Mark Steyn: "Swingin' Supremacists"

This is why you get such death duels about Supreme Court appointments: 

If you incline to the view that Obamacare is a transformative act, isn't there something slightly pitiful about the fact that the liberties of over 300 million people hinge on the somewhat whimsical leanings of just one man? I mean, Kennedy seems a cheery enough cove, but who died and made him the all-powerful Sultan of Swing? "It is a decision of the Supreme Court," explained Nancy Pelosi a few years back in more congenial times for the Democrats. "So this is almost as if God has spoken."

He wrote this in 2012 while the Supreme Court was debating the constitutionality of ObamaCare.

Thus, in this week's debate on whether Obamacare is merely the latest harmless evolution of the interstate-commerce clause, the most learned and highly remunerated jurists in the land chewed over the matter of whether a person, simply by virtue of being born, was participating in a "market." Had George III shown up at the Constitutional Convention to advance that argument with a straight face, the framers would have tossed aside the quill feathers and reached for their muskets.

Recall that Nancy Pelosi famously said that we have to pass it to know what's in it?

He was making a narrow argument about "severability" — about whether the Court could junk the "individual mandate" but pick and choose what bits of Obamacare to keep. Yet he was unintentionally making a far more basic point: A 2,700-page law is not a "law" by any civilized understanding of the term. Law rests on the principle of equality before it. When a bill is 2,700 pages, there's no equality: Instead, there's a hierarchy of privilege micro-regulated by an unelected, unaccountable, unconstrained, unknown, and unnumbered bureaucracy. It's not just that the legislators who legislate it don't know what's in it, nor that the citizens on the receiving end can never hope to understand it, but that even the nation's most eminent judges acknowledge that it is beyond individual human comprehension. A 2,700-page law is, by definition, an affront to self-government.

Read the whole thing.

Paid protesters? Soros-funded network drives anti-Kavanaugh activism

George Soros may not be passing out twenties to activists on the street, but that doesn’t mean President Trump was wrong when he accused the Democratic megadonor of having a hand in the anti-Kavanaugh protests.

Mr. Soros has been a key funder through his Open Society Foundations of a left-wing network of protest groups, including the Center for Popular Democracy, which has received millions of dollars from the Soros philanthropy and helped spearhead demonstrations against Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh.

“Most any left-wing group of any consequence at all is getting Soros money,” said Scott Walter, president of the Capital Research Center. “In my decades of studying left-wing groups, I almost never find a group that lacks funding from Soros.”

In a pivotal moment, Ana Maria Archila, co-executive director of the Center for Popular Democracy, and another center activist cornered Sen. Jeff Flake, Arizona Republican, in an elevator and criticized Justice Kavanaugh. Ms. Archila earned $178,071 in 2016, according to tax records on GuideStar.

Other Soros grantees involved with #CancelKavanaugh include the American Civil Liberties Union, the Human Rights Campaign, NARAL Pro-Choice America and Planned Parenthood.....

Kavanaugh Conservatives vs. Booker Democrats

Christopher Caldwell - is a national correspondent at The Weekly Standard.

But it was a Kafkaesque situation for Kavanaugh: Since Ford could not (or would not) say when and where the incident took place, it was literally impossible for him to exonerate himself conclusively. “Doubts” had been “raised.” Raised by people with a desperate political interest in raising them, it is true. But those who sit on the Senate Judiciary Committee are no more immune than ordinary human beings to the lazy-minded heuristic that when accounts clash, the truth must lie “somewhere in the middle.” When Ford finished testifying on Thursday morning, Kavanaugh’s nomination appeared to be finished.

The moment Kavanaugh began to speak, he broke that logic. The senators were not adjudicating a difference of recollections. They were not adjudicating at all. They were engaged in a “grotesque and coordinated character assassination . . . a calculated and orchestrated political hit, fueled with apparent pent-up anger about President Trump and the 2016 election, fear that has been unfairly stoked about my judicial record, revenge on behalf of the Clintons, and millions of dollars in money from outside left-wing opposition groups.” Now the middle ground was gone, and a new understanding was in place: Whether Ford was lying or misremembering, what was happening was not a hearing but a show trial. ...

Kavanaugh’s foes were comfortable voting against him on the basis of temperament. The question is not “whether he’s innocent or guilty,” said Cory Booker. “I am emphatically not saying that Kavanaugh did what Ford says he did,” says Wittes. “The evidence is not within 100 yards of adequate to convict him. But whether he did it is not the question at hand.”

What is that supposed to mean? This amounted to saying that Brett Kavanaugh lacks a “judicial temperament” because he objected to being summarily executed following a show trial. If you permit the criteria of culpability to shift, then you have the circular logic typical of totalitarian regimes. Just as there are people famous-for-being-famous, now there are people guilty-of-being-accused.

Progressive Tribalism Beats The War Drums

I would like fair-minded liberal readers to take a look at this op-ed from The New York Times, and consider that this is exactly the kind of left-wing racist rant that drives many of us white people into the arms of the Republican Party — not out of any particular love for the GOP, but out of fear of what this progressive racism would do in power. Alexis Grenell, the author, is a white woman and a Democratic strategist. ..

After a confirmation process where women all but slit their wrists, letting their stories of sexual trauma run like rivers of blood through the Capitol,

“Slit their wrists” … “rivers of blood through the Capitol”. Un-freaking-hinged. These people are working themselves up to doing something violent.

the Senate still voted to confirm Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. With the exception of Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, all the women in the Republican conference caved, including Senator Susan Collins of Maine, who held out until the bitter end.

These women are gender traitors, to borrow a term from the dystopian TV series “The Handmaid’s Tale.” They’ve made standing by the patriarchy a full-time job. The women who support them show up at the Capitol wearing “Women for Kavanaugh” T-shirts, but also probably tell their daughters to put on less revealing clothes when they go out.

Here, she tears into women who express concern about men being falsely accused of sexual assault:

But the people who scare me the most are the mothers, sisters and wives of those young men, because my stupid uterus still holds out some insane hope of solidarity.

Think about that: Alexis Grenell believes that having a uterus means that women should not be concerned that their sons, brothers, and husbands might be falsely accused of raping a woman, and suffer from the lack of due process.

Think about that.

And here, we get to the heart of the matter:

We’re talking about white women. The same 53 percent who put their racial privilege ahead of their second-class gender status in 2016 by voting to uphold a system that values only their whiteness, just as they have for decades. White women have broken for Democratic presidential candidates only twice: in the 1964 and 1996 elections, according to an analysis by Jane Junn, a political scientist at the University of Southern California.

Women of color, and specifically black women, make the margin of difference for Democrats. The voting patterns of white women and white men mirror each other much more closely, and they tend to cast their ballots for Republicans. The gender gap in politics is really a color line.

That’s because white women benefit from patriarchy by trading on their whiteness to monopolize resources for mutual gain. In return they’re placed on a pedestal to be “cherished and revered,” as Speaker Paul D. Ryan has said about women, but all the while denied basic rights.

“Patriarchy,” “whiteness” — she’s using these Grievance Studies buzzwords in response to women worried about their flesh-and-blood male relatives being falsely accused. That’s because these men are nothing but abstractions to Grenell.

Again, she returns to hysterically violent language — a language of tribalism:

This blood pact between white men and white women is at issue in the November midterms. President Trump knows it, and at that Tuesday news conference, he signaled to white women to hold the line: “The people that have complained to me about it the most about what’s happening are women. Women are very angry,” he said. “I have men that don’t like it, but I have women that are incensed at what’s going on.”

I’m sure he does “have” them; game girls will defend their privilege to the death.

“To the death”? What does that mean? What could that possibly mean, other than to signal that Alexis Grenell and her people are preparing to do violence to them, and that Alexis Grenell believes that they cannot be persuaded, only defeated, no matter what it takes.

Again: Alexis Grenell is a Democratic Party strategist. The New York Times, the most important newspaper in the world, and the voice of the liberal Establishment, saw fit to publish this racist, sexist call to arms. This is what elite liberalism in America has become.

Read the whole thing and then this : 

WATCH: Leftists Protesters FREAK OUT, Claw At Supreme Court Doors While Brett Kavanaugh Is Sworn In

This is the Democrat party and these are the people who would rule you if they ever capture the government.

Some thoughts on Justice Kavanaugh

Some thoughts.

The notion that the Supreme Court is above politics and its decisions are based on the Constitution and the plain letter of the law is simply false and people recognize it.  That's why confirmation battles have become so bitter.  The Supreme Court is political, and its members are either ideologues or politicians, based on their particular philosophy.

Brett Kavanaugh has been widely supported by the Republican establishment. We will not know what that really means to the ideological orientation of the Supreme Court until he votes on several divisive issues. Keep in mind that many of the Justices appointed by Republican presidents (Warren, Brennan, Souter) have ruled as Liberals after getting on the court. Others, like former Justice Kennedy, were weathervanes, making decisions based on the direction the political winds in Washington DC were blowing.

The fight was so bitter over Kavanaugh because the Left feared that a weathervane would be replaced by a conservative ideologue.  The Court has been a key player in the clash of cultures giving the Left via judicial fiat what they could not achieve at the ballot box or via legislation.

The latest battle ground is gender.  The Left is pitting women against men. In an inversion of Sharia, it stands for the principle that female testimony is more credible than male testimony. It used the weapon of unsupported accusations by women as a way to prevent a potentially conservative judge to swing the Court against their use of law-fare as a way to reshape the culture.

Now that that assault has been repelled, it remains to be seen if Kavanaugh is truly devoted to the Constitution. Or is he, like John Roberts demonstrated in his decision on ObamaCare, going to make judgements based on political pressure from the Left.

I hope that Justice Kavanaugh is ideologically Conservative, but I suspect that his careful path to the Supreme Court shows a political animal. I suspect that no one gets there without mastering the politics of Washington.

Conclusion: cautious optimism.

Former Google boss launches scathing Silicon Valley attack urging tech giants to end the delusion that it's making the world a better place

She said: ‘You can’t go about telling your advertisers that you can target users down to the tiniest pixel, but then throw your hands up in front of the politicians and say your machines can’t figure out if bad actors are using your platform.’

She said: ‘On the surface, things seemed really important and exciting. We were doing big things! Bringing the internet to the developing world! But also, on some level, it all felt a bit off, like when you go on vacation and find yourself wondering when it’s going to feel like the Instagram pics other people have posted.’

Miss Powell also levelled criticism at Amazon and Facebook.

I hope this is a trend.

The trap they laid for Kavanaugh (via Althouse)

It's not a bug, it's a feature! Basically this entire process has been designed from the get go as a Kafkaesque trap:

1) Hey, there are some terrible accusations and if you don't withdraw, they are going to come out and it's going to be embarrassing for you and your family. You should withdraw.
2) Okay, you deny the accusations and aren't withdrawing? Well we're going to draw this out so that all the crazies can come out of the woodwork and accuse you of being a closet horrific criminal. Don't make us have a hearing - you don't want that.
3) Okay, you're going to cause us to have a hearing? We're going to make sure the salaciousness of every accusation is stretched out in loving detail on TV.
4) Oh, this makes you angry? Well that's clearly a sign that you lack the temperament to be on the court.
5) You point out how partisan this has been? Clearly you're not going to be a fair umpire on the court. We, who were never going to vote for your confirmation anyway, are shocked that any potential justice would consider these obviously partisan attacks as partisan.
6) Does this process make you angry bro? Well, by the way you're acting, it's possible to see that this has damaged your mind and you're probably no longer fit to be on the court.
7) Oh, you got confirmed anyway? Nearly half the country is going to think of you as a rapist for the rest of your life. It'll be mentioned in every biography ever written about you and will be one of the only thing that anyone remembers about you in the future.

I cannot wait to see who wants to go through this process in the future. And boy, howdy, I cannot wait for the next time a Democratic president tries to get someone confirmed. It's gonna be lit!

Lawsuit accuses Seneca Valley 'mean girls' of targeting boy with false allegations

"Mean girls" conspire to accuse a boy of sexual abuse.  It's not just Brett Kavanaugh. 

In a tape-recorded interview with school officials in 2017, the lawsuit alleges K.S. said she made the sexual assault claim against T.F. because “I just don’t like him.”

“I just don’t like to hear him talk. … I don’t like to look at him,” K.S. reportedly disclosed in the recorded interview obtained by Fishman.

On Oct. 2, 2017, K.S. told fellow students “that she would do anything to get T.F. expelled … and accused T.F. of sexual assault” with school officials, the lawsuit states. T.F. was subsequently charged in juvenile court with indecent assault and two counts of harassment.

And it gets worse.

Ricochet: "Things I Did Not See Coming When PDT Was Elected"

A lot of what has happened since Donald Trump became president has been predictable. The economic recovery was probably inevitable, given eight years of pent-up demand. Even a sitzpinkler like Jeb or Little Marco could have gotten some economic gains. Only a Democrat could have screwed it up. The betrayal of PDT by Senate Republicans and cruise-ship “conservatives” comes as no surprise. And the descent of the Democrat Left into derangement and full-on embrace of authoritarian Marxism is just an extension of prior existing trendlines.

But there are a few things that, if you told me in 2016 would happen if Donald Trump were elected president, I don’t think I would have believed you.

1. Senate Democrats debating whether “Boof” means fart. This is why they call themselves ‘The World’s Greatest Deliberative Body,” folks. About the only surprise is that a massive gasbag like Sheldon Whitehouse doesn’t understand how ‘boof’ could mean flatulence. Oh, and the Media Wing of the Democrat Party wants the FBI to investigate the meaning of ‘boof’ because it’s vital to our democracy or something.
2. A creepy porn lawyer is a viable Democrat candidate for the presidency. Seriously, I thought were another 10-12 years from this level of depravity. Man, was I wrong.
3. Democrats coming out in support of MS-13. Trump said the MS-13 was a violent street gang; you know, because of the gang rapes and hacking innocent people to death with machetes and stuff. Next thing you know, Nancy Pelosi is talking about “sparks of the divine” and media figures began defending MS-13 like they were just a few teenagers having some good clean fun. I guess I should have seen this coming given the general drift of the Democrats, but I didn’t.
4. Democrats Becoming the Anti-Beer Party. Conversely, after they started digging around in Brett Kavanaugh’s high school yearbooks to find something to prove that anyone who was ever a normal high school boy should never be a Supreme Court justice, the Democrats claimed outrage that young Brett Kavanaugh went to keg parties. Suddenly, drinking beer is so evil you half expect the Democrats to revive the 18th Amendment. The Democrats used to feign bonhomie with the working class, but since they have reinvented themselves as the party of incel women, they feel a lot freer to express their scorn for working class things like beer and football. (BTW, Democrats in New Jersey just passed a whole slew of regulations to clamp down on artisanal breweries in that state. {But then temporarily suspended the new regulations after public outcry.})
5. Odd New Respect for Kanye West. I mean, seriously, who saw that coming? See also, Lindsey Graham.

The Kavanaugh Allegations Are Psychological Terrorism, And It’s Time They End

The left’s smear tactics have come on full display during the surfeit of attacks on Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. Whether you support or oppose this SCOTUS nomination, the tactics being used are more extreme even than during the Clarence Thomas hearings.

But as we know, they are nothing new, and Democrats will continue to use them until the American people scream “Enough!” — because they are effective. The real goal is psychological terrorism—that is, engaging in a scorched-earth effort to destroy the target, and in so doing intimidating anyone willing to enter public service, or even just support a public figure that does not parrot the politically correct line.

The charges do not need to be true, or even credible. People do not recoil because of the charges themselves (although, as we see, the left spares no effort to dream up the worst accusations they can think of). People recoil out of fear.

This tactic relies on the human herding instinct. People naturally shy away from anyone so vilified, whether the charges are credible or not, simply out of fear of being smeared with the same brush. They don’t want to be ostracized by the group.

Such excommunication has real consequences on reputations, jobs, relationships, even survival. The real goal is to threaten the rest of us into silence. How many people, for example, never used Donald Trump yard signs or bumper stickers out of fear of ostracism, or even property destruction?

When there are people out in the streets who have demonstrated that they are violent, how willing are you to stand up in support of Trump?

Another Antifa member, a professor at the City University of New York, tweeted, “Reminder that if Trump does end up winning this stupid thing to assassinate Mike Pence *first*.”

When people tell you they are willing to kill, believe them.

Here's the process.  Recognize the pattern that the Left followed with Kavanaugh?

Defamation Attacks Follow a Definite Pattern

In 2010, Laird Wilcox penned an article titled “The Practice of Ritual Defamation,” that describes the process. The most salient points are quoted here:

1. In ritual defamation the victim must have violated a particular taboo in some way, usually by expressing or identifying with a forbidden attitude, opinion or belief…
2. The method of attack… is to assail the character of the victim… Character assassination is its primary tool…
3. An important rule in ritual defamation is to avoid engaging in any kind of debate over the truthfulness or reasonableness of what has been expressed, only condemn it…
4. The victim is often somebody in the public eye – someone who is vulnerable to public opinion…
5. An attempt, often successful, is made to involve others in the defamation…
6. In order for a ritual defamation to be effective, the victim must be dehumanized to the extent that he becomes identical with the offending attitude, opinion or belief, and in a matter… where it appears at its most extreme.
7. Also to be successful, a ritual defamation must bring pressure and humiliation on the victim from every quarter, including family and friends. If the victim has school children, they may be taunted and ridiculed as a consequence of adverse publicity.
8. Any explanation the victim may offer, including the claim of being misunderstood, is considered irrelevant. To claim truth as a defense for a politically incorrect value, opinion or belief is interpreted as defiance and only compounds the problem…

Obama’s Social Experiments Are Wreaking Havoc on America Today

Barack Obama's biggest harm to America was not his economic policies but his social policies.

Here are five key ways Obama's policies impacted American culture, beginning with #MeToo, sexual assault, and Brett Kavanaugh.
1. The sexual assault maelstrom.
2. Transgender ideology.
3. "The Handmaid's Tale."
4. Same-sex marriage.
5. Race.

Read the whole thing.

The Grievance Studies Scandal: Five Academics Respond

NOTE:

For the past year scholars James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, and Peter Boghossian have sent fake papers to various academic journals which they describe as specialising in activism or “grievance studies.” Their stated mission has been to expose how easy it is to get “absurdities and morally fashionable political ideas published as legitimate academic research.”

To date, their project has been successful: seven papers have passed through peer review and have been published, including a 3000 word excerpt of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, rewritten in the language of Intersectionality theory and published in the Gender Studies journal Affilia.

Postmodernists pretend to be experts in what they call “theory.” They claim that, although their scholarship may seem incomprehensible, this is because they are like mathematicians or physicists: they express profound truths in a way that cannot be understood without training. Lindsay, Boghossian, and Pluckrose expose this for the lie that it is. “Theory” is not real. Postmodernists have no expertise and no profound understanding.

Read the whole thing.

The Sexual Revolution Is Over

It’s impossible to know when this “revolution” began with any precision, but perhaps we could date it from the publication of “sexologist” Alfred Kinsey’s two famous studies, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male in 1948 and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female in 1953. Kinsey conducted hundreds of interviews and concluded from these that most Americans’ private sexual practices differed sharply from their professed beliefs about sexual morality. Holding as he did to a crassly Darwinian worldview in which men and women are highly developed animals and so merely animalistic in their appetites, Kinsey believed Americans could achieve greater happiness and fulfillment only by expressing their sexual urges without deference to arbitrary cultural and religious rules. Except, of course, the rule of consent. That one had to stay.

Kinsey’s many critics, then and since, have pointed out the laughably unscientific nature of his research, but it didn’t matter. The second half of the 20th century in the United States is the story of the slow collapse of a broadly Christian cultural consensus on sexual morality.

At least one sensible way of understanding the ongoing succession of men credibly charged with sexual harassment and assault is that LMen, especially men of a hubristic bent and in positions of authority, were only too happy to discard the old rules governing the expression of their appetites, but those rules were put in place over many centuries in large part because such men were apt to behave like beasts without them. Setting aside morality and ontology, Kinsey’s presupposition that men are animals isn’t entirely wrong.

The counterargument to this interpretation is the one made by my liberal friends: These things have always happened, only now it’s reported. It’s not an unreasonable point—men have forced themselves on disinclined women since there were men and women. This is the experience of Pamela Andrews in Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, published in 1740, and of Tamar, half-sister of the loathsome Amnon, in the Book of Second Samuel.

The question, though, is whether these things happen more frequently as a result of the dissolution of sexual mores. Such a thing is perhaps unknowable in a strict sense, but the important thing is this: It looks and feels like men behave badly much more often than they used to. It’s hard to believe that Harvey Weinstein would have dared to engage in the systematic abuse of women if he had achieved his fame and wealth in the 1890s rather than the 1990s.

Read the whole thing.

Ann Coulter: "NO MORE MR. WHITE GUY"

Why do liberals hate white people?  The airwaves are filled with press babes and babettes telling us how bad it is if old white guys ask the sainted-must-be-believed Ford questions about her -or-uncorroborated accusation that Brett Kavanough tried to rape her 35-or-so-years-ago at a party that four other witnesses denied they attended.


Read the whole thing.

But what is the thinking behind snickering at “white men” judging an accusation of sexual assault? Chuck Grassley is a big rapist?

You can be for rape or against it -- I happen to be against it -- but the idea that alleged sexual assault survivors need the loving care of black, Indian or Hispanic men to judge their stories flies in the face of crime statistics from around the globe.

In the history of the world, there has never been a more pacific, less rapey creature than the white male of Western European descent.

I realize it gives The New York Times’ editorial board (recent acquisition: Sarah Jeong) warm feelings every time someone throws in the word “white” as an intensifier, denoting extra hatefulness, but really, guys, it’s getting old.

Can we please, for the love of God, drop the painfully trite, mind-numbing cliche about “white men,” as if somehow their whiteness makes evil even eviler?

Mark Steyn recalls: "Hearing the Women, Then and Now"

So on Thursday the Senate will hear evidence of what allegedly happened in an upstairs room at an unknown house somewhere near Columbia Country Club, Maryland sometime in the early Eighties. Presumably Judge Kavanaugh will be cross-examined on how close "anything close to it" actually got. This is the pitiful state to which the United States Senate has reduced its "advise and consent" role.

It was different nineteen years ago, when I had the misfortune, briefly, to be living in Washington, DC - just for a few weeks while covering the Clinton impeachment trial. I stayed at the Mayflower Hotel, which my editors kicked up a fuss about until Monica checked in a few doors down the corridor from me and I was the only guy on the inside. Anyway, I wanted to check my recollections of that period, so I looked up the moldering pile of clippings from London's Daily Telegraph, Canada's National Post and the other papers that carried my daily trial diary. Just to set the scene: obviously, nailing Clinton is a lot trickier than Clinton nailing you. The general flavor of the times is caught in this January 22nd 1999 column:

Ace of Spades: Sean Davis, Rush Limbaugh: Republicans Can Either Confirm Kavanaugh or Lose the Senate in November

I don't think Republicans want to hold either chamber of Congress; many Republicans prefer being like Ben Sasse, having no power whatsoever except to burble up baby-talk homilies that he can quote in fundraising letters.

Having power is scary -- you are forced to make decisions that actually have consequences, and those consequences may involve the leftwing media saying mean things about you.

So it's better to be a Controlled Opposition. They don't want actual power, which is a hard thing to have; they just want position, privilege, prestige and perks.

Since these dirtbags, sell-outs, and corporate shills prefer being in the minority, I say vote to keep them in power to spite them. Make them squirm.

The rubber is about to meet the road for Senate Republicans. They have a simple choice: they can vote to confirm Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, thereby ending the baseless and unsubstantiated Democrat- and media-fueled smear campaign against him, or they can kiss House and Senate majorities goodbye for the next decade, if not longer.

In case the election of one Donald J. Trump was not enough to compel the D.C. Republican establishment swamp creatures to wipe the muck from their eyes and see what's happening with their own constituents, Republican voters have had enough of feckless do-nothings whose careers consist of little more than not doing everything they promised to do.

Give us the House, the Senate, and the White House, they said, and we'll repeal Obamacare. Give us power across the major elected branches, and we’ll secure the border, they promised. With a Republican president in the White House and a Republican majority in the Senate, we’ll confirm the most conservative Supreme Court nominees you can imagine, they claimed.

Yet here we are. Obamacare is still on the books, and a wall is still not on the border. The only compelling reason left for Republicans to continue voting for Republicans is the confirmation of conservative jurists to fill the federal judiciary. The confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch was nice, but it changed nothing, as he replaced the staunchly conservative Antonin Scalia. Gorsuch's appointment merely maintained the status quo.

...

Republican lawmakers have to understand that their voters have zero patience for their excuses for not doing what they promised. It's why they elected Trump in the first place. Republican senators failed to repeal Obamacare after promising to do so for years. That was strike one. They've steadfastly refused to secure the border, let alone build a barrier along the most porous sections of the nation’s border with Mexico. That was strike two.

A refusal to vote to confirm Kavanaugh in the face of a blatantly obvious Democrat smear campaign, orchestrated in concert with a compliant and obscenely partisan national media, will be strike three, and there will be no more at-bats. I have spent a career working in and covering politics, and I have never witnessed the kind of anger among rank-and-file GOP voters generated from a combination of the unsubstantiated Democrat attacks on Kavanaugh and the flaccid response of emasculated Republicans.

Marsha Blackburn for U.S. Senate

Has The Keith Ellison Domestic-Abuse Investigation Been Shut Down?

YES, next question.

The Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, the Minnesota arm of the Democratic Party, concluded its investigation into domestic abuse allegations against Rep. Keith Ellison two weeks ago, Karen Monahan told The Daily Caller News Foundation on Sunday.

Monahan, a Sierra Club activist and Ellison’s ex-girlfriend, accused the Minnesota Democrat of emotionally and physically abusing her during their relationship.

“I only know the MNDFL did an investigation that ended two weeks ago,” Monahan wrote in a private Twitter message to TheDCNF on Sunday.

The Liberal Hive protects its own.

SATIRE: Feelings Don't Care About Your Facts

My fellow Americans: I feel like I need to say this.

A lot of you are angry. You're concerned about what's going on right now, and you're worried about the future. You're disgusted by the actions of your political opponents, and you feel hope and anticipation whenever there's the slightest possibility that their goals will be thwarted. You're filled with dread when they're winning, and you're lifted into paroxysms of joyous schadenfreude when they fail.

Good news: Those feelings are all you need! If there was ever a time in American history when it was worthwhile to pay attention to facts and evidence, those days are over. Thanks to the cutting-edge technology of the early 21st century, choosing to go with your gut has never been easier or more effective. Name the outrage, and you're just a click away from the corresponding mob.

Read the whole thing.

DRUDGE ON KAVANAUGH

KAVANAUGH DEFIANT: Lifelong record of promoting dignity...

'I was a virgin'...

Never Been Involved In Gang Rape...

'I have faith in fairness of American people'...

LIMBAUGH TO REPUBLICANS: CONFIRM OR LOSE MIDTERMS!

MCCONNELL: FLOOR VOTE NO MATTER WHAT...

Fate rests with Sen. Collins?

BUCHANAN: Huge stakes of Thursday's confrontations...

WASH POST PAGE ONE: Fight takes on symbolism in divided era...

YALE cancels classes to accommodate protests...

KIMMEL: Cut His Penis Off...

ANNALS OF LIBERAL HATE: Now #MeToo is coming for your thought crimes

#MeToo is totalitarian.

People are right to be concerned that #MeToo has gone too far. There are few who don’t think the movement has done good work in exposing predatory men and encouraging victims to come forward.

But when an editor is forced out of his job because he published something controversial, or a friend of the accused suffers professionally for his kind words, we’ve gone to the crazy place and need to come back from it.

Predatory men are all over the media and the “arts.”

It’s a place for good-looking and amoral people. 

It’s part and parcel of what they sell.

It practically defines who they are. 

Harvey Weinstein was able to get women to have sex with him in return for given them movie roles.

 And don’t think for a moment that the women who gave him sex were not aware of the bargain they were making. 

He was exposed before there was a #MeToo movement.

Afterward it was a way for the women who participated to claim the virgin-victim status.

And now it’s become the tool to destroy the men that Liberals don’t like, even the men who maintained their virginity well into their adulthood, like Bret Kavanaugh. 

Break up the Tech Monopolies

DRUDGE:

WIRE: Tech Giants Spend $80 Billion to Make Sure No One Else Can Compete...

GOOGLE Tells Congress How To Legislate Privacy...

Search engine answers questions -- before asked...

Chrome update tracks you online... 

Tech Giants Spend $80 Billion to Make Sure No One Else Can Compete

Time to break up the Tech Monopolies.

General Motors Co. and Google couldn’t be more different. GM musters an army of people and machines to produce the 10 million cars it sells each year. What Google makes doesn’t really exist: You type on a laptop or click play on a YouTube video, and Google zips back bits of digital information.

But Google parent Alphabet Inc. and the other four dominant U.S. technology companies—Apple, Amazon​.com, Microsoft, and Facebook—are fast becoming industrial giants. They spent a combined $80 billion in the last year on big-ticket physical assets, including manufacturing equipment and specialized tools for assembling iPhones and the powerful computers and undersea internet cables Facebook needs to fire up Instagram videos in a flash. Thanks to this surge in spending—up from $40 billion in 2015—they’ve joined the ranks of automakers, telephone companies, and oil drillers as the country’s biggest spenders on capital goods, items including factories, heavy equipment, and real estate that are considered long-term investments. Their combined outlay is about 10 times what GM spends annually on its plants, vehicle-assembly robots, and other materials.

The have no real competition and aim to keep it that way.

Vatican Cardinal: Pope Francis Is ‘Ice-Cold, Cunning Machiavellian’

Asking the important questions: Is the Pope Catholic?

Gallup: Republican Party Favorability Highest in Seven Years

Recall the last High Tech Lynching - Democrats learned nothing from the last one.

"This sleaze, this dirt, was searched for by staffers of members of this committee, was then leaked to the media, and this committee and this body validated it and displayed it at prime time over our entire nation. It is a high-tech lynching."

Familiar?🤔pic.twitter.com/AmNsI7QhPK

— Maverick (@RodStryker) September 23, 2018

The witnesses Kavenaugh's accuser names all deny her story.

STUNNING: ALL FOUR WITNESSES Deny Christine Ford's Story and ALL FOUR WITNESSES DENY PARTY EVER TOOK PLACE! https://t.co/hqtLncmnpi

— Super❌ Elite ❤️ Molly (@mollyday15) September 23, 2018

By pussyfooting around, the Republicans have allowed a fake political-agenda driven story to drag Kavanaughs impeccable reputation through the mud.
All men & women everywhere should be pissed, most especially men.
This is dangerous & Ford should face a harsh punishment.

— Heather (@hrenee80) September 23, 2018

CNN’s Jake Tapper Dedicates Segment to Trump’s Penis

CNN aired a segment about Stormy Daniels’ new book that described what Donald Trump’s genitals looks like on The Lead with Jake Tapper Tuesday.

Keeping it classy at CNN.

Joe Biden: 'Dregs of society' support Donald Trump

Dear fellow Dregs:

Here's what creepy Joe Biden, who fondles little girls, thinks of you.

Former Vice President Joseph R. Biden assailed President Trump’s supporters during a speech Saturday at the annual Human Rights Campaign dinner in Washington, lamenting that “virulent people” and the “dregs of society” still had a friend in the White House...

“They’re a small percentage of the American people, virulent people,” he continued. “Some of them the dregs of society.

Taking a play from the Hillary playbook who famously called you "deplorables."

It should be noted that he spoke at something called THE HUMAN RIGHTS CAMPAIGN.  Motto:

"Working for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Equal Rights"

Bringing sexual perverts to a public bathroom near you.

EX-NSA DIRECTOR DISPUTES REPORT THAT TRUMP ASKED HIM TO PUSH BACK ON COLLUSION PROBE

The Washsington Post lied ... but then, you knew that.

5 Times Trump People Were Trapped Into Creating Russiagate Narratives

Suppose the entire DOJ is just a giant sting operation designed to destroy the Right, and you would not be far wrong.

Fake-rape history repeats itself: first as cock-and-bull story from the UVA campus, then as cock-and-bull story from high school

From now on, every claim of rape has to be accompanied with a written confession by the rapist.

Socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez warns that people had better get used to her slaying lewks

What's a lewk, you may ask, and why would anyone kill it?

Proof positive that Trump is just like Hitler

Someone alert the NY Slimes and the Washington Compost.

NYT’s Editors Issue An Extremely Embarrassing Correction

NYT just wrote a “bombshell” story on Nikki Haley’s ridiculously overpriced curtains.

The State Department spent $52,701 last year buying customized and mechanized curtains for the picture windows in Nikki R. Haley’s official residence as ambassador to the United Nations, just as the department was undergoing deep budget cuts and had frozen hiring.

Just one problem.

This happened in 2016 under the Obama administration. Trump and Haley had nothing to do with it, as was implied in the original version. It’s confounding, because NYT even acknowledged the truth in later in the post.

A spokesman for Ms. Haley said plans to buy the curtains were made in 2016, during the Obama administration. Ms. Haley had no say in the purchase, he said.

NYT was ruthlessly called out, so the editors decided to “review” the piece.

Why didn’t they review it before? That’s my question.

As it turns out, they agreed the piece was misleading and ridiculous, so they updated the post and provided this note:

Our original article was a huge crapload of #FakeNews.

HAHAHA. Just kidding. That’s what I would’ve suggested though. Here’s the real note:

An earlier version of this article and headline created an unfair impression about who was responsible for the purchase in question. While Nikki R. Haley is the current ambassador to the United Nations, the decision on leasing the ambassador’s residence and purchasing the curtains was made during the Obama administration, according to current and former officials. The article should not have focused on Ms. Haley, nor should a picture of her have been used. The article and headline have now been edited to reflect those concerns, and the picture has been removed.

I like my version better, but whatevz.

SENATOR BOOKER QUOTES VIOLENT RACIST WHO URGED MURDER OF JEWS, WHITE PEOPLE

Corey Booker admires Stokely Carmichael, who proudly proclaimed:

“The only good Zionist is a dead Zionist we must take a lesson from Hitler” and “The only position for women in SNCC is prone." ...

Carmichael’s anti-Semitism had been defended in the past by Rep. Keith Ellison, the number two man at the DNC and Dem nominee for Minnesota Attorney General. He was attended by Rep. Maxine Waters.

Americans are treated to non-stop lectures about racism from top lefties like Cory Booker. But they are the ones who are the most in need of those hectoring lectures about the evils of racism.

When former president Barack Obama, former president Bill Clinton and Eric Holder, a top DOJ official in both administrations, have been caught hanging around with Farrakhan, there’s a racism problem.

When Senator Booker casually quotes a violent anti-Semitic racist, there’s a serious racism problem.

It’s a problem of black racism. And until it’s taken seriously, there are no other conversations about racism worth having. When the top figures in the Democrat party are okay with anti-Semitism and racism, then their political faction and its media apparatus has no right to lecture on racism.

Babylon Bee: "Nicolas Cage Grills Kavanaugh On Whether Any Secret Maps Are Hidden On Constitution"

WASHINGTON, D.C.—The confirmation hearing for Judge Brett Kavanaugh heated up as actor Nicolas Cage began an intense line of questioning Friday: “You say you’ve studied the Constitution,” Cage said to the nominee, “so have you seen anything on it that might resemble a map, maybe pointing to the location of a hidden treasure trove?”

Cage’s line of questioning appeared to make Kavanaugh uncomfortable, as he responded with evasive answers such as, “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” “That’s insane,” and “How did you get in here?”

This only seemed to incense Cage, who continued to press this line of questioning with the nominee. “There has to be something!” he asserted. “Maybe a word out of place. Or have you tried applying open flame to the Constitution to reveal a hidden message?”

“No, nothing is hidden on the Constitution,” Kavanaugh responded. “It’s all very clear.”

This enraged Cage, who started shouting and gesticulating in such an over-the-top manner that one could almost mistake him for Senator Cory Booker. “You know something!” he screamed. “You’re trying to get the treasure for the Illuminati!”

Kavanaugh looked like he was about to say something, but he turned to a menacing looking man in a bowler hat who sat behind him, who shook his head. Kavanaugh then announced, “I’m done here,” and abruptly left the hearing while Cage continued to shout at him that the treasure belonged to the American people.

It was the most confrontational questioning of the day, and one thing was clear: either Nicolas Cage was determined like no other to get the hidden treasure of James Madison or he had 2020 ambitions.

Keep Christianity Weird

Conrad Black: "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. Woodward should never have survived as an author after inventing the deathbed confession of a comatose William Casey in his nasty novel Veil about the Iran-Contra fiasco, but this time he took one for the losing team and shot himself in the head with a howitzer. Sending him into battle to win it for the Democrats two months before the election is like dispatching a small brigade of very aged arsonists to fight one of the California summer forest fires that the new prophet of the Democrats, Bernie Sanders, says was caused by this president’s opinion of climate change.

Read the whole thing.

Why is the non-ideological Donald Trump able to implement conservative principles when previous Republican presidents failed?

It occurred to me in a flash of insight that one of the reason that Trump has successfully implemented some of the fundamental objectives of Conservatism was because he’s faced an unprecedented amount of hate from a broad spectrum of people.

Everyone agrees that he does not have an ideological bone in his body.  So why is he managing to implement so many Conservative goals when, with the possible exception of Reagan, previous Republican presidents failed to do so?   Why is he willing to back dramatic cuts in taxes for corporations, dramatically cut the regulatory environment, and drastically expand the production and use of fossil fuels?   

Conservative theory holds that corporations don’t pay taxes; they just pass them along to consumers so cutting corporate taxes increase economic activity.  Conservatives have campaigned against the regulatory state for as long as I have been alive, yet the regulatory state has grown under Democrats and Republicans.  Global Warming has been exposed as Fake Science for decades yet Republicans have gone along with the lie that it’s a threat out of fear of being labelled science deniers.   

Trump signed the largest corporate tax cut in history.  Trump is slashing regulations.  Trump pulled out of the Paris Climate Accord and supports increased oil, gas and coal production.    

So what gives the most reviled President the courage to make moves that terrified his Republican predecessors?  I think that Solzhenitsyn provided a clue when he wrote (in the First Circle): “You only have power over people so long as you don’t take everything away from them. But when you’ve robbed a man of everything he’s no longer in your power — he’s free again.”

He was talking about prisoners.  But it applies in politics as well.  Politicians, more so than other people, depend on public opinion as both a weapon and a shield.  They can use favorable public opinion to advance their agenda but are acutely conscious of public opinion being used to reduce their power and to affect their re-election.  

Previous Republican politicians did not have opponents who were seeking to totally destroy them and their families.  They were not going to leave office financial ruined.  Their families were not threatened with jail, or worse.  They media and the culture were not out to assassinate them. 

In an unprecedented way, the insane level of vitriol directed at Trump frees him caving to the press and his political enemies.  He knows that they don’t want him to modify his policies but to overturn the election, to destroy him and remove him from office.  That leaves him free to counter-attack rather than hunker down as previous presidents did.  

He knows that the only people he has to care about satisfying is his political base.  That's what he meant when he spoke about being able to shoot someone on 5th Avenue without losing his base.

The great economic expansion that began with his election is either denied by his opponents or ascribed to Obama.  Whether he approves or denies the use of coal for power plants he knows that the level of vitriol with stay at Max levels.  Whether he increases or decreases the number of immigrants he will still be called a racist.  If he were to implement a policy to either increase or decrease CO₂ emissions his enemies would still denounce him as a science denier.  

My theory is that Trump knows that he has a rock-solid base of support – those who got him elected primarily because they are opposed to the “Ruling Class” (a term that covers the coalition that’s been running – and ruining –the country).  He’s also aware that his opposition is not persuadable.  They will oppose anything he does. 

So he’s freed of the shackles that restrained conventional Republican politicians who believed that they needed to do business as usual even after getting elected on promises to make major changes. 

Trump is free to use executive power, build over generations as Congress gave the Executive more power.  He has been freed of the illusion that he can persuade the opposition.  Like the prisoner who has had everything taken away from him, he’s much more free that those who still had that hope left.  He understands that it’s him, his base, and that part of Normal Americans who can be shown that his ideas work.

Thanks to an insane opposition, Trump is the Conservative they never wanted and they are in danger of creating the autocrat they feared.

Why Are American Taxpayers Subsidizing Chinese Companies?

Every package from China only costs $1.50 to ship. The US Post Office charges about $14 or more.  American Taxpayers make up the difference. 

Jayme Smaldone, owner of Mighty Mug and featured in the video above, was also recently interviewed by Kenny Malone of NPR. Here they discuss when Smaldone discovered his mug was being counterfeited in China and shipped to American at taxpayer expense.

MALONE: A few years ago, knockoff versions of this so-called Mighty Mug started popping up all over the world. And so Jayme bought one of these.

SMALDONE: For $5.69, free shipping from China.

MALONE: Five dollars and 69 cents total, including shipping. And Jayme turns to his shipping guy and says, wait; how much would it cost us just to ship this same mug across the street?

SMALDONE: He told me it’s going to cost us about 6.30 to ship this item across the street.

MALONE: Somehow, Jayme’s foreign competitor could manufacture and deliver a mug to a U.S. address for less than he pays to just ship the mug. When he started to look into how this was possible, Jayme discovered the answer had to do with a quiet, powerful organization called the Universal Postal Union.

Mark Steyn: "The Lost Frontier"

Mark takes on the fact that we seem to have lost the ability to explore.  The last time we went to the moon was over 50 years ago.  Donald Trump's announcement of an American Space Force was greeted with ridicule even as our entire economy would collapse if space became enemy territory.

Mark sums it up.

Those "Space Age" astronauts were men of boundless courage and determination: they strapped themselves in and stared not just death in the face but death in hideous and unknown ways. Yet they were also ordinary men, who were called upon to do extraordinary things and rose to the challenge. These days we are unmanned in more than merely the sense of that Luna 2 expedition. Glenn and Armstrong are gone, and their surviving comrades are old and stooped and wizened, and yet the only giants we have. Space may still be the final frontier, but today, when we talk about boldly going where no man has gone before, we mean the ladies' bathroom. Progress.

Scrappleface: "Trump Behavior Shames Economy"

The U.S. Economy today said it was embarrassed at its own impressive growth after learning — from a new Bob Woodward book and an anonymous op-ed in The New York Times — that the country is run by an impetuous idiot.

“Here I am happily growing and creating jobs,” the Economy said, “while this amoral, bozo blunders around the White House saying stupid stuff, and causing chaos for his staffers. It’s humiliating for me to succeed at this level, at a time when senior administration officials have to steal documents from the president’s desk just to maintain proper decorum.”

Reached by phone early this morning, National Security, Deregulation and Judicial Restraint sheepishly agreed with the Economy saying they feel their pleasant circumstances were purchased at the cost of turmoil for senior officials, who have to bear the unfair burden of coping with Trump’s embarrassing behavior just to make America great again.

“When we see the suffering of the anonymous resistance,” they said, “we feel guilty about thriving. After all, what do the American people want more than anything, if not a White House that runs according to historic protocol?”

Jim Treacher: "That NYT Op-Ed from That Anonymous Trump Official Was a Terrific Idea"

Jim Treacher does a great parody of the anonymous NY Times editorial

Hello, America. My name is not Mike Pence. I am not the Vice President of the United States.

I work in the White House, and I'm super-important. I do awesome stuff for America every day, like secretly keeping Trump from killing us all and then writing op-eds about how grateful you should be. I want to reiterate right here that I am probably not Mike Pence.

As a White House insider, I can reveal the awful truth: Trump is a stupid stinky fart-face and nobody likes him. He really sucks. If I just let him run around the White House in his big poopy diaper doing president-type stuff all by himself, he would mess it all up and you'd hate him even more than you do now.

You want an example to prove what I'm saying? Fine. One time Trump was eating candy out of a big glass jar, this was during a really important meeting, and he was just gobbling up all this candy. Looked like almond clusters or maybe almond bark. ...

Read the whole thing.

Democratic candidate Julia Salazar, 27, who 'faked her Jewish immigrant biography' was accused of affair with Mets star Keith Hernandez, 64, and arrested over claim of stealing from his wife

Salazar, who has campaigned as a Democratic socialist claiming to be a Colombian-Jewish immigrant, was outed as a Catholic Republican born in Miami

From the London Daily Mail.

Should Netflix Fire Obama? | We The Internet TV

Millennials aren’t taking offence. They’re hunting for victims

Radiating rapidly from campuses into the larger polity, the noble defence of an infinitely multiplying list of ‘marginalised groups’ is a predatory movement. Prowling the cultural veldt for givers of ‘offence’ is a blood sport, and its pleasures are those of hunting: spotting your prey, stalking, going in for the kill. Any source of umbrage thus presents an exulting opportunity to score a trophy, stuff it, and hang it on your (Facebook) wall. Mainstream institutions straining to be with-it give credence to this pretence of injury and vulnerability, when no one’s feelings actually have been hurt. So the victory is two-pronged. You take down the sinner, and you humiliate the editors of the Nation by forcing them to participate in an emotional theatre that every-one knows is fake.

I don’t buy into the notion that the ‘snowflake’ generation is all that sensitive, either. Antifa protestors in balaclavas can be quite violent for little specks that melt. ‘Snowflakes’ may have induced institutions to employ the language of fragility, but I think a lot of these kids are tough as old boots.

For verification, check out the YouTube video from last summer of a liberal biology professor at Evergreen State College in Washington being shouted down and physically hounded by a crowd of students crazed with virtue over a difference of opinion regarding the university’s race-related Day of Absence (‘Hey, hey! Ho, ho! Bret Weinstein has got to go!’). Behold, a pack of hyenas. Campus police told Weinstein they couldn’t guarantee his safety on campus. Obliged to hold his classes 30 miles away, at length the professor was successfully forced from the faculty.

Despite youth’s reputed belief in the importance of being earnest, the whole ID politics movement is emotionally disingenuous. When during that Evergreen foofaraw a rabid convocation of students cowed the college president into lowering his arms at the podium because they found his hand gestures ‘threatening’, those students didn’t feel jeopardised; they were dominating and emasculating a man supposedly in authority. The students cowering in ‘safe spaces’ don’t feel endangered; they’re claiming territory. In protecting the faux-helpless from noxious opinions via no-platforming, they’re exercising power. The experience of exercising power isn’t scary, except on the receiving end; it’s supremely gratifying. These people aren’t frightened. They want you to be frightened of them. And we’re not talking ‘microaggression’. PC police often prefer macroaggression, the kind that can get people sacked.

Mark Steyn: "The Day After Labor"

Mark Steyn discussed an old Fritz Lang movies “Metropolis” a dystopian world where people are slaves to the machine and are ruled by a technocratic elite. 

We’re not tied to a machine; or are we? What’s that machine in your pocket? Do you feel naked if you don't have it on you?

And those technocratic elite at Google, Facebook and Twitter control what we are allowed to see and hear. The amount of control they have over us is staggering. They amount of information they have about us, what we see, read, hear and say, where we are at any time should be terrifying. The Stazi never knew nearly as much about the people they spied on.

Under the pretense of caring for the worker, for the dispossessed, for the downtrodden, the Left is creating Fritz Lang's dystopia.

From The Undocumented Mark Steyn:

What do millions of people do in a world in which, in Marxian terms, "capital" no longer needs "labor"? America's liberal elite seem to enjoy having a domestic-servant class on hand, but, unlike the Downton Abbey crowd, are vaguely uncomfortable with having them drawn from the sturdy yokel stock of the village, and thus favor, to a degree only the Saudis can match, importing their maids and pool-boys from a permanent subordinate class of cheap foreign labor. Hence the fetishization of the "undocumented", soon to be reflected in the multi-million bipartisan amnesty for those willing to do "the jobs Americans won't do".

So what jobs will Americans get to do..?

Consider Vermont. Unlike my own state of New Hampshire, it has a bucolic image: Holsteins, dirt roads, the Vermont Teddy Bear Company, Ben & Jerry's, Howard Dean... And yet the Green Mountain State now has appalling levels of heroin and meth addiction, and the social chaos that follows. Geoffrey Norman began a recent essay in The Weekly Standard with a vignette from a town I know very well — St Johnsbury, population 7,600, motto "Very Vermont", the capital of the remote North-East Kingdom hard by the Quebec border and as far from urban pathologies as you can get. Or so you'd think. But on a recent Saturday morning, Norman reports, there were more cars parked at the needle-exchange clinic than at the farmers' market. In Vermont, there's no inner-city underclass, because there are no cities, inner or outer; there's no disadvantaged minorities, because there's only three blacks and seven Hispanics in the entire state; there's no nothing. Which is the real problem.

Large numbers of Vermonters have adopted the dysfunctions of the urban underclass for no reason more compelling than that there's not much else to do. Once upon a time, St Johnsbury made Fairbanks scales, but now a still handsome town is, as Norman puts it, "hollowed out by the loss of work and purpose". Their grandparents got up at four in the morning to work the farm and their great-great-great-whatever-parents slogged up the Connecticut River, cleared the land, and built homes and towns and a civilization in the wilderness. And now? A couple of months back, I sat in the café in St Johnsbury, and overheard a state bureaucrat and a Chamber of Commerce official discuss enthusiastically how the town could access some federal funds to convert an abandoned building into welfare housing...

What does every initiative of the Obama era have in common? Obamacare, Obamaphones, Social Security disability expansion, 50 million people on food stamps... The assumption is that mass, multi-generational dependency is now a permanent feature of life. A coastal elite will devise ever smarter and slicker trinkets, and pretty much everyone else will be a member of either the dependency class or the vast bureaucracy that ministers to them. And, if you're wondering why every Big Government program assumes you're a feeble child, that's because a citizenry without "work and purpose" is ultimately incompatible with liberty. The elites think a smart society will be wealthy enough to relieve the masses from the need to work. In reality, it would be neo-feudal, but with fatter, sicker peasants. It wouldn't just be "economic inequality", but a far more profound kind, and seething with resentments.

McCain tributes echo with criticism of Trump

The star of the McCain funeral was the man who wasn't there: Donald Trump.

Vigano to Journalists: Investigate Vatican's 'Cache of Documents' Showing Clerical Sexual Abuse

In an interview this week, Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò challenged journalists to investigate what happened to the “cache of documents” Benedict XVI delivered to Pope Francis after his election. Some sexual abuse victims and journalists seem to have heeded the call, demanding the documents outside the Vatican Embassy in Washington, D.C.

Viganò is the author of an extraordinary 11-page letter that sent shockwaves throughout Christiandom this week.

Meanwhile the Pope is denouncing plastic.

Suppose the Devil is real "For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this world's darkness, and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms."

The Devil is imaginary, most people say, a myth or literary device to personify the evil in the world.  Time to rethink that.

Richard Fernandez presents a plausible reason.

If anyone thought the 2016 revolt against the institutions was transient recent events may force a reconsideration. Instead of dying down open political war now permanently grips Washington. Abroad, time has healed no wounds; immigration issues have not dissipated in Europe, on the contrary riots are rocking Germany The British are still rushing bald-headed toward Brexit with all the incalculable consequences that entails. What can't be happening is.

According to sources quoted by the NYT "ideological agendas" have spread to the Catholic Church. After the Vatican's ex-ambassador to Washington Archbishop Carlo Vigano claimed a gay and left wing mafia had been protecting sex abusers within the Church and naming Pope Francis as the Left's man an issue was reliably anti-clerical suddenly turned into conspiracy story. Jason Horowitz in the NYT concluded that politics must be behind Vigano's allegations.

The letter, a bombshell written by Carlo Maria Viganò, the former top Vatican diplomat in the United States and a staunch critic of the pope’s, seemed timed to do more than simply derail Francis’ uphill efforts to win back the Irish faithful, who have turned away from the church in large numbers.

Its unsubstantiated allegations and personal attacks amounted to an extraordinary public declaration of war against Francis’ papacy at perhaps its most vulnerable moment, intended to unseat a pope whose predecessor, Benedict XVI, was the first pontiff to resign in nearly 600 years.

Politics, as Ross Douthat notes, explains "why certain organs and apostles of liberal Catholicism are running interference for [alleged abuser] McCarrick’s protectors — because Francis is their pope, the liberalizer they yearned for all through the John Paul and Benedict years." But can "politics" or even "ideological agendas" explain why the culture wars raging raging across the world look so similar.

Seventy-two percent (72%) believe that government agencies use their power to influence elections... and with good reason

Total Contributions Federal Employees to Democrats

• Dept. of State $999,502–94.3%
• Postal Service $644,594–68.3%
• Health & Human Services $630,957–94.8%
• Veterans Affairs $549,941–78.7%
• Dept. of Justice $479,083– 91.6%
• Dept. of Agriculture $368,426-87.2%
• Dept. of Energy $313,046-93.7%
• Dept. of Labor $286,023 -98.8%
• Dept. of Defense $735,983-65%
• Homeland Security $257,647 -75%
• Dept. of Education $110,513- 96%

Federal Employee Union PACS to Democrats

• American Federation of Govt Employees $1,945,539-91.6%
• National Rural Letter Carriers Association $435,000-59.7%
• National Treasury Employees Union $409,932 -95.9%
• National Association of Postal Supervisors $311,250-93.3%
• National Postal Mail Handlers Union $234,000 -92.5%
• National Association of Postmasters $100,580-78.9%
• NARFE-PAC $539,250-78.5% (active and retired federal employees)

Now you know why Trump rescinded the upcoming pay raise for government employees.

Respondin to the movie made of the moon landing without mentioning the American part

We don't even know if it's scientifically possible for a non-American to go to the moon. It's never happened.

— Frank J. Fleming (@IMAO_) August 31, 2018

He's right , you know.

I Worked With Avital Ronell. I Believe Her Accuser.

The Left doesn't like the rules it made.

The humanities are ablaze. This month The New York Times reported that the Title IX office had found Avital Ronell, a professor of German and comparative literature at New York University and a superstar in literary studies, responsible for sexually harassing a former student, Nimrod Reitman, now a visiting fellow at Harvard. A lawsuit filed by Reitman fills in the details. Leading feminist and queer scholars like Judith Butler, Lisa Duggan, and Jack Halberstam have defended her — or at least deflected criticism.

I believe the allegations.

It is simply no secret to anyone within a mile of the German or comp-lit departments at NYU that Avital is abusive. This is boring and socially agreed upon, like the weather.

Stories about Avital’s “process” are passed, like notes in class, from one student to the next: how she reprimanded her teaching assistants when they did not congratulate her for being invited to speak at a conference; how she requires that her students be available 24/7; how her preferred term for any graduate student who has fallen out of favor is “the skunk.”

...

This is how institutionality reproduces. Even the call to think critically about power becomes a clever smoke screen. There is a whole dissertation to be written on intellectuals using the word neoliberal to mean “rules I shouldn’t have to follow.” “If we focus on this one case, these details, this accuser and accused, we will miss the opportunity to think about the structural issues,” wrote Duggan. This was code. It meant, “You can talk about structural issues all you want, so long as you don’t use examples of people we know.”

You cannot have a cycle of abuse without actually existing abusers.

In a milquetoast take for The New Yorker, Masha Gessen applauded Duggan as a model of “academics doing their job: engaging with things in great complexity.” Of course power is messy. But there is no complexity in studying forests if you can’t recognize a tree from a few feet away. This is not wisdom; it is an eye complaint.

Structural problems are problems because real people hurt real people. You cannot have a cycle of abuse without actually existing abusers. That sounds simple, which is why so many academics hate it. When scholars defend Avital — or “complicate the narrative,” as we like to say — in part this is because we cannot stand believing what most people believe. The need to feel smarter is deep. Intelligence is a hungry god.

In this way, Avital’s case has become a strange referendum on literary study. Generations of scholars have been suckled at the teat of interpretation: We spend our days parsing commas and decoding metaphors. We get high on finding meaning others can’t. We hoard it, like dragons. We would be intellectually humiliated to learn that the truth was plain: that Avital quite simply sexually harassed her student, just as described. Sometimes analysis is simply denial with more words. Sometimes, as a frustrated student in a first-year literature course always mutters, the text just means what it says it means.

Winning.

1. The Deep State and their allies in the Media were determined to elect Hillary.
2. First they promoted Trump believing that Trump was the easiest Republican to beat.  Then he won.
3. After the nominations were over they conspired to defeat Trump.  Then he won.
4. After the election they conspired to prevent his taking office.  Then he won.
5. After he took office they are conspiring to remove him from office.
6. He’s still winning.

118 POLITICAL SCIENTISTS WANT THE AMERICAN POLITICAL SCIENCE ASSOCIATION TO RESCIND AN AWARD FOR CONDOLEEZZA RICE

Why is the American Political Science Association such a hotbed of racism and misogyny?