“…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.’
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…”
“…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.
“…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…”
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…”
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.
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…”
