JOHN FUND:

“…Rarely has a new movie become available at a time when the news made its subject matter timelier and more appropriate. Gosnell: The Trial of America’s Biggest Serial Killer is the true story of a doctor who went to prison for life in 2013 for stabbing several infants he had delivered alive inside his hellhole of an abortion clinic in Philadelphia. After being almost completely ignored by critics during its release last year, last week the movie went on sale in Walmart and on Amazon, where it is the No. 1 best-selling dramatic DVD. At the same time, infanticide became a key issue in major stories in Virginia and New York.

Last week, Virginia governor Ralph Northam became engulfed in a controversy over whether he had appeared in his medical-school yearbook in costume, either in blackface or in the white sheet and hat of a Ku Klux Klan member. The photo came to light because a medical-school classmate of Northam’s was appalled at the governor’s candid support for a bill that would remove many restrictions on late-term abortion. While the media outrage was largely directed at his alleged racist actions 35 years ago, the abortion bill was promptly killed in committee, hours after Northam had been overly honest in describing what the bill would allow.

When radio station WTOP asked the governor what would happen to a baby born alive during the last part of a pregnancy, Northam said:

If a mother is in labor, I can tell you exactly what would happen. The infant would be delivered. The infant would be kept comfortable. The infant would be resuscitated if that’s what the mother and the family desired, and then a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mother.

A few days before Governor Northam’s shocking remarks, New York’s new Democratic majorities in the state legislature stood and clapped as they passed the Reproductive Health Act, which removed restrictions on late-term abortions. The law took effect with Governor Andrew Cuomo’s signature on January 22. A week later, prosecutors in Queens dropped one of the criminal charges against Anthony Hobson, who stands accused of killing his girlfriend Jennifer Irigoyen, who was 20 weeks pregnant. They had initially included a charge of second-degree abortion (in addition to the murder of Irigoyen) but had to drop it because, as a spokesman for the Queens district attorney noted, the law removes abortion from the state’s criminal code and puts it into public-health law.

Gosnell director Nick Searcy wrote at TownHall that New York has now legalized almost everything that Gosnell and his aides did in Philadelphia: Gosnell was convicted of killing breathing infants who had already been born. It is now legal in New York to kill an infant who survives an abortion. Gosnell was convicted of allowing untrained and unlicensed medical personnel to perform abortions. It is now legal in New York for non-physicians or any “health professionals” to perform abortions. Gosnell was convicted of performing at least 21 late-term abortions past the legal limit of 24 weeks. It is now legal in New York to terminate a pregnancy up until the due date. In New York, there is no longer any such thing as a “late-term abortion.”…”

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Victor Davis Hanson:

“…Donald Trump in 2016 did not only run against the planted rumors of the fake Steele dossier, 90 percent negative media coverage, his own boisterous past, and the “Access Hollywood” tape. He also was campaigning against Hillary Clinton—and the nation’s quarter-century weariness with the Clinton scandals, crimes, money-grubbing, and hypocrisies.

For a quarter of the country, independents especially, a vote for Trump was not a referendum on a Democrat or Republican, or even love or hate for Donald Trump, but rather reflected a “Never Hillary” desire to be done with the very name Clinton.

So, too, in 2020 Trump will not be running only on his own record, or even his person but also against a living and breathing alternative candidate, one that both offers a precise antithetical agenda and displays a concrete personage.

Considering all of that, during the last week, Trump has been given great gifts in a way no one might have imaged just a month ago.

True Lies
Trump in 2020 might have controversially slurred his future Democratic rival as a socialist, radical late-term abortion advocate, open borders chauvinist, a Medicare destroyer who wished to make it free for everyone, or wacko environmentalist intent on banning gas and diesel engines.

Now he won’t have to smear anyone: the Democrats have largely done that to themselves. Policy-wise the 2020 choice will be between Trump’s mostly doctrinaire conservatism, spiced with populist trade and immigration agendas, and what is a now a new Democrat orthodoxy of Bernie Sanders’ adolescent socialism and incoherent Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Neverland something or other.

Trump legitimately will be able to say of a 2020 opponent, “Candidate X wants over the next 10 years to junk your present car, to scrap your combine, to stop your jet travel, to ban your cruise ship, to take away your lawn mower and snow blower, to outlaw your snowmobiles and jet skis, to shut down the fracking industry, the heavy equipment manufacturing sector (I doubt there will be a replacement battery-powered Cat D-11), the pipeline and rail business, and to make every homeowner an indebted remodeler, refitting his house while for all his green trouble and expense he still will be paying more for solar and wind-generated electricity.

Trump can legitimately also say to an independent or swing voter, “You may not like my tweets, but you will really won’t like infanticide, a 70 percent income tax, a diluted Medicare for everyone including those who have never paid a dime into the system, open borders, and guaranteed incomes for all.”

In other words, for the all the NeverTrump hysteria over Trump’s “nationalist-populist agenda,” his record so far is so far arguably more Reaganesque than either of the Bush presidencies or what was likely to come from a McCain or Romney Administration…”

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Christopher Jacobs:

“…A forthcoming book by reporter Joan Biskupic, who has covered the Supreme Court for decades, goes into detail on Roberts’ first defense of the health-care law—his ruling in the 2012 case of Nation Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius. In a book review for The Atlantic, Michael O’Donnell includes the following precis of Biskupic’s reporting:

She writes that he initially voted with the four other conservatives to strike down the ACA, on the grounds that it went beyond Congress’s power to regulate interstate commerce. Likewise, he initially voted to uphold the ACA’s expansion of Medicaid. But Roberts, who kept the opinion for himself to write, soon developed second thoughts.

Biskupic, who interviewed many of the justices for this book, including her subject, writes that Roberts said he felt ‘torn between his heart and his head.’ He harbored strong views on the limitations of congressional power, but hesitated to interject the Court into the ongoing health-insurance crisis. After trying unsuccessfully to find a middle way with Kennedy, who was ‘unusually firm’ and even ‘put off’ by the courtship, Roberts turned to the Court’s two moderate liberals, Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan. The threesome negotiated a compromise decision that upheld the ACA’s individual mandate under Congress’s taxing power, while striking down the Medicaid expansion.

On the day of the ruling in June 2012, Chris Cillizza, then writing for The Washington Post, claimed that Roberts’ opinion “made good on his pledge to referee the game, not play it.” But the story Biskupic tells, which confirms prior reporting by Jan Crawford published shortly after the ruling, contradicts Cillizza’s view entirely. Roberts’ entire approach to the case consisted of playing games—and highly political ones at that…”

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Old Bathos:

“…In those days, I had a role as a lobbyist in various coalitions of trade groups as part of my legal practice. Lots of people in Washington had really wonderful jobs as lobbyists for several decades because liberals would faithfully introduce bad bills with enormous potential harm to business, the lobbyists would report that threat back to their employers and clients, trade associations and large firms would then pay them to defeat this threat. Then Dingell or some other titan would simply kill it anyway and the lobbyists could rack up another “victory,” steer contributions to the right people and stay flush. Clean Air amendment legislation routinely died in each Congress because Dingell faithfully represented the automakers and Byrd the coal industry. But anybody ‘working’ the issue could claim results.

Senior Democrats like Dingell racked up large contributions from business because by the 1980s Congress was largely designed to be an extortion racket. “Pay us to either kill what you don’t like or to insert protections for you in the bad bill we are about to pass or else.” Before 1986, high tax rates were part of a code festooned with countless arcane provisions to lessen the blow but only for paying customers. Enormous regulatory assaults were legislated but with hundreds of arcane provisions to protect those who stepped up and paid up.

If you were paying for protection, this was not a one time fee. Once your protections were enshrined in a paragraph or a sentence in legislation, there was the eternal threat of repeal or amendment so the payments had to continue.

Once I recall that all the reps in one coalition I worked with got a letter from Dingell’s AA which said: “The Chairman may lose interest in your issue if your support is not more forthcoming.” If you think of it as an invoice, it makes more sense…”

and

“…In defense of Dingell and the Democratic Party of that recent era, they were not nuts. They were close to small businesses and workers in their home districts, not rich white liberals in Malibu and Manhattan. They delivered. They were not impractical. John Dingell and his ilk knew not to kill the Golden Goose. They knew how to compromise and get things done when it was important–not always what one would prefer they do but it got done. Patriotism was bi-partisan. They were not ideologues and the other party was not evil, just wrong. And frankly, I would rather have a Congress that I could bribe rather than a majority of AOC-type ideologues…”

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ROGER L. SIMON:

“…In the immediate sense, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez may be the best thing to happen to the Republican Party since Abraham Lincoln. Her Green New Deal is as much dead in the water as it is brain dead and constitutes a fabulous talking point for the GOP to run on in 2020.

But there is a point of concern — and in the long run a more important one.

AOC represents the natural outgrowth of our extraordinarily biased higher educational system. She is its valedictorian, its Social Justice Summa Cum Laude. Give her the SJWPhD honoris causa and, while you’re at it, give the United States of America to China. They won’t have to fire a shot.

Think I exaggerate? Consider the level of writing and thinking in her Green Deal in whatever ever-changing iteration, with or without the banning of cow flatulence and air travel, and notwithstanding the guaranteed income for those unwilling to work. (Isn’t that already the case with internet trolls — but I digress?) This document, if one can call it that, resembles nothing more than the kind of swill presented to — and highly approved by — professors in today’s grievance-obsessed colleges, where Shakespeare and Milton are dismissed or rejected and actual thought (i.e., intellectual reasoning) is ridiculed as manifestations of “white privilege.”…”

and

“…That’s what I mean about the danger of our educational system. It’s not global warming that’s the problem, as the Green New Deal would have it (though its actual intention appears to have little to do with the environment and everything to do with promoting socialism). The real problem is our colleges (and earlier education, obviously) that are turning out the likes of AOC on an assembly line of the sort that drove Charlie Chaplin mad in Modern Times.

As I wrote elsewhere, only 20 percent of colleges have even one Republican on the faculty. Imagine the indoctrination that is going on. Imagine how much more attention is paid to Marx (and Marcuse and Gramsci, etc.) than to Adam Smith or Edmund Burke, let alone Aristotle, Aquinas, or even James Madison…”

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https://dai.ly/x2ml1ns

John Stossel:

“…San Francisco is one of the richest cities in the world. It’s given us music, technology and elegant architecture.

Now it gives us filthy homeless encampments.

One urban planner told me, “I just returned from the Tenderloin (a section of San Francisco). It’s worse than slums of India, Haiti, Africa!”…”

and

“…I’ve never seen slums in Africa, but I’ve seen them in Haiti and India.

What I saw in San Francisco looked similar. As one local resident put it, “There’s shit everywhere. It’s just a mess out here.”

There’s also lots of mental illness. One man told us, “Vampires are real. I’m paranoid as hell.” San Francisco authorities mostly leave the mentally ill to fend for themselves on the street.

Other vagrants complain about them. “They make it bad for people like us that hang out with a sign,” one beggar told us.

San Francisco is a pretty good place to “hang out with a sign.” People are rarely arrested for vagrancy, aggressive panhandling or going to the bathroom in front of people’s homes. In 2015, there were 60,491 complaints to police, but only 125 people were arrested.

Public drug use is generally ignored. One woman told us, “It’s nasty seeing people shoot up — right in front of you. Police don’t do anything about it! They’ll get somebody for drinking a beer but walk right past people using needles.”

Each day in San Francisco, an average of 85 cars are broken into.

“Inside Edition” ran a test to see how long stereo equipment would last in a parked car. Their test car was quickly broken into. Then the camera crew discovered that their own car had been busted into as well.

Some store owners hire private police to protect their stores. But San Francisco’s police union has complained about the competition. Now there are only a dozen private cops left, and street people dominate neighborhoods.

We followed one private cop, who asked street people, “Do you need any type of homeless outreach services?”

Most say no. “They love the freedom of not having to follow the rules,” said the cop.

And San Francisco is generous. It offers street people food stamps, free shelter, train tickets and $70 a month in cash.

“They’re always offering resources,” one man dressed as Santa told us. “San Francisco’s just a good place to hang out.”

So, every week, new people arrive.

Some residents want the city to get tougher with people living on the streets.

“Get them to the point where they have to make a decision between jail and rehab,” one told us. “Other cities do it, but for some reason, San Francisco doesn’t have the political will.”

For decades, San Francisco’s politicians promised to fix the homeless problem.

When Sen. Dianne Feinstein was mayor, she proudly announced that she was putting the homeless in hotels: “A thousand units, right here in the Tenderloin!”

When California Governor Gavin Newsom was mayor of San Francisco, he bragged, “We have already moved 6,860 human beings.”

Last year, former Mayor Mark Farrell said, “We need to fund programs like Homeward Bound.”

But the extra funding hasn’t worked.

One reason is that even if someone did want to get off the street and rent an apartment, there aren’t many available.

San Francisco is filled with two-and three-story buildings, and in most neighborhoods, putting up a taller building is illegal. Even where zoning laws allow it, California regulations make construction so difficult that many builders won’t even try.

For years, developer John Dennis has been trying to convert an old meatpacking plant into an apartment building — but it has taken him four years just to get permission to build…”

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Michael Barone:

“…“This year,” President Trump stated in the seventh paragraph of his widely viewed and positively rated State of the Union address, “America will recognize two important anniversaries that show us the majesty of America’s mission and the power of American pride.”

“On D-Day, June 6, 1944, 15,000 young American men jumped from the sky and 60,000 more stormed in from the sea,” he said. And then in July 1969, “brave young pilots flew a quarter of a million miles through space to plant the American flag on the face of the moon.”

None of the commentators I’ve seen have questioned why Trump chose to spotlight these events. He is not usually given to historical references; even his trademark slogan is vague about just when American was great. Celebrating others’ past achievements has not been his thing. But beginning the speech by celebrating these two American triumphs provided a shrewd framing with the potential to elevate his image. . . .

The larger point made at the beginning, underlined by the appearance of three D-Day veterans and astronaut Buzz Aldrin, is a refutation, without specific mention, of an argument that underlies so much of the upscale loathing of Trump and his politics.

That is the idea—call it the cosmopolitan argument—that nationalism is always bad, a primitive and unsophisticated bias in favor of the home team, a short step (if that) from Nazism. The argument is attractive to many because it makes them feel more sophisticated than the rubes who always praise America.

But the argument is weak if you know more history. “I ask you to join with me in prayer,” Franklin Roosevelt said in his radio fireside chat on the evening of D-Day, “Almighty God: Our sons, pride of our Nation, this day have set upon a mighty endeavor, a struggle to preserve our Republic, our religion and our civilization, and to set free a suffering humanity.”

Yes, it’s nationalism, and it’s a prayer. Roosevelt mentioned allies only at the end and in passing. Trump underscored Roosevelt’s assertion that American nationalism is for the good by introducing (and leading the singing of Happy Birthday) for 81-year-old Holocaust survivor Judah Samet, recalling how, when their train “suddenly screeched to a halt, a soldier appeared. Judah’s family braced for the worst. Then his father cried out with joy, ‘It’s the Americans!”

Today, Trump argued, American nationalism continues to be benign, whether it’s trying to stop Iran’s genocidal nuclear ambitions by withdrawing from the Obama nuclear deal or it’s seeking to oust the disastrous Nicolas Maduro dictatorship in Venezuela.

This State of the Union can also be seen as a refutation of the identity politics conceit that white cisgendered males are inevitably the villains of history, ever-ready to oppress women and people of color, and that virtue inheres only in their intended victims.

That just doesn’t compute when you watch Trump’s salute of SWAT officer Timothy Matson, who “raced into gunfire and was shot seven times” and brought down the hateful murderer at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh.

There was less emphasis than many predicted on divisive issues — the border “barrier,” as Trump has taken to calling it, and abortion. On these, Democrats are at risk of getting out on flimsy limbs…”

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F-1 rockets on display at Kennedy Space Center.

Elizabeth Warren Admits To Wearing Paleface At College Costume Party

‘Republicans Are Brainwashed,’ Democrats Dutifully Chant While Clad In Identical White Uniforms