Doug Santo

Troops of the 20th Armored Division and units of the 9th Army whoop it up between raindrops as the S.S. John Ericsson nears Pier 84, Hudson River as they return from Europe—victorious.

Outstanding piece by Conrad Black. Here’s a little taste:

“…However, there is extensive public evidence that Messrs. Clapper, Brennan (who recently tweeted that Mr. Trump could “not destroy America”), Comey, his former deputy Andrew McCabe, and Mrs. Clinton and her entourage all lied to Congress or to federal officials. The former attorney general and deputy attorney general (Loretta Lynch and Sally Yates), and Mr. Rosenstein himself, are among those implicated in misleading the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court, and all are in the gray zone of potential indictability and conviction…”

Conrad Black

Two CV-22 Osprey aircraft fly close together during the Cannon Air Show, Space and Tech Fest at Cannon Air Force Base, N.M., May 26, 2018.

I am not entirely satisfied with the Supreme Court decision in this matter, but this take from Scotusblog seems to interpret the Court’s decision about right. It also predicts the next actions from the progressive left in their lawfare campaign against traditional American institutions.

“…What the Supreme Court said was different but may ultimately come to nearly the same place. The court said that the inconsistent treatment of Phillips and the protected bakers showed hostility towards Phillips’ religious faith. Colorado had violated its duty “not to base laws or regulations on hostility to a religion or a religious viewpoint.” The state must “proceed in a manner neutral toward and tolerant of Phillips’ religious beliefs.” The commission had been “neither tolerant nor respectful”; it had proceeded on the basis of “a negative normative ‘evaluation of the particular justification’ for his objection” (quoting Lukumi).

There is a practical holding and an ideal holding here. The practical holding is that the unequal treatment of Phillips and the protected bakers is evidence of unconstitutional hostility. Conscientious objectors embroiled in litigation will have to send testers to smoke out uneven enforcement of anti-discrimination law. We expect that states are unwilling to require socially liberal vendors to produce goods with conservative religious messages they find offensive or against their conscience. If that is so, then those states cannot require religiously conservative vendors to produce goods in violation of their conscience.

The Supreme Court has announced a powerful ideal. Even when a law has no explicit exceptions, hostile enforcement is unconstitutional. Single-issue agencies that enforce state civil-rights laws must approach claims to religious exemptions with tolerance and respect. And this is apparently an absolute rule; the court does not consider whether hostility might be justified by some state interest, compelling or otherwise.

But a requirement of tolerance and respect, or even the avoidance of hostility, is difficult to enforce. The opponents of religious exemptions will now start doing the sorts of things done by many other government officials resisting constitutional mandates. They will seek doctrinal and rhetorical manipulations to cloak their hostility to the constitutional right, and their unequal treatment of objectors they agree with and objectors they don’t…”

Scotusblog

God bless these brave men.

First wave beach battalion lays low under the fire of Nazi guns on a beach in southern France on D-Day.

Like global warming, recycling was more about progressive and secular faith-based policy beliefs than hard science.

“…Some Inconvenient Truths About Recycling…

It has become an article of faith in the U.S. that recycling is a good thing. But evidence is piling up that recycling is a waste of time and money, and a bit of a fraud.

The New York Times recently reported that, unknown to most families who spend hours separating garbage into little recycling bins, much of the stuff ends up in a landfill anyway.

One big reason: China has essentially shut the door to U.S. recyclables.

The Times notes that about a third of recyclables gets shipped abroad, with China the biggest importer. But starting this year, China imposed strict rules on what it will accept, effectively banning most of it. That, the Times reports, has forced many recycling companies who can’t find other takers to dump recyclables into landfills.

One company, Oregon’s Rogue Disposal and Recycling, sent “all its recycling to landfills for the first few months of the year,” the Times reports.

Bloomberg says Massachusetts has issued dozens of landfill waivers so recyclable material can be dumped in them. The Florida Sun Sentinel reports that in Broward County, Fla., up to 30% of the stuff residents put in recycling bins ends up in landfills...”

IBD

I see indicators that Black Americans are taking a second look at the democrat party.

“…Voters feel young black Americans are better off under President Trump than they were under Barack Obama, the nation’s first black president.

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey shows that 32% of Likely U.S. Voters believe life for young black Americans has gotten better since Trump’s election. Slightly more (36%) say life for these Americans has gotten worse, while 26% think it has stayed about the same…”

and

“…Even black voters are nearly twice as likely (28%) to say young black Americans are better off now than they were in the closing year of Obama’s presidency (15%).

Forty-seven percent (47%) of all voters, however, believe race relations are worse since Trump’s election. Still, that compares to 60% who felt that way after eight years of the Obama presidency. Just 20% say those relations are better now, while 30% rate them about the same…”

Rasmussen Reports

An interesting analysis of recent international trends.

“…Without fanfare elements of a new cold war are being put into place by the Trump administration, the European Union and China. Although the disconnected components separately make headlines, the underlying pattern is evident despite the carnival-like distractions of the Mueller investigation and the reluctance to declare the old order dead…”

Richard Fernandez

I don’t believe global warming was ever a serious scientific issue—by that I mean one that required a consortium of governments to solve immediately so humans could survive. It has been obvious for some time that the science did not match the political and media hype. It has also been obvious that the science was used by the progressive left in an attempt to force their will on western countries.

Steven Hayward:

“…Climate change is over. No, I’m not saying the climate will not change in the future, or that human influence on the climate is negligible. I mean simply that climate change is no longer a pre-eminent policy issue. All that remains is boilerplate rhetoric from the political class, frivolous nuisance lawsuits, and bureaucratic mandates on behalf of special-interest renewable-energy rent seekers.

Judged by deeds rather than words, most national governments are backing away from forced-marched decarbonization. You can date the arc of climate change as a policy priority from 1988, when highly publicized congressional hearings first elevated the issue, to 2018. President Trump’s ostentatious withdrawal from the Paris Agreement merely ratified a trend long becoming evident.

A good indicator of why climate change as an issue is over can be found early in the text of the Paris Agreement. The “nonbinding” pact declares that climate action must include concern for “gender equality, empowerment of women, and intergenerational equity” as well as “the importance for some of the concept of ‘climate justice.’ ” Another is Sarah Myhre’s address at the most recent meeting of the American Geophysical Union, in which she proclaimed that climate change cannot fully be addressed without also grappling with the misogyny and social injustice that have perpetuated the problem for decades.

The descent of climate change into the abyss of social-justice identity politics represents the last gasp of a cause that has lost its vitality. Climate alarm is like a car alarm—a blaring noise people are tuning out…”

Wall Street Journal

 Said to have been the last full-rigged ship built in Massachusetts, the Mary L. Cushing was launched in Newburyport in 1883 by George E. Currier. Registered to Pendleton, Carver & Nichols of Searsport in 1895, and eventually sold into the salmon trade; disappeared from the register in 1907.

Google, Facebook, Yahoo, and big tech in general have been trending left for some time. A few people in northern California, directing an army of carefully selected recent college graduates, is deciding what information the American public sees, and more importantly, what speech the American public may express on social media sites. Censorship of conservative ideas and speech is real. Because this is the new media, and because it has such an over-sized effect on the public, it is time for government oversight.

“…Most Republicans are now convinced that high-level federal law enforcement officials tried illegally to stop Donald Trump from being president.

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that 72% of Likely Republican Voters think senior law enforcement officials are likely to have broken the law in an effort to prevent Trump from winning the presidency, and that includes 55% who say it’s Very Likely. That compares to 66% and 47% respectively in early February.

Democrats are slightly more convinced, too, although only 29% believe these officials are Very Likely to have broken the law. Still, that’s up from 22% in the earlier survey. Twenty-five percent (25%) of voters not affiliated with either major political party share that view, down a bit from 29%.

Among all likely voters, 51% think it’s likely senior federal law enforcement officials broke the law in an effort to stop Trump, with 36% who say it’s Very Likely. Forty-two percent (42%) disagree and consider it unlikely that these officials illegally attempted to stop a Trump presidency, including 26% who say it’s Not At All Likely…”

Rasmussen Reports

An interesting chart that shows 500 day own party approval of modern presidents.

Well…not in my lifetime, but this is an interesting article by Victor Davis Hanson:

“…Conservatives know that the problem with California is not skin color, ethnic affinity, or race, but rather a juxtaposition of historically unprecedented great wealth on the coast and the culture it spawns — especially in high technology, government, finance, entertainment, and academia — with dire poverty in the state’s north and interior, some the result of years of open borders and illegal immigration. The result is a state in which the pernicious consequences of elite policymaking are never quite experienced by their insulated architects.

Open borders are fine, but then so are their proponents’ gated communities and the growth in coastal private academies and prep schools, as the public schools score near bottom in the nation’s test scores. Water transfers are the obsolete projects of a bygone age, but not those such as Hetch Hetchy, vital to Bay Area survival. Expensive gas and electricity are good green policies, but their deleterious consequences fall most heavily on the distant inland poor of the much hotter and colder interior. The nation’s highest basket of income, sales, and gas taxes can be either avoided or easily paid by those who are most in favor of them.

And, yes, there are enormous demographic changes in the state going on. One in four residents was not born in the U.S. Somewhere near 4 million Californians have left in recent years. The Democratic party has largely bifurcated into a pyramidal, medieval organization of the few very wealthy and the many very poor, the former pursuing iconic green and identity politics and gender issues, the later increasingly dependent on social services…”

and

“…What, then, is the chance of California’s recalibrating as a conservative state? It largely hinges on meritocratic, measured, diverse, and legal immigration that studies show most successfully leads to assimilation, intermarriage, and integration, a melting pot that makes residents see their particular tribal affiliations as incidental rather than essential to their characters…”

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/california-and-conservatism/

More evidence of trickery and deceit at the FBI. If a FBI or DOJ or intelligence official briefing President Trump, lied or knowingly withheld information from the president to confuse or hide what the FBI was investigating, that was as much of a False Statements Act violation as anything Flynn is accused of.

Byron York:

“…Now, with the Trump lawyers’ memo leaked to the New York Times, it seems clear that all the key players in the Flynn affair, including the president himself, were aware of the FBI’s assessment in real time. And the president’s knowledge — that the agents did not think Flynn lied, plus strong hints that the investigation was actually over — underlay Trump’s Feb. 14, 2017, statement to Comey that, “I hope you can see your way to letting this go, to letting Flynn go.” Trump’s lawyers argue that the president had no intention to obstruct an investigation he thought was finished.

The leaked memo portrays a confused White House in the administration’s early days, trying to figure out what the Justice Department was up to with its interest in Flynn’s conversations with Kislyak…”

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/trump-lawyers-reveal-previously-unknown-evidence-in-michael-flynn-case?platform=hootsuite

A long read, but worth it.

I do believe the FBI/DOJ/CIA is more politicized than ever before. It was not the Trump Administration that did this.

John O’Connor:

“…If there was any doubt about the political motivation of Comey, it was removed by his rhetoric following his ouster, clothed in talk of FBI independence and ethics, but revealing raging partisan animus toward Trump. Every American has a right to political beliefs, but it hardly behooves the dignity of a former FBI Director to speak as such a nakedly partisan actor.

Thousands of loyal, straight, politically-independent FBI personnel understand the damage Comey has done to the Bureau to which they devoted their lives in service to their country. We should all sincerely hope and pray that new FBI Director Christopher Wray will right the ship, restoring its honor and, above all, its cherished, apolitical independence…”

http://dailycaller.com/2018/06/03/how-comey-succeeded-where-nixon-failed/