Month: July 2018

Members of the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment’s Horse Detachment conduct the ceremonial last charge during a change-of-command ceremony at Fort Irwin, Calif., June 28, 2018. Army photo by Staff Sgt. David Edge

Judge Kavanaugh appears to be a solid man and judge. I salute the president for choosing this man, and I support Judge Kavanaugh for the next justice on the Supreme Court.

Ed Whelan:

“…Congratulations to President Trump on his decision to nominate D.C. Circuit judge Brett M. Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. I very much look forward to Justice Kavanaugh.

Judge Kavanaugh, 53 years old, has compiled an outstanding record during his twelve years on the federal court of appeals in D.C. On what is commonly regarded as the second-most-important court in the country, he has confronted a vast array of consequential constitutional and statutory issues and has written strong, influential opinions. His positions in numerous dissents were later adopted by Supreme Court majorities.

Judge Kavanaugh has been selected to fill the seat of retiring Justice Anthony Kennedy, for whom he clerked — along with Neil Gorsuch — 25 years ago. A graduate of Yale College and Yale Law School, Kavanaugh has dedicated his career to public service. He worked for several years in the Office of Independent Counsel under Ken Starr and then for five years in the White House of President George W. Bush, first in the White House counsel’s office and then in the role of staff secretary. During an interlude in private practice, he headed the Federalist Society’s Religious Liberties Practice Group and wrote two pro bono Supreme Court amicus briefs in support of the cause of religious liberty.

Kavanaugh is a lector at his Catholic parish, where he also coaches his daughters’ CYO basketball teams. He also volunteers with Catholic charities and teaches and mentors in local schools. He is as fit off the court as he is on it: The former captain of his high-school basketball team runs regularly and has won his court’s annual 5-K five times…”

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I don’t agree with much that Glenn Greenwald says about politics, but Greenwald is an honest man. You should read this whole piece about liberal media from a liberal journalist.

Glenn Greenwald:

“…During the 2016 primary and general election campaigns, various MSNBC hosts were openly campaigning for Hillary Clinton…”

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Much of California’s middle-class is gone and the normal-rich are now exiting. That leaves the super-rich and the poor. A situation described in detail by Victor Davis Hanson. This bodes poorly for the golden state.

“…Prop. 30 raised the state’s top income tax rate by more than 29%, increasing it three percentage points from 10.3% to 13.3%, which is now the highest state income tax rate in the nation. Prop. 30 also hiked the tax rate on income between $300,000 and $500,000 by two percentage points (a 21.5% rate increase), and raised the rate on income between $500,000 and $1,000,000 by three percentage points (a more than 32% rate hike).

In 2016, California voters extended the Prop. 30 income tax increases, which were originally scheduled to expire in 2019, until 2030. There will be an effort to extend those income tax hikes yet again prior to their expiration in 2030; book it now.

Varner’s new research examined taxpayers who were and were not hit by the Prop. 30 rate hikes. He found that in the two years before the Prop. 30 tax hike was imposed (2011 and 2012), net in-migration for both groups “was positive and roughly constant.” Yet following 2012 and the passage of Prop. 30, net in-migration dropped for households that were facing an effective tax increase of 0.5 percent or more. The reduction was greatest for households facing the highest effective tax hike, according to Varner and his coauthors.

This isn’t surprising for those who are familiar with other attempts to soak the rich with punitive state income tax hikes on high earners…”

Liberal Government, or the lack of same?

Karol Markowicz:

“…Beautiful, hilly San Francisco has become known as the city where 20 pounds of poop were dumped on a sidewalk last week in a clear bag and remained there for hours. As The Post noted, “human waste-related complaints in San Francisco have skyrocketed 400 percent from 2008 to 2018,” and “In 2017 alone, more than 21,000 reports were received.”

What happened in San Francisco is obvious. It stopped prosecuting quality-of-life offenses and, unsurprisingly, the quality of life for the city’s residents and visitors decreased sharply.

In 2015, San Francisco courts stopped enforcing bench warrants for such offenses. Police continued writing up tickets for public drunkenness or sleeping in parks, but when the accused failed to show up to their court appearance a judge simply dismissed the outstanding warrant.

New York started following San Francisco’s lead in 2016 when Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance Jr. announced his office would no longer be prosecuting offenses such as public urination. Both cities have accepted that they’ll continue to have a large number of people living on their streets and inevitably using their sidewalks as a toilet…”

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Blue Wave? Don’t believe everything you hear or read from the MSM.

“…But however skewed Rasmussen’s poll sample might be, that 74 percent number indicates the Democrats are in serious trouble if they actually believe a far-left push is the key to winning those mid-term elections. It isn’t. It is a complete invitation to disaster. The Rasmussen poll isn’t the only one recently offering an indication the Democrats are on the absolute wrong track this year. In another, this one from Reuters/Ipsos, the Dems are cratering among the millennials they’re trying to build their party around — dropping from 55 percent support over Republicans two years ago to 46 percent now. And among white millennials the numbers are catastrophic. Two years ago with white voters between 18 and 34, Democrats held a 47-33 edge over Republicans; now it’s 39-39. And with white male millennials it’s an almost unimaginable swing; what was a 48-36 Democrat advantage is now a 46-37 GOP edge…”

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John Hinderaker:

“…Remember the good old days when the Left pretended to worry about ‘eliminationist rhetoric’? Now, they don’t even pretend to worry about a Bernie Sanders volunteer trying to murder Republican Congressmen.

Yesterday’s New York Times editorial on the judiciary illustrates how far around the bend the Democratic Party has gone:

‘With Republicans controlling the Senate and the judicial filibuster dead, the Democrats’ odds of denying President Trump a second Supreme Court appointment are slim. Barring some unforeseen development, the president will lock in a 5-to-4 conservative majority, shifting the court solidly to the right for a generation.

This is all the more reason for Democrats and progressives to take a page from “The Godfather’ and go to the mattresses on this issue.’

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Think Trump is a poor GOP president? Fine. Think Hillary would be preferable? You’re crazy.

JONATHAN S. TOBIN:

Leaving the party — destroying it to save it — won’t work.

“…As I wrote in March about Boot, and as Charles Cooke has also discussed with respect to Jennifer Rubin (another of my former Commentary colleagues), the issue isn’t so much about how Trump has changed the GOP as how Trump derangement has changed them. Both now take positions that are contrary to the stands they took prior to 2016. If Trump is for something, they’re against it even if they used to support it. If he’s against it, they’re for it even if they used to oppose it…”

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You can’t make this stuff up!

“…Portland State University is offering a course this fall on ‘Ecofeminist Spirituality,’ which combines ‘feminist biblical interpretation’ with the idea that ‘the oppression of women and the exploitation of the earth are related.’ According to the professor, the most radical form of ecofeminism is ‘Socialist Ecofeminism,’ which posits that the capitalist economy exploits both women and nature.

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“…Barack Obama got elected twice but he was an ungodly disaster for the Democratic party. They lost the supermajority, they lost the Senate, they lost the House, they lost 1,000 local state and local offices, they’re going to lose the Supreme Court. And they can’t come to grips with the fact that they control popular cultural — sports, universities, the media — but that turns into this type of street theater you referenced. It doesn’t transfer into actual political power and they’re very frustrated.

The Never Trumpers told us that Trump would be a moderate or a liberal. He wasn’t. The Heritage Foundation said he was more conservative in his first 2 years than Ronald Reagan. The left said he was going to implode or that the Mueller investigation, or impeachment, or the emoluments clause, or they were going to sue under the 25th Amendment. None of that happened. So Trump is almost 50% approval rating.

And the final thing is there’s no alternative agenda. We don’t know what your speaker, your guest, what do they feel about taxes? Do they want more government? More regulation? Less? Is the Iran deal good or bad? We don’t hear any of that. Instead, they fixate on somebody like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, kind of an obscure 28-year-old who won an election with 20% turnout and suddenly that’s a metaphor for a brave new world. So it’s a frustration that they don’t translate their cultural influence into raw political…”

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First the Declaration of Independence, and now this: Country band says Facebook prevented promotion of song, ‘I Stand for the Flag,’ because of ‘political content.’

Well, when one party is explicitly unpatriotic, patriotism becomes a political statement.

From Glenn Reynolds

The majority from the Obama Era.

There are more that need to go–including the school discipline guidance.  But Tuesday’s action looks like real progress.

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