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“…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…”
First the Declaration of Independence, and now this: Country band says Facebook prevented promotion of song, ‘I Stand for the Flag,’ because of ‘political content.’
Well, when one party is explicitly unpatriotic, patriotism becomes a political statement.
From Glenn Reynolds
The majority from the Obama Era.
There are more that need to go–including the school discipline guidance. But Tuesday’s action looks like real progress.
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…”
Modified from original post by Scott Johnson.
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.
by: Steve Kelley
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…”
This day in history turned the tide of the Civil War. Pickett’s failed charge into Union lines on Cemetery Ridge.
Thure de Thulstrup’s Battle of Gettysburg, showing Pickett’s Charge
Hugh Hewitt Comes out in Favor of Judge Raymond Kethledge:
“…The search for Gorsuch 2.0 is underway at the White House. The best choice for the opening is Judge Raymond Kethledge of the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit. The 51-year-old judge from central casting — just like Neil M. Gorsuch — is not as well-known as front-runner U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh. But the longtime Michigan resident brings political upside to the process that Kavanaugh and several other contenders cannot.
The president sounds like a man who wants a second term, which means keeping his most high-profile and decisive campaign promises. During the 2016 campaign, Donald Trump pledged his Supreme Court nominees would be thoroughgoing “originalists” in the mold of Justice Antonin Scalia. So the first question is: Has the nominee ruled steadily in a fashion consistent with the original intent of the Constitution and its amendments and faithful to the statutes passed by the executive and legislative branches?
Kethledge’s record shows that in his case, the answer is a resounding “yes.” He has stood strongly with free exercise rights, siding for example with a church and its volunteers against the Labor Department’s bureaucrats, writing a separate concurrence to emphasize “The Department should tend to what is Caesar’s, and leave the rest alone.” He has an exemplary record on Second Amendment rights, concurring with his colleague Judge Jeffrey Sutton’s declaration of the right to bear arms as “fundamental” in a crucial en banc case on the amendment. Kethledge has also dissented in a Fifth Amendment takings case from the decision of his colleagues to punt back an aggrieved party to state court in a way he concluded indicated that the court had “lost our constitutional bearings” on property rights. . . .
Kethledge is also not another Harvard Law or Yale Law attendee , and with eight of those remaining on the court — Ruth Bader Ginsburg got her J.D. from Columbia , but her first two years were spent in Cambridge — the University of Michigan Law School credential sends an important message to the country…”
Jonathan Tobin:
“…The more they emphasize the consequences of replacing Kennedy with a more consistent conservative, the greater the depression their voters will feel when the next Gorsuch takes the oath of office in time to join the Supreme Court for the opening of the fall term in October.
The irony here for Democrats is that the “resistance” is fueled by their conviction that Trump has violated key norms and threatens the institutions of democracy. Yet if there is one aspect of his presidency that has been completely normal, it is his approach to judicial appointments. He has stuck to the list of qualified conservatives that he made public before his election. No one can pretend that his appointments are any different, in terms of their beliefs or credentials, from those that might have been put forward by any other Republican president. Rather than heralding an era of radical Trumpian madness, Gorsuch and the other Trump judges are just normal constitutional conservatives and a reminder that, his Twitter account notwithstanding, the Trump presidency is for the most part an exercise in conservative rather than extremist governance.
That’s why it’s going to be hard for Democrats to persuade any GOP senators to join them or to keep their own caucus in line, setting them up for failure and the recriminations that will follow.
Democrats aren’t happy about a post-Kennedy Court that will protect religious freedom and freedom of speech in ways they abhor and perhaps even chip away at Roe. As President Obama liked to say, “elections have consequences.”
Yet the Democrats’ more immediate concern should be the way their inevitable defeat in the coming confirmation fight will depress their base and strengthen the forces pushing their party farther to the left in the run-up to 2020. It remains to be seen whether this is a prescription for a revived opposition party or a gift to an otherwise embattled Trump administration. Nevertheless, Democratic activists are going to be judging every member of their party’s caucus on their conduct in the next few months. As their less-than-scintillating performance on the first day of the struggle illustrated, their conclusions are likely to be harsh…”
Opinion letter to the editor from a gentleman named Andy Weiss:
“…When Democrats lost the election in 2016, there emerged a movement to get rid of the Electoral College, because they deemed it unfair, since they had more popular votes. Now I see some are proposing the elimination of lifetime appointments to the U.S. Supreme Court because a majority of conservative judges is threatening.
It seems to me the Founding Fathers were far smarter than present-day politicians when they set up this republic. In 2016, Americans were fed up with politicians and elected a president who is not beholden to any special interest group. It’s time the Democrats man up and admit they lost fairly, because they keep trying the same old failed policies. You can’t change the rules if you don’t like the outcome…”