Month: July 2018

Calvin Coolidge, the 30th president of the United States, is generally not well-respected today. That is a mistake. Coolidge celebrated the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1926, with a speech providing a magisterial review of the history and thought underlying the Declaration. His speech on the occasion deserves to be read and studied in its entirety. Following is a short snippet relevant to the progressive dogma that modern elites view as higher wisdom:

“…About the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful. It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning can not be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction can not lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers…”

Modified from original post by Scott Johnson.

Hiring credentialed, but uneducated, SJW’s (Social Justice Warriors) to filter out “hate speech” didn’t work out, but poor Zuckerberg doesn’t realize if you let the same dopes write your filtering algorithms, stupid things happen. Like banning parts of the Declaration of Independence.

Reason reports that:

“…Since June 24, the Liberty County Vindicator of Liberty County, Texas, has been sharing daily excerpts from the declaration in the run up to July Fourth. The idea was to encourage historical literacy among the Vindicator’s readers. The first nine such posts of the project went up without incident. ‘But part 10,’ writes Vindicator managing editor Casey Stinnett, ‘did not appear. Instead, The Vindicator received a notice from Facebook saying that the post ‘goes against our standards on hate speech.’…”

Similar censoring happened to me. I closed my account. I don’t need Facebook to help me lead a better life.

Original Here

by: Steve Kelley

San Francisco’s last Republican mayor left office a month before the Beatles landed at JFK.

“…SAN FRANCISCO – The homeless encampments and drug addicts have become more visible to tourists, at times overshadowing the many landmarks that make San Francisco unique. Groups that hold their conventions here continue to take notice. ‘And it’s not just groups but also a lot of individual travelers. We hear a lot from individual travelers that have come here and have had negative experiences on the streets and say they don’t want to come back to San Francisco,’ said Joe D’Alessandro, President and CEO of the San Francisco Travel Association…”

Original Here

This day in history turned the tide of the Civil War. Pickett’s failed charge into Union lines on Cemetery Ridge.

Thure de Thulstrup’s Battle of Gettysburg, showing Pickett’s Charge

Hugh Hewitt Comes out in Favor of Judge Raymond Kethledge:

“…The search for Gorsuch 2.0 is underway at the White House. The best choice for the opening is Judge Raymond Kethledge of the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit. The 51-year-old judge from central casting — just like Neil M. Gorsuch — is not as well-known as front-runner U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh. But the longtime Michigan resident brings political upside to the process that Kavanaugh and several other contenders cannot.

The president sounds like a man who wants a second term, which means keeping his most high-profile and decisive campaign promises. During the 2016 campaign, Donald Trump pledged his Supreme Court nominees would be thoroughgoing “originalists” in the mold of Justice Antonin Scalia. So the first question is: Has the nominee ruled steadily in a fashion consistent with the original intent of the Constitution and its amendments and faithful to the statutes passed by the executive and legislative branches?

Kethledge’s record shows that in his case, the answer is a resounding “yes.” He has stood strongly with free exercise rights, siding for example with a church and its volunteers against the Labor Department’s bureaucrats, writing a separate concurrence to emphasize “The Department should tend to what is Caesar’s, and leave the rest alone.” He has an exemplary record on Second Amendment rights, concurring with his colleague Judge Jeffrey Sutton’s declaration of the right to bear arms as “fundamental” in a crucial en banc case on the amendment. Kethledge has also dissented in a Fifth Amendment takings case from the decision of his colleagues to punt back an aggrieved party to state court in a way he concluded indicated that the court had “lost our constitutional bearings” on property rights. . . .

Kethledge is also not another Harvard Law or Yale Law attendee , and with eight of those remaining on the court — Ruth Bader Ginsburg got her J.D. from Columbia , but her first two years were spent in Cambridge — the University of Michigan Law School credential sends an important message to the country…”

Original Here

Jonathan Tobin:

“…The more they emphasize the consequences of replacing Kennedy with a more consistent conservative, the greater the depression their voters will feel when the next Gorsuch takes the oath of office in time to join the Supreme Court for the opening of the fall term in October.

The irony here for Democrats is that the “resistance” is fueled by their conviction that Trump has violated key norms and threatens the institutions of democracy. Yet if there is one aspect of his presidency that has been completely normal, it is his approach to judicial appointments. He has stuck to the list of qualified conservatives that he made public before his election. No one can pretend that his appointments are any different, in terms of their beliefs or credentials, from those that might have been put forward by any other Republican president. Rather than heralding an era of radical Trumpian madness, Gorsuch and the other Trump judges are just normal constitutional conservatives and a reminder that, his Twitter account notwithstanding, the Trump presidency is for the most part an exercise in conservative rather than extremist governance.

That’s why it’s going to be hard for Democrats to persuade any GOP senators to join them or to keep their own caucus in line, setting them up for failure and the recriminations that will follow.

Democrats aren’t happy about a post-Kennedy Court that will protect religious freedom and freedom of speech in ways they abhor and perhaps even chip away at Roe. As President Obama liked to say, “elections have consequences.”

Yet the Democrats’ more immediate concern should be the way their inevitable defeat in the coming confirmation fight will depress their base and strengthen the forces pushing their party farther to the left in the run-up to 2020. It remains to be seen whether this is a prescription for a revived opposition party or a gift to an otherwise embattled Trump administration. Nevertheless, Democratic activists are going to be judging every member of their party’s caucus on their conduct in the next few months. As their less-than-scintillating performance on the first day of the struggle illustrated, their conclusions are likely to be harsh…”

Original Here

Opinion letter to the editor from a gentleman named Andy Weiss:

“…When Democrats lost the election in 2016, there emerged a movement to get rid of the Electoral College, because they deemed it unfair, since they had more popular votes. Now I see some are proposing the elimination of lifetime appointments to the U.S. Supreme Court because a majority of conservative judges is threatening.

It seems to me the Founding Fathers were far smarter than present-day politicians when they set up this republic. In 2016, Americans were fed up with politicians and elected a president who is not beholden to any special interest group. It’s time the Democrats man up and admit they lost fairly, because they keep trying the same old failed policies. You can’t change the rules if you don’t like the outcome…”

Original Here

There seems to be a large gap between elite (media, Washington political types, academia) and mainstream opinion on the issues relating to immigration. As usual, Trump found the pulse of the country despite the wild and inaccurate media reporting.

Byron York:

“…If a new poll is correct, it appears the Trump administration, after an enormously damaging few weeks, has ended up squarely on the side of the majority of American voters.

The new survey is a Harvard-Harris poll, by former Clinton pollster and strategist Mark Penn. It was conducted June 24-25, with 1,448 registered voters.

On the issue of separations, Penn began with a threshold question: “Do you think that people who make it across our border illegally should be allowed to stay in the country or sent home? Sixty-four percent (83 percent of Republicans, 47 percent of Democrats, and 66 percent of independents) said they should be sent home. Thirty-six percent said they should be allowed to stay.

Then, Penn asked: “Do you think that parents with children who make it across our border illegally should be allowed to stay in the country or sent home?” The presence of children made little difference in the result: 61 percent (81 percent of Republicans, 40 percent of Democrats, and 66 percent of independents) said they should be sent home, while 39 percent said they should be allowed to stay.

The vast majority — 88 percent — opposed separating illegal immigrant families while they are in the U.S., and they blamed the Trump administration for the policy. On the other hand, 55 percent (76 percent of Republicans, 39 percent of Democrats, and 55 percent of independents) said illegal immigrant families should be held in custody “until a judge reviews their case” — essentially the new Trump family detention policy.

The end result was that a substantial majority said illegal border crossers, and the children they brought, should be returned to their home countries. To that end, 80 percent (84 percent of Republicans, 79 percent of Democrats, and 78 percent of independents) favored hiring more immigration judges ‘to process people in custody faster.’…”

Original Here

Joel Kotkin:

“…No state in the union has been more adamant in opposing President Trump’s policy on immigration than California. The Golden State widely sees itself — and is widely seen in progressive circles — as the harbinger of America’s multi-cultural future, a “sanctuary state” that epitomizes ethnic ascendency.

Yet in reality, the picture is far less pleasing, most of all for racial minorities, particularly the poor and working class. The state policy agenda, dominated by concerns over climate change, has been something of a disaster for the very minorities that state progressives so fervently claim to serve.

This claim is at the center of a new report by David Friedman and Jennifer Hernandez, released this week by Chapman University, which spells out the ways the California “boom” has hurt the prospect for historically disadvantaged ethnic minorities such as African Americans and Latinos.

In the past decade, Democratic progressives have benefited enormously from African American and Latino voters, who support them by wide margins. As California has become dominated by racial minorities, now over 60 percent of the population, it has drifted towards a status of a one-party progressive state.

But, as the report makes clear, Democratic protestations of solidarity have not worked out well on the ground. “The imposition by the state’s Democratic Party leaders of highly regressive climate schemes have engendered disparate financial hardships on middle and lower income workers and minority communities,” they write. This, they continue, “represents a significant departure from more traditional Democratic Party values.”

The authors demonstrate that California’s draconian climate regime — mandating more than twice the actual emissions reductions from 2015 levels by 2030 compared with the European Union under the Paris Agreement — has been blatantly injurious to working class populations. This includes greenhouse gas policy-induced electricity rates that are nearly 60 percent above the national average, the nation’s highest rent and housing prices and a general decline in the blue-collar industries, such as manufacturing that have historically provided the best path to upward mobility…”

Original Here