This is an outstanding article about a difficult subject. The piece is long, but worth clicking over to read the whole thing.

Kyle Sammin:

“…New York’s legislature last week passed a bill that drastically expanded access to late-term abortion in that state. Although ghoulish, it was unsurprising. It fits neatly within the mainstream opinion of the 21st-century Democratic Party. Neither was Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s signature a surprise, since the governor has followed the well-worn path of fake-Catholic Democrats on the subject.

Vermont and Virginia are considering similar laws. The shift has been building for some time. The radical fringe that pushes abortion rights has dropped all pretense that abortion has any downsides…”

and

“…As with the debate over abortion, the debate over slavery began in America mostly among moderates. Partly this was because, then as now, the people most deeply harmed by the institution were not consulted. Among the voices that were allowed to be heard, most wanted gradual changes if they wanted changes at all.

By the time the Constitution was written, slavery had already declined in the Northern states. Partially this was because their climate and terrain did not lend themselves to the South’s large-scale plantation economies, but there was more to it than that….More typical were slaveowners like Thomas Jefferson who, paraphrasing Suetonius, famously said of slavery, “We have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.” Despite limited action by the remaining slaveholders, the general sentiment even among its supporters was that slavery was a necessary evil that someday would disappear…”

and

“…That trajectory toward freedom was not maintained…Instead, a new generation of slavery advocates arose that supported the institution even more than their fathers and grandfathers had. Sen. John C. Calhoun of South Carolina was foremost among these. In 1837, Calhoun gave a speech in the Senate that marked the transition to a new, more aggressive pro-slavery ideology:

I hold that in the present state of civilization, where two races of different origin, and distinguished by color, and other physical differences, as well as intellectual, are brought together, the relation now existing in the slaveholding States between the two, is, instead of an evil, a good–a positive good. … I may say with truth, that in few countries so much is left to the share of the laborer, and so little exacted from him, or where there is more kind attention paid to him in sickness or infirmities of age. Compare his condition with the tenants of the poor houses in the more civilized portions of Europe–look at the sick, and the old and infirm slave, on one hand, in the midst of his family and friends, under the kind superintending care of his master and mistress, and compare it with the forlorn and wretched condition of the pauper in the poorhouse.

“…That phrase—“a positive good”—signaled that Calhoun and others like him were committed to their cause, and no reason, science, or moral suasion would divert them from their chosen path. Slavery advocates now proclaimed the institution as actually superior to any other sort of labor arrangement. They still had Jefferson’s wolf by the ears, but now they liked it just fine and had no intention of letting the wretched thing go…”

and

“…The parallels to the abortion debate are unmistakable. Although Cuomo lacks Calhoun’s rhetorical skill, his devotion to an unjust cause matches the South Carolinian’s. The #ShoutYourAbortion campaign began in 2015, and in 2019 it has only increased in reach. Abortion’s defenders now see that unholy act as a positive good in the world, not just a necessary evil. The lights of the World Trade Center were a burnt offering to Moloch, a pledge of allegiance to the cause of infanticide. This is abortion’s Calhoun moment…”

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This is brutally harsh, but there is truth to it.

S.G. CHEAH:

“…It was a sort of sick unintended symbolism that the Parkland school shooting happened on Valentine’s Day. That an act so evil could occur on a day that is dedicated to the celebration of love. Horrified, I asked “How could this possibly happened?” Especially after multiple reports and investigations uncovered that the Parkland tragedy was fully preventable.

Suddenly it hit me like a brick. Liberals claim to love the young. “Think of the children!” is one of their favorite rallying cries.

And yet, it was a liberal School Board that failed to protect the children at Parkland.

It was a liberal Sheriff Office that failed to protect the children at Parkland.

It was an liberal (Obama appointed) Judge who ruled that the authorities didn’t have the obligation to protect the children at Parkland.

The kids at Parkland were simply not safe under the protection of Broward’s liberal district.

Liberals always claim to love and care about the young more than the conservatives, and yet liberals are the ones that are the most predatory against the young…”

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When local politicians talk about national issues like global warming, it is to deflect criticism from local issues that they are unable or unwilling to resolve.

“…Greenwood believes she contracted typhus from fleas in her office at City Hall East. Fleas often live on rats, which congregate in the many heaps of trash that are visible across the city of LA, and are a breeding ground for typhus. ‘There are rats in City Hall and City Hall East,’ Greenwood added. ‘There are enormous rats and their tails are as long as their bodies…”

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If President Trump has done nothing else, his presence on the national political scene has exposed the truth about many politicians.

Matthew Continetti:

“…On Monday, in a townhall organized by CNN, Kamala Harris endorsed a Medicare-for-All plan that would “eliminate”—her word—private insurance. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, employer-provided health insurance covers “approximately 152 million nonelderly people in total.” A poll last year by America’s Health Insurance Plan (AHIP) found that 71 percent of Americans were satisfied with their employer’s plan. Most Americans have health insurance, and most Americans are pretty happy with their insurance. Too bad: Kamala Harris says it’s time to “move on.”

Harris’s rival, Elizabeth Warren, has endorsed a tax of 2 percent on assets above $50 million and 3 percent on assets above $1 billion. Now, Warren would like to raise taxes on incomes, capital gains, dividends, and corporations, too. That’s just for starters. A wealth tax of the sort she has proposed—a government claw-back of property in order to make real a subjective standard of equality—would be unique in American history. It might even be unconstitutional. But hey, why worry about that when you can indulge in some light court packing?

The brightest star in the Democratic Party is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, aka AOC. The other week, in conversation with Ta-Nehisi Coates, AOC said, “I do think that a system that allows billionaires to exist when there are parts of Alabama where people are still getting ringworm because they don’t have access to public health is wrong.” Don’t worry, “It’s not to say someone like Bill Gates or Warren Buffet are immoral people.” AOC’s complaint is with the “system” that “allows” Gates and Buffet—and Schultz and Bezos and George Lucas and Mark Zuckerberg and the rest—”to exist.” Presumably, then, Gates and Buffet are safe, existentially speaking. But the “system” of relatively free enterprise that allowed them to grow rich—and finance or innovate remarkable advances in technology and productivity that have benefited the world—should be altered drastically. Hence AOC’s call for a 70-percent marginal tax rate—backed by the same genius from Berkeley who designed Warren’s expropriation of wealth—to help pay for the “Green New Deal” that will give us “a 100% greenhouse gas neutral power generation system, decarbonizing industry and agriculture and more.” Currently, 17 percent of American energy is renewable. The scale of coercion required for such a transformation would brighten any Jacobin’s day. Don’t think too hard about the details of the proposal, though. AOC says there isn’t time to worry about cost, implementation, and unanticipated consequences. “The world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change,” she told Coates. Nice while it lasted, I suppose.

AOC also has a message for Schultz, who has been the recipient of sustained, ferocious, and panicked attacks from members of his former party outraged that a moderate billionaire might spoil their plans for replacing Trump with an unreconstructed left-winger. “Why don’t people ever tell billionaires who want to run for president that they need to ‘work their way up’ or that ‘maybe they should start with city council first’? ” she Tweeted. Well, plenty of people do tell them that—I seem to recall a lack of government experience being an issue in the most recent presidential election—but if anyone has “worked his way up,” from the poorhouse to being the first in his family to graduate from college to turning a coffee shop at the Pike Place market into the global behemoth that is Starbucks, it’s Howard Schultz. I’d even go as far to say that Schultz’s company has done more for its low-wage workers than the corniest socialist dreams of AOC.

Let’s see … what else happened in the busy world of crazy … excuse me while I flip through my files … Ah yes, there was congresswoman Ilhan Omar, parroting the Kremlin-Havana-Tehran line on the democratic uprising in Venezuela, calling it “a U.S. backed coup.” A few days later, Omar, a supporter of the anti-Semitic Boycott Divestment Sanctions movement whom the Democrats have awarded with a place on the House Foreign Relations Committee, said she “almost chuckles” because “we still uphold” the Jewish State of Israel “as a democracy in the Middle East.” I chuckle—and begin seriously to worry—that someone who cannot distinguish between tyranny in Latin America and democracy in the Middle East commands such acclaim and receives such attention. Omar has former Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett in her corner. When Omar dismissed Congressman Lee Zeldin’s criticism of her views by Tweeting, “Don’t mind him, he is just waking up to the reality of having Muslim women as colleagues who know how to stand up to bullies!”, Jarrett replied, “Shake him up!” Zeldin is a Jewish Republican…”

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You can count on CNN to help out when Democrats are in trouble:

The complex moral signalling codes of Democrats is difficult to describe and understand. J. Christian Adams gives it go in this article. Worth clicking over for the whole thing.

J. CHRISTIAN ADAMS:

“…We still don’t know: did Virginia Governor Ralph Northam dress up in Klan garb, or is he the fellow in blackface? One thing we do know is that if photos of any Republican surfaced wearing either, they would have already resigned five or six times.

Ask former Mississippi Senator Trent Lott. . . .

Ralph Northam declared war on white supremacists in 2018. In 1984, he may have been dressing like one. . . .

In his extraordinary statements on pre- and post-birth abortion, Northam has secured his defense. Who needs mercy and charity when he’s already all-in on the NARAL agenda? Political ideology masquerading as forgiveness will carry Northam through with Virginia Democrats.

Three cheers for reproductive justice. It’s such an intoxicating theology for Democrats that it may even absolve blackface and KKK garb.

Both United States senators from Virginia have announced their support for Northam. Just a few days ago, old photos of Florida Secretary of State Mike Ertel in blackface emerged and Ertel was gone before the cock crowed…”

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FRANCEY HAKES:

“…The word “coup” evokes imagery of bloody revolution, but does a coup have to be bloody, or even happen all at once? What if, instead, a bloodless, rolling coup started with a snowball and ended with an avalanche? Many believe this very thing happened in 2016, with a small political cabal determined to see Hillary Clinton elected president. When she was defeated, the theory goes, they worked even harder to try to bring her hated opponent, Donald Trump, down by any means necessary — even if this caused much of the American public to believe the president of the United States is the tool of a foreign adversary.

Is this theory merely the fevered dream of tinfoil-hat-wearing types, or could such a cabal have existed with the kind of power to instigate such a plot? With special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation apparently close to winding down, it is useful to analyze the underpinnings of the Trump-Russia collusion accusation that started it all.

Partisans cite evidence to support both the theory of an attempted “bloodless coup” by political hacks inside the FBI and Department of Justice (DOJ) and the theory that dedicated professionals had reason to believe there was a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Russians sufficient to launch an unprecedented counterintelligence operation.

Which theory is more plausible, based on how DOJ and the FBI operate? A review of what happened holds the answer.

By March 2016, it was clear Trump would become the Republican nominee. The Russians hacked Democratic National Committee (DNC) servers to gain access to Clinton campaign emails. Two months later, the DNC hired a law firm that retained Fusion GPS and ex-British spy Christopher Steele to conduct opposition research on Trump. Steele was a confidential FBI informant and friend of former Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr, who oversaw drug and organized crime and had no role in intelligence or national security matters.

In early July 2016, Steele alerted the FBI about details in his dossier of allegations (ultimately paid for by the Clinton campaign). He accused Trump and the Russians of an extensive conspiracy to throw the election. On July 30, over breakfast, Steele asked Bruce Ohr to share his dossier with the FBI. Ohr later noted that Steele made clear he wanted to stop a Trump presidency from happening. This obvious bias should have encouraged a seasoned prosecutor’s caution about the veracity of the allegations, yet Ohr used his position at DOJ to share Steele’s allegations with then-FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe.

That interaction, in particular, was a shocking lapse of protocol. Ohr worked directly for the deputy attorney general, but when given information that a presidential candidate might have been compromised by the Russians, he failed to alert anyone in his chain of command. DOJ is a chain of command-oriented place. Why didn’t Ohr tell his boss that the possible next president of the United States represented a threat to national security?

Ohr wasn’t an expert on intelligence or national security, but someone in the office was. Yet Ohr testified to Congress that he did not seek out anyone on staff — not his boss, nor any of her advisers — to brief them about this sensitive but potentially catastrophic information. Again, why not?

Partisans on one side might suggest the only explanation is political — that is, that like Steele, Ohr and McCabe were Clinton supporters who wanted to ensure Trump’s defeat. This point of view is hard to rebut, given what we now know about text messages between former FBI lovers Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, indicating they, too, were determined to prevent a Trump presidency.

Ohr has said he subsequently shared the information with three other DOJ employees, but none was in his chain of command, or even in the deputy AG’s office. (Two of them subsequently — coincidentally? — joined Mueller’s Russia collusion investigation.)

It’s hard to understand Ohr’s actions. DOJ has strict protocols for investigating politicians; rule one is to notify your chain of command. Instead, Ohr encouraged the FBI to investigate. And so, it appears that DOJ abdicated its role as neutral arbiter.

But what about the FBI? On July 31, 2016, one day after Ohr reached out to McCabe, Strzok opened a counterintelligence matter dubbed “Crossfire Hurricane” to look into the Trump-Russia allegations. What was the basis for this unprecedented action against a presidential campaign? Was it merely Steele’s dossier, containing allegations that former FBI Director James Comey later acknowledged were unverified? We now know the FBI in October 2016 used this dossier, in part, to convince a judge there was probable cause to believe Trump campaign volunteer Carter Page was engaged in criminal activity on behalf of Russia and should be covertly surveilled.

It’s not unusual to use informants such as Steele to obtain search and arrest warrants. When an informant’s word is used to secure such warrants, however, the case agent must assure the judge that the informant is reliable. Reliable informants generally have firsthand information, but the Steele dossier stands in stark contrast: It relied upon unnamed sources in Russia for information. Investigators should have tried to establish the veracity of those sources. Yet, as Comey has admitted, those efforts either were not made or were unsuccessful.

This lends credence to those who argue the FBI ignored protocols for partisan political ends. First, efforts were made to prevent Trump from winning the White House (high-level leaking of information ensured the Russia collusion investigation became public before the election). Second, surveillance and leaks continued until after the president’s inauguration — leading to talk that he should not be inaugurated, or should resign shortly thereafter.

All of these facts appear to show the “collusion” investigation was begun by those with apparent political motives and complete disregard for protocols. This suggests that, indeed, a small political faction inside the U.S. government attempted to sway a presidential election — and used our country’s counterintelligence assets to do it…”

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“…Russian misbehavior aside, this ostensibly bilateral treaty is obsolete in a multilateral world, giving a strategic advantage to other adversaries. China has aggressively expanded its intermediate-range missiles to assert its influence in the Pacific while the U.S. is constrained by the INF, threatening both our posture in that theater and the security of our Pacific allies.

Advocates of the deal insist that leaving the treaty removes any chance that Russia would return to compliance, but Moscow has had ample opportunity to do that already. They insist, too, that leaving confers no advantages. But there are significant costs to remaining in the treaty, which complicates the testing of American missile-defense systems and sends a signal that the U.S. is not serious about enforcing the terms of its agreements with other countries.

The INF set up an enforcement regime that was reasonably effective in the first decades of its signing. It no longer works, and it hamstrings us in other key domains. Barack Obama forgot Reagan’s doctrine that “to be serious about arms control is to be serious about compliance.” Trump remembered it, and not a moment too soon…”

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