the Smithsonian Institution's plan for an exhibition of the Enola Gay for the 50th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima.  In a particularly repugnant exercise of political correctness, the exhibit was planned to emphasize the "victimization" of the Japanese, mentioning the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor only as the motivation for the "vengeance" sought by the United States.  (The exhibit as originally conceived was eventually canceled.)

President, Business Groups Defend Money-Losing Export-Import Bank.  Rarely do some of the nation's most powerful politicians and businesspeople laud banks that report big profits when in fact they have lost billions of dollars.  But we're witnessing this spectacle on behalf of the Export-Import Bank of the United States, which for many decades, and for good reason, has been called by its critics "The Bank of Boeing." [...] Boeing's customers include both domestic and foreign airlines.  Because of the loans and guarantees the Export-Import Bank gives to overseas buyers of Boeing airplanes, those overseas airlines often end up paying less for Boeing planes than domestic airlines pay.  In helping Boeing, the Export-Import Bank can end up hurting domestic airlines.  Boeing in 2012 received more than 80 percent of the Export-Import Bank's largesse.

Ted Cruz: The Export-Import Bank is a 'Corrupt Crony-Capitalist Fiasco'.  Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) encourages his fellow Republicans to kill the Export-Import Bank in a USA Today editorial, in which he describes the bank as a "corrupt crony-capitalist fiasco" that does a good deal of deliberate harm to American companies.

Obama backs corporate welfare.  Contrary to the values that keep America strong, safe and free, the Export-Import Bank has facilitated lending to governments in Congo and Sudan, countries with horrific human rights records.  It has financed Chinese power plants and backed Russian billionaires buying luxury planes.  And, it has provided lots and lots of financing to oil companies in Russia, Brazil, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia that compete directly with America's energy companies.  Americans shouldn't be forced to finance those who are actively working against them, as a basic matter of prudence.  The Export-Import Bank operates outside of commonsense.  There's nothing inherently wrong with big business — and President Obama is wrong to constantly demagogue them — but they don't need special handouts from government.  Especially when the government favors hurt other U.S. businesses and jeopardize American jobs.

Do Corporations Rule America?  When in 1911 the federal government broke up the Standard Oil Company, a monopoly that it permitted partially to reform in 1998 as ExxonMobil, who was the boss?  When in 1969 the federal government sued IBM, the dominant computer company, on anti-trust grounds, who was the boss?  When in 1982 the federal government broke up AT&T, who was the boss?  When in 1998 the federal government and 19 states sued Microsoft on anti-trust, who was the boss?

Fighting parasitic bureaucracies and crony capitalism.  The federal bureaucracy head count is not significantly larger than it was 50 years ago.  But the federal impact is much greater, through entitlement programs, subcontracted welfare provisions and regulation that favors entrenched interests.  Thus the Dodd-Frank Act gives favored financial institutions too-big-to-fail status that enables them to muscle aside potential competitors.  The Export-Import Bank provides special favors to a few giant corporations.  But there are few loans to start-up businesses.  Government subsidization of health care, even before Obamacare, and of higher education creates huge dysfunctional bureaucracies that vacuum up supposed benefits to patients and students.

Free Countries Mock Their Presidents.  Chief Justice John Jay's 1795 treaty with the British was so wildly unpopular among the Jeffersonians that Jay reported being able to travel from Boston to Philadelphia by the light of his burning effigies.  Later, during the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln was subjected to the treatment. [...] During his two terms, George W. Bush was the object of considerable opprobrium, his likeness being frequently hanged, knived in the forehead, and even assassinated on prime-time television.  At the height of the Left's umbrage, progressive heroes Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield went so far as to take a twelve-foot effigy of Bush on a national tour, setting fire to it at each stop to the audience's hearty cheers.

Germany is Hardly a U.S. Ally.  The Washington Post reported, "In ordering the CIA station chief to leave, Germany resorted to a form of retaliation that is occasionally employed by espionage adversaries such as the United States and Russia, but rarely by such a close ally."  But where is the evidence that Germany under Merkel is such a close ally?  The paper fails to cite the evidence that Merkel is regarded with suspicion because she came out of East Germany, when it was a Communist state, and hid a very important aspect of her early life — as a propagandist for a communist youth group.

Fed up: Anger rising across America.  There is a new dissatisfaction blowing across the country.  As it was in the 1770s, the movement is not coming from the seat of power or among those who make the laws.  It's coming from the "little people," who live outside the Beltway.

Long-building conservative anger at Export-Import Bank reaches boiling point.  What began as a pet issue for a handful of conservatives is now turning the GOP on its head.  The fight over the obscure agency has pitted traditional lawmakers backed by big corporations against tea party conservatives, who, still fuming over bank bailouts of 2008, insist that supporting free markets is not the same as supporting business interests.

Army vets blast PC police for attacking Apache, Chinook helicopters as racist.  Veterans aren't happy with a recent op-ed by the Washington Post, which charged that the Apache, Comanche, Chinook, Lakota, Cheyenne and Kiowa military vehicles were a "greater symbolic injustice" than the NFL's Washington Redskins' name.  "Even if the NFL and Redskins brass come to their senses and rename the team, a greater symbolic injustice would continue to afflict Indians — an injustice perpetuated not by a football club but by our federal government," Simon Waxman of the Boston Review wrote for the Post on Thursday [6/26/2014].  He added that the helicopter names were "propaganda" that needed to end, because Native American life expectancy statistics indicate the "violence is ongoing, even if the guns are silent."

The U.S. military's ongoing slur of Native Americans.  In the United States today, the names Apache, Comanche, Chinook, Lakota, Cheyenne and Kiowa apply not only to Indian tribes but also to military helicopters.  Add in the Black Hawk, named for a leader of the Sauk tribe.  Then there is the Tomahawk, a low-altitude missile, and a drone named for an Indian chief, Gray Eagle.  Operation Geronimo was the end of Osama bin Laden.

The Editor says...
The Indian tribes, whose members — at the time the White Man arrived — had never built a city or discovered such things as wheels, should be flattered that the most effective and complicated military weapons in the world are named after them.

Hank Paulson: As Wrong about Climate Change as he was about The Crash.  [Scroll down]  There's a desperate logical fallacy, here, Hank — and you, of all people, ought to be able to see it.  You talk about the "economic risks of doing nothing."  But what if the economic risks of doing something are even greater?  C'mon, Hank.  You should know.  You were the guy who used trillions of tax dollars to bail out the zombie banks, with effects we are still ruining to this day.

Dems Are To Blame For Political Polarization.  A Pew study finds the country more polarized than ever, and naturally Republicans are catching the blame.  Truth is, it's Democrats who've lurched to extremes.

Richard Mourdock Warns America is Heading the Way of Nazi Germany in a Dramatic Farewell Speech.  In the 1930's during the Great Depression and under the pressure of the Treaty of Versailles, the National Socialist Party showered the poor with bread and put millions of unemployed to work with government programs before leading the entire world into war.  "Over the next several years, every time a program began to fall apart, Mr. Hitler's party was very, very good at dividing Germany by pointing to this group or that group," Mourdock continued.  "First they went after their political opponents.  Then they went after the aristocrats.  Then they went after the trade unionists.  And ultimately, of course, they went after the Jews.

Chomsky: Obama 'Determined To Demolish The Foundations Of Our Civil Liberties'.  Progressive hero Noam Chomsky is terrified of the surveillance state that has developed during the tenure of President Barack Obama, calling it a grave threat to our fundamental civil liberties.  In a column published Monday, Chomsky writes that the documents revealed to the public by Edward Snowden show a system that is flagrantly violating the principles of the Constitution.

We are in a golden age for journalism.  The news from the world of journalism has been almost unrelievedly bad for as long as I have been a journalist. [...] But I would argue that maybe it's not that bad, that maybe all the things that people have savaged the Internet for — speed, carelessness, chaos, the destruction of the daily newspaper — are actually creating a golden age for journalism.

Disastrous Afghanistan Trip For President Obama.  In a trip that was supposed to be a simple Memorial Day visit to the troops, President Obama's Afghanistan visit was marked by miscues and mistrust.  Afghan President Harmid Karzai refused to meet with President Barack Obama during Mr. Obama's visit to the country, and the White House hinted they would simply wait for Karzai's successor.  In addition, White House press materials outed the CIA's top spy in the country, and blamed the military for their mistake.  Since the White House didn't trust Mr. Karzai with the information that Mr. Obama would be coming to Afghanistan, it forced the White House to deliver a last-minute invitation to meet.  Karzai declined to meet with Obama, to return the diplomatic slight.

How to Save the Republic: Throw the Bums Out!  Apparently everyone hates Congress, but no one hates their congressperson. [...] Congress just watered down a bill that would start to begin the process of maybe thinking about re-establishing our Fourth Amendment rights.  Guess we don't need those after all.  But aside from our eroding civil liberties, the economic situation is even more dire.  There's a reason only 28 percent of Americans think the country is moving in the right direction.  Here's the problem.  Our elected officials have been writing checks to voters without the cash to back them up.

Ted Cruz's Dad Slams Obama, Lois Lerner, And Eric Holder With The Bible.  Cruz cited an Old Testament passage in which Jethro discussed choosing the right leader with his son-in-law, Moses.  God spoke through Jethro, he explained, and "gives four qualifications:  able men, such as fear God, men of truth, hating covetousness."  Expounding on those concepts, Cruz concluded that the guideline is still relevant in today's political culture.

A Conservative Candidate of Character, Conviction, Knowledge, and Leadership.  Gary Palmer, who is seeking a House seat in Alabama, is a unique candidate.  Until this year, he'd never run for political office.  Yet he has a long and impressive record in politics. [...] And it's a candidate's record that matters most.  It tells voters two things.  If a candidate has a history of accomplishments, it's evidence that he's capable and qualified, even gifted and talented.  And if the candidate's record is in sync with his campaign pitch, all the better.  That candidate can be counted on to pursue in elected office what he says he will.

Where is the innovation in health care?  Health care in the United States is stuck in a rut.  Americans are spending more on the same old care.  The disastrous Obamacare rollout creates more problems than the administration can spin that it "solves."  We have simply grown to accept rising prices and stagnating service as a fact of life.  It doesn't have to be this way.

The Freedom Index:.  A Congressional Scorecard Based on the U.S. Constitution rates congressmen based on their adherence to constitutional principles of limited government, fiscal responsibility, national sovereignty, and a traditional foreign policy of avoiding foreign entanglements.

War for Oil.  The New York Times reports "when Russia seized Crimea in March, it acquired not just the Crimean landmass but also a maritime zone more than three times its size with the rights to underwater resources potentially worth trillions of dollars."  And you thought it was America that went to war for oil.

These Guys Use 'Small Business' to Get Their Way in Washington.  Saying that something helps small businesses is a great way to gain public support for your cause.  Except when it's not true.  Take, for example, claims about the government-run Export-Import Bank, which subsidizes U.S. exports by providing discount loans to foreign governments and businesses to purchase American goods.  According to bank Chairman Fred Hochberg:  "Helping small businesses... grow and compete on the global stage is at the heart of the Bank's mission."  Boosting the fortunes of mom-and-pop businesses certainly sounds noble — and much more likely to win support from Congress.  But the real beneficiaries aren't exactly what most people would consider "small."

FBI's Huge Hacker Bust Could Be Bogus.  The 16 governments bringing charges may have a tough time with their cases if they were arresting people for possession of the software package. [...] Despite the shocking list of features highlighted by the FBI press release, Blackshades was technically no different than any other remote desktop tool.  There is nothing sinister about RATs as a kind of program.  Remote Access Tools are a ubiquitous feature of networks and the internet, allowing for administration and control without being physically present with the computer.

Dr. Ben Carson Slashes Obama's Presidency With Facts, Reason And Common Sense.  It's no wonder the White House wanted Carson to apologize after his speech at the National Prayer Breakfast; he spoke the truth, and the truth is offensive to Obama.  Whether he runs for president or not, one thing is clear:  Carson isn't afraid to speak truth to power.

Voters are giving up on fixing Washington.  The question is simply, "Compared to previous elections, are you more enthusiastic about voting than usual, or less enthusiastic?"  The acceleration of the number of respondents who are less enthusiastic to vote is a direct reversal of attitudes from just four years ago when the Republicans took back control of the House in the Tea Party election.  Now, both sides face an enthusiasm gap with Democrats trying to find the prescription to cure Obamacare depression and Republican leadership successfully using every media and legislative opportunity to beat their base into submission.

The Number of Innocent People Murdered by Governments.  People suspicious of coercive power have been on the defensive recently — or, more accurately, their opponents want them to be on the defensive.  The latest argument spouted by fans of a government potent enough to give you all you could want and give it to you good and hard is that any eyebrows raised at the prospect of such an expansive state are evidence of racism.  Don't try to follow the logic; you might trip over the twists and turns it takes.  But here's the honest truth:  Not just skepticism toward state power, but a strong antigovernment sentiment, are natural and logical results of taking a close look at the state and its works — its bloody, heavy-handed works.

What Conservatives Want from Washington.  Washington has become an exclusive province of leftism, a place in which all variety of conservative positions and values are subverted, corrupted, or compromised.  Is there any aspect of established leftism that could survive without the power centers of Washington?  No, there is not.

Hollywood Actor and Comedian Says What He Really Thinks.  In a recent interview with Talk Radio 120 WPTH, Hollywood actor and SNL alum Rob Schneider shared his opinion on where he thinks the country is headed and what it is like to work in a politically biased industry.  Schneider shared his thoughts on how he thinks the Obama administration is doing with the economy.  Unfortunately, not all of his comments are funny.

It is time to choose our side.  Today in America, there are an increasing number of men and women who see the ominous parallels between the pre-Revolutionary War days and the present day. [...] Only those buried deep in denial or their own normalcy bias refuse to see the increasing oppression against the citizens of America by their own government.  Only those who are completely clueless or complicit cannot see or vociferously deny that the clouds on the horizon are not storm clouds, but the dust clouds of an approaching enemy selected and elected to retake our freedoms.  Only those who have been effectively brainwashed believe that those currently in power reflect the true will of the people.

Conservatives' Moment to Stand Against Cronyism.  Most Americans know that our revolutionary history began when a handful of brave patriots tossed crates of tea into Boston Harbor to protest unfair taxation.  But what they might assume incorrectly is that our forefathers did so in response to increased taxes.  In fact, the Tea Act of 1773 actually lowered taxes on imports.  What truly offended the colonists was that it only lowered them for one corporation, the politically connected East India Company, giving it an unfair, artificial advantage over smaller, local American competitors.  Thus, not only was the American idea hatched in protest to a government that was too big and too intrusive, but also protesting a government that was willing and able to unfairly benefit favored special interests at the expense of everyone else.  Today, it's commonly known as "cronyism" and represents a uniquely malignant threat to American exceptionalism.

Guns And Abortion: States Starting to Rebel Against Federal Control.  It is easy to imagine that the founders would have already started shooting at and/or tar and feathering government officials by now, but the tide of this un-American control from the top is starting to show some signs of collapse.  A bloodless revolution seems to be forming.  Starting in the 1980s with the election of Ronald Reagan, Americans began a long process of falling out of love with Obama-styled communism.  Sure there is a long, long way to go before we denude Washington of power and get back to the representative republic we are supposed to be, but you can see that there are some examples that the states are starting to rebel against Washington.

'Hurricane' Carter Was Wrongly Convicted, But He Wasn't Innocent.  I have no doubt that Paterson, N.J., was stuffed to the gills with racists in 1966, but I still have suspicions that Hurricane's versions of events and the ubiquitous media claim that he was "wrongly" convicted isn't exactly true.

Does the Triumph of Faith Films Matter?  I'm glad there are movies being made about faith and I'm glad people like them and go to see them.  Since a huge majority of us have some kind of belief in something, I don't see why that part of the human experience should be edited out of the arts simply because it threatens the teeny-tiny-minded worldview of certain coastal reviewers.

Michael Bloomberg: 'I Have Earned My Place in Heaven'.  Former New York City mayor is pledging to spend $50 million this year to push gun control, the New York Times reports.  For this and other deeds (such as taking on obesity and smoking), Bloomberg believes he's going to heaven.  "I am telling you if there is a God, when I get to heaven I'm not stopping to be interviewed.  I am heading straight in.  I have earned my place in heaven.  It's not even close," Bloomberg told the Times.

The Editor says...
Mr. Bloomberg is in for a deep disappointment, because he obviously does not understand God or the Scriptures.  He will someday discover that all his wealth and his good works amount to exactly nothing [Isaiah 64:6], and instead he will find himself without any justification to enter Heaven.  This will be made abundantly clear to him, and it's not going to be pleasant.  But really, why would he waste his breath boasting about his guaranteed place in Heaven if he isn't even convinced that there is a God?  Mr. Bloomberg (or you, or I, or anyone else) has only one hope of eternal salvation, and that is to accept by faith the payment for sin that has already been made by Jesus Christ [Romans 10:9-10].

Michael Bloomberg: I've 'earned my place in heaven' for anti-gun crusade.  Michael Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York City, said it's his work for more gun control — along with his anti- smoking and healthy eating campaigns — that have won him God's favor and a sure spot behind the Pearly Gates.  His exact words, made in context of discussing his smoking cessation and anti-obesity pushes, as well as his concerted crackdowns on private gun ownership, to the New York Times were:  "I am telling you if there is a God, when I get to heaven I'm not stopping to be interviewed.  I am heading straight in.  I have earned my place in heaven.  It's not even close."

Democrats Lose Two More Special Elections They Didn't Expect To.  Democrats downplayed last week's losses, but they are beginning to form a pattern, starting in February with the San Diego mayoral race and continuing with a special U.S. House election in Florida and a state legislative race in Virginia last month.  Democrats are dispirited with the record of the Obama administration and aren't turning out.  Energized Republicans are.

The Twilight of Abundance.  Baby boomers enjoyed the most benign period in human history.  The superpower nuclear standoff gave us fifty years of relative peace.  We had cheap energy from an inherent over-supply of oil.  Grain supply increased faster than population growth.  And the climate warmed due to the highest level of solar activity for eight thousand years.  All those trends are now reversing.  We are now in the twilight of that age of abundance.

Meet the 2016 Republican Nominee.  This hypothesis is that America has reached a stage of progressive soft despotism in which the only important family feud in national politics is between the fundamentally allied factions of the Washington establishment itself.  The great advantage of despotism is its predictability.  In nations whose leaders have forsaken the manners and morals of representative government, the future can mean only two things:  the present, continued, or the present, escalated.

Poverty and Income Inequality.  There is an immense amount of income inequality here and everywhere.  I am not sure why that is a bad thing.  Some people will just be better students, harder working, more clever, more ruthless than other people.  Some people will have better family connections than others.  Some people will have richer parents than others.  Unless we want to do away with property rights — a surefire route to dictatorship — we will have a lot of men and women who are rich by inheritance.  Frankly, I feel sorry for them.

Is the U.S. stock market rigged?  This month marks the fifth anniversary of the current bull market on Wall Street, making it one of the longest and strongest in history.  Yet U.S. stock ownership is at a record low and less than half of Americans trust banks and financial services.  And in the last two weeks, the New York attorney general and the Commodities Futures Trading Commission in Washington have both launched investigations into high-frequency computerized stock trading that now controls more than half the market.

Can We Get Some Americans Out of Jail?  An unlikely alliance is forming between conservatives and liberals rightly asking whether it makes sense that America has the highest incarceration rate in the world.  One out of every 100 American adults is behind bars, according to The Washington Post.  Besides the tremendous cost of housing an inmate in a maximum-security federal prison — pegged at around $33,000 per year — the sheer volume of the U.S. prison population warrants a closer look.  Why are so many people behind bars?

Jeremiah Denton.  It is one of the most astonishing film clips in American history. [Jeremiah] Denton, then a commander in the United States Navy, had been shot down in Vietnam on July 18, 1965, and thrown into a communist dungeon.  The following May, the Communists tried to use him in a propaganda exercise, and arranged for him to be interviewed on camera by a Japanese correspondent.  It became the broadcast that confirmed what everyone feared.

Is Ted Cruz eligible to serve as president?  The answer is yes.  Here's why.  Cruz was born in Calgary, Alberta, in 1970.  His mother was American and his father was Cuban.  Before his birth, Cruz's parents moved from Houston to Canada to take jobs in the Alberta oil industry.  The family returned to Texas in 1974.  Although born abroad, Cruz received U.S. citizenship at birth.  The reason is because in 1970 federal law extended citizenship to foreign-born children of any American parent who had lived in the U.S. for at least 10 years before the child's birth.  In addition, the law required that five of those years come after the American parent turned 14.  A similar law remains on the books today.

Does America need a surgeon general?  It's not a glitzy job.  In fact, it's kind of boring.  But these days, the Office of the Surgeon General is at the center of a political storm — as Republicans stall the president's pick for the post of America's top doc.  The controversy over nominee Vivek Murthy, though, raises two questions: Who would he replace, and does America even need a surgeon general anymore?

A glimpse inside the dysfunctional federal bureaucracy.  We are governed by an arrogant, dysfunctional, self-serving organization that couldn't care less about us.  The federal bureaucracy, which increasingly behaves as our overlords, regulating what we may or may not do, prosecuting (or declining to prosecute) alleged wrongdoers, and spending roughly one dollar of every four in our economy (up from one in five in just a few years) is out of control and dangerous.  And it is only "extremists" like tea partiers who propose to do anything about it.

Why is it so expensive to build a bridge in America?  [Scroll down]  The fact that both left- and right-aligned institutions (public employee unions and private contractors, respectively) are implicated here is evidence that this isn't a typical left-right situation.  And if we look internationally, both Singapore (very free-markety) and Sweden (unembarrassedly socialist) manage much cheaper building costs than America.  This is basically about our greedy and opaque political culture.  Every American infrastructure project features a scramble on the part of all parties to skim as much for themselves as possible.  This leads to a self-defeating cycle in which voters are reluctant to pay for new stuff, so elites try to fund new projects in a duplicitous way, which only leads to more cost overruns.

Legal 'standing': Obama's executive branch escape hatch.  President Obama's proclaimed strategy to "bypass Congress" — most conspicuously his broad rewriting of the Affordable Care Act — has given unusual prominence to a fairly arcane legal doctrine:  standing.  Standing is what is preventing a potential blizzard of litigation against the president's unilateral decrees, and ironically, it's a doctrine liberal jurists have long decried.  To challenge the government in federal court, it isn't enough to simply believe that the government's conduct is illegal or even unconstitutional.  Federal courts can hear only specific disputes about the law as applied to particular people.  To be heard in court, a person must have a concrete complaint that he or she has suffered or will suffer a distinct injury stemming from the government action.

Uncontested and contested arrivals.  In a juvenile bureaucratic effort to disguise the Russian invasion of the Ukraine, the administration airbrushed it as an "uncontested arrival".  I suppose that might make some not very bright people think the customs and immigration desks in the Crimean ports of entry were unmanned.  Or was the administration simply signaling it would provide cover for a later claim by Russia that (as Russia claimed in Syria ) it had intervened at the behest of the local government to protect lives and peace?  To me it is obvious that Sarah Palin was right when she warned after watching Obama's lame response to the Russian invasion of Georgia that if he were elected Russia would invade the Ukraine.  It is amazing what and who the media thinks is stupid, isn't it?

U.S. assessment of Crimea: This isn't an invasion, it's an ... "uncontested arrival".  My mistake. I thought the White House might try to make all of this go away by accepting Putin's phony pretense that it's a domestic uprising among ethnic Russians in Crimea, not an invasion by Russia.  In fact, says the White House, there is a foreign element to the new troop presence — but it's all good so far because Crimea isn't resisting.  In other words, to save face over the fact that there's nothing much we can do to stop this, the official U.S. line is that this can't be an invasion if the Russians are being ... greeted as liberators.
[Superfluous ellipses in original.]

Banning the American Flag and Reconquista.  A federal court has ruled that an American school student has a right to free expression — unless that American might be threatened for that expression by others, in which case state officials have the right to quash the offending expression to appease potential aggressors.  Which, ipso facto, means Americans have no right to free expression at all.  For if it's not the government's role to protect expression that is thought to be offensive by a vicious mob, what purpose does the First Amendment have?  "Safe" expression needs no protection, after all.

The Democrats Are Apparently Terrified of Scott Walker.  This is a lot like what happened with Sarah Palin a while back.  Democrats think that a large number of emails are bound to reveal some criminal activity.  Once they have access, they begin frothing and assuming they will unearth something criminal.  This is probably because the same would be true if you were perusing thousands of the average Democrat's emails.

One Election Away from Losing Our Freedom.  Putin's little fingers in the Ukraine, Cuban agents in Venezuela and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt all remind us how uniquely vulnerable democracy is totalitarianism.  In the United States, cities aren't burning and streets aren't filling up with bloodied bodies, but the government of phone and pen also shows us that we are always one election away from losing our freedom.

The Fairness Fraud.  When statistics show that sons of high school dropouts don't become doctors or scientists nearly as often as the sons of Ph.D.s, that is taken as a sign that American society is not "fair."  If equal probabilities of achieving some goal is your definition of fairness, then we should all get together — people of every race, color, creed, national origin, political ideology and sexual preference — and stipulate that life has never been fair, anywhere or any time in all the millennia of recorded history.  Then we can begin at last to talk sense.

All In The Communist Family.  Leave it to the Communist Party USA to ride to the Marxist rescue for the November elections.  They are intent on keeping the Senate in the hands of Progressives and fighting back hordes of Tea Party, right wing extremists.  But as vampires shun the Cross, Commies fear the Constitution and freedom and they are about to get the subject lesson of their red lives.

Here's What 'Income Equality' Would Look Like.  President Obama has talked a lot recently about reducing income inequality.  Yet he neither acknowledges how much money the government is redistributing, nor how much more would be needed to close the income gap.  Perhaps that's because the project would require redistribution on a staggering scale.  That's the upshot of two separate studies published in November 2013 by the Congressional Budget Office and the Tax Foundation.

Stuff Bush Didn't Do.  One good way to force the Left to confront President Obama's own responsibility for his conduct in office is to compare his abuses of office with the record of President Bush 43, who was reviled by by his opposition as a dictator-wannabe, Constitution-abusing, moronic ogre straddling the line between simian and human.  Doug Ross of Director Blue has produced an amusing comic-book approach toward explaining the differences between the two men.

Is It Over, and We Just Don't Know It?  The failure by the U.S. Senate to convict Bill Clinton after his impeachment by the House was the first signal that the rule of law might not matter any more.  These days, the law seems to be whatever Barack Obama and Eric Holder want it to be.  President George W. Bush's formation of the mammoth Homeland Security Department and mission creep at the National Security Agency after the 9/11 terrorist attacks consolidated awesome and disturbing powers in very few hands.  Now both outfits are out-of-control monsters.

Article V Of The Constitution: An Emergency Solution, Hidden In Plain Sight.  [Scroll down]  Since the government has tried to reach into our homes, medical care, and pockets, frustrated citizens have talked of rebelling against the government or even secession.  But this extreme reaction ignores the fact that the founders saw this day coming and gave us a Constitutional tool which allows us to restrain the out-of-control federal government.  Knowing human nature, the founders knew the federal government would eventually grow like a fungus and try to cover every aspect of our lives.  That's why there's a modern-day interest in Article V.

The Final Constitutional Option.  Article V establishes the amendment process as a two-phase affair:  proposal, followed by ratification of three fourths of the states.  The states have no way to ratify that which has not first been proposed.  From the beginning, the states have relied on congressional super-majorities to do the proposing.  But the founders knew that Congress would be loath to propose anything that would limit federal power, so they included a way for the states to propose amendments in an ad hoc assembly Article V styles as "A Convention for Proposing Amendments."

Article V Convention: Path of Least Resistance.  In what is taking shape as a sort of Great Awakening, state legislators have begun to learn that they hold equal status with Congress when it comes to proposing amendments to the U.S. Constitution.  Indeed, a handful of state legislators from each state, as yet unknown, are destined for the annals of American history the moment the nation's first Convention for Proposing Amendments is gaveled to order.

The US Chamber of Commerce versus America.  The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is a politically entrenched synod of special interests.  These fat cats do not represent the best interests of American entrepreneurs, American workers, American parents and students, or Americans of any race, class or age who believe in low taxes and limited government.  The chamber's business is the big business of the Beltway, not the business of mainstream America.  If you are a business owner who believes your country should strictly and consistently enforce its borders and deport illegal immigrants who violate the terms of their visas, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce doesn't represent you.

Poverty, White Privilege and Short Memories.  Although the part of Appalachia I live in is not as deeply mired in poverty, the pathologies remain the same.  Welfare is ubiquitous, drug abuse is rampant and there is little hope for a better life for many of the young because of chronically poor school systems.

Jahi McMath is Alive.  There are thirty different criteria for "brain death," which differ from state to state and institution to institution.  In the wake of early enthusiasm for heart transplantation, "brain death" legislation was passed in the 1970's in all fifty states in the USA, to allow for death to be declared by neurological criteria, rather than the cessation of cardiac activity.  This permits surgeons to remove hearts from "brain dead" donors and not be charged with homicide.  Despite claims that there has never been a case of a person diagnosed with "brain death" having a partial or full recovery, this is not true.  There are in fact examples of this type.

The Outlaw Campus.  Colleges have gone rogue and become virtual outlaw institutions.  Graduates owe an aggregate of $1 trillion in student debt, borrowed at interest rates far above home-mortgage rates — all on the principle that universities could charge as much as they liked, given that students could borrow as much as they needed in federally guaranteed loans.  Few graduates have the ability to pay back the principal; they are simply paying the compounded interest.

The Trillion-Plus Heist.  Government produces nothing.  It creates no wealth.  Yet the District of Columbia is ranked as the richest area in the nation. [...] D.C. is the richest area in the nation not only because an annual salary of $174,000 is paid to congressional members, 261 of whom are millionaires, not only because most of the appointed cabinet secretaries are multimillionaires, but also because federal employees are paid salaries over three times what the average taxpayer earns.  The source of all that money is taxes levied on production.

Liberals Win Only If We Refuse To Fight Back.  Demanding that Americans hide their religious beliefs.  Banning dissenting views on the climate change scam.  Slandering people with charges of the kind of racism pioneered and perfected by the Democrat party.  Those are just some highlights of the concerted campaign by the goose-stepping freaks of the left to silence us, to shut us down and leave the culture open to their domination.  But the organized left is only a small cadre of sociopaths — its strength comes from the apathy and cowardice of those who won't stand up to them.  They win only when we surrender.

The Counter-Revolution Begins.  As 2013 comes to a close, two important developments have the potential to turn the tide against Obama's "fundamental transformation" of the United States. [...] These two seemingly unrelated developments were dramatic indications that the American people are beginning to understand that their country is being transformed in ways that run directly contrary to their best interests and values.

Impeachment, 15 Years Later.  Fifteen years ago today, the House of Representatives impeached a president for only the second time in history — and the first in well over a century.  At some point, some fair-minded historian should go back and publish a thorough account of that year-long controversy, just to set the record straight.  Some may argue over whether Clinton's perjury and obstruction of justice amounted to "high crimes or misdemeanors," but the case needs to be established for the record that Clinton did, without a doubt, perjure himself and obstruct justice.  (I believe he also suborned perjury, among other misdeeds.)

Why Mandela's Communist Party membership is important:  On the day of Nelson Mandela's death the South African Communist Party chose to reveal a fact that it had long denied:  that he was a party member.  Indeed, at the time of his arrest he was on the Central Committee.

Nelson Mandela and the Dangers of Deification.  [Scroll down]  But Mandela was also a terrorist leader associated with the Communist Party during his early career.  His ANC was responsible for violence and murder against both military and civilian targets. [...] He remained close with Cuban dictator Fidel Castro ("Long live the Cuban revolution.  Long live comrade Fidel Castro"), personally supported Libyan thug Moammar Gadhafi ("It is our duty to give support to the brother leader"), sold tanks to the Syrians and backed the terrorist Palestinian regime of Yasser Arafat ("There are many similarities between our struggle and that of the PLO").  Mandela said:  "If there is a country that has committed unspeakable atrocities in the world, it is the United States of America.  They don't care for human beings."

Ted Cruz and Mike Lee being vindicated on shutdown.  The GOP establishment is loath to admit it, but the government shutdown is turning out to be a brilliant political chess move on the part of Senators Ted Cruz and Mike Lee.

To Propagandize The West, Lenin Recruited A Corps Of "Useful Idiots.  Contrary to what you might have heard, there really was a world communist conspiracy.  Its purpose was not just agitation but propaganda.  To bring it about, V.I. Lenin recruited a special corps of propagandists for what was to become the Communist International.

Income, IQ, and Effort.  Liberal media bon pensants are in a huff over remarks delivered by London's Mayor Boris Johnson suggesting that IQ and effort have something to do with income. [...] The time for left wing fantasies about social justice is ending.  It is time everyone admitted that talent and effort count.

For Obama, Everything Is About Politics.  Telling Americans that you cannot honor Lincoln's words 150 years later because you have to fix a website that you botched and a Democratic Party that you unraveled — but you can honor the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech — is disturbing.  First, without the former, you would not have had the latter.  And, second, what you are telling Americans with such a decision is that politics is everything to your presidency.

What's in CIA's secret JFK files?  Among the material that remains classified are the files of a number of long-deceased CIA officials who are believed by researchers to have had knowledge about the movements and actions of Lee Harvey Oswald, the president's assassin, in the months before Dealey Plaza.  Some of these officials are also believed to have helped the CIA conceal this knowledge from the staff members of the two major official probes into the assassination:  the Warren Commission, which concluded in its 1964 report that Oswald was the sole assassin; and the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), whose final report in 1979 determined that there was a "high probability" that two gunmen fired at the president that day.

Final word: Lee Oswald either did it or he didn't.  The JFK assassination may never be solved completely.  Too much time has passed and too many witnesses are dead.  But there is also far too much evidence of a conspiracy to ever conclude decisively that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in killing President Kennedy. [...] Lots of the evidence against Lee Harvey Oswald makes perfect sense when viewed through the prism of a high-level conspiracy intended to cut down the president without drawing attention to the conspirators.

Is Kerry the Worst Secretary of State Ever?  During his first term in office, President Obama was criticized by conservatives for conducting what they dubbed apology tours in which he always seemed to find something in American history for which he felt compelled to make amends.  To his surprise, neither apologies nor the magic of his personality and historic status were able to conceal the fact that he was far better at alienating America's traditional allies than winning new friends.

Mining Policy Designed to Benefit Our Own — Mighty Rare.  While most people don't give REEs [Rare Earth Elements] a thought, we all use them in our modern lives as they are an essential part of what makes cell phones, flat screens, and computer chips work. [...] America's REE resources and potential production and refining give us a strong global advantage — but we must accelerate and streamline the permitting process.  It is time for our government to make policy that is designed to benefit America.

Grand Theft Obama: The Biggest Heist in U.S. History.  Our nation is being stolen before our very eyes.  The American people are being robbed of their livelihoods, their security and their freedom.  President Obama makes grand sweeping gestures and delivers soaring rhetoric about helping the poor and achieving fairness.  But he merely draws our attention away from the hand that is reaching deep into our pockets.  Such is the nature of his extremist legislative agenda.

The Conservative Alternative to ObamaCare.  It's not a secret that Obamacare is wreaking havoc on the health-care sector, and this is prompting many Americans to ask for an escape.  However, we wouldn't want to go back to the health system as it existed before the Affordable Care Act.  Recognizing this, the Heritage Foundation last week released a definitive compilation of health-care solutions that make patients the primary decisionmakers.  Our common[ ]sense solutions are based on five principles: [...]

Federal Bailouts For Cities Would Reward Bad Behavior.  Advocates for cash-strapped municipalities want Washington to clean up their mess.  Detroit's July bankruptcy filing, prompted in part by its huge worker-retirement debts, has led to calls for a federal bailout of the beleaguered city — and also, by extension, of retirement debt in other fiscally squeezed municipalities.

The Emmanuel Goldstein-ing of Ted Cruz.  David Corn leads the Emmanuel Goldstein-ing of Ted Cruz, but the hate is clearly coming straight from the Democratic Party leadership, as the second section shows.  It's not accidental.  It's a party strategy to single Cruz out and pour hate on him, make him radioactive and unelectable.  Democrats successfully did the same thing to Sarah Palin, and will do the same to any genuine leader who emerges among the GOP.  Why would [Harry] Reid really care if a Cruz nomination hurts the GOP? [...] It's a strategy to destroy Cruz.  If Reid really thought Ted Cruz would be bad for the GOP, he would shut up and hope that Cruz wins the nomination in 2016.

Forget the apologies — fire Sebelius and delay ObamaCare.  At the beginning of his first term, President Obama embarked on a famous "apology tour," where he traveled the world describing all the various ways he imagined America hadn't lived up to its ideals.  When it came to condemning the actions of others the president was front-and-center.  But now — when it comes time to apologize for his administration's incompetence and misconduct — the apologies come from his subordinates. [...] Apologies without accountability are meaningless.

How do you simulate physical attacks during emergency drills?  We'll know the results of simulated cyberattacks during "GridEx 2" instantly.  It's called no power.  But how do you simulate physical attacks, and will we ever read the results about any simulated physical attacks gone wrong?  What about terrorists planning a takedown of the grid.  Would November 13-14 appeal to them on the basis that their terrorism could be conveniently blamed on the "GridEx 2" massive simulation?  How do thousands of utility workers, business executives, bureaucrats communicate with each other if their simulation exercise actually takes down large parts of the power grid in Canada, the United Sates or Mexico?

How immunize our kids against Obama's victim mentality.  It seems tragic to admit it is time to tell our children that the person elected to lead the free world is urging them toward less free will, but denying that reality would be to compound the tragedy.  Directly explaining what is happening will insulate our kids, in some measure, from the worst of what could happen — the subtle, chronic, steady erosion of their belief in themselves.  Some of our children may ask how this could be?  How could the president of the United States be a force that is disempowering Americans?  The answer is this simple:  At the time we elected this president, we were doubting ourselves.

The Liberal War on Scientific American.  Scientific American, like many older publications, wanted to get into the blogging game.  Unfortunately Scientific America was not too picky about whom it let through the door.  And it made the mistake of having Danielle Lee write a blog called The Urban Scientist.  Urban is liberal code for Black.  Obviously Scientific American was looking to push some minority friendly stories.  But its focus was on science.  It didn't realize that identity politics and science go together about as well as phrenology and science or as well as Scientology and science.

Democrats Need an Election Bailout.  [W]ith Obamacare cost over-runs, taxes, rapidly escalating premiums, and employment conversions to part-time becoming a major drag on the economy, the Democrats fear a potential rout in next year's elections.  The left is getting desperate for another $100 billion in "targeted" spending or more monetary stimulus to produce election year jobs.

Ted Cruz Won.  It has become clear after the government shutdown that if Obamacare isn't destroyed now, it will be with us forever.  Waiting until after a series of elections to try to kill it is a fool's errand.  There will never be more support for ending Obamacare than there will be in the next few months.  Once the dependency class hooks up their Obamacare IV, it's game over.

In Just One Month, Politicians Prove the Power To Govern Is the Power To Destroy.  "The power to tax involves the power to destroy," wrote then-Chief Justice John Marshall in 1819.  The man lacked vision.  As we've seen time and again, and was emphasized this month with all of the subtlety of Joe Biden on a bender, government can destroy in all sorts of ways beyond taxation.  In fact, everything the coercive and yet incompetent institution touches is put immediately at risk of collective disaster from stupid or petulant political decisions.

Thanks To New-Gen Legislators, There's Still Hope For America.  To this day, the underlying causes of the housing bubble and the systemic risk caused by government favoritism have not been addressed, or even acknowledged, by most legislators in Washington.  Many of the worst actors on Wall Street were rescued, and are bigger today because they "played ball."  The Federal Reserve now holds those trillions of dollars in toxic assets on their books, monetized with multiple tranches of "quantitative easing."

How Cruz, Lee and Paul shut down Obama's agenda.  After Republicans drifted for years without a pilot, Sens. Ted Cruz and Mike Lee have taken the helm of the GOP, steering their party and its grassroots into a much-needed, head-on battle with the Democrats.

Columbus Day: Still a Day Worth Celebrating.  Few holidays are as "politically incorrect" as is the day that Americans reserve to commemorate the birthday of Christopher Columbus.  Such is the ferocity of the smear campaign to which Columbus has been subjected for decades that he has been made into a villain among villains in the rogues' gallery of history.

25 facts about Christopher Columbus and his disputed holiday.  Was Columbus a bad person?  Was he responsible for the decimation of the natives in the lands he discovered, both through disease and warfare?  Did he discover America?  Is his place in history that of a man of myth or a man of legend?  Here's a look at the famed navigator, the voyage to the New World, the history of today's holiday and other interesting facts that have helped drive the conversations and controversy surrounding Christopher Columbus.

Civil disobedience in the Internet age.  Before exploring tactics for small group action, are you writing, calling and e-mailing your Representatives, imploring and demanding they vote your way, insisting on a written response?  It does work.  Constitutionalists have proven it several times this year, defeating the Toomey-Manchin gun-grab, the bloated Farm Bill, the aptly-named Law of the Sea (LOST) Treaty, and others.  In politics, no idea is dead unless the other side gives up.  Pestering politicians must become your regular habit.

Shutdown of Government Starts To Feel Like Sequester — a Surprise Success.  If there's an upside to this shutdown, it is the opportunity it provides to take federal government services that are assumed to be necessary and put them under new scrutiny.  Can we do without them?  Are these things that can be done better, or as well, by state or local government or by the private sector, either for-profit or not-for-profit?  These are questions that are asked too little in Washington and in the rest of the country in normal times.

Harry Reid and the Constitution: the power of the purse.  Congress was given what is commonly known as the power of the purse, and at the Constitutional Convention it was decided that the House of Representatives should hold more of that power than the Senate because the House "was more immediately the representatives of the people, and it was a maxim that the people ought to hold the purse-strings."  Aside from this balancing of fiscal power somewhat in favor of House over Senate, another goal was to make sure the executive did not spend money without congressional authorization.

The Government Is Closed, But America Is Still Open.  It's time to realize just how much of government can be permanently furloughed. [...] We hear of how most federal agencies are being forced to prioritize because of the shutdown.  But shouldn't they be doing that when the government is open too?

Rich, Arrogant, and Stupid.  Whether it's foreign policy, managing the economy, or teaching the young, our leaders institute policies that violate the traditional wisdom accumulated by generations of human experience.

GOP Shouldn't Run From Shutdown — It Should Own It.  The Republican Party didn't blink, and as a result non-essential aspects of the federal government are shutting down.  Republican politicians and members should cheer, as the "Stupid Party" actually revealed a political and economic savvy that will serve it well in 2014 and beyond.  The Republican Party now has a brand that says it's willing to stand athwart the obnoxious growth of Leviathan.  Its decision to allow a shutdown of the federal government, and ideally let it remain shut through the 2014 elections absent substantial concessions from the Democrats, is both good politics and economics.

A Global Slaughter of Christians, but America's Churches Stay Silent.  Christians in the Middle East and Africa are being slaughtered, tortured, raped, kidnapped, beheaded, and forced to flee the birthplace of Christianity.  One would think this horror might be consuming the pulpits and pews of American churches.  Not so.  The silence has been nearly deafening.  As Egypt's Copts have battled the worst attacks on the Christian minority since the 14th century, the bad news for Christians in the region keeps coming.

Senator Ted Cruz stands up to the liberal Left with real conservative leadership.  Ted Cruz may not be a household name in the UK, but he is a rising star in the American conservative movement, and a key figure to watch for the 2016 presidential race.  The Princeton and Harvard-educated Senator from Texas is making waves in Washington, with his marathon speech on the floor of the Senate against Obamacare.

U.S. economy on schedule to crash March 2014.  Any wishful thinking that America is in a "recovery" and that "things are getting better" is an illusion.  The problem is not Medicare, which won't quit on us for another six or seven years.  Nor is it Social Security, which will not be fully bankrupt for another 15 years or so.  The crisis is much more immediate and much more serious.  The central problem is that America is the bank of the world.

The Havoc of Prosecutorial Misconduct.  With the exoneration of Tom Delay in Texas yesterday, yet another high-profile case of prosecutorial misconduct has emerged.  This follows such other cases as that of Ted Stevens in 2008, and the notorious Duke Lacrosse case.  But these were all cases in which top-flight legal talent was able to uncover the misconduct.  There are many more that go unrecognized.

Guess Who Can Go to Heaven.  Hey, good news for all you atheists.  When you stop breathing you can still get into heaven.  That's right, even if you don't believe in God, you can enter the pearly gates, as long as you're a good person.  To my conservative Christian friends:  Please don't send your angry emails to me.  I'm just your humble messenger.  Send them to the pope.  That's right, The Pope!  He's the one who said it, in an open letter published on page one of an Italian newspaper — big news that's getting play all over the place.

Pope Francis assures atheists: You don't have to believe in God to go to heaven.  In comments likely to enhance his progressive reputation, Pope Francis has written a long, open letter to the founder of La Repubblica newspaper, Eugenio Scalfari, stating that non-believers would be forgiven by God if they followed their consciences.

Pope Francis reaches out to atheists and agnostics.  The Pope has struck a surprisingly conciliatory tone towards atheists and agnostics, saying that God will "forgive" them as long as they behave morally and live according to their consciences.

Pope: Stance on abortion, gays massive threat to church.  Pope Francis said today that the Roman Catholic church has become "obsessed" with abortion, gay marriage and contraception, and that he is done talking about it.  In remarkably blunt language, the man with the world's biggest bully pulpit appeared to be setting a new tone, telling followers that the church should be a "home for all" and not a "small chapel" focused on doctrine and moral castigation.

The Editor says...
Sometimes moral castigation is entirely appropriate.  The Bible quite clearly says, "All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness."  Reproof and correction are part of a priest's job.  Candy-coating the truth is not.

Pope warns church must find new balance or fail.  Signaling a dramatic shift in Vatican tone, Pope Francis said the Catholic Church had become obsessed by "small-minded rules" about how to be faithful and that pastors should instead emphasize compassion over condemnation when discussing divisive social issues of abortion, gays and contraception.

Pope Bluntly Faults Church's Focus on Gays and Abortion.  Pope Francis, in the first extensive interview of his six-month-old papacy, said that the Roman Catholic Church had grown "obsessed" with preaching about abortion, gay marriage and contraception, and that he has chosen not to speak of those issues despite recriminations from some critics.  In remarkably blunt language, Francis sought to set a new tone for the church, saying it should be a "home for all" and not a "small chapel" focused on doctrine, orthodoxy and a limited agenda of moral teachings.

The Editor says...
The Pope sounds like an external critic of the Catholic church, rather than its patriarch.  Sounds like he's more of an activist than a clergyman.  In fact, he sounds more like a community organizer than a competent leader.  That sounds familiar, doesn't it?  If your faith is based on whatever the Pope says, your house is built on the sand, and the sand just shifted.

Pope Francis Said What?! Actually, No, He didn't.  [Scroll down]  But Francis never said "You don't have to believe in God to go to heaven."  In fact, he never used the word "Heaven" in what was a 2688-word letter even once.  What the pope said that the media is spinning was, "God's mercy has no limits if you go to him with a sincere and contrite heart.  The issue for those who do not believe in God is to obey their conscience."

The Editor says...
The most notorious mass murderers and the most infamous criminals in history obeyed their own consciences, to the exclusion of any other guiding principle, and I wouldn't want to spend eternity with any of them.

Aaron Alexis and the costs of false religion.  CNN, among other media outlets, expressed shock that a Buddhist like Alexis could be responsible for the Navy Yard massacre.  "When I learned he was a practicing Buddhist, when I learned he spent so much time vacationing in Thailand, it was not the profile of who I expect to pick up a weapon and kill 12," offered CNN host Ashleigh Banfield.  Fellow anchor Chris Cuomo chipped in that "You know, it is a very defined philosophy.  And being someone who has a violent tendency and appetites does not square with the philosophy involved there."  Their prattle assumed that Buddhism is a religion of peace and rationality.  But if one follows the argument of John Paul II that it violates human nature and denies God, one can see that it is really not.

Bloggers are the only true journalists left in America.  Thank heavens for the First Amendment that gives us the right to free speech.  Without it, we'd be a dark, corrupt, hell-hole of tyranny.  Like California.  And thank heavens even more for the Second Amendment that protects all the other freedoms in the Constitution because tyrannists in Washington are hell-bent on killing off the only purveyors of truth left in America — bloggers!

It's Pretty Bad When Dilbert's Mom Whacks Federal Agents.  Scott Adams comments on government intrusion.

Twelve Years Later  ... we are still at war with the Muslim world, and it most certainly is still at war with us. [...] in addition to the 3,000 souls lost in 2001, more than 5,000 soldiers have perished in the "War on Terror," and for absolutely no strategic purpose or effect.

America: Not Shining but Burning.  America is now a nation ruled — and that is the correct word — by a self-appointed elite of ignorant snobs and power-mad degenerates to compete with the worst ruling castes of the civilized world.  The U.S. federal government has, through the deliberate deteriorations of a century, finally dispensed with all but the flimsiest pretense of the principles of limited government and the rule of law that virtually defined America's historic political achievement.

What I Learned from the Zimmerman Trial.  [Scroll down]  So pervasive was its messaging in the Zimmerman case that it persuaded even eyewitnesses to believe that big was small and up was down.  Republican strategists who soften policy to appeal to those who don't pay attention will only succeed in alienating those who do.

War on Syria Means Victory for Al-Qaeda.  President Obama's proposed military strike means, practically speaking, that the U.S. will intervene on behalf of al Qaeda in Syria.  Why is this dangerous proposal being taken seriously by Congress?  If the proposal were somehow designed to save the Christians and other minorities in Syria, that would be one thing.  But there has been no announced intention to do that.

Rush: Could Al Qaeda Be Framing Assad?  On his Tuesday morning [9/3/2013] program, Rush [Limbaugh] asked the provocative question:  "What if Bashar didn't do it?  What if Bashar is being framed?"  ["]The rebels nerve gassing their own people to create exactly what is happening — us mobilizing to get rid of Bashar.  They use chemical weapons on their people — it gets blamed on Bashar.["]

Obama's Half-Assad War.  In Obama's 2002 speech against the Iraq war, he scoffed at "armchair weekend warriors" who pursue "dumb" and "rash" interventions.  As if to punctuate that he has become what he once opposed, Obama went golfing on Saturday right after announcing his plans to bomb Syria.  Not even Wag the Dog captured that level of presidential cynicism.

Natural born Citizens: Marco Rubio, Bobby Jindal, Ted Cruz.  I believe Marco Rubio, Bobby Jindal and Ted Cruz to be "natural born Citizens" and eligible to be President.  Here's why.

Is every nation on earth besides the United States "isolationist?"  Only in America is the word "isolationist" used to describe reluctance to initiate wars of choice.  In every other context, that word has a far different meaning.

Obama's 2014 calculation: Let's have a war.  Make no mistake:  The president couldn't care less about the plight of Syrians, the 1,500 gassed to death — including nearly 500 children.  It's all about 2014.  Win the House, reign supreme.  Consider this:  Mr. Obama made his dramatic Rose Garden statement on Saturday — then headed to the golf course.

The Myth of a Runaway Amendments Convention.  The Founders provided, in Article V of the Constitution, for a "convention for proposing amendments."  They did this to enable the people, acting through their state legislatures, to rein in an abusive or runaway federal government.  In other words, the Founders created the convention for precisely the kind of situation we face now.

Stop privileges for government officials.  All over America, government officials enjoy privileges that ordinary citizens don't.  Sometimes it involves bearing arms, with special rules favoring police, politicians and even retired government employees.  Sometimes it involves freedom from traffic and parking tickets, like the special non-traceable license plates enjoyed by tens of thousands of California state employees or similar immunities for Colorado legislators.  Often it involves immunity from legal challenges, like the "qualified" immunity to lawsuits enjoyed by most government officials, or the even-better "absolute immunity" enjoyed by judges and prosecutors.

Five Reasons Why a Constitutional Convention Is a Better Idea than Just Electing More Republicans.  Mark Levin's new book The Liberty Amendments proposes that state legislatures use their Article V power to call a convention to propose new constitutional amendments for state ratification.  The unorthodox process seems impractical at first — it's never been used, it's off the mainstream political radar, few people even know it exists, etc. — but a closer look reveals transformative advantages over the prevailing political strategies of the day.

Is Article V in Our Future?  The only power the states have under Article V is the opportunity to submit an "application" (petition) humbly beseeching Congress to call a convention.  Hundreds of such applications have been submitted over the years, with widely different purposes and wording, many applications were later rescinded and some purport to make the application valid for only a particular amendment such as a federal balanced budget or congressional term limits.  Article V states that Congress "shall" call a convention on the application of two-thirds of state legislatures (34), but how will Congress count valid applications?  We don't know, and so far, Congress has ignored them anyway.

Was Kennedy murdered by his own vice president?  [Scroll down]  It would appear significant, therefore, that after JFK was shot Johnson was in a tearing hurry to be sworn in.  He insisted it be before they left Dallas and aboard Air Force One, the presidential plane.  It was not unnoticed that it was insisted by "someone in authority" that the body of President Kennedy was not, under any circumstances, to be left in Texas for autopsy.  Government agents virtually wrenched the body from the Dallas doctors in Parkland Hospital who had tried everything they knew to save his life.  In doing so those agents broke the law which placed the responsibility for autopsy on Texas.  There is more.

When Everything is Public, Then No One is Free.  Since every activity between two people will in some way "leak" beyond them... everything is public.  The government isn't only in the bedroom, but in the kitchen and the living room and everywhere else.  That is how we got Obamacare and there is no limit to it.  We end up in a 1984ish sphere where there is no longer a private sphere, because even the individual and his activities affect others because Carbon has been declared a pollutant and any form of consumption naturally affects others.

Propaganda: Key To The Communist Takeover In Russia.  It was astonishing that a ragtag, uncouth band of conspiratorially inclined communists, led by V.I. Lenin, managed to topple the mighty czar of Russia and the weak social democratic government that followed him, decisively taking power in the October 1917 revolution.  But much of it can be explained by their mastery of propaganda, which was stronger, simpler, more centralized, more national and more quickly delivered than that of any of their socialist rivals.

Napoleon Invented the Modern Idea Of Public Relations.  [Scroll down]  "It has been noted that Bonaparte's military genius was not that of an originator, but rather lay in his status as one of the most able 'scramblers' or adapters in history," wrote [Wayne] Hanley.  The author added:  "The same is true of his genius for propaganda.  All the techniques and tools of propaganda used by the young general — the popular press, propagandistic art and even medals — already existed; he merely employed them on a scale and in ways never before attempted, proving himself to be among the first masters of the art of image-making."

Mark Levin: A Modern-Day Constitutional Prophet.  Mark Levin is a modern-day constitutional prophet whose purpose is not to revamp the Constitution.  It is to revive it and refurbish it — to restore the cracks in its foundation caused by lawless officials through the years who were more interested in guaranteeing outcomes than they were liberty.

Time to say good-bye to the Star-Spangled Banner?  Has the time come to replace Francis Scott Key's "Star-Spangled Banner" as America's national anthem?  Certainly the phrase "land of the free" no longer applies to this country.  I'm beginning to wonder if "home of the brave" is also anachronistic.

How Comanche Indians butchered babies, roasted enemies alive and would ride 1,000 miles to wipe out one family.  S C Gwynne, author of Empire Of The Summer Moon about the rise and fall of the Comanche, says simply:  'No tribe in the history of the Spanish, French, Mexican, Texan, and American occupations of this land had ever caused so much havoc and death.  None was even a close second.'  He refers to the 'demonic immorality' of Comanche attacks on white settlers, the way in which torture, killings and gang-rapes were routine.  'The logic of Comanche raids was straightforward,' he explains.

Largest Child-Sacrifice Graveyard Strikes Huge Blow to Native American Innocence Myth.  Every Columbus Day, liberals insist that the story of European colonization is a simple narrative of good versus evil: horrible Europeans came upon innocent Native Americans, introducing slavery, exploitation, and oppression.  A massive archaeological discovery blows one of many gaping holes in this narrative.  While Europeans did indeed do horrible things, the natives weren't exactly innocent.  Two hundred and fifty skeletons of children between the ages of 4 and 14 have been unearthed at Huanchaco, Peru, in what experts say is likely the world's largest child-sacrifice site.  Huanchaco is a site of the Chimú culture (1200-1400), a predecessor to the mighty Inca Empire, which also carried out child sacrifices.

Time for a New American Revolution?  The United States of America was born in revolution.  The Declaration of Independence asserted that people have a right of revolution. [...] The Declaration acknowledged that people should not, and will not, seek to overturn "long-established" governments "for light and transient reasons."  After "a long train of abuses and usurpations," however, which are clearly aimed at establishing "absolute Despotism," people have not only the "right," but the "duty," to "throw off such Government, and provide new guards for their future security."

What Has Mark Levin Wrought?  In The Liberty Amendments Mark Levin has delivered more than advertised.  He promises a credible agenda for reinvigorating constitutional government based on an approach to the amendment process which avoids the liabilities of better known options.  What he delivers, though, is a vast, potentially game-changing political arsenal that can be drawn upon by everyone from had-it-up-to-here Tea Partiers to Republican candidates at least sentient enough to know they need something more than budget and deficit talk.

The American Right to Revolt Against Tyranny: Part A — Ancient Roots.  The American Republic was founded upon Revolution.  Talk of resisting King George's tyranny had long been in the air in the colonies.  When the crown refused to take heed of the colonists complaints, the Americans decided they had a right to take up arms in their grievance.  Most importantly, the naturally religious Americans found biblical warrant for their armed resistance against tyranny in the ancient world and also in great theologians like Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin, Johanne Althusius and Samuel Rutherford.

Time For Third Party.  Most Americans love this nation.  The current level of bipartisan-induced rancor only accrues to the legions of government officials who create the very same problems they tell us can only be solved by more and more of their intervention.  This vicious cycle has gone on long enough.  Ronald Reagan once said, "Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction."  So is tyranny if we choose to eradicate it.  Let's eradicate it.

Government Fiddles, Our Nation's Forests Burn.  Wildfires are an entirely natural phenomenon.  However, the size, intensity and harm caused annually by the past two decades' forest fires have been greatly enhanced by human activities and inactivity — federal mismanagement of our national forests is to blame.  The simple fact is, when forests aren't allowed to burn periodically, fuel — trees and brush — builds up which results in more fires burning at hotter temperatures.

Is Obama 'Insuring' Softball Questions?  [Scroll down]  American media executives, and American journalists, might have political positions with which we cannot agree, and they might not even appear sensible, but for the most part, they are still intelligent people.  And they remember a lot of what they hear or read.  They see how this administration has approached dealing with those it might view as "enemies."  They have heard how a president's choice for the FCC views control of the media. [...] So perhaps we should view these media "softball" questions as a pre-emptive defense position.  That would be the most charitable view we could take.  Otherwise, we would have to conclude that the mainstream media are acting in collusion with the administration to undermine the Constitution of the United States of America.

Seoul Long.  Pyongyang is a great international mystery.  What makes the system of monarchical communism tick?  How are decisions made?  What are the chances for change?  But there is a bigger question much harder to answer.  Why is the U.S. still involved on the peninsula, threatening and threatened by the North?

How Not to Debate What We Should Be Doing at Movie Theaters.  On Monday [8/5/2013], tech guy Hunter Walk wrote a blog post saying that movie theaters should offer screenings with brighter lighting and WiFi, where people who want to can tweet and text and do all kinds of other "second screen experience" things.  Many people found this proposal appalling.  Or, if not appalling, certainly a little depressing.  Then this morning, another tech guy, writer and self-described entrepreneur Anil Dash, wrote a smug, scolding piece about priggish "shushers" and their obstinate refusal to let other people enjoy movies the way they want to enjoy them — meaning talking, texting, tweeting, tromboning, whatever.  It's a gruesome read.

State Seizes Two-Year-Old Child From Parents Because They Smoked Pot, Child Dies in Foster Care.  Statistics on child abuse in foster care are, perhaps unsurprisingly, hard to come by, but children in foster care may be up to 10 times more likely to die than children in the care of their own parents; one estimate places the number of children who die in foster care in the US every year at about 1540.

The Real J. Edgar Hoover?  [Scroll down]  I can further confirm that Ed Miller's eyes swelled with tears and he choked up as he talked glowingly about his old boss.  It was an intense admiration for a man who did not deserve the trashing he received in life and (even more so) in death, when he couldn't defend himself.  In fact, that's another thing typical of the left, and especially communists:  they destroy the reputations of the dead, who can't defend themselves.

Can the world cope with a trigger-happy Fed?  [Scroll down]  Bernanke is a "creditist", not a monetarist, so perhaps he really believes his own implausible hypothesis.  He thinks QE works by pushing down long-term interest rates, that is to say by manipulating the price of credit.  This is a total departure from orthodox monetary theory, whether you wish to go back to Gustav Cassel, Ralph Hawtrey, Irving Fisher, the early Keynes, Milton Friedman, Clark Warburton, and many other of the great monetarists of the last century.

A Living Document? Well, that Depends.  Our glorious President, and his almost equally glorious Attorney-General, miscellaneous members of his exalted cabinet as well as numerous members of the amazing Democrat politicians in the House and Senate are constantly reminding us that the Constitution of the United States is a "living document."  To be fair, there are a number of RINOs that try to help with their agenda as well.  By "living document" they, one presumes, mean that they are able to discern the true intent of those who drafted the original Constitution and put their intentions down on paper in clear, reasonably simple English, which are opaque to the rest of us.

Justice For Zimmerman Came From Trial By Jury, Not By Racialized Mob Rule.  'No justice, no peace" chants the telegenic mob.  In a civilized society, however, where the mob doesn't rule, justice is defined by the verdict that follows a fair trial.  It's the best that humans can do.  And in the case of George Zimmerman, we have a verdict.  It followed a trial every minute of which was seen by the world.  Nothing secret, nothing hidden.  Where in the trial was there racial bias?  What evidence of the case being tilted toward the defendant because the victim was black?  What sign of any racial animus in the jury?

Obama paints himself into a corner over Trayvon Martin.  Despite White House efforts to distance the president from the department's investigation, Obama inevitably will have to answer for how his administration proceeds.  The White House can ill afford to give critics more ammunition as the administration fends off attacks about the IRS' targeting of conservative groups, the postponement of a major part of Obamacare and the Justice Department's spying on journalists.

Zimmerman prosecutor Angela Corey may face a reckoning.  If she is put under a microscope, Angela Corey is going to be her own undoing.

Zimmerman Verdict: Race, Guns, and Baloney.  As the unnecessarily divisive and horribly overblown Zimmerman trial and its aftermath begin to fade into memory, it behooves us to gather our thoughts and ponder the notion that there are lessons to be learned from our folly, so that somehow, we can avoid the madness the next time a racially charged incident sears the consciousness of black people, reminding them of past — and present — injustices.  A folly, indeed.  The incident that led to the death of Trayvon Martin and the trial of George Zimmerman is pregnant with counterfactuals, any one of which, if they had come to pass, might have allowed us to avoid the bitterness and sense of betrayal felt by so many.

Addicted to hate.  Demagogues figured out that if you treated people like dogs they behaved exactly like them.  In the mid-20th century there was much interest in its use as a means of controlling the "masses of people".  They were taught what to like, and most especially they were taught what to hate.  And boy did it work.  For much of the middle of last century these techniques of conditioning convinced millions to kill millions.

Shut it down, Mr. President, shut it down.  Trayvon Martin was not shot while walking home.  He was shot after sucker-punching George Zimmerman, breaking his nose, knocking him down, jumping on top of him, beating him martial arts style and banging his head on a concrete walk, while Zimmerman screamed again and again, "Help me, help me."  This is what George Zimmerman said happened.  It is what the sole eyewitness to the fight, John Good, says happened.  It is what Sanford police believed.  It is what the defense proved beyond a reasonable doubt.

Zimmerman juror: Travyon 'played a huge role' in own death.  Juror B-37 says Trayvon Martin "could have walked away and gone home" after he was followed by George Zimmerman.

Injudicious Criminal Justice in Florida.  The trial of George Zimmerman should be taught in law schools and elsewhere as a prime example of one of the most mishandled and politically motivated prosecutions in recent U.S. history.  If we want to reserve the criminal-justice system for deciding guilt or innocence rather than for playing out social and racial grievances, it's important to review the spectacle we just witnessed.

What Federal Law Has Zimmerman Violated?  Why should the federal government intervene in murder, the prosecution of which is the job of the states?  The main civil-rights laws are targeted at defendants who deprive others of their federal rights acting under "color of law" — i.e., acting on behalf of the state.  That is the whole point of the Reconstruction Amendments, which the civil-rights laws implement:  to prevent states from depriving their residents of their constitutional rights.

Propaganda Through The Ages Has Been The Enemy Of Reason.  In an open, democratic society such as ours, freedom of speech and what John Stuart Mill called "the marketplace of ideas" are huge benefits.  They enable all of us, even the most marginalized, to make our case to the public, to be heard.  They allow reason to be inserted into public debate as an essential part of the checks and balances of the democratic process.  This is a healthy thing, vital for our republic.  But for those who would rule absolutely, such liberties are intolerable.  Rather than ensure a free and open discussion of ideas, philosophies and politics, they seek to monopolize the conversation.  And they do it with propaganda.

Why the Zimmerman Prosecutors Should Be Disbarred.  The State's job is to make the case for the defendant's guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.  Fifty years ago, in Brady v. Maryland, the U.S. Supreme Court established that a prosecutor's responsibility was "to seek justice fairly, not merely win convictions by any means."  In the case at hand, this meant that the State of Florida had the responsibility to share promptly all exculpatory evidence with the defense.  It did not.  One substantial block of evidence that it kept to itself until a whistleblower alerted the defense was the content of Martin's cell phone.

Take cameras out of the courtroom.  As a courtroom junkie since my early reporting days, it is at great personal sacrifice that I suggest the following:  It may be time to get television cameras out of the courtroom.  Or at least, judges might be encouraged to exclude electronic media from high-profile trials.

The Editor says...
That horse is already out of the barn and it cannot be recalled.  Now that the public has sampled "courtroom drama," this facet of the perceived "right to know" will never be withdrawn.

A Case Of Corrupt Justice In Florida.  It's come out in the George Zimmerman murder trial that the state of Florida withheld key exculpatory evidence in its arrest affidavit and charged Zimmerman under false pretenses.  Forty-four days after local police released neighborhood-watch captain Zimmerman from custody, ruling he fatally shot 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in self defense, a special state task force set up under pressure from the Obama administration decided it was murder — with no grand jury input.

The End of Obama's Brotherhood Crush.  The end of the Muslim Brotherhood government in Egypt is a blow to the cause of radical Islam.  The rise of the Brotherhood and the now deposed President Mohamed Morsi was a disaster for Egypt as well as for the West. [...] The even better news is that the Egyptian Army didn't listen to the Obama administration when it asked them not to launch what is, for all intents and purposes, a military coup that toppled a democratically elected government.

A crisis in competence.  The reason the Saudi-backed boys will get a seat at the table is simple.  Only the kingdom has the money to save Egypt from imminent starvation.  The Egyptian military can hardly turn to Obama.  Spengler notes, "Obama is all talk and no money ... the administration cannot squeeze meaningful sums out of Congress for Egyptian aid.  The only prospective rescuer with deep enough pockets to keep Egypt from disintegrating is Saudi Arabia."  He's all turban and no camels.

The Camelot Fraud.  We are coming up fast on the fiftieth anniversary of the assassination of President Kennedy.  While it is good and proper to respectfully note the assassination of any political leader in America, the establishment left in America has tried since November 1963 to bleat, blame, and badger their countrymen into accepting the false notion that Kennedy was a great president or, indeed, a good man.

Racialized prosecutorial indiscretion in the Zimmerman case.  [Scroll down]  The prosecution also serially struck whites from the jury, leading the Judge to overrule two of the strikes.  The prosecution also is obsessed with showing that Zimmerman "followed" Martin as part of "profiling" even though that has no legal significance under the law as Zimmerman was permitted to follow whomever he wanted.  The legal question is who commenced the physical altercation and what the status of that physical altercation was at the time of the use of deadly force.  On that point, the evidence in the form of physical injuries and eyewitness testimony points to Trayvon Martin as the aggressor under the law and Zimmerman having a plausible case of self-defense.

The Zimmerman trial is already over.  The tragic thing about the case is how many people jumped to conclusions before they knew the facts.

Federal Regulation Has Left America A Poorer Nation.  Some people, it seems, live to rail against free markets and free enterprise, holding them responsible for flat wages, lack of opportunity, income gaps, middle-class stagnation, poverty and economic listlessness.  They're convinced private greed holds back the government's ability to improve conditions.  But it's the government that's done the most damage to economic growth, new research shows.  America is now more of a regulatory state than a haven of free enterprise — a development that has not come without measurable cost.

The Glue Holding America Together.  Few Americans seem to worry that our present leaders have lied to or misled Congress and the American people without consequences.  Most young people cannot distinguish the First Amendment from the Fourth Amendment — and do not worry about the fact that they cannot.  Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln are mere names of grammar schools, otherwise unidentifiable to most.  Separatism is believed to bring dividends.  Here in California, universities conduct separate graduation ceremonies predicated on race — sometimes difficult given the increasingly mixed ancestry of Americans.  As in Rome, there is a vast disconnect between the elites and the people.

Church without God — by design.  It's Sunday in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and a rapt congregation listens to a chaplain preach about the importance of building a community.  A few dozen people sit quietly for the hourlong service.  Music is played, announcements are made and scholars wax poetic about the importance of compassion and community.  Outsiders could be forgiven for believing this service, with its homilies, its passing of the plate, its uplifting songs, belongs in a church.  If so, it's a church without one big player:  God.

The Editor says...
I once went to a funeral at a place like that.  It was an unforgettably creepy hour, spent among the most hopeless people on earth.

The assault on the First Amendment.  Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell gave an important speech at AEI this morning on the continuing assault on the First Amendment.  Senator McConnell is an expert on the First Amendment and he has seen the assault of which he speaks up close.  [Video clip]

Government gone wild.  With each passing week comes more proof that President Obama's government is out of control.  The past couple of months alone have produced a long list of scandals. [...] As scandal after scandal unfolds, however, Mr. Obama acts as though nothing is his fault.  The buck never stops with him.  He insists it's not his fault — the government is too immense for him to know everything that's going on.  He always finds someone else to blame.

Nancy Pelosi agrees!
Pelosi: 'To Be an Amateur is to Cast Blame on Everyone Else'.  House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said the definition of an "amateur" is to "cast blame on everyone else" and "to not take responsibility for what you are responsible for."

Why Liberals Kill.  The communist Khmer Rouge promised Cambodians peace, equality and prosperity, but then proceeded to kill off a third of them between 1975 and '79.  The Soviet Bolsheviks adopted the slogan "bread, peace and land," but then purposely starved to death nine million people during the "Great Famine."  Mao Zedong pledged to give the Chinese a better life but only delivered a quicker death, exterminating 60+ million of his countrymen.

The Regulated States of America.  In "Democracy in America," published in 1833, Alexis de Tocqueville marveled at the way Americans preferred voluntary association to government regulation. [...] Tocqueville would not recognize America today.  Indeed, so completely has associational life collapsed, and so enormously has the state grown, that he would be forced to conclude that, at some point between 1833 and 2013, France must have conquered the United States.

Law means nothing without the will to enforce it.  [Scroll down]  The left continually proves this.  The Defense of Marriage Act is law, but Barack Obama simply refuses to enforce it.  We have long had sanctuary (i.e., lawless) cities and those that refuse to obey federal drug laws.  And, of course, there are literally thousands of more obscure laws on the books that are routinely ignored by states and localities, and our government has been trampling much of the supreme law of the land — the Constitution — for 100 years.  Even more to the point here, the Obama administration has refused to enforce immigration laws already on the books and has granted a form of amnesty by executive order.  So why suppose that a few more immigration laws would make a difference?

The Sheep Look Up.  Most ordinary people — those not directly involved in politics — pay little attention to government scandals beyond their limited entertainment value. [...] But there exists a certain class of scandal that defies all the rules, that breaks down the barriers between the Beltway and the country at large.

It's better to take our chances with the Muslim terrorists than to forfeit our liberty.
Are you Willing to Die for your Freedom?  [Scroll down]  I'm willing to die for my freedom.  I'm certainly willing to take the slightly-increased risk of dying in a terrorist attack that ostensibly will result from the government not sifting my email and monitoring all my calls and banking activity and who knows what else.  At this point, I'm becoming convinced it's not worth it.  We're groping children and Korean War vets in airports as part of an expensive show of security.  We're teaching our kids to put up with government intrusion into our lives.  On my most recent flight, I saw a father help his 5-year-old son remove his shoes and show him where to put them, how to remove his belt, how to wait his turn, how to go through security and comply with routine government searches.  It's not worth the toll on our freedom and our veneration of freedom.

Surveillance and Its Discontents.  The ObamaCare mandate-tax that commands Americans to buy a private product is far more offensive to the Constitution than NSA reading the emails of terrorists overseas.  The regulatory agencies claim — and use — the power to seize property and control individual conduct.  The very administration of the entitlement state depends on tracking (Social Security numbers), data-processing (Medicare benefits) and individual scrutiny (tax audits).  The IRS knows far more about American citizens than the NSA does, and while there is much speculation about the potential for surveillance abuse, we now have real evidence of corruption at the IRS.  So which is the greater scandal?

The Obama Scandals and the Limbaugh Theorem.  [T]he Obama tactics have been successful only because of the confluence of three factors that came together at a right moment in American history.  The first is the long-term and intentional dumbing down of the American people.  The second, the incarnation of a celebrity culture as a byproduct of the ill-education of the citizenry as well as the concurrent decline of morality and denigration of religion.  The third is this nation's unhealthy obsession with race.

Federal Kudzu Is Strangling This Great Nation.  Today, despite distractions proffered by the President and his media minions, many citizens are correctly focused on alarming scandals that serve to underscore how this administration has flouted the rule of law and abused the trust of the American people. [...] Yet a related, not so obviously ominous, phenomenon also deserves our attention:  the radical over-federalization of our lives and institutions.  This now manifests itself in the view, common among our ruling elites, that every conceivable "problem" must be met by a "federal government" response.  Every issue, no matter how local or personal it once may have seemed, is now of national import and simply cannot be left to state and local government, much less to individuals or to an unregulated marketplace.

Wake Up!  Conservatives — while you are (rightly) excited about NSA snooping and partisan IRS corruption, the Congress is about to change America in a more profound, permanent way right under your noses.

Reining in Fascism.  If fascism exists in America — and the IRS targeting the Obama Administration's political and religious foes, Department of Justice spying on AP reporters, labeling a Fox News journalist a felon, and the NSA collecting millions of Americans' phone records indicate it does — how could it be changed to the republic established by the Constitution?

How much more will Americans take?  The "fundamental transformation" of America proceeds apace.  The erosion of our freedoms and traditions, once incremental and barely perceptible, accelerates daily.  Armies of bureaucrats commanded by political ideologues remarkable mainly for their galactic incompetence intrude on ever more aspects of our lives — aspects both large and small.  They tell us what light bulbs we're allowed to use and how much water we may flush.  They stick swabs in our mouths to collect our DNA and order us to buy health insurance we don't want.  They can seize our land if they think they know how to use it better, or stop us from using our land because a favored amphibian might live there too.

Press shield has holes.  In response to the acknowledged abuses of his own Justice Department, President Obama has urged Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., to reintroduce legislation for a "journalist shield law."  And in typical Washington fashion, the proposed act would do nothing to prevent the abuses that supposedly make the law so necessary.  We saw a similar response to the horrible Connecticut school shootings last December — a raft of laws that wouldn't have prevented the tragedy in the first place.  It seems that whenever government fails to do what it is supposed to do with the laws already on the books, the answer is to give the government even more power.

A Government's Targeting of Conservatives and Pregnant Women.  Government targeting of conservatives is not confined to a couple of federal departments, as demonstrated by the events in a small District of Columbia employee relations board.  A letter obtained by PJ Media documents open racism and hostility toward pregnant and conservative employees in the D.C. Public Employee Relations Board (PERB).  The letter also demonstrates that lawless hostility toward conservatives is a characteristic of all levels of government.

One Man's Hitler Fascination.  Here's a story you probably haven't heard, unless you read Drudge or Breitbart.  The Independent in the U.K. has published a story, as have a couple of Jewish outlets.  That's all I can find.  You tell me if it qualifies as "news" that the "news " media should be covering.  It involves a young man who would someday become one of the best-known and most powerful men in the world.  A new book is out.  It explores recently uncovered diaries kept by this young man.  The journal entries document his fascination with Adolf Hitler and Nazism.

Author: Soviet agents subverted US in 1930s.  Syndicated columnist Diana West says the ultimate conclusion of her new book shocked even her.  "Americans have been betrayed ... by our leaders going back to FDR's administration in the 1930s because we were penetrated by Soviet agents to such an extent that our policies and, indeed I argue, our character as a nation was subverted," she explained in an interview with The Daily Caller's Ginni Thomas about her book, "American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation's Character."  "I don't believe we won World War II," West added.  "I believe that we were actually carrying out Soviet strategy due to this penetration."

Scandals usually lead to reform. Maybe not this time.  Put aside the politics, and the question of who-knew-what-when.  There are two policy problems highlighted by the controversies at the Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Justice.  The first is the growth of 501(c)(4) groups into vehicles for anonymous and unlimited political spending.  The second is the Obama administration's overzealous prosecution of leaks.  Unfortunately, for those who would like to see these policy problems resolved, the wrong party is angry about them and the wrong party is complacent.

Don't Blow the Opportunity Obama Has Handed Us.  The American founding fathers understood that government expands and becomes tyrannical not because it is inherently corrupt, but government, because of its unique role in the affairs of a nation, can easily be transformed into an overwhelming instrument of oppression and self-aggrandizement. [...] This process, while slowly evolving over the past eighty years, has hit the crisis point with the most corrupt and ideological administration in American history, coupled with the massive infiltration of government agencies andf [sic] the mainstream media by those motivated by ideology, greed and narcissism.

Five reasons why focus on scandals is unlikely to backfire on GOP as in 1998.  As multiple scandals have simultaneously engulfed the Obama administration, a number of political observers have cautioned Republicans against overreaching.  Liberal blogger Greg Sargent writes over at the Washington Post that, "the current scandal-mania gripping the GOP risks bringing about a rerun of 1998, when the frenzy amid the Monica Lewinsky revelations led the GOP to overreach, resulting in backlash."

A Crisis of Authority.  Democracy is in peril:  That is an emerging theme of the liberal left's response to the Obama scandals.  The argument misses the point, no doubt deliberately.  What we are witnessing now is not a crisis of democracy but a crisis of authority.  The administrative state, in thrall to a decadent cultural elite, has lost the consent of the governed.

Obama's Scandals Reveal the True Face of Government.  I take a bipartisan approach to Washington, DC's political scandals and find myself savoring them all, regardless of the party that is in control of the White House.  Any sane person would conclude that all administrations and bureaucracies essentially are corrupt given that they thrive on the exertion of power of other people.  We know about the corrupting influence of power, and DC has become like ancient Rome that way.  It's a magnet for those seeking favor, money, or a big title administering some pointless program.

The Lying King.  At a dinner not long ago someone described the wonders of a new product which uploaded your vital signs to the Cloud, a process that was so much more accurate than having to take it yourself and write it down on a piece of paper. [... But] The American economy increasingly runs on information.  That also means that it increasingly runs on trust.

In Praise of Schadenfreude.  Why is anybody surprised by the tactics of this administration?  Starting with the 2008 campaign, some of us have been warning about the fundamental nature of a crew whose explicit goal was the fundamental transformation of the United States of America.  Today, as scandal piles upon scandal, the press finally seems to be waking up to the fact that it's been had.

O's scandals take nation by storm.  As a metaphor for big government, it is hard to top the Justice Department's seizing of journalists' phone records from The Associated Press.  Unless, of course, you think the best example is the Internal Revenue Service turning the screws on groups it viewed as conservative and, therefore, unworthy of fair treatment.  Or maybe the winner is the sneaky spreading of ObamaCare's tentacles, with insurance companies now predicting the law will drive up the cost of individual premiums by as much as 400 percent.  There are no losers in this race to the bottom — except the American people.

A Dangerous Mind.  [Scroll down]  In fact the worst recorded cases of modern terrorism never used a firearm.  The attackers on September 11 used box cutters.  Jim Jones used a poisoned Kool-Aid.  Shoko Ashara manufactured Sarin.  Timothy McVeigh's weapon of choice was fertilizer.  The Boston Bombers wreaked their mayhem with nothing but pressure cookers and black powder.  Their real weapon was not the box cutter.  It was knowledge.  For a choice of enemies pick a paranoid illiterate holed up in a mountain cabin with a rifle and six cases of beans over an MIT engineering graduate out to kill the world any day of the week.

Furlough ObamaCare Folks, Not Air Traffic Controllers.  The administration furloughed federal workers whose absences would cause the most pain to the public.  ObamaCare officials, meanwhile, are still at work, though they should have been the first ones sent home.

Selective Constitutional Deafness.  Often a phenomenon of bad marriages, "selective deafness" is when one hears only what is convenient.  The same failing manifests itself in government when politicians and judges hear the Constitution talk only when it sings their tune.  Worse still, sometimes these people behave as if the document says things it doesn't.  This is the equivalent of hearing things.

Clarence Thomas: Obama 'Approved By The Elites' Because He Says What They 'Expect From A Black Person'.  Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas ripped the media and took a subtle dig at President Obama during an CSPAN interview dated from April 9th.  When asked about how he felt about the nation's first black President, Barack Obama, Thomas said he always knew it would have to be a person who was "approved by the elites and the media" because if it was someone who they didn't agree with, that person would be picked apart.

Flying the Government Skies.  Start with the Federal Aviation Administration, better known as the Postal Service without the modern technology.  Flyers directly fund two-thirds of the FAA's budget through 17 airline taxes and fees — about 20% of the cost of a $300 domestic ticket, up from 7% in the 1970s.  Yet now the White House wants to make this agency that can't deliver what passengers are supposedly paying for even more dysfunctional.

The Corruption of Big Spending Democrats.  A sad fact is that few of the votes cast by our Senators and Congressmen are cast based on the merits of the main bill.  Instead they are cast to get give-aways paid for courtesy of the American taxpayers.  The best reform movement our government could make, one that would help cut the size of government, is to initiate a movement to have stand-alone bills where the only amendments allowed are those that pertain directly to the subject of the bill.

[The] Air Traffic Slowdown is [a] Manufactured Crisis.  So the sky is not falling, the government is beginning to see higher revenues, the deficit appears to have shrunk a little and Social Security checks are going out on time.  But over at the Federal Aviation Administration, they're playing a different game, hitting the air-flying public and air freight industry where it hurts the most:  lengthy delays that cost time and money.  FAA officials say sequestration cuts have forced them to sharply reduce the number of air traffic controllers and that they had no other options.

Demonizing Ted Cruz.  Ted Cruz has made quite an impression in just three months in the Senate.  Like Marco Rubio, he is the son of a Cuban exile.  He is a extraordinarily talented guy.  Unlike Barack Obama, he had a stellar record both in academia and in the practice of law:  he was national debating champion, graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School, clerked for the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, was named by American Lawyer magazine as one of the 50 Best Litigators under 45 in America, served as Solicitor General of the State of Texas and authored more than 80 briefs in the U.S. Supreme Court.[...] So it is not surprising that, just as Cruz has quickly become a hero on the right, the Democratic Party is out to destroy him.

Media Chorus to Silence Ted Cruz Growing Louder.  The complaints are all quite familiar by now:
  •   "He has already turned the Senate's ancient seniority system upside down and is dominating his senior Republican colleagues."
  •   "Cruz is 42, the same age Joe McCarthy was when he amassed power in the Senate with his allegations of communist infiltration.  Tail-gunner Ted debuted in the Senate this year with the insinuation that Chuck Hagel, now the defense secretary, may have been on the payroll of the North Koreans.  Cruz also wrote in Politico that "Hagel's nomination has been publicly celebrated by the Iranian government."
  •   "Now Cruz is turning his incendiary allegations against fellow Republicans."

Silence of the Lambs in America.  As Americans, we are witnessing the systematic dismantling of our country by the incremental erosion of our liberties and rights by methods that are shaking the very foundations upon which this country was founded.  We've seen this before, as history is filled with examples of our current predicament; but somehow, today, things seem different to those who are paying attention.

Liberals accomplish massive changes through innocuous incremental steps.  Note the steps:
  •   Ask for more than you know you can achieve.  In fact, ask for something you don't even want.  Then everyone will be focused more on that than on your real goal.
  •   Use all media and educational tools to inculcate your view in the public and low-information voters.
  •   Develop your own lexicon, redefine words, and then keep pounding those words into the psyche each time you speak.
  •   Attack your opponents not on logic or facts, but by name-calling and emotion, and accuse them of being "obstructionist."
  •   When you concede, always be sure you've moved the marker a little farther toward your goal.
  •   Reset the measures so that the new position is now considered "normal," which makes it impossible for anyone to argue against or reverse.

A Primer for Understanding Obama's Budget.  Congress can misrepresent the effects of any given piece of legislation in complex ways.  It does not do so by entering, say, $800 million when the correct number is $900 million.  Instead, Congress enacts certain tax and spending measures as "temporary" when it has no intention of allowing the provision to lapse; or it assumes legislative provisions in current law that would cut spending will be made, when Congress knows they never will.

We need an IQ test for politicians.  While politicians talk about expanding background checks for gun owners, I'm starting to think that what we really need are IQ tests for political officeholders.  The only problem is, that might leave us with a lot of vacancies in Congress and America's statehouses.

They pay less, so you pay more.
Understanding the Many Costs of Corporate Welfare.  Beneficiaries of the various special tax treatments and exceptions include owners of NASCAR speedways, companies in American Samoa, rum producers, businesses on Indian reservations, railroads, Hollywood moviemakers, and green-energy firms, including wind-power equipment producers. [...] Corporate welfare is a way for politicians to maintain the façade of a free economy while rewarding some activities and punishing others.

You are among the last weeds in the Marxist Garden.  If we do not eradicate the parasites from our Society, then our society will collapse.  We can tolerate some quantity of parasitic leeching, but not the level we have today.  According to recent reports half of the households in America receive some sort of parasitic benefit, and a third of our population are suffering one STD or another, half of all marriages end in divorce, our literacy rate and cognitive abilities of our young are in the toilet, homosexuality is accepted to be on the same moral plane as matrimony, and the number of Americans today who genuinely subscribe to Jefferson's Rightful Liberty is probably under 3% of the population.

When the government goes bankrupt.  [Bankruptcy] rarely happens to the government.  That's because the government, which has no competition, creates no wealth, doesn't produce anything of value and needn't attract clients, has a monopoly on the use of force with which it can extract what it needs to pay for its mistakes in the form of higher taxes.  These extractions, of course, are not voluntary transactions as when you buy gas for your car or food for your table.  They are mafia-style transactions: Pay us more, or else.

Long knives for Ben Carson.  Among the people who "do more before breakfast than most others do all day," Dr. Benjamin S. Carson, head of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins is atop the list.  What he does really is brain surgery, and not just brain surgery, but brain surgery on infants, the most delicate of patients.  His steady hands and quiet manner in the operating room will be excellent training for his latest challenge:  withstanding the verbal slings and arrows of black leaders who don't like his political views.

Why Freight Rail Pays and Passenger Trains Flunk.  The past 40 years have seen a laboratory experiment on how to revive railroads.  Government has gotten out of freight rail, while passenger rail has become largely a public sector function.  We've had a chance to see which works better and to understand why.

When Men Forsake God, Tyranny Always Follows.  The prophetic words of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn resonate like thunder across the history of man.  "Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened." [...] Godlessness is always the first step to the concentration camp.  Tragically, that same process is now at work in America and many other parts of the world.  Too many refuse to see it or believe it.

Why America should have elected Gary Johnson.  Republicans who wanted change or saw something wrong couldn't criticize George W. Bush when he was in office because it would have been disloyal to their party.  Democrats now can't criticize President Barack Obama because of the fear that they will be castigated for disloyalty to their president.  But who, if anyone, speaks today with loyalty to the people, to the Constitution and to our Republic?

The Editor says...
Perhaps America should have elected Barry Goldwater, but there's no point in speculating about it now.

Bread and Circuses: The Last Days of the American Empire.  Pan et Circenses (Bread and Circuses) famously described the relationship between the Roman Emperor and his people in the decadent years of the Empire, and they seem fairly applied to America today.  We have, in line with our technological advancement, upgraded (if that is the term) to food stamps (47.5 million and counting) and sports, but the broad scenario hasn't changed.  The Romans devalued their denarius by reducing its silver content; we devalue our dollar by issuing more of them against an unchanged amount of real wealth.  To wit:  Gas was 20 cents a gallon in the early 1930's; a new 1937 Chevrolet could be had for $725 and a 1940 haircut was $0.50.  Imperial Rome failed to manage its finances; imperial America's debt, deficits and inflation are just an updated rerun.

Trouble is Brewing in America.  Ordinary American citizens may need guns and ammunition to defend themselves and their families in the not-so-distant future.  That's why they are buying AR 15s and other scary looking weapons in record numbers.  Like me, they can see the writing on the wall, and they are preparing for what might happen.

One of the nastiest and most immoral political acts in modern times.  People who rob old ladies in the street, or hold up security vans, are branded as thieves.  Yet when Germany presides over a heist of billions of pounds from private savers' Cyprus bank accounts, to 'save the euro' for the hundredth time, this is claimed as high statesmanship.  It is nothing of the sort.  The deal to secure a €10 billion German bailout of the bankrupt Mediterranean island is one of the nastiest and most immoral political acts of modern times.  It has struck fear into the hearts of hundreds of millions of European citizens, because it establishes a dire precedent.

Jane Goodall's Troubling, Error-Filled New Book, 'Seeds of Hope'.  Last week famed primatologist Jane Goodall was found to have plagiarized parts of her new book, but a deeper look reveals a work plagued by rampant copying, obvious errors, and ominous junk science.

Can It Happen Here?  The decision of the government in Cyprus to simply take money out of people's bank accounts there sent shock waves around the world. [...] The economic repercussions of having people feel that their money is not safe in banks can be catastrophic.

NASA's Chinese Spy Problem.  Looks like NASA is suffering from a massive infestation of Chinese spies.  So, let me get this straight (and I'm not being funny here):
  •   We've got radical Islamists in our government, committing a soft coup from within.  Check.
  •   We've got Commie radicals in our unions, schools and major institutions.  Check.
  •   We've got Commies, radical Islamists and spies in our political ranks.  Check.
  •   We've got Commie spies from China throughout our scientific communities.  Check.
The only surprise here, is that we haven't been totally destroyed from the enemies within yet.

Liberty and Self-Government: California or Texas?  This week America took a step toward Texas, and away from California.  On the same day the Alamo fell 117 years ago, the historic filibuster of Rand Paul scored, with an assist by Senator Ted Cruz.  It did so because these men understand that the leadership America has achieved in military, economic, scientific and cultural arenas is not due to its size or population.  Nor is its unheralded dominance the result of an accident.  With only five percent of the world's population, America is dwarfed.  But its founders were giants.

Escape From Spending Hell.  So it looks like we've all been sentenced to spending at least two more years in budget hell with Barack Obama.  Under the rules of budget hell set the past four years by the prince of Pennsylvania Avenue, you're not allowed to do anything real about federal spending.  You can only fight over federal spending.  Forever.

The Escape and Roundup of the Sheep.  Of all of the stupid things we do, changing our clocks each spring and fall, has to rank near the top.  The anarchists of Arizona don't recognize the spring forward, fall back national stupidity that occurs twice a year at 2 a.m. on a Sunday morning.  In fact, Arizona seems to do just fine without that bi-annual disruption.  Odd.  The question I have isn't whether or not the time change is useful — clearly it is not.  The real fun occurs when we ask ourselves, "How do we get rid of it?"

Is it time to end Daylight Saving Time?  [Scroll down]  In any case, the United States formally instituted Daylight Saving Time in 1918 to place work and school schedules within daylight hours to save electricity.  But now lighting accounts for a small amount of energy consumed by the country, and the savings are minimal, argues Bora Zivkovic, a chronobiologist.  Moreover scientists are beginning to understand good reasons why changing our clocks back and forth is not at all good for humans.

Death to Daylight Saving Time.  This morning you were required to get out of bed an hour earlier than you rose last Monday.  If you are like most people, you did so in the same spirit of resignation with which you endure winter rain, believing that there are benefits to be gained from Daylight Saving Time that outweigh its discomfort and inconvenience.  This belief, however, has no basis in reality.  Unlike cold rain, which at least provides sustenance for the land and its inhabitants, DST offers no benefit whatsoever.  Indeed, evidence is mounting that it actually constitutes a threat to your health and adds substantially to the cost of American medical care.

Surviving the coming collapse.  Based on my investigation, numerous interviews and hours upon hours of extensive research, one thing appears to be certain.  The collapse of the U.S. dollar is a mathematical certainty, it merely a question of when.  No one seems able to answer the timing aspect of such an event, although they all comfortably believe it will be sometime within the next 18-24 months at the "outside."  Quietly, however, they have murmured that they don't think we have that much time.

Why Florida Persists in the Zimmerman Prosecution.  Prodded by a president with a weakness for racial agitation and enabled by a politically complicit media, the State of Florida persists in a prosecution that can come to no good end.  The defendant is neighborhood watch captain George Zimmerman.  The charge is the second-degree murder.  The potential outcomes range from major injustice, if Zimmerman is convicted, to mayhem in the streets, if he's acquitted.

The media's approach to Rand Paul's filibuster: pretend it never happened.  During his filibuster odyssey, Paul demonstrated that he is a lucid speaker, who still managed to make sense after almost twelve hours on his feet.  No wonder the Young Gun Republicans in the Senate soon rallied to his cause.  (And no wonder the Old Gun Republicans went off to enjoy an expensive dinner with Barack Obama.)  In one staggering feat, Rand Paul demonstrated he is contender material for the 2016 presidential election.

Bradley Manning is lucky he's not charged with treason.  Army Pfc. Bradley Manning pleaded guilty Thursday [2/28/2013] to 10 charges related to the misuse of federal documents.  He will likely spend 20 years in prison for these offenses.  He may face further charges, and we hope the military prosecutes him on as many of them as possible.

Big Government Likes To Inflict Pain To Avoid Cuts.  Back in my teaching days, many years ago, one of the things I liked to ask the class to consider was this:  Imagine a government agency with only two tasks:  (1) building statues of Benedict Arnold and (2) providing life-saving medications to children.  If this agency's budget were cut, what would it do?  The answer, of course, is that it would cut back on the medications for children.  Why?  Because that would be what was most likely to get the budget cuts restored.  If they cut back on building statues of Benedict Arnold, people might ask why they were building statues of Benedict Arnold in the first place.

Fighting the Real Enemy.  [Scroll down]  That is our situation today.  We have a federal budget law which is simply ignored, and immigration laws are not enforced.  The Tenth and Ninth Amendments, intended to preserve the autonomy of states and of individuals, have been scrubbed out of the Constitution.  We have no "government" in America at all any longer; we have a regime of intimidation whose real masters do not hold public offices.

The Democratic Majority Is Doomed.  [Scroll down]  More recently, leftists took to calling themselves "progressives" to avoid what was seen as the pejorative term "liberal."  And just over two years ago, the Democrats took a drubbing in the midterm elections.  Today, with the real-time flow of unfiltered information via blogs, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc., and more Americans self-identifying as independents and able to shift their support rapidly to either party, lasting coalitions will be difficult to maintain.

Repeal the 17th Amendment!  [T]he American system was deliberately designed to balance power between the various branches of government and to guarantee individual rights against majority rule, thus protecting the people from tyranny whether they liked it or not.  The United States government was arranged in this way as a permanent bulwark against federal encroachment.  "Changing times" was no more a strong justification for the undoing of this system in 1913 than it is now.  And whatever the Wilson-era progressives might have held, the federal government was not intended to be a wholly separated layer of government.  Instead, it was to be intertwined with the states to such an extent that it could not ride roughshod over their interests without pushback.

The Tyrant in Your Television.  When conservatives point to the obvious contradiction between Barack Obama's words and actions on spending, taxes, healthcare, the free market, Benghazi, and almost everything else, they merely reveal their naïvité.  Obama, like [Bill] Clinton, is not a president, or even a human, in the old sense of those terms.  He is a TV-president and a TV-human; his words need not match any reality beyond the media apparatus in which he "exists."  He is to be judged according to whether his TV-presidency is interesting and entertaining.  When the greater public gets bored of the show, they will switch channels and watch a different show.

"We Have An Entitlement Problem" And One Day The Fed's Hamster Wheel Will Stop.  The media was more concerned about the fiscal cliff and what might happen to the economy over the three months than the big picture which is the debt which is going to swallow our kids in 15 or 20 years.  They totally take a pass on entitlements which is the problem.

The Decline of America.  Americans have never led such affluent material lives — at least as measured by access to cell phones, big-screen TVs, cheap jet travel, and fast food.  Obesity rather than malnutrition is the greater threat to national health.  Flash mobs go after electronics stores, not food markets.  Americans spend more money on Botox, face lifts, and tummy tucks than on the age-old scourges of polio, smallpox, and malaria.

The audacity of Ben Carson.  [President] Obama is not used to being challenged, especially in public, even if indirectly and without being specifically named.  From the look on his face, it was obvious Obama was none too pleased with Carson's message or with his "presumptuousness" in presenting it in that forum, while he had to sit still and — remain silent.

Confederalism.  Confederalism also allows people to choose to live in states which reflect their values.  Those people truly interested in "diversity" ought to delight in this aspect of Confederalism.  Those states that wish to recognize gay marriage, under the principles of Confederalism, can do that.  Those states that wish to have prayer in public school can do that, too.  As with any market-driven system, everyone wins.  If Confederalism is the tonic our nation needs, what can we do about it?

We, the Grand Jury.  The education citizens gain by participating in the grand jury process — and it is estimated that one-third of Americans will serve on some sort of jury in their lifetime — isn't only about their criminal justice system.  It's also about their community.

A Perfect Contrast.  The revelation here is not that Barack Obama is a PC thug who intends to transform the fabric of America, or that he makes victims of women rather than empowering them, or that he subscribes to a Marxist's notion of fairness by coercion, or that his healthcare solution is a muddled, hopeless mess sold on Utopian dreams.  We already knew all that.  No, the real revelation is that at this year's prayer breakfast, so often only a pious ritual, his exact opposite stood and spoke in sharp contrast to our president.

Don't give up rights without a fight.  Somehow, in 237 years, we have gone from declaring the necessity of dissolving political bands with England and explaining proudly why we must do so ... to the current pusillanimous acquiescence to tyranny which we are assured by the villains in Washington, D.C, is better than the alternative.  Don't you believe it.  The alternative, ladies and gentleman, is freedom.

Do We Live in a Post-Truth Era?  "Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts," the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.) famously quipped.  But when it comes to social and environmental problems nowadays, nearly everyone thinks he is entitled to his own facts, and an army of experts is on hand to manufacture and promote the carefully curated truths they require.

The Super Bowl Veers Left.  During Sunday's Super Bowl, the advertising and programming executives in Hollywood and New York graced us with their version of what we want to see.  And if it's any reflection of reality, we're becoming a coarser, stupider, and less value-oriented nation.

Hijacking Rights.  Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the "hidden" confiscation of wealth.  Gold stands in the way of this insidious process.  It stands as a protector of property rights."  Fiat money is a credit con game.  It borrows money from you today which is paid by money it will borrow from you tomorrow.  This con game has now run up a debt of $16 trillion and an unfunded liability of $100 trillion.

Unite or Perish.  Americans who value the Constitution and the Founders' vision must set aside their differences and unite upon common ground or we all can continue to watch American freedom perish.  It is time to regroup, re-engage, and organize and, most importantly:  Unite or perish.

The Editor says...
I'm so sick of this "set aside your differences" nonsense.  "Americans who value the Constitution and the Founders' vision" don't have any major differences.  Differences exist between true conservatives and so-called "big tent" people — godless centrists who want to include abortion, same-sex marriage, open borders, women in combat, and global warming battles into the Republican platform.

Dangerous Times: Gimme a General Who Won't Fight!  Lincoln's first generals fought desperately hard, but not hard enough to win.  In the upshot, the Civil War dragged out to became our bloodiest war ever, 600,000 dead — mostly white folks.  And yes, it was triggered by Christian Abolitionists who made slavery morally intolerable to half the nation.  Lincoln was therefore forced to find generals who would fight, and he found Sherman and Grant, who wreaked terrible destruction on the South.  He could see no alternative.  Soldiers who survived the Civil War lived with their painful wounds for the rest of their lives.  They had no modern painkillers, no antibiotics, just liquor, morphine and silent suffering.

Big Government Is Bad Government Because Power Attracts The Corrupt.  It's a good bet that no matter where you are on the political spectrum-liberal, conservative, libertarian or something else-you want men and women in government to be honest, humble, fair, wise, independent, responsible, incorruptible, mindful of the future and respectful of others.  But you may be holding profoundly contradictory views without realizing it.  This is the bottom line:  The bigger government gets, the less likely it will attract men and women who possess those traits we all say we want.

Good Sense and Gun Control.  In the early 1980s, transit officials in Washington couldn't figure out why traffic on the Beltway would grind to a near halt every day around the exact same time.  The usual explanations didn't fit.  Then it was discovered that a single driver was to blame.  Every day on his drive to work, this commuter would plant himself in the left lane and set his cruise control to 55 mph, the posted speed limit, forcing those behind him to merge right, and you can imagine the effects.

What Happened to Our Country?  A yearning exists for the days when children rode their bikes to schools, which were open with flowing green fields where they frolicked under minimal supervision.  Now children are escorted by grownups to their schools, which are fenced in and then locked down.  Remember even at Sandy Hook the school was locked down at 9:30 each morning, just as almost all elementary schools are today.  What does it say to the children of our country that they have to be escorted everywhere they go?  Are they left to think that wherever they go there are people in uniforms providing security and their parents are on a constant vigil watching them?  What kind of country have we passed to them?

A Revolution is Part Anger and Outrage, and This is Revolution.  When the peasants revolt, they can often be tricked into going home with some false promises and free beer.  It worked more often with the serfs in European history than you would think.  It's the middle class that you really have to watch out for. [...] The most dangerous people are the ones who have tasted enough freedom and prosperity to want to keep it.

Flip of a $1 trillion coin.  The Obama administration has finally put to rest the absurd plan to mint a $1 trillion coin to evade spending limitations, but the idea remains a sad sign of the times. [...] This year will be the fifth in a row in which the federal government has spent $1 trillion more than it took in.  It's a relief that the Treasury has finally ruled out this shell game, but at the same time it is an apt symbol of how Washington has grown so out of control that such a plan could be entertained.

A land less free.  The United States is no longer a beacon of freedom to the world.  Countries once looked to America for inspiration on how to escape poverty and embrace prosperity, but now they can find better examples to follow. [...] U.S. economic policy has broken faith with the Founding Fathers, who preached the value of property rights, sound money and the rule of law.  Our government has traded the frugality of Benjamin Franklin for a habit of spending $1 trillion more than it takes in each year.  Profligate lawmakers use public funds to bail out Wall Street banks and Detroit labor unions.

Congress Must hold Hearings into the Al Jazeera Deal.  If Homeland Security Committee Chairman Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas) lets the Al Jazeera-Al Gore deal go through without scrutiny, then every broadcast entity or communications facility in America is ripe for the plucking by any of our nation's enemies and adversaries.  For those who haven't been paying attention lately, the government of Qatar has announced a deal through Al Jazeera with former Democratic Vice President Al Gore for his Current TV cable channel, in order to transform it into an arm of its Jihadist or "Terror TV" network, once known as a mouthpiece for mass murderer Osama bin Laden.  They are planning to call it "Al Jazeera America," when the oil money for the transaction is coming from abroad.

Allen West: The only gun control is your index finger.  West believes that it just won't fly with the American people and he doesn't believe that Obama has the populous mandate that he things he has.  West says we're not talking about the real issues anyway, we're just talking about a political agenda.

America Is Reaping From Its Moral Collapse.  How could America have become such an alien place, where bedrock principles of the Constitution face imminent threat and the nation's finances careen towards implosion, with Washington oblivious to the scope of the problem?  How could an event as horrendous as the Sandy Hook shootings be so shamelessly exploited by politicians who clearly have no interest in addressing its root causes or achieving workable solutions, yet are happy to wield it as a means of bludgeoning their political opposition?

It's about more than guns.  Today, we find ourselves at the precipice of a tyrannical takeover and the complete destruction of our Republic, best illustrated by the talk of disarming the American populace.  The assertion is that the it's for the children when, in fact, the children are being used as political capital to advance the political agenda of American disarmament, loss of liberty, sovereignty, and the rights bestowed on our Republic by God as enumerated by our Constitution.  Notice how there is a war not only against gun owners, but a parallel war against the very Judeo-Christian principles on which this country was founded.

Limbaugh Asks CNN: How Would You React If Bush/Cheney Tried To Use Executive Order On Abortion?  "If George Bush, and Dick Cheney, and Alberto Gonzales got together and decided too many people were dying because of abortion in this country, and said that they were looking at ways to curb abortion, and one of the things they were doing was using executive orders on abortion," Limbaugh said to CNN in particular, "what do you think your reaction would be?  I'm telling you:  outraged panic would set in."

Why Americans cannot discipline their children.  The ultimate reason that Americans are unable to discipline their children is that they have no authority over them.  The American state, together with private industry, especially the "helping professions," have usurped their authority in loco parentis, thus empowering physicians, psychologists, judges, social workers, dentists and other health workers by, in effect, reducing people to parental incompetence.  American children run amuck, throw tantrums in the "terrible twos" and "fearsome fours," and commit indignities against their parents and maliciously disobey them such as to shock the rest of the world.

The right to shoot tyrants, not deer.  There have been practical historical reasons for the near universal historical acceptance of the individual possession of this right.  The dictators and monsters of the 20th century — from Stalin to Hitler, from Castro to Pol Pot, from Mao to Assad — have disarmed their people.  Only because some of those people resisted the disarming were all eventually enabled to fight the dictators for freedom.  Sometimes they lost.  Sometimes they won.  The principal reason the colonists won the American Revolution is that they possessed weapons equivalent in power and precision to those of the British government.

Democrat Hurricanes Versus Republican Hurricanes.  Mature adults understand that earthquakes, hurricanes and other natural disasters are an unfortunate fact of life.  They further know that government agencies are, by their very nature, slow and lumbering animals.  [Paul] Krugman was right about one thing, though.  Sandy would not be Obama's Katrina because the press is on his side.  President Obama parachuted into New Jersey after the storm and declared that he would not tolerate "red tape" or "bureaucracy" by the government.  He then hopped back aboard Air Force One and resumed his campaign schedule.

20 Ways America Has Begun to Reap What It Has Sown.  [#8]  We allow communists, terrorists, and people who hate America to be public university professors in this country; then we're surprised when our college students graduate without understanding how this country works and what made it great in the first place.

The real Obama returns.  "Why," asked The Washington Post on the eve of the final "fiscal-cliff" agreement, "is the nation's leader not embracing and then explaining the balanced reforms the nation needs?"  Because he has no interest in them.  He's a visionary, not an accountant.  Sure, he'll pretend to care about deficits, especially while running for re-election.  But now that he's past the post, he's free to be himself — a committed big-government social-democrat.

Can You Imagine King George III Telling Our Nation's Founders They Couldn't Have Muskets?  From Hollywood's heavily armed guarded elite to the radical, anti-gun commie rag Journal News, peaceful and upright average Joes are being isolated and concentrated on as the bane of America's existence just because we righteously and lawfully keep and bear arms.  Hollywood has even cobbled together a little tsk-tsk black and white video demanding our government do something about gun violence.  That would be the very gun violence they have glamorized on the big screen for the last few decades.

Who's 'Dangerous'?  The case for locking up the dangerous usually proceeds from three assumptions:  (1) that any person who commits atrocities such as the Newtown or Colorado shootings must be mentally ill (and thus, a proper subject of psychiatric treatment); (2) that "dangerousness" is a quantifiable entity which can be accurately identified and measured, like flour or sugar; and, (3) that involuntary civil commitment on grounds of dangerousness poses no threat to individual rights because it does not risk a criminal conviction or imprisonment.  All three assumptions are demonstrably wrong.

Who Would Dare Veto the Sandy Bill?  In the late 19th century we had a president empowered by the same Constitution we have now, who felt its limitations mattered.  Today's politicians, judges, academia and mainstream media are unashamed to openly defy the Constitution, circumvent it, or declare it outdated and irrelevant — while at the same time seeking to publicly shame those who strive to adhere to it, or at the very least hesitate to spend what our treasury doesn't hold.

O's cloud over us all.  More than ever, the "invisible hand" of free markets is being replaced by the visible hand of bureaucrats.  The political class is the new master of the universe. [...] That's because the tax-and-spending drama in Washington, as pathetic and infuriating as it is, threatens real-world consequences for every American.  How could it be otherwise when Big Government is getting bigger?

Guns are dangerous, but people are more so.  Guns are dangerous, but only in the hands of dangerous or irresponsible people.  Guns also represent safety when they are in the hands of those who know how to use them correctly, and those whose hearts are pure.  But now, it appears that Sen. Diane Feinstein, Rep. Nancy Pelosi and numerous other legislators are intent on shaming those responsible people who have guns, rather than focusing on trying to find ways to make society safer by making sure that crazy people get treatment and evil people go to jail — before they make their suicidal last stand.

Guns Are Not the Problem, People Are.  In the wake of the Sandy Hook shootings, there has been a flurry of calls for gun control.  Senator Diane Feinstein has called for national gun control legislation, which is supported by President Obama.  Bob Costas and Piers Morgan have made condescending remarks on TV towards those who do not support gun control. [...] However, gun control is not and will never be the answer to ending violence.  Using the tragedy at sandy hook [sic] as a catalyst for more Government control over our lives and actions will only compound violence in our society.

Has Obama's Big Spending Also Bought American Silence On Chinese Prison Camps?  Despite a slew of laws to the contrary, it looks as though America's vaunted trade relationship with China — the one hailed by the Obama administration and praised by CEOs from Siemens, Bayer, Coca-Cola, Citibank, and General Electric — remains what it always has been:  a great slave empire.

The Politics of Gun Control.  If we are going to take effective action against events like the Newtown massacre, it's not our freedoms that should be limited.  We've protected the dangerous mentally ill so well that it's extremely difficult under most states' laws, to take them off the streets.  And even where — as in Connecticut — the laws provide the means to do so, those laws are not used effectively.  Their freedoms are trumping our right to safe schools, movie theaters, and shopping malls.

The Worst School Massacre In American History Was 'Gun-Free'.  It was the unspeakably horrible, evil act of a man who had become insane.  Of a man whose heart was so cold that he could no longer sense any difference between right and wrong.  Against such people, no law passed by Congress will ever prevail.  Only the final judgment will.

Does the Promise of Media Coverage Encourage Mass Murder?  What are the guaranteed promises the media makes to those willing to go on a shooting-spree targeting innocent people?  The answer is simple:
    1. The media will make you famous.
    2. The media will ensure your crime controls the national conversation for days, even weeks.
    3. The media will try to make your crime relevant when it comes to national policy.
    4. The more awful your crime, the more attention you'll receive.
    5. The media debate and push for political impact will be so great, the president of the United States will talk about what you did, books will be published, and movies will be made.

"Progressive" talk radio station shuts down, feels betrayed.  From the website of WVKO 1580AM in Columbus, "Ohio's Progressive Talk":  ["]It is with great sadness I must inform WVKO's listeners that once again, Progressive Talk will be silenced on the Columbus airwaves.  Our one-year lease on the station is about to expire, and at this time there is no way that we can continue operating the station.["]

The Editor says...
Left-wing talk radio has been tried many times and has never been commercially successful, because (1) there aren't that many leftists, partly because they feel free to abort their offspring, (2) if you've heard one episode of a left-wing rant program, you've heard them all, (3) advertisers won't support tax-and-spend anticapitalists who are trying to put those advertisers out of business, or under the control of the government, and (4) the message from left-wing talk radio is tiresome and disheartening:  There is never anything uplifting in the extemporaneous rant of a baby-killing totalitarian marxist.  A lot of late-night right-wing radio is tiresome, too, but at least it's punctuated with pride in our country, love of freedom, and faith in God.

Our Financial Crisis Is Government-Created.  Suppose you saw a building on fire.  Would you seek counsel from the arsonist who set it ablaze for advice on how to put it out? [...] But that's precisely what we've done:  turned to the people who created our fiscal crisis to fix it.

Printing Weapons.  Like it or not, the seed of printing weapons has been planted, and the idea is sure to gain momentum through hobbyists in the near future — until federal laws are enacted to gain control over the issue.  It's only a matter of time before a printed weapon is used in a crime.

Let Teachers Carry A Weapon.  After 9/11 there was a push to allow airline pilots to carry weapons to protect themselves.  This was based on the idea that there are times when bad people get into restricted areas and needed to be dealt with via lethal force.  Classrooms are no different, in my opinion.  Before you freak out, I'm not talking about the open carrying of weapons in schools.  My suggestion is that teachers should be able to have weapons in their classrooms and in offices that are securely locked with limited access.  If an event were to happen, teachers could get to their weapons and help to diffuse a situation and minimize casualties.  And perhaps twisted people would think twice about entering a school if they knew that they might meet resistance.

The Dumbing Down Of Americans.  Superficial thinking has made many Americans vulnerable to demagogues, thieves and just plain liars.  Unfortunately, the media and our government are full of the latter.  What's behind this intellectual indolence?  Is it drugs, our poor educational system, the instant gratification addiction induced by the technological advances in our culture or is it all the above?

Race With the Devil — Is America Converting to Marxism?  Only fanatics believe that any negatives are acceptable simply because they are delivered by a Democrat, instead of a Republican.  Yet this is the strange territory we are now traversing.  Further, the relentless and implacable leftist nature of America's army of journalists, entertainers, academics is now mirrored by the voting public.

Stalinism Lives in South Africa: Was Nelson Mandela a Secret Communist?  Last week, a book review appeared in the Wall Street Journal by South African journalist Rian Malan, a man from the Afrikaner family who ran the apartheid regime but broke with them and became an opponent of apartheid. [...] Mr. Malan refers to the fact that all the contemporary black South African leaders, from Mandela on, have sung the praises of leftist dictators such as Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez, and among other things have been vigorous opponents of Israel.  Led by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, they all depict Israel, as Tutu recently put it, as a state even worse than apartheid South Africa.

Welcome to the Catacombs.  The nation is now divided.  Not between or among the classes promoted by the Democrats who have routinely sorted groups by race, income, wealth, digital access, and a thousand other sub-classes in their unending search for victims to label, save, and subjugate.  No, not talking about all those.  Because there are only two classes now:  "Christians" and "Romans".

Laughing Out Loud at Obama.  We might all love a farce when viewed from afar, but a tempest in a teapot is dangerous when we all live in that teapot.

Will We Ever Get Our America Back?  Our problems in America are not taxes and revenue; our problems are spending and the immoral class warfare that allows it all to continue without end.

$80 Trillion In Unfunded Liabilities The True Noose Around Our Necks.  The course that we are on right now has been tried many times throughout history and each time it has failed.  You can look at how Weimar Germany attempted to print and inflate their way out of the morass it faced and how it led to totalitarianism, or you could look here at home how FDR tried to spend his way out of the problems he faced at the time.  Both examples did not work, they only delayed the inevitable as in the case of FDR in his second term he faced a second recession instead of recovery just as we are facing today.  They found out that spending did not help employment levels and left them further in debt as a result.  Many of the things started under that administration and later under LBJ has led us to the real cliff of $80 trillion dollars in unfunded liabilities.

What We Should Care About.  The Founding Fathers did not risk their lives and their fortunes to get richer, although that is what Marxist professors teach our kids.  Men like Washington hoped our new land would prosper over time, but their purpose in creating a new nation was liberty.

Did the U.S. Constitution Promise a Chicken in Every Pot?  [In the Federalist Papers,] Publius writes about the hardworking farmer, the active mechanic and the industrious manufacturer.  So it looks like the founders knew about small business and they realized they were the backbone of the country and its commerce.  And the main purpose of the federal government was to make sure that commerce was free to flow.  If Commerce was free to flow than there would be more money in circulation.

Showing Liberty the Door.  It is a sad irony at this time when Thanksgiving Day is being celebrated in America, that one of the things Americans had to be most thankful about — their liberty — is going away.  It is not simply in danger of going away, as it was throughout the last century and over the last thirteen years; it is on its way out.

Losing the Battle to Spin the War.  Republicans never identified Obama as a liar as Joe Wilson might have or a communist as Allen West might have or as an incestuous lover with a corrupt media as Newt Gingrich might have.  By not identifying Obama as a collectivist and a statist, no motive could be given to the center showing that his destructive agenda flows from his Progressive values and his anti-American character.  Once Obama was painted as the well-meaning incompetent, Republicans could never portray him as the saboteur.  And the Republicans always stuck to the script.

These Truths Are Not So Self-Evident, After All.  As a nation we are rapidly running out of gas, cash, and credit — but most damaging we are running low on attention span and comprehension.

The Republican Party is a Political Insane Asylum.  [Scroll down]  In their post-election analysis, many of these same "experts" are giving poisonous advice to a party in serious trouble.  They are recommending the party move in the direction of Democrats on issues such as illegal immigration, gay marriage, drug use, taxes, abortion to name a few.  Following such advice would be the death knell of the Republican Party.  To succeed, the GOP must stand for principles that are starkly different from the Democratic Party; otherwise there is no compelling reason for any voter to support the Republican Party.