MEGAN MCARDLE:

“…Neomi Rao is eminently qualified to be a judge; the former law professor has worked in both Congress and the White House, in addition to her academic experience. She has also long leaned right; when she was in college, and for some time after, she wrote right-leaning opinion pieces. Progressive groups have seized on these old writings as evidence of racial insensitivity and hostility to sexual-assault survivors, and in Rao’s confirmation hearing Tuesday, Democratic senators called her to account for them.

I’m tempted to write “Democrats are reduced to pointless obstructionism,” but “obstructionism” implies the ability to obstruct. Senate Democrats lack that ability, having done away with the filibuster for lower-court judicial nominations when they were in control. Thus they are reduced even further, to “pointless mudslinging.”

Yet “pointless” doesn’t mean “harmless.” The Democratic senators’ juvenile tactics will not stop Rao’s confirmation, but they are lowering the already debased national discourse. . . .

Of course, if the latter-day inquisitors get their way, and everyone is liable to future prosecution for views they no longer hold, we might all become somewhat less cognitively supple. Consider the message that progressives are sending to anyone hesitant about some proposed social change: “We want equality and justice. Also, after we win, we want to punish anyone who disagrees with us right now.”

Future punishees could be forgiven for being reluctant to support any such victory. Moreover, at the beginning of any major campaign for social change, those people will definitionally be in the majority; if they weren’t, the campaign would be unnecessary.

There’s a certain irony in watching progressive groups deploy tactics that are anti-progress in every sense of the word…”

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Liz Sheld:

“…In the 80s, the thing to do in Virginia was take pictures in blackface apparently.

Yesterday, we learned that the Democrat attorney general of Virginia, Mark Herring, wore blackface at a party in 1980. We learned this after he called for Democrat Governor Ralph Northam to step down from office because *he* appeared in blackface (or in a KKK outfit) in his medical school yearbook. Northam initially admitted the blackface picture was him but subsequently changed his mind and currently denies he is the blackface on the page bearing his name in his medical school yearbook.

The man who’s second in line to become Virginia’s governor on Wednesday admitted that he too has worn blackface — just days after he called on Gov. Ralph Northam to resign for the same thing.

Democratic Attorney General Mark Herring on Saturday declared, “It is no longer possible for Governor Northam to lead our commonwealth, and it is time for him to step down.”

But on Wednesday, he issued a statement saying he wore brown makeup and a wig in 1980 when dressing up as a black rapper during a party when he was a student at the University of Virginia.

“In 1980, when I was a 19-year-old undergraduate in college, some friends suggested we attend a party dressed like rappers we listened to at the time, like Kurtis Blow, and perform a song. It sounds ridiculous even now writing it,” Herring said.

“But because of our ignorance and glib attitudes — and because we did not have an appreciation for the experiences and perspectives of others — we dressed up and put on wigs and brown makeup.”

“Wore brown make up?” Interesting way of putting it. Does anyone think that either one of these jokers, Northam or Herring, would be accorded any courtesy by the media if they were Republicans. No. There would be special theme songs on cable and network news, there would be special graphics, there would be people interviewing every person that ever went to school with these blackfacers. They would be parked outside their residences, following relatives around, going through trash, confrontations by angry activists captured on video, think of the Kavanaugh confirmation hearing as a paradigm. Why aren’t we seeing this?

Now Herring is 2nd in line to take over from the blackface governor. So who is the first in line? I’m glad you asked because….

VA Democrat Lt. Gov. accused of sexual assault

Crazy, right? We have the top three (Democrat) executives of Virginia all embroiled in some serious scandals.

Vanessa Tyson, the college professor who accused Virginia Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax of sexual assault in 2004, issued a lengthy statement Wednesday detailing the alleged incident.

“With tremendous anguish, I am now sharing this information about my experience and setting the record straight,” she wrote. “It has been extremely difficult to relive that traumatic experience from 2004. Mr. Fairfax has tried to brand me as a liar to a national audience, in service to his political ambitions, and has threatened litigation. Given his false assertions, I’m compelled to make clear what happened.”

Dr. Tyson, and she is a DOCTOR, just like DOCTOR BLOWSEY of the Kavanaugh fame is a DOCTOR. SURVIVOR & DOCTOR Tyson is no slouch in the credential department, writes Politico, SURVIVOR & DOCTOR Tyson is “a political science professor at Scripps College and visiting fellow at Stanford University.”

Many of the major Democratic candidates for president were quick to condemn Northam over his blackface getup but pointedly refused to comment on the allegations against Fairfax, the only statewide elected African-American Democrat. Tyson, too, is African-American.

Tyson released her statement through the Washington law firm Katz, Marshall and Banks, which lists sexual harassment law as one of its areas of expertise and represented Christine Blasey Ford, the woman who accused Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh of assaulting her when the two were in high school. Ford’s accusations led Democrats to proclaim the need to “believe the woman.”

Where are we in this intersectional polka dance? Believe all women?!? Maybe not, if they are accusing the wrong kind of person. Or maybe there is something different about this accuser. It sure looks that way.

Over at Bearing Drift, Stephen Spiker games out who is next up to bat for Virginia’s leadership.

Now who is dropping this oppo on the VA Dems? After all these years and campaigns, why is this info coming out now? Cui bono?…”

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Worth clicking over.

Conrad Black:

“…The nadir of the amoral egotism of what might broadly be called “Me-ism” has been reached by the avant garde of the Democratic Party in their race to the bottom of the electoral depths. The renunciation of any notions of sacrifice, patriotic pride, the spirituality of life, or the recognition of anything except the smash-and-grab politics of endless atomized grievances and instant gratification of convenience, has reached what must, in its way, be the end of history.

The governor of Virginia, Ralph Northam, a pediatric neurologist, led the way downwards with an unctuous statement on the virtues of delivering children, assuring their survival as live babies, and then determining in discussion with the mother (of course) whether they deserved to be allowed to survive.

This was an attitude that appalled a large section of opinion in 5th century B.C. Athens. In espousing it, far more than the utter moral vacuity of the cutting edge of the Democratic Party has been exposed. When running for governor, Northam called his opponent a racist and President Trump a “narcissistic maniac.”

The Bigger Fight
The informal, spontaneous, emergent strategy of the Democrats is finally erupting and foaming from the mouths and nostrils of their legislators and candidates in a mighty outburst of opportunistic consciousness. This is a delayed reaction to the destruction of their monopoly on political power by the Trump phenomenon, compounded by the recognition that Trump can’t be impeached and will do everything he promised if he can get a firm enough grip on the apparatus of political power.

The supreme struggle for the commanding heights of American politics, the battle of Verdun or of Stalingrad, has come over immigration. The decades-old understanding between machine Democrats vacuuming up easy Latino votes and largely Republican employers exploiting the cheap labor of illegal Latino immigrants enabled Donald Trump to forge a new coalition of the threatened working class, the middle class exhausted by more than a decade of flat-lined purchasing power, the silent majority of disinterested patriotic Americans, and the legitimate immigrants who do not want their ability to climb the socio-economic ladder as American immigrants have done for 240 years to be undercut by swarms of illegal migrants with no sense of choosing a new country and determining to accept that country’s values and work within them…”

and

“…The Democratic train is now roaring off the tracks and down the third rail which politicians used not to touch, out of a lingering sense of self-preservation. The logical coruscation of this dispersal—this flight from the political center to the left, to stage a goal-line stand of the die-hards against the Trump ogre, grinding relentlessly forward, heedless of the semi-daily announcements by most of the national media of his imminent collapse in legal shambles, is to repurpose abortion as the end of the policy rainbow.

Abortion is too intrusive, too inconvenient; let the children be born and then the mother can decide whether she wants to be a mother after all, or kill the child, or give it up for adoption.

This was the logical end of the nonsensical Roe v. Wade decision that childbirth is exclusively a matter of a woman’s control over her body: it decided correctly that the state does not have the power and should not seek the power to inflict childbirth on a woman who does not want to have a child. But it ignored the real question of when the unborn attain to the rights of a person. That is why the decision is vulnerable and the Democrats, in cold terror that it could be overturned, are in panic and are moving the battle-lines forward to the position of Ralph Northam, far from a natural oracle of moral opinion this past week.

To hell with control over their own bodies! Women will decide in post-natal calm whether to kill the child. It is to this unspeakable assault on every principle and value that has guided, inspired, and undergirded American civilization, where the Democrats are arriving at their last post…”

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An E-2C Hawkeye assigned to Carrier Airborne Early Warning Squadron (VAW) 117 prepares to land on the flight deck of the aircraft carrier USS John C. Stennis (CVN 74) in the Indian Ocean, Jan. 28, 2019.

Journalism (Fake News)

Glenn Greenwald:

“…NBC NEWS PUBLISHED a predictably viral story Friday, claiming that “experts who track websites and social media linked to Russia have seen stirrings of a possible campaign of support for Hawaii Democrat Tulsi Gabbard.”

But the whole story was a sham: The only “expert” cited by NBC in support of its key claim was the firm New Knowledge, which just got caught by the New York Times fabricating Russian troll accounts on behalf of the Democratic Party in the Alabama Senate race to manufacture false accusations that the Kremlin was interfering in that election.

To justify its claim that Gabbard is the Kremlin’s candidate, NBC stated, “analysts at New Knowledge, the company the Senate Intelligence Committee used to track Russian activities in the 2016 election, told NBC News they’ve spotted ‘chatter’ related to Gabbard in anonymous online message boards, including those known for fomenting right-wing troll campaigns.”

What NBC — amazingly — concealed is a fact that reveals its article to be a journalistic fraud: That same firm, New Knowledge, was caught just six weeks ago engaging in a massive scam to create fictitious Russian troll accounts on Facebook and Twitter in order to claim that the Kremlin was working to defeat Democratic Senate nominee Doug Jones in Alabama. The New York Times, when exposing the scam, quoted a New Knowledge report that boasted of its fabrications: “We orchestrated an elaborate ‘false flag’ operation that planted the idea that the [Roy] Moore campaign was amplified on social media by a Russian botnet.’”

That fraud was overseen by New Knowledge’s CEO, Jonathon Morgan. At the same time Morgan was fabricating Russian troll accounts and using them to create a fraudulent appearance that Putin was trying to defeat the Democratic Senate candidate, he was exploiting his social media “expertise” to claim that Russians were interfering in the Alabama Senate election. In other words, Morgan used his own fake Russian accounts to lie to the public and deceive the national media into believing that Kremlin-linked accounts were trying to defeat the Democratic Senate candidate when, in fact, the accounts he was citing were ones he himself had fabricated and controlled…”

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Roger Kimball:

“…Shouldn’t Democrats as well as Republicans rejoice that unemployment is at a generational low and that Black and Hispanic unemployment is at an historic low? Shouldn’t Democrats as well as Republicans rejoice that economic growth, well north of three percent, is at a level declared impossible under the anemic leadership of Barack Obama? Shouldn’t Democrats as well as Republicans rejoice that manufacturing is flooding back to the US? Shouldn’t Democrats as well as Republicans rejoice at the president’s attack on the regulatory state, the monstrous regime of Title IX fanatics, and other efforts to transform ‘the land of the free and the home of the brave’ into a safe-space chest-less pajama boys? Shouldn’t Democrats as well as Republicans rejoice that wages are rising, that inflation is stable, that the stock market is booming? Shouldn’t Democrats as well as Republicans rejoice that 2018 marked the first time in 46 years that that cost of prescription drugs dropped? Shouldn’t Democrats as well as Republicans rejoice that the president is endeavoring to rationalize our immigration policy and enforce our immigration laws? Shouldn’t Democrats as well as Republicans rejoice that the president has made historic inroads in negotiations with pariah states like North Korea and adversarial states like China? Shouldn’t Democrats as well as Republicans rejoice in his rebuilding and modernizing the US military? The answer to all these questions is ‘Yes, they should.’ But will they?…”

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Nitwit celebrities get what they deserve as the PC monster turns on its own. Click over for the names.

MATT MARGOLIS:

“…Last week, when the country learned about Democratic Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam’s med school yearbook featuring him in either blackface or in a KKK uniform, there was universal outrage. There have been calls for his resignation even within his own party. Northam has so far refused to resign, and he probably has good reason. Liberals tend to only get outraged when it’s convenient for them, but in time, they are very forgiving when one of their own does something racist.

Heck, how many Democrats served with and repeatedly praised former KKK-member Senator Robert Byrd (D-W.V.)?

Northam knows that he can probably ride this out and serve out his term. How many liberals have donned blackface and not seen their lives and careers destroyed? To answer this question, let’s look to Hollywood… a bastion of left-wing ideology and hypocrisy. They’ll call Donald Trump a racist despite no evidence of it, but they’ll turn a blind eye when one of their own mocks African Americans by wearing blackface for the sake of entertaining other rich white liberals…”

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Howie Carr:

“…Stick a fork in cold crab omelette — the fake Indian is all done now.

She speak-um with forked tongue one time too many, and now The Washington Post, of all places, has scalped her. The smoke signals went out last night — as early as 1986 she was lying on a Texas bar application that she was “American Indian.”

Lieawatha admit-um she talk with forked tongue, only she use white-eye language, calling it “furthering confusion.”

No confusion anywhere. You are an utter fraud. Fake Indian, you will have many moons to reflect on your serial lies. Never will you be great white father…”

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Byron York:

“…The strongest part of Trump’s speech that appealed to all Americans came after his “choose greatness” introduction, when he walked through recent progress in the American economy. “In just over two years since the election, we have launched an unprecedented economic boom — a boom that has rarely been seen before,” Trump said. Then the details: 5.3 million new jobs; 600,000 manufacturing jobs; rising wages; Americans off food stamps; low unemployment; low minority unemployment; low unemployment for disabled Americans; more people working (157 million); lower taxes; an increased child tax credit; soaring energy production; deregulation, and more…”

and

“…Immigration, of course, was Trump’s appeal to his base. He offered some of the stories that Democrats hate to hear, of Americans who have been killed by illegal immigrants. But in a bigger sense, he stressed that immigration was a jobs issue, an economic issue, and ultimately a culture and class issue for millions of Americans. “No issue better illustrates the divide between America’s working class and America’s political class than illegal immigration,” Trump said. “Wealthy politicians and donors push for open borders while living their lives behind walls and gates and guards. Meanwhile, working-class Americans are left to pay the price for mass illegal migration — reduced jobs, lower wages, overburdened schools and hospitals, increased crime, and a depleted social safety net.”

“This is a moral issue,” Trump said, in an indirect dig at Pelosi, who has called his border barrier proposal “immoral.” Trump continued: “We have a moral duty to create an immigration system that protects the lives and jobs of our citizens.”…”

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Madeline Osburn:

“…The Washington Post, in phone calls to people who knew Fairfax from college, law school and through political circles, found no similar complaints of sexual misconduct against him. Without that, or the ability to corroborate the woman’s account — in part because she had not told anyone what happened — The Washington Post did not run a story,” the newspaper reported on Monday.

This is quite the opposite of the standard the Post applied when reporting on allegations of sexual misconduct against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh last year. The Washington Post reported Christine Blasey Ford’s accusations against Kavanaugh despite no evidence and no corroboration of Ford’s account. The Post claims the fact that Fairfax’s accuser, “had not told anyone what happened,” is a reason for not running the story — something that Ford did not do either until Kavanaugh was listed as a potential Supreme Court pick…”

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“…On the Senate floor this evening, Senator Ben Sasse (R., Neb.) called for unanimous consent on his Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, which provides protections for any infants born alive after attempted abortion procedures.

Democratic senator Patty Murray of Washington objected to the bill on the floor, preventing it from receiving unanimous consent. Murray claimed that the legislation is unnecessary because there are already legal prohibitions on infanticide. Murray was the only Democratic senator to come to the Senate floor this evening and left immediately after objecting…”
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WALTER RUSSELL MEAD:

“…He does not believe existing arms treaties serve American interests; his withdrawal from the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty was motivated by the same considerations that drove his withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal. Meanwhile, he wants to reduce American commitments in the Middle East and sees close links with Israel, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt as the best way for the U.S. to retrench militarily while containing Iran.

He holds international institutions and the bureaucrats who run them in low regard. He believes forums like the United Nations are stacked against the U.S. and American interests are better served by working directly with powerful leaders on a bilateral basis than by engaging in what he sees as the empty rituals of conventional multilateralism.

He thinks Europe is free-riding on American security commitments and exploiting the U.S. on trade, and that he can continue to reject the trans-Atlantic status quo until his complaints are addressed. He sees the European Union as a weak actor on the international stage.

He believes foolish American trade negotiators allowed China to become a great power through its abuses of the World Trade Organization, and he thinks a tough stand on trade with Beijing is good politics and policy. He believes the threat of tariffs gives him an important advantage and that U.S. trading partners need the U.S. more than it needs them.

He believes the U.S. faces a massive challenge from failing states and drug traffickers in the Western Hemisphere and wants to move hemispheric policy from an afterthought to center stage. Diplomats impress him not at all; he sees the intelligence community as hostile; and after two years in the White House, he has lost much of his early respect for the Pentagon brass…”

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Brooklyn real estate agent allegedly brokered gun permits known as ‘a de Blasio special’ in corrupt NYPD License Division.

Steven Greenhut:

“…Have you noticed how Californians move up and down the state?

They take Southwest Airlines, which offers low-cost, quick flights serving the major airports. Yet former Gov. Jerry Brown had focused his attention on building a $100-billion high-speed rail system that, if it ever is completed, will have ticket prices higher than airfares and will take nearly twice as long as flying to get from the Bay Area to Southern California. What is the point? The answer echoes my earlier point: Politicians and planners use public money to change how we live in pursuit of grandiose goals, such as slowing global warming. Easing cross-state travel is important, but if that were the primary goal, our leaders would consider a variety of practical—but boring—ideas, such as improving air service in hard-to-reach places such as Bakersfield, the Central Coast or Redding.

I think of my attempts to take transit to go from my exurb to downtown Sacramento. It would involve driving to a station 20 minutes away, paying for parking, buying a ticket and waiting for a train. It would take longer and cost almost as much as just driving downtown directly and parking. That train might make sense in the urban core, but not in the outlying areas, yet officials love to lecture us about our supposedly unsustainable reliance on driving…”

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