Investor’s Business Daily has two of note today. Midterm Elections: 5 States Could Wreck Their Economies In Futile Fight Against ‘Climate Change’ – “Next week, voters in five states will decide whether they want to raise their own taxes, kill jobs and lower their standards of living.” Memo To Midterm Voters: It’s Democrats, Not Republicans, Who Are The Extremists Today – “But look at the data, and you see that it’s Democrats who are increasingly well outside the mainstream.”

The Electronic Committee of Public Safety. Victor Davis Hanson – “

Investor’s Business Daily has two of note today. Midterm Elections: 5 States Could Wreck Their Economies In Futile Fight Against ‘Climate Change’ – “Next week, voters in five states will decide whether they want to raise their own taxes, kill jobs and lower their standards of living.” Memo To Midterm Voters: It’s Democrats, Not Republicans, Who Are The Extremists Today – “But look at the data, and you see that it’s Democrats who are increasingly well outside the mainstream.”

The Electronic Committee of Public Safety. Victor Davis Hanson – “Modern-day Robespierres send counterrevolutionaries to the virtual chopping block. They should recall his fate.” Megyn Kelly provides the example.

“Millions of Internet sleuth volunteers play the 18th-century role of the shouting mob in the street, as they google the condemned person’s name in search of a prior quote from YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, or any random outlet that can prove a “pattern” of incorrect expression or counterrevolutionary behavior.
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We now fear the lethal wrath of the Internet’s Committee of Public Safety. But beware of fickle revolutionary temperament. Soon our 21st-century Robespierres may become so promiscuous and obnoxious in their beheading that they wear out even the mob — and find themselves next in line on a counterrevolutionary chopping block.

Is It ‘Hate Speech’ to Tell the Truth? Robert Stacy Mccain – “It is not yet illegal to tell the truth, however, and Republicans trying to prevent a Democrat takeover of Congress are telling the truth while it’s still legal.”

“Two days ago, CNN’s Jim Acosta wrote on Twitter: “We are not the enemy of the people. I am not your enemy. You are not my enemy. It is wrong to call your fellow Americans the enemy. We are all on the same team. We are all Americans.” This was a lie, of course. If you vote Republican, you’re not on “the same team” as CNN. They consider you their enemy, because you refuse to acknowledge their authority to tell you what to think and how to vote. This is the real “hate” problem in America — the media elite’s hatred of anyone who disagrees with them.

Lemon: Stop demonizing people. Also, white men are the biggest terror threat. Ed Morrissey – “It’s tough to know which is funnier: Lemon’s smugness as he delivers this rhetorical whiplash, Chris Cuomo’s hostage-tape face, or the “FACTS FIRST” chyron that displays through the whole pathetic rant.”

“The larger problem is our societal obsession on immutable characteristics as determinative rather than character. Not only have we not progressed past race and ethnicity, we practically wallow in it. We’re obsessed with ethnic identity as a marker of authenticity; we get DNA tests to claim it, we incentivize it through public policies that were intended to redress undeniable oppression and disadvantage. This obsession does nothing but divide people up into tribes rather than bring them together into communities. Lemon’s formula here duplicates that of other bigoted fringe groups; he’s only choosing more socially acceptable targets. The best option for this game is not to play.

New liberal line: Don’t blame Trump. Blame all Republicans. Jazz Shaw – “According to Catherine Rampell at the Washington Post, we now live in a “poisonous, increasingly violent political atmosphere.”

“The usual pattern on cable news is for the various hosts to begin by saying, “I’m not saying this is directly President Trump’s fault, but…” before going on to explain why it’s totally President Trump’s fault. Rampell, however, offers a refreshingly different take on the subject. She insists that you actually shouldn’t blame Donald Trump. You should blame the entire Republican Party.
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If this is what passes for political analysis at the Washington Post these days, there are places that require more housecleaning than the GOP. You can’t make everything “racist” by using terms like dog whistle every time someone expresses an opinion you don’t care for.

Revoking birthright citizenship would enforce the Constitution. John Eastman – “President Trump’s comments are not even set to air until this weekend, but already they have created a firestorm of commentary, most of it ill-informed.” In this case, it is about a caveat in the 14^th amendment and what it means. send counterrevolutionaries to the virtual chopping block. They should recall his fate.” Megyn Kelly provides the example.

“Millions of Internet sleuth volunteers play the 18th-century role of the shouting mob in the street, as they google the condemned person’s name in search of a prior quote from YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, or any random outlet that can prove a “pattern” of incorrect expression or counterrevolutionary behavior.
…
We now fear the lethal wrath of the Internet’s Committee of Public Safety. But beware of fickle revolutionary temperament. Soon our 21st-century Robespierres may become so promiscuous and obnoxious in their beheading that they wear out even the mob — and find themselves next in line on a counterrevolutionary chopping block.

Is It ‘Hate Speech’ to Tell the Truth? Robert Stacy Mccain – “It is not yet illegal to tell the truth, however, and Republicans trying to prevent a Democrat takeover of Congress are telling the truth while it’s still legal.”

“Two days ago, CNN’s Jim Acosta wrote on Twitter: “We are not the enemy of the people. I am not your enemy. You are not my enemy. It is wrong to call your fellow Americans the enemy. We are all on the same team. We are all Americans.” This was a lie, of course. If you vote Republican, you’re not on “the same team” as CNN. They consider you their enemy, because you refuse to acknowledge their authority to tell you what to think and how to vote. This is the real “hate” problem in America — the media elite’s hatred of anyone who disagrees with them.

Lemon: Stop demonizing people. Also, white men are the biggest terror threat. Ed Morrissey – “It’s tough to know which is funnier: Lemon’s smugness as he delivers this rhetorical whiplash, Chris Cuomo’s hostage-tape face, or the “FACTS FIRST” chyron that displays through the whole pathetic rant.”

“The larger problem is our societal obsession on immutable characteristics as determinative rather than character. Not only have we not progressed past race and ethnicity, we practically wallow in it. We’re obsessed with ethnic identity as a marker of authenticity; we get DNA tests to claim it, we incentivize it through public policies that were intended to redress undeniable oppression and disadvantage. This obsession does nothing but divide people up into tribes rather than bring them together into communities. Lemon’s formula here duplicates that of other bigoted fringe groups; he’s only choosing more socially acceptable targets. The best option for this game is not to play.

New liberal line: Don’t blame Trump. Blame all Republicans. Jazz Shaw – “According to Catherine Rampell at the Washington Post, we now live in a “poisonous, increasingly violent political atmosphere.”

“The usual pattern on cable news is for the various hosts to begin by saying, “I’m not saying this is directly President Trump’s fault, but…” before going on to explain why it’s totally President Trump’s fault. Rampell, however, offers a refreshingly different take on the subject. She insists that you actually shouldn’t blame Donald Trump. You should blame the entire Republican Party.
…
If this is what passes for political analysis at the Washington Post these days, there are places that require more housecleaning than the GOP. You can’t make everything “racist” by using terms like dog whistle every time someone expresses an opinion you don’t care for.

Revoking birthright citizenship would enforce the Constitution. John Eastman – “President Trump’s comments are not even set to air until this weekend, but already they have created a firestorm of commentary, most of it ill-informed.” In this case, it is about a caveat in the 14^th amendment and what it means.

Guy Benson tries to debate the “both sides equivalent” issue starting with the headline NBC Journalist: Stop With the False Equivalencies. It’s ‘Plain as Day’ That Republicans Are Just Worse.

“These partisan assertions, dressed up as clear-eyed truth-telling, were pumped into the Twitterverse in response to an MSNBC segment in which radio host Hugh Hewitt invoked this incident as push-back against a different liberal’s claim that “there is no equivalent” to President Trump’s rhetoric within the Democratic Party. Harwood went off: …

I agree with Hugh in the sense that the unhinged diner screaming at Mitch McConnell at a Louisville eatery wasn’t an aberration. … A high-profile Democratic member of Congress has directly advocated this approach to ‘discourse.’ Maxine Waters isn’t just a random back-bencher
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Some may argue that the modern American Left lacks a figure like Trump, whose rhetorical excesses, street-fighting impulses, casual deceit, and power are unmatched. There are entirely fair criticisms to be leveled against Trump, just as there are unfair attacks, too.
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Ugly as it may be, the obnoxious and aggressive harassment of politicians doesn’t sink to the level of bona fide physical threats or actual violence … It’s also true that Trump whips up tribal frenzies and is rarely bashful about leaning into social conflicts in which he senses potential political benefit. He has said some appalling things, overtly or by omission. Only his most hardcore sycophants are blind to those realities.

“Those realities” need examination as Benson is using them to refute the headline assertion with a ‘both sides do it’ rationalization. If you look at the ‘realities’ cited and then at what he compares them to, you’ll see the problem with his argument despite his threat about blindness if you don’t agree with him. From the Left is broad based generic assault and call for violence. From Trump is a few very specific responses to individuals who have attempted to harm him often ignoring the possibility of misperception. Benson is not doing well with intellectual integrity in his moral preening. The dog whistle here is the list questionable assertions about Trump and the attempt to assert the logical fallacy of correctness by authority.

The Left’s Response To The Mass Shooting Of Jews Is An Act Of Bad Faith. David Harsanyi – “How are Americans ever going to ‘come together’ if the first thing a political party sees when it sees dead Americans is a partisan cudgel?”

“It was ironic to see many of the same liberals, who recently fought to prop up the world’s most powerful Jew-hating terror state, lecturing us on the importance of combating anti-Semitism. But there they were yesterday.

The same Voxers who had long rationalized, romanticized, and excused the Jew-killing terror organization of the Middle East were now blaming the existence of the evil, anti-Semitic Pittsburgh shooter on Republicans. The same Pod bros whose echo chamber deployed anti-Semitic dual-loyalty tropes to smear critics of the Iran deal were now incredibly concerned about the Jewish community.
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If you think Trump should bring down the temperature, you have a point. If you think Trump should turn down the temperature but you fail to mention that a progressive yelling about “health care” tried to assassinate the entire GOP leadership on a baseball field, you don’t really care about the temperature.

If you fail to mention that Democrats have been accusing Republicans of wanting to the kill the poor and young, of trying to destroy the planet, of being “terrorists” after every school shooting, you don’t care about the temperature. If you rationalize mob behavior every time you don’t get your way in the electoral process, you don’t care about the temperature. And if your first instinct is to play politics with tragedy for partisan gain, you are part of the problem.

Caravan Contradictions. Victor Davis Hanson

“To be sure, Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala are often violent places. They have been so for centuries, both before and after the Spanish conquest. But pause and reflect on the ensuing paradox: fury and fear over endemic lawlessness now prompts thousands to wish to break the law to enter the United States, and continue to ignore statutes by illegally residing here.

Do the migrants ever pause and wonder whether their own past and present attitude to the law in the abstract may in some small part explain why their own country in the concrete is often prone to lawlessness? In other words, why would a host country welcome in aliens who break the law to enter it because their own former home is lawless?
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In other words, immigration has been historically a brutal bargain, one that demands of the immigrant not to live as he did in the past, because to do so would replicate the failures from which he was escaping.

More millennials are abandoning religion for witchcraft, astrology. Jazz Shaw – “Is there some larger message here? Perhaps. When you turn away from the faith your family followed for generations and all the values it brings with it, all other paths are probably at least a bit “darker” in tone. And the fact that this trend is so much more common among the young on the left might give a few clues as to how we arrived at the situation we’re in today.”

Seeing the light, and everything else: Sunday reflection. Ed Morrissey – “This morning’s Gospel reading is Mark 10:46–52 … the restoration of Bartimaeus’ sight strikes me not just as another healing miracle, but as a testament to the role of faith in a fallen world.”

“Faith allows us to see the world as it is, and as it is meant to be. …

Our faith allows us to put reason and hope together. I certainly won’t try to recapitulate St. Thomas Aquinas in a few brief words, but his conclusion of the necessity of a Prime Mover demonstrates the power of embracing both. If we accept a Creator, which Creation itself suggests, then we must consider the why of Creation, and our role within it.
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This gift of sight carries burdens of its own. We see the Light, but we also gain perception of the darkness, too. We see the love of God, but we also see the self-love of vanity and arrogance in ourselves and others, too. We comprehend the beauty, order, and purpose of Creation, but we also perceive the avarice and gluttony of those who wish to manipulate it for their own glory rather than to Him who created it.

How Should Churches Respond to Mass Shootings? Jamie D. Aten – “The minute we start talking about security in churches and houses of worship, we’re admitting we have a much bigger problem.” Really? Why do you think Jesus had to tell his disciples to put down their swords when Judas betrayed him? The entire Bible is full of stories about the “much bigger problem.” Bartimaeus was not alone in his blindness but he found sight that many others have not – even those who think they have faith.

Trump Calls Out Media: ‘Their Fake & Dishonest Reporting Causing Problems Far Greater than They Understand!’ Justin Caruso – “Media pundits calling Trump anti-Semitic and suggesting that he could be to blame for the attack isn’t surprising, but it is still a complete and utter lie.” But the President is right on with a very large truth.

Betsy Newmark, even with a “There is a lot about Donald Trump’s presidency that I dislike intensely” problem, provides many specific examples of Leftist anti-Semitism. Farrakhan is featured. But, as is usual from the ‘hate Trump’ crowd, all she can offer about Trump is empty assertions and platitudes with little specific support for them. The intensity of the dislike leads to bias, misperceptions, and distortions that the following Hurt column notes.

Donald Trump at fault for all political incivility? Charles Hurt – “What takes over a heart, infects a soul so perversely that a person sees murder, terror and violent crimes and immediately begins plotting how such misdeeds might benefit himself? How such things might advance his own political agenda?”

“The media tries drawing a straight line from President Trump’s joyous verbal pounding of the media to actual violence against reporters. That is why there has been so much flood-the-zone coverage of the dastardly murder of Jamal Khashoggi, the occasional columnist for The Washington Post.

Their argument: It’s all President Trump’s fault.

New York Times pushing fake news about oil and gas drilling. Jazz Shaw – “not all of the coverage is quite as honestly depicted as you might hope. We’re still riding a nearly unprecedented energy boom in the United States, but the New York Times found a way to cast a dark cloud over it this weekend.” … “It’s a “parade of trailer trucks!” Somebody is “reversing a trend… of the Obama presidency.” Big oil is engaged in a “federal lands free-for-all!” A blindness does infect our society.

“You’d think from these heated proclamations that the oil and gas industry was running wild in Wyoming at massive levels which dwarf anything seen during the peace and love festival of the Obama days, right? But as Energy In Depth (EID) was quick to point out, Lipton is using some verbal sleight-of-hand to push a narrative here. Cleverly mixing just enough facts with some misdirection, the reader is led to believe that drilling on federal lands under the Trump administration is skyrocketing. The author himself promoted the idea on Twitter.
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Notice what’s being done here. Lipton is pushing numbers which indicate the number of acres of land being offered at auction. That’s quite different from the number of acres which were actually leased to energy companies and the amount of actual energy extraction taking place.
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There are also dark hints in the New York Times story about how this flurry of drilling has created “concerns” about environmental impact, particularly when newer wells in remote areas are flaring off excess gas.

100 Percent Renewables—Poor Policy for Ratepayers. s_goreham – “cities and states pursuing 100 percent renewable electricity lay the foundation for a future painful lesson. Households and businesses will experience the shock of rapidly rising electricity prices as more renewables are added to the system.” There are two questions on the ballot in Nevada representing efforts to impose fantasy on the energy supply and power delivery by legal fiat.

“Superstition is powerful. There is no evidence that 100 percent renewable efforts, all combined, will have a measurable effect on global temperatures. Instead, cities and states that pursue 100 percent renewable policies will learn the hard lesson of skyrocketing electricity prices.

Complex problems need a bit more than a naive, simplistic solution such as superstition offers.

Lucianne has a number of citations that should make one wonder about bias and self deceit. Here’s from several abstracts. Here’s a sample.

Jamie McIntyrae – “Welcome to the world of Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, the man whose job it is to turn President Trump´s impulsive orders into something the military is happy to salute.” Impulsive? there’s that narrative again. Something developed over weeks is “impulsive” and it is the subordinates that just ignore the boss to do the right thing.

Maureen Dowd – “As long as I’ve covered politics, Republicans have been trying to scare me. Sometimes, it has been about gays and transgender people and uppity women looming, but usually it has been about people with darker skin looming.” Really? How about the KKK, Antifa, BLM? What about Water’s et al condoning assault and even battery against Republicans? What is the referent here and why is it so different depending upon the target?

Caleb Parke reports that “college students have been warned ahead of time to carefully select the costumes they wear lest “cultural appropriation” come back to haunt them.”

Penny Star also reports on another case – “The gathering at Freedom Plaza in Washington, DC, on Saturday was a stark contrast to recent rallies where people dressed in black and held signs disparaging President Donald Trump and members of his administration. The #WalkAway rally featured a sea of red, white, and blue-clad participants, waving flags, wearing Make America Great hats, and even pussy hats made infamous during the Women’s March were transformed into bright red, Trump-supporting headgear.”

Joe Hoft notes that “Erin Banco, claimed that the line to see former President Barack Obama in Milwaukee today was a mile long….(Photo/Tweet) Hah-Hah-Hah! This was clearly a fabrication because the disgraced former President’s event was at North Division High School gymnasium and it was barely half full”

Clarice Feldman, on the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre notes that “The shooter appears to someone who not only hates Jews, but hates President Trump as well. Julia Joffe, a GQ correspondent, finds a way to blame Trump for this mayhem.” Feldman also notes similar derangement stimulated by the “dud bomber” and other incidents.

“I see a pattern here. Don’t you? Bury the background of the shooter if he’s on the left. When you can no longer bury it, blame it on mental illness and lack of sufficient gun control. When the shooter appears to be from the right, double down on even the provably false contentions made in past shootings that it was the intemperate rhetoric of the right to blame.

It seems to me that partisan scoring of points on twisted evidence is not good journalism.

and Feldman cites a link to an assertion that is has been worse… and on and on it goes. Why? Then there’s this:

Thomas Lifson “was stunned yesterday watching live coverage of President Trump’s campaign rally in Murphrysboro, Illinois. He said something that may be the strongest statement ever delivered by an American president about the Jewish people.” Trump promises ‘destruction’ of those seeking the destruction of the Jews.

“Trump’s enemies expected him to offer some sort of boilerplate denunciation of anti-Semitism, owing to the awful slaughter in Pittsburgh. I am sure many were preparing to dismiss whatever he said, and no doubt some already have (I haven’t bothered looking because they are so predictable). But he said something that electrified me, going far beyond any ritual condemnation to make what struck me as a declaration that the United States is the guarantor of the survival of the Jewish people.
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Every Jewish Democrat should watch this moment, and ponder whether the party of Keith Ellison really deserves support. This was no mere boilerplate, it was outright love and a desire to protect.

Compare and contrast?

Ace of Spades notes that “There’s Just No Way That a Terrorism-by-Mail Scheme Targeting the Political-Media Establishment Could be a False Flag. I Mean, It Couldn’t Happen Again, After The Last False Flag Mail Terror Attack in 2001. Everyone remember the Anthrax mailings?” The ‘bombs’ count is now up to an even dozen but the ‘irregularities’ in the ‘terror’ campaign are becoming noticed. That means the media campaign to blame Trump is becoming more difficult to rationalize and that means the behavior of the media and others on the Left becomes even more distorted.

Fake bombs are not bombs. Fake news is fake news. Patricia McCarthy – “The fake news of the day has been disingenuously pretending that any those persons to whom the fake bombs were addressed were in any danger. They were not. Who sends bombs to people who do not open their own mail?”

“As Roger L. Simon wrote, it doesn’t matter who built those little fake not-pipe bombs, the intent is clear. The message? See, it isn’t only the left that is vicious and violent. The right is violent too! Whoever is guilty of perpetrating this latest stunt is irrelevant; their intent is obvious. Demonstrate that there are lunatics on the right too! Great plan.

Underestimating the intelligence of the American people is a progressive conceit. People on the left are confident that those not on their “team” are all troglodytes.
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Whoever the maker of the fake bombs turns out to be is, as Roger Simon asserted, irrelevant. It is the mainstream media that is the malefactor in our life and time.

HuffPost Lectures Trump On Rhetoric, While Delivering A Daily Dose Of Hate To Its Liberal Readers. Investor’s Business Daily – “Every day their front page is rife with violent and hateful rhetoric — all directed, of course, at Republicans.”

“And when not consulting its dictionary of violent verbs, HuffPost routinely mocks Republicans, links them with fascists, and otherwise demonizes them.
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And on every issue, there are no shades of gray. Republicans are always cast as liars, cheats, schemers. Democrats — especially the far left ones — are always the heroes.
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True to form, the site is now pinning blame for the bomb scares on Trump’s choice of words when criticizing his political opponents or the leftist media. (To be sure, every other major media outlet is doing the same thing.)
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This is not to say that there isn’t extremist rhetoric on the right. But none of it appears on sites considered a mainstream news outlet like the Pulitzer Prize-winning HuffPost.

If “hate flows down” as the HuffPost headline states, then doesn’t HuffPost have a responsibility to tone down the unending stream of violent rhetoric and divisive, hate-inducing headlines it’s sending down to its readers?

Maxine Waters: ‘I think that they are acting out what the president wants them to do’. John Sexton – “Maxine Waters gave an interview to a site called Blavity in which she reacts to finding out she was one of the targets of the mail bombs sent this week. As Waters sees it, this is the direct result of presidential dog whistles” (just who are you calling a dog?)

“Look, I get that some people really believe rhetoric creates a climate of hate that leads to violence. All I ask of those people is that they believe it regardless of who is spewing the rhetoric and not limit it to rhetoric on the other side. Maxine Waters fails that test. If she really believes what she’s saying, she should be a lot more careful with her own words at her own rallies. And if she’s not going to take any responsibility for that then she shouldn’t be demanding anyone else do so.

While Demanding ‘Civility,’ NYT Publishes Fan Fiction Depicting Trump’s Assassination. Bre Payton – “Should The New York Times, which published Trump-killing fan fiction, be held to the same standard it expects of the president?”

The media’s false narrative complaints ring a bit hollow. Jazz Shaw – “Two largely unrelated stories clearly have many journalists at both print and cable television outlets seeing red.”

“The social media responses to both the incoming Honduran migrant caravan and the recent spate of non-functional pipe bombs being mailed to prominent Democratic figures are “creating false narratives” and the tech giants who control these platforms aren’t doing enough about it. That attitude is aptly demonstrated by the Washington Post’s Drew Harwell this week. His complaints center on the rumors and speculation on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram which describe both of these events in ways the Washington Post and CNN clearly disapprove of.
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The overarching theme here is that the social media giants need to be squashing any stories describing the serial bomber as potentially being some sort of Democratic operative or issuing warnings about the dangers posed by the caravan because they are “creating false narratives.” Of course, for anyone who has been paying attention, what they’re actually upset about is the idea that somebody else is creating a competing narrative to the one they’re trying to sustain. That’s because in both cases we’re talking about situations where there are too many unknowns involved for a factual consensus to be reached at this point. This hasn’t stopped the media from preemptively trying to do just that, however.
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Again we see two different narratives, each with an element of truth to them, or at least a valid possibility being suggested until more confirmed facts are revealed. So when Harwell and other media figures begin carping about “false narratives” emerging on social media, that’s a disingenuous complaint. What they’re really upset about is that someone else is building a competing narrative which runs contrary to the one they’re trying to peddle.

Andrew McCabe, the deep state henchman. Thomas Lifson – “The process by which the FBI and Department of Justice were corrupted into serving as political attack machines for the Democrats is finally coming into focus.”

“In an article in The Hill that is today’s read of the day, a retired senior FBI executive puts together the evidence already on the record to offer a roadmap of how the politicization of these powerful bureaucracies was accomplished.

Update: looks like a suspect has been found in the pipe bomb incident. That will start a new page of speculation and narrative manipulations.

So many threads and they keep showing patterns and connections.

The Pipe-Bombs Story: Another Example of Why No One Trusts the Media. Andrew C. McCarthy – “I’m at a loss to understand how the climate is improved by spicing up reports with thinly veiled suggestions that President Trump may have triggered a series of potentially murderous attacks on political opponents.”

“At this point, there is no evidence whatsoever that provocative words from the president had anything to do with the sending of bombs. Indeed, there is as yet no known evidence of who is behind these possible attacks. And speaking of “attacks,” why, in light of the context of a possible bombing spree, is the Times asserting that Secretary Clinton, President Obama, and Mr. Soros have “figured prominently in conservative political attacks”? They have not been subjected to “attacks” in the sense conveyed by this report; they have been on the receiving end of mere political criticism, not the subjects of attempted political assassinations.

Explosive Packages a False Flag? Daniel John Sobieski – “Now the Democrats genuinely get to say “both sides”, with packages containing explosives sent to the Clintons, Eric Holder, George Soros and others conveniently two weeks before a possibly history-changing midterm election.”

“Somehow it is all too convenient, this “October surprise”. None of the named targets were really in danger, although others could have been hurt touching, picking up, or opening a package. The same could not be said when a Bernie Sanders supporter showed up at a baseball field in Alexandria determined to kill Republicans.

Back then we weren’t supposed to link that individual with the rhetoric of Sanders and other Democrats who warned that if the Republican agenda was enacted, millions would die.
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Of course, rhetoric does not justify a response with explosive violence, yet, as noted, for a so-called domestic terrorist attack, this scattering of suspicious packages seems too lame, too ineffective, too conveniently timed and doesn’t really pass the smell test,
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The packages may be found to be a real threat from an obviously unbalanced individual or individuals, but it may very well also be a false flag designed to reaffirm the Democrats’ continuous slander against the GOP.

See AP: CNN Pipe “Bomb” and Powder Within It Were Perfectly Harmless. Ace of Spades – “That last bit, the Git ‘er Done thing, makes me think this is a false flag, and not merely a fake bomb.”

“One expert, the guy who caught the UNABomber, says this looks like it might be false flag to him. He pointed out that there was no method by which the bombs would detonate themselves — he said something like “the recipient would have to figure out how to detonate it himself.”

An expert on CNN said something like “the bombs seem to be designed to be intercepted, and not to actually harm anyone.”

A self-professed expert (admittedly, his expertise is unverified) said the bombs were “silly-looking” and look like the most common type of bomb, which is a fake bomb.

Are Chuck and Nancy overplaying their hand on political violence? Paul Mirengoff – “Today, President Trump did just what Schumer prescribed. … How did Schumer respond? He issued a statement, along with Nancy Pelosi, essentially rejecting the president’s call.”

“They then recited standard-issue Democrat talking points in a dishonest attempt to support of their assertion that Trump condones violence. They claimed, for example, that Trump “express[ed] support for the neo-Nazis who killed a young woman in Charlottesville.” This is a bald-faced lie.
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In other words, it might cause them [moderates and swing voters] to see Schumer and Pelosi for what they are — hyper-partisan jerks with even less class than Donald Trump.

What you smell is like what you see in the mirror.

Fact-Checkers Without Evidence. Eric Lendrum – “Even more than “journalists” fact-checkers claim to be above the fray, depicting themselves as sticking to the “cold hard facts” while leaving their opinions at the door.”

“Of course, this is meant to cover up the fact that almost invariably they inject their opinions into various matters while projecting a false narrative that their work emanates from some higher authority that must be believed, much like a college professor who thinks he must not be questioned by mere students.
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The Kavanaugh hearings brought on one of Snopes’ most recent failures. It was actually a hilarious display that tied them in the knot of blatant lying, followed by admitting to the lie, while still insisting that the lie was true.
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At the same time, the President has not hesitated to place the blame exactly where it belongs: With the Democrats and the American Left. Naturally, CNN rushed to denounce this with just the latest of many, many uses of their new favorite phrase: “Without evidence.”

Whenever Trump or someone on the Right makes a claim, the media always throws up that phrase as a sort of disclaimer; but when the Left makes a claim, even if it is truly without evidence (like the entirety of the “Russia” conspiracy theory, or the Kavanaugh allegations), the media appears to assume that the burden of proving the charge untrue is on the accused.
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Don’t be fooled by the seemingly innocuous (and not to mention self-awarded) title of “fact-checker.” Fact-checkers are nothing more than glorified and self-elevated members of the mainstream media, and thus cleave to the same left-wing bias and agenda.

The Ever More Delusional Left. Patricia McCarthy – “Despite 98% of the media foaming at the mouth against President Trump since he was inaugurated, the left, meaning the legacy media, academia, all elected Democrats and the radical progressives, has convinced itself that Americans hate the man.”

“Why do they believe their unscrupulous tactics will work? Because they believe we are all mind-numbed, uninformed imbeciles who can be cajoled by their nonsense. … Those people are not a majority anywhere; they are the disordered among us. The left has psychologized politics; their party has become a refuge for the deranged persons who seem to think they live in the worst nation on earth when, in fact, they live in the greatest country ever created.
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Worst of all was the left’ s self-revelation of exactly who they are; vicious to the point of evil.
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Those who promote violence against conservatives — Maxine Waters, Cory Booker, Eric Holder, et. al., — think their rhetoric will win supporters, but they are driving sentient Democrats and independents away. Their delusional belief that the rest of us are easily proselytized is a dream too far. The Democratic Party is dying by its own dishonorable hand.

The Opportunity Costs of Socialism. Steven Hayward – “With socialism becoming the new fad for Democrats, good to see the Trump White House getting out ahead of it. Today the Council of Economic Advisers released a 72-page report entitled “The Opportunity Costs of Socialism” that clearly and succinctly lays out a powerful case against all of the leading Democratic nostrums that are likely to be the heart of the Democrats’ 2020 platform.

Census Win – Supreme Court Strikes Down Activist New York Court in Census Citizenship Ruling. Sundance – “framing a challenge based on the question being discriminatory- ruled that Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross must submit to a deposition to discover “the motives” of the decision.” A very typical example of assuming guilt and trying to prove it by any means necessary gets a blow but isn’t done yet.

“An appellate circuit panel initially agreed with the lower court and ACLU lawyers. However, U.S. Solicitor General Noel Francisco asked the Supreme Court to stay the circuit court ruling. SCOTUS agreed with the administration and blocked the ridiculous activist lawyers from questioning the cabinet; the supreme court does allow the plaintiffs to question the DOJ civil rights division lawyer.
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The challengers are led by New York’s attorney general and left-wing activist groups such as the ACLU. They are claiming that President Trump’s real reason for adding the citizenship question is to reduce the representation of immigrant populations in the census. There is no structural basis for their claim. It is not likely their challenge will succeed on the merits. The case is schedule to go to trial November 5th.

Obama Tells One Whopper Of A Lie. It’s About Lying. Daily Wire – “Speaking in Nevada on Monday, former president Barack Obama uttered what may have been the most pompous, patronizing, and pretentious lie from a politician since Woodrow Wilson” Note that this isn’t a generic ‘he lies’ but rather a specific assertion supported by examples that can be observed.

Wow – The Bloom is Really Off The Ruse. Sundance – “When I watched this earlier today I noticed something was odd; the background sound and the responses from the visible audience don’t align with the visual as presented.”

“Watch. When President Obama is speaking there’s almost no visible reaction; but something more… LISTEN ! There’s almost no audible audience response… it just seems weird.

The media have always covered for the Manchurian lightbringer, so we knew something was off when we first watched the Obama presentation. Thanks to twitter video we now know what that something was … It’s the Obama Potemkin village again; only this time in Nevada.

Then, “Meanwhile in Texas” …. Pictures for comparison and contrast.

The Dems October Surprise May be on Them. William L. Gensert – “If we learned anything from the Kavanaugh smear and the endless Russia collusion investigation, it’s that just as Islam is a political system masquerading as a religion, Democratic Party ideals are a religion masquerading as a political system.”

“It has been said that President Donald Trump is a buffoon, that he is a loudmouth from Queens with little impulse control. But everything Trump does can be seen in a different light if one only bothers to look. Much of what the president says on Twitter and during political rallies can be interpreted as deliberate and designed to control the conversation.
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Trump has Democrats playing his game and it’s not a good look for them. David Gelernter wrote in the Wall Street Journal that all the Democrats have is their hatred of Trump and many people may see that as a hatred of the country as well.

Another Reason Why You Got Trump: Feds Draft Plan to Discard Obama’s Transgender Ideology. J.J. Sefton – “And yet for the sake of maybe a few thousand mentally disturbed people, a nation of 315 million or so citizens is supposed to turn society upside down not just to accommodate them, but in fact, to submit to them. And by them, I mean the totalitarian Left.”

Yes, Be Very Worried Over Growing Polarization. Victor Davis Hanson – “Especially worrisome is the recent habit of social scientists and statisticians of claiming near-scientific authority through purported numerical precision.” It is one way that people deceive themselves and that is what leads to divergent outcomes and reason for worry.

“It is now difficult not to witness political sermonizing in popular culture in a fashion not seen in the recent past. The Oscars, Grammys, Hollywood movies, stand-up comedy, and professional sports were never devoid of politics, but they were not perceived as all-political. Such current ideological saturation of entertainment might explain why many of these venues are suffering losses in audiences, of which political weariness may be one contributing cause, and polarization and anger another.
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Popular culture can certainly provide a much-needed veneer of commonality in language, fashion, and habit. But without a commitment to shared values, a common agreement on constitutional norms, allegiance to the rule of law, and some deference to collective American traditions and customs, factions that superficially seem similar in their language and habits might devolve into violence of the sort now associated with Antifa or attacks on invited speakers to college campuses (or even on congressional representatives).

The lesson from the American Civil War and the French Revolution, the rise of Nazism in Germany or of Bolshevism in Russia, is not that clear majorities of partisans and countless news junkies are needed to foment extremism and tear apart a country. Instead, it is that zealous and sometimes warring tiny minorities can escalate tensions, nullify opposition, and bully the silenced majority to sanction–or at least not object to–the violence by which they eventually make their illiberal agendas go mainstream.

Dear Resistance, listen to my lived totalitarian experience – you have no effing idea what you’re talking about. Arthur Chrenkoff – “As a straight, white, Christian, right-wing, middle class male of European extraction I get told to shut up a lot.”

“you really have no idea, and I mean it with the greatest possible respect. Actually, I don’t. Most of you are supposedly mature, rational adults but you seem to have at best the most superficial knowledge of history and a complete lack of self-awareness, any sense of perspective, and an ability to contextualise. Having spent your lives relatively free of hardship, deprivation and persecution on any remotely comparable scale to people in other, less fortunate corners of the world, you probably get some frisson from believing yourself to be big actors at a critical time in history, the last line of separating civilisation from the descent into new dark ages. You’re free to engage in whatever ideological cosplay you want, but don’t expect others to take you seriously.

HT neo. Instapundit also linked the essay and the resulting storm got this update from Chrenkoff”

“You can very well believe that Trump is a bad president with wrong policies who is damaging American society and America’s international standing, but calling him Hitler or imagining that the United States is months away from a fascist dictatorship simply means I will never take you seriously. It’s stupid, self-indulgent and arguably insulting to the tens of millions of people around the world who have actually experienced real dictatorships and lack of freedom. It doesn’t insult me personally, as I’m not a sensitive type, but it simply makes me pity you for your pathetic need to cloak yourself with the rhetoric and symbols of historical martyrdom and heroism. Grow up and engage in politics like a rational adult.

Many examples of what he is talking about receive comments here.

Resurrecting the Jonestown Dead. Daniel J. Flynn – “Once historians settled on the facts, and agreed that a group that taught Russian to its members, issued to socialism examinations, and willed millions of dollars to the Soviet Union did not mesh well with the Bible thumper label, chroniclers shifted from obscuring the facts to offering unusual interpretations of them.”

““Unfortunately, the laudable aspects of Peoples Temple have been forgotten in the horrifying wake of Jonestown,” Julia Scheeres writes in A Thousand Lives. She posits, “If anything, the people who moved to Jonestown should be remembered as noble idealists. They wanted to create a better, more equitable, society. They wanted their kids to be free of violence and racism. They rejected sexist gender roles. They believed in a dream.”

Most people who wake up in a nightmare do.
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Jonestown offers lessons if we listen. It occurred, as I write in Cult City, as a cautionary tale about ends rationalizing means, heaven on earth inevitably yielding to a less comfortable place, the profound wrongs people imagining themselves as right can commit, and outsourcing thinking to an ideology or guru. Not a factor mitigating their evil, socialism helped bring it about.

Jim Jones, who boasted of making the dead walk again, proved incapable of resurrecting his flock. Various revisionist histories prove impotent in this task, too.

End could be near for House investigation of Trump-Russia investigators. Byron York – “Among the things Americans know about the conduct of the Trump-Russia probe that they would not have known had Nunes and his colleagues not tackled the subject:”

“Nunes and his colleagues learned these things, and told the public about them, over the determined opposition of the FBI, the Justice Department, and Democrats, both on the Intelligence Committee and in the larger House.

In fact, it would not be an overstatement to say the FBI and Justice Department fiercely resisted the investigation. They withheld materials, dragged their feet, and flat-out refused to provide information to which congressional overseers were clearly entitled. Sometimes disputes were settled by the intervention of House Speaker Paul Ryan on Nunes’ behalf. Sometimes they weren’t.
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If they win, Democrats will of course be fully entitled to investigate what they want; that’s part of what is meant when it is said that elections have consequences.

But the work of Nunes and his fellow Republicans has been enormously valuable. When all the investigators, and the politicians, and the press were looking in one direction, Nunes looked in another — and found important information. That is not to say the other investigations were not important, too. But Nunes showed Americans something they needed to see. And if his work as chairman ends with the next election, it has still been an indispensable contribution.

Wolves in Wolves’ Clothing. Victor Davis Hanson – “although many Democrats in Trump states still dance the old bipartisan two-step, lots of blinkered progressive wolves don’t even bother to put on the sheep’s clothing.”

“As the economy kept booming and things overseas calmed down, the Democrats found it harder to run a campaign strictly against either the ogre or the incompetent Trump. So they stayed on the offensive and did not bother to hide their agendas of open borders, “Medicare for All,” abolishing ICE, identity politics quotas, radical feminism, abortion on demand, and climate change hysterias. And they were quite lupine in their sincerity even as the public insidiously began to tune them out.
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But give progressive wolves credit. Unlike liberals, they are as they talk and act. They are at least proud of their agendas of remaking America in their own image—and in the last few weeks that image is appearing a veritable nightmare.

Here’s why Hillary Clinton losing her security clearance matters for the rest of us. Frank Miniter – “The mainstream media is treating the loss of these clearances as a move by Clinton to avoid a political snub by the Trump administration.”

“Treating this security issue in such a purely political manner misses a growing problem that the media is purposely trying to ignore, as an honest analysis of it doesn’t help their attacks on the current administration.
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But this lax security is not simply a political story. It puts every one of us in jeopardy.
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By overlooking and explaining away how Hillary Clinton treated government data, including classified information, and then covering up what Imran Awan allegedly did for years in the House, the mainstream media has done a massive disservice to the state of our democracy. Light needs to be shined on Congress and on anyone who abuses the safeguards of our system so that reforms can take place.

Growing Invasion Force Overwhelms Mexican Authorities – Approximately 10,000 Now Traveling through Mexico to U.S. Southern Border. Sundance – “Despite media claims to the contrary, elected Mexican officials previously promised to allow the invasion of Central American migrants. There is a history here.”

A different insider dish on Trump. Seth Lipsky – “With all the books about President Trump, one mystery has been ignored. How did this supposed clown manage not only to learn Ronald Reagan’s economic formula but also carry it to the next level?”

“Yet none has even tried to address the elephant in the room — how Trump built the platform of economic growth and jobs that managed to crack the Democrats’ presidential-election “Blue Wall” and leave our newscasters agape.

That’s the scoop that Stephen Moore and Arthur Laffer are about to publish in their new book “Trumponomics.” …

It’s not due to hit the bookstores until Oct. 30. You can bet, though, that the networks and the big Democratic papers are going to cover it with derision.
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Back in the summer of 2015, these three musketeers of economic growth founded, with Steve Forbes, a committee to, as they put it, “unleash prosperity.” It wasn’t a Trump project. Their aim was to educate all candidates in tax cuts, spending limits, decreased regulations, sound money, the rule of law — and free trade.
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This story is not only about Moore, Laffer and Kudlow educating Trump. It’s also about Trump doing the educating (and surprising).

Invasion of the wolves, or of the cannibals?

What Trump Knows That Obama Didn’t. Fred Barnes – “We all know Trump exaggerates and brags. But many of the economic gains were impressive, especially the fact that job openings outnumber job seekers for the first time on record.” As they say, it ain’t bragging if you can do it (Dizzy Dean) yet folks like Barnes haven’t quite got that figured when it comes to President Trump … yet.

“The Obama school of economists and commentators, embarrassed by anemic results, argued that economic growth was stuck, perhaps permanently, at 2 percent annually. That meant Obama was doing the best any president could do. Certainly far better than Trump, about whom they issued dire predictions: …

Wrong, wrong, and wrong. Trump’s economy is expected to grow by more than 3 percent this year.

Barack Obama is a proud man and it was somewhat endearing when he stooped to claim he had created the ground on which Trump’s economy was growing. The media sided with Obama, no surprise.
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Trump is correct about the condition of the economy in late 2016. It was weakening. The shift in economic policy to the right changed the direction of growth from down to up, just as it had with JFK and with Reagan. That’s what tax cuts deliver and tax hikes don’t.

Another example is at Coyote Blog: “Readers know that I find Trump and his style to be distasteful, and believe he is dead wrong on immigration and trade” … “If one instead challenges his manhood, he is going to dig in his heels and likely childishly harden his position against whatever you support.” Reality speaks another story. Success is a response to judgment about “dead wrong” but since when does reality or results matter to those blinded by their bias? Consider the idea that there might be something ‘distasteful’ about dishonesty and false witness.

White Privilege Means Having Your Reputation and Career Destroyed for Asking a Black Guy for I.D. [Warden] – “Yet another white person convicted by the media of racism, condemned by the internet mob, and fired from her job–all before her side of the story can be heard.”

“Now here’s the fun part: If and only if you watch the video on that news website do you discover that this “racist” white woman is married to a black guy.

Days later, buried at the end of a video most people won’t watch is a piece of context that most people would deem exonerating. Aren’t journalists terrific?

This is happening every other month or so, which leads me to believe that the people who record these videos know exactly how much power they possess to harm whites through weaponized online outrage, eagerly stoked by the left-wing media.
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You are interested in civility, in getting along. But there is an entire group of sociopaths on the left who are not interested in these things at all. What they want is the power to control, humiliate, and ultimately ruin you.

Definitely not a mob: Multiple reports of left-wing partisans attacking GOP candidates, staffers. John Sexton – “Whoever dubbed this the Jobs vs. Mobs election was on to something.”

“Yesterday we had the threatening letter left at Sen. Collins’ home. Today, Fox News reports that a “tracker” with the left-wing group American Bridge 21st Century, Wilfred Stark, was arrested after manhandling the female campaign manager for Nevada GOP gubernatorial nominee Adam Laxalt.
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Stark was arrested Tuesday night and remains in the Las Vegas city jail. But that’s not the only story of assault circulating today. Minnesota House candidate Shane Mekeland says he was punched by a large man during an event at a local restaurant.
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Meanwhile, Minnesota State Representative Sarah Anderson, also a Republican, was attacked over the weekend by a self-described anarchist after she asked him to stop kicking her campaign signs.

Another Day, Another Lefty Thug on the Attack. JVW – “It’s time for the Republican National Congressional Committee to update the ad they created a last week. Let’s have everyone see just the type of people that “progressive” activist groups have on their payroll.”

“Well, you know, passions are running high and Trump has placed us on edge, right? I mean, this must be out of character for Mr. Stark; it’s not as if this Soros-funded group would employ someone with a history of this sort of action, would they?

Paid Democratic voter fraud ring uncovered in Texas. Jazz Shaw – “Despite being constantly assured by Democrats and most of the mainstream media (but I repeat myself) that voter fraud doesn’t really happen, these nagging stories seem to keep popping up.”

“The Attorney General’s office has been pursuing this case for two years and it’s a major organized crime situation. Known as “harvesters,” these women were part of a group that has been filling out ballots in the hundreds or even the thousands. While four women have been indicted on sixteen counts thus far, the AG is saying that there are more people involved and a lot more incidents. These are just the ones they feel confident they can get convictions on for the time being.

Democratic Mobs, Then and Now. Steven Hayward – “with the Democratic Party openly embracing mob tactics, we can make out a reversion to a very old pattern.”

“I went through Lincoln’s first significant public speech, his “Lyceum Address” of 1838, when we was just 28 years old. The formal theme of the speech is “The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions,” but Lincoln spends a large portion of the speech decrying the rising mob violence of his time. After reviewing three examples of mob violence that had recently received national attention, Lincoln explained …

The Lynching of Mark Judge. John Zmirak – “The Democrats and the media have cast Judge onto the corpse heap of the politics of personal destruction. He has to go the rest of his life under the totally meritless shadow of hideous accusations —the worst you can throw at a man.”

“Political forces desperate to keep the Supreme Court as a means of ruling America by decree showed how utterly ruthless they really are, and Judge was collateral damage. Spiritual forces hungry for the ongoing sacrifice of unborn children were perfectly happy to destroy an innocent adult Christian along the way. Don’t let them win.

The Democrats Must Be Defeated. John Hinderaker – “The Democrats are trying to bully their way back into power through mob actions of various kinds. What you think of the Republicans is pretty much irrelevant. The Democrats’ bullying tactics must not be allowed to succeed. The republic depends on it.”

Trump Takes the Right Position (Again) on Khashoggi. Roger L Simon – “In the Middle East, suffused as it is by the Islamic doctrine of taqiyya — making it permissible, often required, to lie to the kufr (non-Muslim) for the good of the faith — it’s hard to discern who is telling the truth or anything close.”

“As for Trump, I think once again he is being smart not following the herd. If MBS turns out to be a total swine, there’s plenty of time to react accordingly. If not, the president has properly hedged his bets. In any case, in a world (the Middle East) where practically all leaders, other than Israelis, are various degrees of thugs, it may come down to the regrettable choice of the traditional the “enemy of my enemy,” etc. Thanks to Obama’s giveaway of billions, we know who that mainly is — Iran and its client Hezbollah.

Mob navigation, it is.

Smothered: Six Democratic Scandals That The Elite News Media Suffocated With A Pillow This Cycle. Matt Vespa – “it shouldn’t shock us that the Media Research Center’s Newsbusters division probably has carpal tunnel syndrome from jotting down all the insanity that is transpiring across CNN, MSNBC, and the Big Three (CBS, NBC, and ABC).”

“Let’s be honest. We all know this game. If these were Republicans, the media would have peddled a narrative of scandal and sleaze that would have saturated this election cycle. It must be nice to be a Democrat. You can lie, cheat, steal, and (allegedly) beat women with zero consequences because there will always be an expansive media complex that will give you tons of cover. Same as it ever was.

Ellison accuser: Why won’t anyone believe me — when I’ve provided corroboration? Ed Morrissey – “This is far more than anything provided by Ford, Deborah Ramirez, and Julie Swetnick over the last few weeks. Democrats and the media demanded an FBI investigation into those anyway, but have little if anything to say about Monahan. And you don’t even need one guess to know why.”

Political Violence Comes to Minnesota. John Hinderaker – “Any time you see “Republicans seized,” you know you are reading an article by a Democratic Party reporter.”

“Similar incidents are taking place across the country. It isn’t just Antifa brownshirts in Portland and New York; low-level political violence by the Left is being mainstreamed. The problem with low-level violence is that it can rapidly escalate. So far, due to the miracles of modern science, no Republican politicians have been murdered by Democrats. Let’s hope that is still true on November 7.

Cheeky girl demands moonwalker, geologist to shut his mouth on geology. Luboš Motl – “And now, an arrogant left-wing journalist demands you to admit that if you have walked on the Moon, every piece of arbitrarily fishy left-wing pseudoscience must also be true.”

“Nevertheless, this pathetic female nobody has enough arrogance to demand that despite the monologue that has made so much sense, the famous geologist Harrison Schmitt doesn’t speak for geologists. He didn’t even speak “for geologists” – he just said how things are being evaluated in geology which is the field where he was trained. And she didn’t even attempt to present to have any evidence or isolate an imperfection in Schmitt’s monologue. She just unashamedly told him to shut his mouth because she clearly found his observations inconvenient – she must believe that this is how things should work in science.
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This exchange is another great example showing the far-reaching consequences – destructive consequences for whole countries and our civilization – of the affirmative action and the reckless reduction of the spanking of kids. Affirmative action doesn’t just mean that for ideological reasons, 50% of the people whom you hire don’t do anything useful in some occupations and the efficiency gets halved. It’s worse than that. Many of the “invisible” ones actually contribute with the negative sign – they actively undermine the system and everyone who has actually achieved something tangible. (That’s why it’s so great that Hungary has banned “gender studies” at the public universities.) They don’t respect any meritocracy and any authorities that emerged from the old meritocracy. They only respect themselves and the political interests of similar parasitic additions to these fields.

There Is No Middle Ground for Disagreements About Facts’… Except When It’s a Straw Man. David Middleton – citing Klemmens Kappel: “Climate skeptics have insulated themselves from any evidence that would otherwise be rationally compelling.” contrast to the reality provided …

Deep Disagreement on Facts. Maggie’s Farm – “Ignoring facts and blaming other people for not ignoring them with you is not a disagreement on facts.” It doesn’t seem she’s observed Juan Williams on The Five as one example that refutes the idea that “People tend to agree about facts, so the adjudication process remains adequate.”

The Origins of Progressive Agony. Victor Davis Hanson – “In the wake of Obama, the Democratic party was a shipwreck, to be saved only by Hillary and the Supreme Court … ”

“What has transformed the Democratic party into an anguished progressive movement that incorporates the tactics of the street, embraces maenadism, reverts to Sixties carnival barking, and is radicalized by a new young socialist movement?
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The catastrophic yet suicidal loss in the 2016 election and the disappointment over the Obama presidency radicalized Democrats. A combative Trump himself certainly enraged them, on a variety of political, social, and cultural levels.

When Democrats lost, they realized that they still lived in a Republic and not a volatile Athenian democracy — and found this also hard to take.

More exasperating still was the loss of the Supreme Court, the last bastion of elite brilliance and superior morality that might yet save America from the prejudices and ignorance of the irredeemables, deplorables, clingers, and crazies.

Add it all up, and it was enough to drive any liberal to binge progressive drinking.

Trump the knuckleballer. neo – “Hanson’s essay is well worth reading in its entirety; a summary hardly does it justice. I believe he intends “agony” in both its meanings, suffering and contest, and I believe it is the correct word for what the left is going through right now. It is by no means clear who will win this struggle, long term.”

“During the primaries, Trump’s Republican opponents never quite figured out how to wrestle this particular alligator. In the time since he’s been president, some of the Republican NeverTrumpers are still going at it and failing, although most have given up the agon and praised him, albeit sometimes reluctantly. Now it’s the Democrats who are engaged in a struggle with this strange opponent, continually thinking “Gotcha!!” and continually being bested.

Which brings me to another metaphor, appropriate for this time of year: Trump as knuckleballer. The knuckleball pitcher confounds batters with the zaniness of the ball’s behavior once it leaves his hand. It doesn’t require extreme force but it’s not an easy pitch to throw and it’s a very difficult one to control. But it can make ordinarily good hitters look bad; they often just can’t figure out what’s going on, and they end up looking silly when they swing at a knuckler.

What do you do to save face when you’ve been shown a dupe?

JD Mullane: The media’s still blacking out Gosnell. Ed Morrissey – “national news outlets ignored the story even when Gosnell came to trial. Only after Mullane’s picture of the empty courtroom pews set aside for media went viral on Twitter did the media show up to cover the trial.”

“The motive here is pretty transparent. Gosnell raises all sorts of questions not just about abortion itself, but also the manner in which pro-choice forces have cowed governments to the point of refusing to police clinics where abortions are performed. That’s precisely what happened in Pennsylvania for the 17 years prior to the discovery of Gosnell’s horrors, which happened because of an investigation into illicit drug sales. Even before that, though, the state and city refused to follow up on specific complaints about Gosnell’s work and refused to investigate the death of Karnamaya Mongar when it happened.

That editorial bias happens in less overt ways, too. For instance, the film Gosnell: The Trial of America’s Biggest Serial Killer opened in 673 theaters this weekend and scored the highest gross of any independent film released this week. It came in 12th overall, 4th among all new releases, and had a respectable $1,836 per-screen average. (In contrast, the highly promoted Bad Times at the El Royale scored $2,573 per screen.)
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Mullane’s correct; the media still doesn’t want to talk about Kermit Gosnell. Fortunately, people can go directly to the theater to see Gosnell and to get an accurate recounting of his horrors.

A wonderful Catholic sermon against cultural Marxism. LuboÅ¡ Motl – “Archbishop of Prague Dominik Duka has already defended Mons. Petr PiÅ¥ha – while some Catholics have left the church in the middle of that sermon and some cultural Marxists, e.g. the Templeton-funded “priest” Mr Tomáš Halík, have attacked Mons. PiÅ¥ha in the media. The priest has already been sued for “fearmongering” by a far left group (ČŽL, Czech Women’s Lobby), too.”

“Another threat, as I see it, is a certain convention’s extension of the rights and freedoms and we are completely overlooking the fact that freedom isn’t a sum of partial freedoms, freedomlets, and little freedoms. Instead, freedom is a unique, compact whole, and it is indivisible. It has the character of the sea that is not the sum of droplets like the rain. Freedom is either present – and then all the smaller things naturally follow from it – or it doesn’t exist and there’s non-freedom instead.

Who and What Threaten the Constitution? Victor Davis Hanson – “Trump poses no threat to the U.S. Constitution. Those who since 2016 have tried to destroy his candidacy and then his presidency most certainly do.”

“In general, free societies more often become unfree with a whimper, not a bang—and usually due to self-righteous pious movements that always claim the higher moral ground, and justify their extreme means by their self-sacrificing struggle for supposedly noble ends of social justice, equality, and fairness.

Media darlings, not media ogres, receive a veritable free pass to ignore constitutional norms. Champions of bipartisan consensus, “the people,” and the power of big government to do the “right” thing and advance social justice are the more dangerous to watch, not those championing the rights of the individual, and small and less intrusive government.
…
when the media become unctuous and complicit with those whom they are supposed to audit and cross-examine, then politicians and political movements—especially those voicing utopian bromides—grow ever more emboldened, empowered and occasionally quite dangerous.
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During Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings, we saw just how fragile a 231-year-long American institution of due process actually was when it was seen as an obstacle to social justice, the anti-Trump forces, the #MeToo movement, and the general progressive agenda.

The 231 year long American institution is just as fragile as the irresponsibility of its constituents.

Hillary Clinton Calls for Incivility Against Republicans. Rick Moran – “The most prominent Democrat in the country has, for all intents and purposes, just given a green light to every left-wing kook and violent sociopath to be uncivil to Republicans.”

“I may be wrong but I haven’t heard of any Democrats and their families being chased out of restaurants or threatened with bodily harm by mobs. Nor have I heard about their personal information being published online.
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Plausible deniability. That’s what Hillary Clinton now has if Republicans are injured or killed by the mobs. She wasn’t calling for “violence,” just incivility toward political opponents.

The problem is that, as McCotter points out, her words have enabled thousands of crazies who believe the hysteria against Republicans and Trump that has been ginned up by those who know exactly what they’re doing when they seek to create an atmosphere of violence and hate.

Clinton has given her blessing — indeed, her permission — for left-wing radicals to tear the country apart.
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We are constantly informed of Trump’s “dog whistles” and “code words” to white supremacists and racists. There’s nothing coded in what Hillary Clinton just said. In my more than 40 years of covering and writing about politics, I’ve never heard anything more irresponsible — or frightening.

Hillary unleashes the thugs. Thomas Lifson – “The use of the word “destroy” is a deliberate attempt to portray violence as justified.”

“Unless sobriety suddenly and miraculously returns to Democrats driven insane by their unexpected loss to Donald Trump, the United States is headed for a downward spiral of political violence of the sort that has destabilized democratic regimes (Weimar Germany and Taisho Japan) and led to fascism and world war.
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The WaPo, shamefully, now is a denier of leftist mob violence, instead blaming the right:
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We already are so far down that path that the unthinkable is possible: the loss of our constitutional republic to armed conflict.

Democrats Consider Becoming ‘More Ruthless’ After Losing Brett Kavanaugh Battle. John Nolte – “Other than violence, what is left?”

“After launching at least a half-dozen debunked and outright phony allegations of criminal sexual deviancy against Kavanaugh, after accusing him of running a gang rape ring where women were drugged as a means to incapacitate them, after legitimizing the harassment of President Trump and Kavanaugh supporters up to and including chasing them out of public spaces, Democrats are thinking about becoming “more ruthless”?
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Are we talking about the same Democrats who violated every norm to hold onto Christine Blasey Ford’s allegations against Kavanaugh until it could do the maximum damage? Are we talking about the same Democrats who used procedural trickery to pass Obamacare? The same Democrats who nuked the Senate filibuster? Who politicized the FBI to try to frame Trump as a Russian spy? Who weaponized the IRS against the Tea Party? Who accused Mitt Romney of murder? Who investigated Sarah Palin’s womb? Who accused Palin of a mass murder in Arizona? Who invented Borking? Who threatened a broadcast network’s license over a miniseries? Who are promising to pack the Supreme Court with more justices?

Footnote 43. John Hinderaker – “Now, Solomon expands on that story by pointing out that the intelligence agencies tried to hide information about that meeting from Congress and the American people”

“The FBI and the CIA cannot be trusted. They have been hopelessly compromised by their effort to swing the 2016 presidential election in Hillary Clinton’s favor, and to bring down the Trump presidency after he won the election. Dishonest redactions tell us they have something important to hide, and it isn’t hard to see what that is. The veil of secrecy is slipping, and what we are seeing is the worst political scandal in American history. President Trump should declassify all documents having to do with the the FBI’s Russia investigation, the surveillance conducted on the Trump campaign, and related matters at the earliest possible moment.

Trust depends upon integrity and is necessary for a civilized society.

Trail Covering: As Predicted U.S. DOJ and Treasury Turn on Oleg Deripaska. sundance – “Because of the associations with the scheme and coup-plotters, Oleg has buckets of dirt on corrupt U.S. officials who were trying to target Donald Trump.” And, are you wondering where the ‘golden showers’ in the Steel Dossier came from?

“Oleg Deripaska is a typical Russian gremlin, and if you research him you can tell he loves mocking the corrupt elements within U.S. politics. I’m almost positive it was Oleg who put the Trump “pee tapes and hookers” into the Steele Dossier just to see if the knuckleheads in the DOJ/FBI would actually use it.

Considering Christopher Steele was a contracted employee of the billionaire it just looks like something Oleg would do. Deripaska and many Russian political types just work that way. To them, manipulating U.S. officials is funny….. ‘stoopid Amerikans‘ etc.
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The Russians (Deripaska) really do have leverage and blackmail… but it ain’t over Trump. Oleg has blackmail on Comey, McCabe and conspiracy crew. Oleg Deripaska must be kept away from congress and away from exposing the scheme.

The Democrats’ Moral Confusion. Karen McQuillan – “Christine Blasey Ford’s accusation against Judge Kavanaugh was deeply unethical.” Despite the denials, the hysteria, the accusations against witnesses, projection, and the prejudice and bigotry on display, reality does not move and that presents a problem for the Democrats. McQuillan walks through the components of their moral dilemma.

“Bearing false witness is of the utmost seriousness as a moral breach. It breaks the Ninth Commandment, “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour.” It is right up there with murder and stealing, because it partakes of both.
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At the end of his life, Moses spells out in detail God’s teaching on how to safeguard an innocent man from false accusations. One witness is not sufficient to lodge an accusation. Two witnesses do not suffice. There must be three witnesses.

Moses also spells out the need for consequences – that is, punishment – for bearing false witness.
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The Democrats think anything goes ethically in their drive for power, because they have defined their desire to rule as ethical in itself, and their political opponents as evil. We have just experienced what happens when a just cause – to end sexual abuse and assault – is twisted to serve a partisan political purpose.

America has become morally confused. Good and evil do not lie along party lines. To follow that moral reasoning leads to horrors.

There are others who are unable to avoid false witness despite the evidence in front of them. See, for instance, Partisans on Both Sides Fervently Believe the Other Side Is More Devious and Less Constrained by Ethics at the Coyote Blog. “Both sides” ?? can you cite equivalent ethical breaches for both sides and maintain any pretense of being objective? This is asserting guilt by innuendo and is in the same league, ethically, as the false witness against Kavanaugh. But the perpetrator in this case is blind unto himself and that is where there is a very big problem for all of us.

Kavanaugh Casualties. Victor Davis Hanson – “Yes, both parties are now more united and energized. But one did so by enticing the recalcitrant back into the fold; the other, by warning them to join the revolution or be guillotined.”

“When Donald J. Trump rants at his rallies about “fake news” and claims that the media is not just biased but lies, Americans wince — but now more so at the accuracy of his charges and no longer so much at the crassness with which he delivers them.

New Kavanaughcalypse hotness: If you accuse, you must recuse — from all “politically charged” cases. Ed Morrissey – “By that measure, shouldn’t Ruth Bader Ginsburg already be recusing herself from the same cases? In July 2016, Notorious RBG told the New York Times’ Adam Liptak that it might be time for her to move to New Zealand if Donald Trump got elected.”

“Best guess: That’ll worry Kavanaugh as much as it worries Ginsburg, which is to say not at all. He’s there to do his job, just as she’s there to do hers. There’s only one Supreme Court and only nine members on its panel, which is why recusals are very rare, and occur as a result of real and personal conflicts of interest or previous work on cases that come before the court. Elena Kagan recused herself from a few such cases when it involved work she did as Solicitor General; various justices have felt it proper to recuse on rare occasions when their investments involved one of the parties. Otherwise, activists can demand recusals as much as they want, as long as they’re prepared to look like fools, shrieking about bias while exposing their own.

The ever receding climate goalpost: IPCC and Al Gore “12 years to save the planet” (again). Anthony Watts – “Ah, it’s beginning to sound like a broken record. The same message over and over again. It’s as if these folks don’t pay attention to history. The United Nations has once again issued another dire climate change report (SR15, see it here) claiming we must act before it’s too late.” It’s amazing how flexible the goalposts are to the Left.

“In the meantime, the audit of faulty climate data suggests the rush to judgment is unwarranted.
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But as the new book, The Politically Incorrect Guide® to Climate Change reveals, climate tipping points have a long history of repetition, moved deadlines and utter failure. The book documents that the earliest climate “tipping point” was issued in 1864 by MIT professor who warned of “climatic excess” unless humans changed their ways.
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The climate change scare campaign has always relied on arbitrary deadlines, dates by which we must act before it’s too late. Global warming advocates have drawn many lines in the sand, claiming that we must act to solve global warming—or else.

False witness infects many passions.

The Left’s Dark Turn. Jack Cashill

“Prodded by her allies on the left, the initially reluctant Hill proceeded to slander Clarence Thomas before the world. This calculation represented a dark turn in progressive history. Ever since the Soviet Comintern decided to make martyrs out of Sacco and Vanzetti more than sixty years prior, leftists had made a practice of declaring the guilty innocent. Now they and their media allies were prepared to declare the innocent guilty and, if need be, imprison them to prove their point. The left’s brief Atticus Finch phase was over.

Alger Hiss, the Rosenbergs, Leonard Peltier, Mumia-Abu Jamal, Hurricane Carter — guilty to a man, but now history. Clarence Thomas, Duke Lacrosse, George Zimmerman, Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, Officer Darren Wilson, Brett Kavanaugh, Donald Trump — innocent, and now the future. There had been cases of the left punishing the innocent before Thomas, and many since, but the Thomas case was arguably the first in which the combined forces of the left knowingly defamed an innocent man on the main stage.
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Like many on the left, Obama had little conscience about sacrificing those who served no useful purpose.
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Fortunately for Wilson, St. Louis County Prosecutor Bob McCulloch relied not on the media but on the evidence, and the evidence cleared Wilson. The evidence also cleared George Zimmerman, the Duke lacrosse players, and the UVA frat boys. Clarence Thomas was confirmed as an associate justice of the Supreme Court, and, if nothing else, Nakoula was eventually released from his Texas prison.

Those who think a series of defeats like this would discourage the left fail to understand its end game. Given their control of academia and the media, progressives are confident the majority of Americans will see these seeming losses as further indictments of the American system –“No justice, no peace.”
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These incidents, especially the deep state assault on Kavanaugh, are all prelude to great defamation project of our time: the Russian collusion hoax. When the American people have their “Oh, I see” moment on this scam, Democrats and their media allies may never recover.

One Ford Narrative Too Many. Victor Davis Hanson – “In the end, the Christine Blasey Ford accusations collapsed. With them went the last effort to destroy Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the United States Supreme Court.”

“To substantiate her claim, the country was asked to jettison the idea of innocent until proven guilty, the need for corroborating testimony, witnesses, and physical evidence, the inadmissibility of hearsay, the need for reasonable statutes of limitations, considerations of motive, and the right of the accused to conduct vigorous cross-examination. That leap proved too much, especially when located in a larger progressive landscape of street theater antics, including Senate disruptions, walkouts, and sandbagging senators in hallways and elevators.
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In the end, we were left only with the Stalinist mantra “to accuse is to be believed”—but, of course, not even the current accusers in the future would be exempt from the very nightmare they now would create for others.

The Democrats’ Constitution Problem. Editorial of The New York Sun – “What was it that so deranged the Democrats that they were willing to try to destroy the good name of a distinguished nominee?”

“It is increasingly evident that the Democrats are chafing under the Constitution itself. Every one of them who holds federal, state, or local office has had to swear to the parchment (the Constitution so requires). They are, though, unhappy about it and want it changed.
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Alexander Hamilton, writing, in 76 Federalist, about the president’s power to appoint judges and other officials, alluded to the danger of “an unbecoming pursuit of popularity.” We’ve always loved that phrase. No wonder it is by the states rather than the people that nominees are confirmed. The Supreme Court, which sometimes must overrule the people, is, in its own right, a check on democracy’s tendency to run away with itself.

Trump goes full Alinsky in the midterm race. Thomas Lifson – “On Twitter, he followed Alinsky’s last and possibly most potent law. The 13th entry in Rules for Radicals reads, “ “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.”

Better Late than #NeverTrump. William Sullivan – “Democrats have done the once-unthinkable.”

“No, they didn’t ultimately obstruct or delay the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh (which has a nice ring to it). But they have been so dastardly, dishonest, and politically conniving in their efforts to publicly smear Kavanaugh without any corroborating evidence that they’ve possibly converted some of the #NeverTrump coalition.
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Democrats have also caused Erick Erickson to finally realize that Democrats will stop at nothing to destroy everything that we hold dear, including due process, our values, and our constitutional republic, and that Trump is the only logical, politically practical alternative to that.

Justice Kagan is Concerned About the Supreme Court’s ‘Legitimacy’ if Kavanaugh is Confirmed. Beth Baumann – “Although Kagan attempted to explain the importance of Kennedy’s seat on the Court, she actually did herself a disservice. She admitted a few things”

“1) While, in theory, the Supreme Court is an “impartial” group of people deciding and interpreting law that will impact us for generations to come, it’s not. For the most part, we know how justices are going to side. … That’s not being impartial in the least bit.
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2) Kagan also, in a roundabout kind of way, admitted that she’s not impartial or neutral.
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3) She also inferred that Kavanaugh’s confirmation would throw the Court to the right

It makes you wonder: why do new justices have to be impartial but those currently on the bench don’t have to be? If we went with Kagan’s theory then shouldn’t everyone on the Court be kicked off and replaced with people who don’t go with their political persuasions?

Kavanaugh and the Crux of a Cold Civil War. Thaddeus G. McCotter – “The Kavanaugh confirmation evinces the political abyss between us; and the bathetic depths to which this divide drives the Left to “win.”

“The crux? Realizing politics is part of life, one side believes America is fundamentally a good country requiring some prudent improvements upon which reasonable minds may differ. On the other side, the Left, thinking politics is life, believes America is a hopelessly unjust nation requiring “fundamental transformation” and this is a point on which no reasonable minds can differ.

… the Left perpetuates the political intimidation of Kavanaugh and Thomas in the separate and equal branch of government that is supposed to reject political considerations and administer impartial justice.

No, it won’t work. But because they feel entitled to announce this; and, excused, emboldened, and empowered by their fellow leftists in the media, they will sadly continue to attempt to erode our constitutional safeguards of equal justice under law.
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Why does the fascist Left feel entitled to engage in sedition, slander, stalking, and violence to pursue it ends? Conflating politics with life and thinking America is beyond redemption absent a fundamental (and impossible) transformation to socialist Eden where everyone must think the same upon pain of ostracism and worse, the Left cannot believe that anyone who disagrees has good intentions.
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Yet the pressing question for those citizens of sound mind and stout hearts is not what will be the next manifestation of the Left’s vicious political paroxysm. To be forewarned and forearmed is, truthfully, all one can do. No, the question at hand is how, for the future good of our free republic, the Left can be constructively engaged and political civility, if not yet comity, restored.

In the wake of the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings, this increasingly is a question only the Left can answer, for it is their calumnies and lawlessness exacerbating the political divide and deepening the America’s cold civil war. Best the Left ponder and devise an answer soon.

If they do not, one day, historians will record that the violent Left had turned Steve Scalise into our Charles Sumner.

The Left’s Bullying Anti-Kavanaugh Tactics Threaten Our Republic. Jay Cost – “If such behavior becomes the new normal, we’ll all be in trouble.”

“But the First Amendment does not grant carte blanche to assembly and petition. In fact it is the only pair of rights listed therein that contains a limitation. We have to assemble and petition peaceably. We the people have a right to come together to voice our complaints to our elected officials, but we do not have the right to behave like a mob.

And a mob was what we saw in Congress over the last ten days. Demonstrators were rude, crude, and abusive. They got in the faces of members of Congress and disrupted the business of the national assembly. Thank goodness there was no violence. 
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When protesters interfere with the legislative process in the reckless fashion they did this week, they are thus harassing not just members of Congress but all of us, for our interests in government cannot be realized if our members are being harried and bullied. This is the line between the benevolent rule of the majority, which the Founders thought was essential for republican government, and the clamors of the mob, which they knew was a threat to it.

Moreover, we should all be deeply concerned about the new tactic of harassing members of Congress in their personal lives.
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What is especially concerning is that high-level liberals are encouraging this kind of behavior.
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And if liberals intend to employ such bullying as a regular tactic, then they are the threat to our form of government, not the policies and people they are protesting.

Some asked how the Left thought its tactics could persuade others to their view. Perhaps persuasion wasn’t the goal?

How Deep is This Swamp? sundance – “There are two facets, two recent researched stories, that paint a very disturbing scenario.”

“The first facet is a reality that Senate Security Officer James Wolfe was given, and leaked, a copy of the Carter Page FISA application on March 17th, 2017. This is important because it leads to context within the larger issue.
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Why? Why is that massive DC corruption story completely overlooked? What does that say about the fourth estate?

It would be entirely impossible for that story to be hidden if the DOJ, FBI, political system (within the Senate Intelligence Committee), and fourth estate were functioning correctly. Something is severely broken, and there’s no-one doing a darned thing about it.
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The smear campaign against Judge Brett Kavanaugh didn’t just involve a small team of connected insiders; their enterprise carried across multiple institutions, the legislative branch, political operations and the media.
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Do you really think that all of those elements described above would even consider going after a supreme court nominee with a baseless lie if they thought they would get caught?

Think about it.

The left escalates its vilification of Susan Collins. Monica Showalter – “For all the appearances of leftishness, she seems to have a thing about not being pushed around and her independent backbone is not just confined to Republicans. That comes as a shock to the left”

“Money didn’t work and Collins called it was it was: Bribery. The Wall Street Journal in its editorial above explained why that was accurate …

Second, the left tried rabid threats and piggery. According to USAToday …

Well, that didn’t work. Leftist threats to rape Collins’s staffers in the name of standing up for women’s “health” had a weird way of not being persuasive.
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Yet Collins stood firm, scolded the hell out of the Democrats, seeing right through them, and as the left continues escalating its campaign to vilify, threaten and harass her, her massive two-thirds majority among Maine’s voters is now likely to just get bigger now. Voters notice. And Collins is a standing tall and powerful. Funny that the left, despite getting slapped in its fat mug for its ‘persuasion’ tactics over and over, hasn’t. It just wants to keep coming back for more.

Susan Collins’ Game Changer. The New York Sun – “what strikes us about Senator Collins’ magnificent moment is that it is about more than courage — it is a profile in substance.”

“The Maine Republican is practically the only person in the Senate to approach this decision by reasoning out the substance of the constitutional questions that have the Democrats so panicked. She parsed the parchment’s preambular purpose of a more perfect union.
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What riveted us, though, was the senator’s fidelity to fairness.
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“Certain fundamental legal principles about due process, the presumption of innocence, and fairness do bear on my thinking, and I cannot abandon them,” she confessed in what will become a famous sentence. Added she: “We must always remember that it is when passions are most inflamed that fairness is most in jeopardy.” She called the presumption of innocence particularly relevant “when an accusation departs from a nominee’s otherwise exemplary record.”

Susan Collins Saved the Senate (For Now). Roger L Simon – “The Democrats and their choleric supporters, overwhelmed by anger and bile, may not realize it yet (or possibly ever) but Susan Collins saved the Senate, at least for now, with her superb, well-reasoned speech explaining her support for Brett Kavanaugh Friday.”

“This seems to have made little impact on the Democrats, at least on the surface. They declined to applaud Collins after a more impressive speech than any single one of them, to my knowledge, has ever given. I guess they couldn’t abide what she was saying toward the end, that she hoped that this hideous period of treating the rule of law like garbage was over and that Congress and the Court could learn to work together for the good of the country.

In a contrary example, Ace of Spades says Sarah Palin Threatens Murkowski With Primary – “Abortion extremist and 2nd-most-liberal Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski will vote against Kavanaugh on social (group) justice grounds — other women were assaulted and not believed in the past, so she will scape-goat an innocent man to balance the Social Justice Warrior karmic scales.” In doing so, Murkowski burns her constituency by showing a lack of support for those responsible for resolving many issues that have helped her state economically and otherwise.

Trump the Indestructible. Conrad Black – “The entire febrile effort to delegitimize President Donald Trump continues to be based on the ability of the Trump-hating media to confect or unveil a Trumpocidal deus ex machina every two weeks”

“ I have just learned from a dear friend of many years, an intelligent and reasonable man who happens to be in the camp of the Trump-haters, what is being thrown into the line as the successor anti-Trump story to the Kavanaugh drama. … The smooth-faced talking heads are earnestly wagging in unison across the channels as they find the judge’s lack of a “judicial temperament” to be “concerning.” … the Trump presidency will be brought down by the New York Times’ revelation of a supposed tax fraud by Trump involving hundreds of millions of dollars. The president has been constantly subjected to tax audits for nearly 40 years. This is another clunker, after so many. I doubt that it will be more effective than the Times’ effort to fell Kavanaugh with the suspicion that he “may have” thrown ice-water at someone at a collegiate social occasion 35 years ago.

Note the “temperament” as with the “non-presidential” and then the allegation that attempts to overturn history.

Kavanaugh boomerang #1: Fanatical Dems finally have unified the GOP behind Trump. Thomas Lifson – “The Democrats have not merely overplayed their hand in opposing the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh, they have provoked a reaction that has serious consequences for the power struggle ahead.”

“Going forward, the salient consideration is that the whole approach to slandering Kavanaugh is being revealed as a setup. There is an actual potential crime to investigate:

Where Do We Go From Here? John Hinderaker – “the slanders the Democratic Party directed toward Kavanaugh were, if anything, even more disgraceful [than the Bork case]. We will feel their impact for many years to come.”

“So, looking to the future, what are the notable features of our political landscape?

1) The validation of violence for political ends. …
2) The final discrediting of the liberal media. …
3) The yawning chasm between our institutions and our people. …

How to Prevent Another Kavanaugh Circus. Ted Noel – “The rules already exist. It’s just a matter of following them.”

“While Feinstein’s leak is a clear violation of trust with Dr. Ford, it’s also an ethical violation. Senate Judiciary Committee Rule II, 1 presupposes fourteen-day advance notice of witnesses in regular order. There was no reason to not present Dr. Ford in regular order.
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How many times do we have to hear this song to realize it’s time to turn off the jukebox and get a new D.J.? If we don’t pull the plug, this will just get worse and worse. Fortunately, Willie Sutton shows us just what we need to do.

Every time the Democrats pull a stunt like this, one of two things happens. Either it works, and they get what they want, or it fails, and they move on to another drama.
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But what if she is actually charged with an ethics violation, as Senator Cotton suggests? In theory, with great power comes great responsibility. A proper penalty for her ethical violation would be expulsion from the committee.
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This brings us to the larger issue. Punishing the useful idiots does little to the power-hungry leftists who exploit them. There will always be GoFundMe contributors to lessen the cost. The Democrats at the top who solicit these lies should suffer. In the case of Michael Avenatti, the crime is subornation of perjury (18 USC §1622). But for Dianne Feinstein and others of her ilk, the solution must be directed at the currency in which she is paid by this evil: power.
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This won’t solve everything, but it’s a beginning. The Rule of Law is the only thing that separates us from being Zimbabwe or Venezuela. A little bit of law applied to our lawmakers seems to be a modest place to start. They won’t be as anxious to rob that bank if there’s no money there to steal.

Accountability needs someone – and many – to stand tall.

The global world vs the global world. Richard Fernandez – “News that China was caught inserting a custom spy chip into the computer supply chain in 2015 is worrisome because it is probably the tip of a very large iceberg.”

“The hardware insertions from 2015 — along with Benghazi, ISIS, Russia’s incursion into the Ukraine, its shootdown of MH17, Beijing’s fortification of the South China Sea — are anecdotal reminders that the old globalist world held grave perils. There was even a stealth recession in 2016 that the New York Times can tell us about now. There was danger galore except the press just didn’t want to talk about them.
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The Left, after having reinvented themselves to cash in on Reagan’s success rose now faces the problem of reinventing itself after Trump. The Third Way is dead, long live the Fourth Way, for there will be one whatever it turns out to be. The only problem socialism ever had is it was never tried hard enough.

The Mainstream Media Fraud. Steve McCann – “The conjoined Democratic Party and mainstream media’s despicable character assassination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh combined with the two-year single-minded determination to destroy the Trump presidency by any means possible has irretrievably awakened a preponderance of the citizenry.”

“There have many frauds perpetrated on the American people. Perhaps the most notable, and consequential, was the media persuading an overwhelming majority of citizens that journalism is not only a noble profession, but one that always strived to be fair and balanced. Journalism, in this or any nation, has never been fair and balanced. Nor has it been afforded the exalted status of a profession, as the definition of a profession is an occupation that involves prolonged training and formal qualifications. Journalism encompasses neither.
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In their anger and retaliation, far too many mainstream reporters, editors, anchors, and columnists exhibit an inability to generate an original thought or comprehend basic concepts, hence fabrications, innuendo, and “fake news” are the hallmark of the mainstream media today.

The Kavanaugh setup becomes clear. Patricia McCarthy – “With each passing day and with each bit of information that seeps out about Christine Blasey Ford, it is clearer and clearer that what the Democrats have done to Judge Brett Kavanaugh has been a setup from the outset.”

“Ford may have seemed like a victim, not of Kavanaugh, but perhaps of her Democrat operatives. Over the past days, however, what is nearer to the truth is that she was and is part of a faction of anti-Trump activists bent upon destroying Kavanaugh in order to deny Trump another nominee to the Supreme Court.

They have badly misjudged the wisdom and sentiment of the American people.
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These people feel so entitled to force their agenda upon all of us that they have lost all moral sense. They will lie, cheat, and steal to win in the end. That is exactly what they did. They lied, cheated, and stole Brett Kavanaugh’s reputation, his life’s work, his love of teaching and coaching girls’ basketball. They did it without a moment’s thought for what it meant to him or to those of us out here in this great nation.

Report: Ford’s FBI Friend, Monica McLean, Pressured Witness To Modify Testimony and Statement. sundance – “According to the Wall Street Journal the FBI has text messages from Ms. McLean to witness Ms. Keyser, directing her to modify statements more favorable to Ms. Ford.”

“If there was any doubt the “small group” of connected DOJ and FBI officials were behind the use of Ms. Ford, you can put that doubt away now that Ms. Ford’s handler, Monica McLean, has enlisted David Laufman as her legal defense.

They’re not even trying to hide it any more.
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It is beyond obvious now that Ms. Christine Blasey-Ford was not just some random ancillary high school acquaintance of Brett Kavanaugh; Ms. Ford appears to have been selected by a group of politically connected FBI and DOJ officials for the purpose of targeting Judge Kavanaugh.

How Far Will Democratic Party Violence Go? John Hinderaker – “the Democrats’ hysteria over the Supreme Court–which actually has little to do with moderate nominee Brett Kavanaugh–has suffused Washington, D.C. with threats of violence.”

“The threats were already there, of course. Egged on by Democrats like Maxine Waters and Cory Booker, crazed activists have made it more or less impossible for Republicans to go out in public in Washington. Today, the Democrats mobilized demonstrators in an apparent attempt to intimidate Republican senators into voting against Kavanaugh’s confirmation. “Demonstrators” have mobbed Republican senators’ offices
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The thing I don’t understand is, why do Democrats like Cory Booker, Maxine Waters, Chuck Schumer, etc., think they are the only ones who can use violence to advance their cause? Do they not understand what a whirlwind they will unleash if they try to use political violence as a path to power?

An underlooked bright spot in NAFTA 2.0: A unified front against corruption. Clay R. Fuller – “North America has now officially entered a new era of international anticorruption compliance, coordination, and cooperation.”

“Auto manufacturing and dairy markets will quickly adjust to the treaty’s new provisions. A unified, continental front against corruption will have long-run positive effects for years to come.

Chapter 27 of the USMCA outlines a general framework for international cooperation on anti-corruption efforts under several existing agreements, including the OECD Convention on Combating Bribery of Foreign Public Officials in International Business Transactions (1997) and the United Nations Convention against Corruption (2003). NAFTA contained no such commitments, making it a treaty par excellence of the naiveté — or willful ignorance — of corruption issues that should be addressed in all US trade agreements.
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The USMCA’s anticorruption measures represent a promising start in rebuilding the United States’ role as a beacon of freedom, transparency, and prosperity that will double as a counterweight to surging authoritarianism and corruption abroad. On this aspect alone, the USMCA deserves extraordinary praise.

Corruption destroys whether in trade or in politics.

Virgil: We’ve Seen this Craziness Before–An Ancient Historian Tells Us How How It Ends — “we might look to the Greek historian Polybius.  He can’t directly address the current state of affairs, since he died in 118 B.C., and yet his wisdom still speaks to us, loud and clear.  In fact, his analysis of political events during polarizing times is timeless.”

Being president already cost President Trump $1.4 bilion. Don Surber – “Trump falls 138 spots on Forbes list of richest Americans”

“Emoluments.

Being president already cost President Trump $1.4 billion, Forbes gleefully reported.

The past two Democratic presidents made out like bandits accumulating post-presidential net worths of $40 million or more, which was about $40 million more than they were worth when they entered the White House.

Running for president not only cost President Trump $66 million in donations to his own campaign but the value of his companies shrank.
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Donald John Trump did not seek high office for power or money. He sought the office to Make America Great Again after 28 years of a White House run by the modern equivalents of Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, and James Buchanan.

Lincoln followed the originals.

That cost Lincoln his life.

So far, it has only cost President Trump money.

Sons of America, beware. Cheryl K. Chumley – “The left, with one fell Supreme Court nomination swoop, has managed to upturn the entire notion of due process and collapse the cherished American principle of innocent until proven guilty.”

“Democrats shrug off such assertions and warnings by saying, in essence, oh, this isn’t a court of law — due process doesn’t apply. But that’s a skirt of accountability. That’s an argument of deceit. The left knows very well what it’s doing.
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Senate Democrats know they don’t have the evidence to prove these flimsy and fantastical allegations against Kavanaugh, so they instead resort to theatrics and distractions to convict — to convict in the court of public opinion, that is.

But slander is serious business. Tearing apart a man’s reputation for political sport is a grave enterprise.

So is the Democrats’ utter disregard for the long-term.
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Your son — yes, yours — is one Ford-like accusation away from complete character destruction.

My Critical ‘Critical Theory’ Theory. Steven Hayward – “Everyone is buzzing today about the revelation of the three academics—James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, and Peter Boghossian—who placed over a dozen complete hoax articles with various premier “cultural studies” or “identity studies” academic journals.”

“Why aren’t more mainstream academic liberals speaking out and objecting to this farcical “scholarship” in the fashion of Lindsay, Pluckrose, and Boghossian? The chief reason is that there is no upside to trying to oppose this nonsense, as you’ll be called a racist/bigot, etc., and maybe even face a harassment complaint from the administrative bureaucracies that universities have set up and allowed to be infiltrated by identity politics dogma. And since academic departments are by tradition entirely self-governing in hiring and promotion decisions, there is no way for senior scholars in, say, political science, to curtail the nonsense scholarship.

The only way this problem will be fixed is for administrators—deans, provosts, presidents, academic councils—to say Enough!, and actually cut back some of these tendentious departments, or at least put out notice that publication in just about any Sage journal will not be recognized by the university. I’m not going to hold my breath.

A lot of talk today about how modern academic values have corrupted Congress.