The Other McCain

The editor of Iowa’s Quad Cities Times has apologized for publishing the cartoon above, after being called out on Twitter by Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who lamented the “shameful” cartoon and said: “It’s sad that this is how the MSM views Republicans. I’ve met with grassroots conservatives across America & never *once* experienced the kind of bigotry that I regularly see from the Left.”

Several commentators have described the cartoon as “racist,” but that’s not really the point. Rather, it is the libelous attribution of hateful bigotry to Republicans which is so offensive. What this illustrates is the assumption of liberals that they are morally and intellectually superior to the rest of us, especially in regard to racial issues, but really on every subject imaginable — economic policy, climate change, gay rights, you name it. “Hate” is now defined as disagreeing with liberals.

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The Finance website Insider Monkey used the latest homicide data to find which US cities have the highest number of murders so far this year. It is no surprise that many of the most dangerous metros are run by Democrats.

Insider Monkey compiled a list of 30 US cities using the FBI’s Quarterly Uniform Crime Report and police department data. For simplicity reasons, we’re only concentrating on half of the list — so 1-15.

And what we discovered is that metros between 1-15 were all controlled by Democrats. Not shocking whatsoever, considering their social justice reform policies are backfiring and turning many metro areas into crime-ridden hellholes.

John Hinderaker at Power Line.

The Southern Poverty Law Center is a far-left hate group with zero credibility. The people who run it are grifters: for a “poverty” organization it has a remarkable amount of money stashed in offshore accounts. SPLC literally doesn’t know what to do with all of the money that rich people and corporations shower on it. I am hoping defamation lawsuits can take up the slack.

SPLC’s childishly simple dodge is to uncover actual “hate” groups–but only on the right, no Antifa–that no one has heard of, and cover a map of the U.S. with them, as though they were everywhere. The SPLC’s real value to the Left is that it goes on to slander legitimate conservative organizations as additional “hate” groups. These are the ones that the Left actually cares about because they are effective. It is an honor to be identified by SPLC in this way.

SPLC has just produced its 2022 “Hate Map.” What’s new? This year, the Left has put Moms For Liberty in the crosshairs. News accounts breathlessly recount the addition of Moms For Liberty to the “hate” map, as though the SPLC had any credibility.

If you look at the SPLC’s hate map of Minnesota, you see five “hate and anti-government groups”–the same thing, apparently–although the web page’s text says there are 19. Whatever. I have never heard of four of the five groups on the map; I suppose they have one or two members if they actually exist. The fifth is Moms For Liberty in Wright County, Minnesota.

John Hinderaker at Power Line.

Do liberal women like to be victimized by the feral predators that haunt America’s cities? No. No, they don’t. This is why a crowd turned out for a city council meeting in Oakland, California, perhaps the most liberal city in the U.S., to protest the city’s soft-on-crime policies

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The interesting question is, will citizen uprisings in liberal cities like Oakland bring about any significant change? I think the answer is No. The Democratic Party is pro-crime, and I think that commitment is unshakable. To bring meaningful change, residents would have to be willing to vote Republican. And even if they were willing, there is hardly any Republican infrastructure in cities like Oakland. I am not sure there are any serious Republicans to vote for, or an organization to get them elected. So basically, it is either put up with increasingly horrific violence and disorder, or move. This is a principal reason why California is hemorrhaging residents.

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Chesa Boudin, named after cop-killer Joanne Chesimard, and son of Weather Underground terrorists Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert, was elected district attorney of San Francisco in November 2020.

Criminals were happy with the outcome.

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Greenberg spearheaded a recall effort and in June 2022 voters booted Boudin by a 60 percent to 40 percent margin. Mayor London Breed then appointed University of Chicago law alum Brooke Jenkins, a prosecutor in the city’s homicide division.

Jenkins proceeded to fire 16 Boudin loyalists, part of “important changes to my management team and staff that will help advance my vision to restore a sense of safety in San Francisco by holding serious and repeat offenders accountable and implementing smart criminal justice reforms.”

Washinton Post.

The man stood in a red Make America Great Again baseball cap pointing his AR-15-style semiautomatic rifle toward the sidewalk.

An elementary school student ran home crying. Parents were terrified. Neighbors called the police. While he had not explicitly threatened people in this suburban neighborhood, just the sight of him walking near school bus stops was enough for the nearby elementary school in Anne Arundel County to delay bus drop off this week.

Ann Arundel County is in Maryland, a blue state. Further adventures in the pussification of blue-state America. In Texas, the kids would have been gathered around: “Hey, mister! Show us your gun!” And they would have been asking questions about it until the bus came.

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The agenda, perfectly expressed by author Michael Shellenberger in a Substack post last week, is to “manufacture a fake ‘hate’ crisis as [a] pretext for mass spying, blacklists, and censorship.” The hype, also exposed by Shellenberger in his recent article, is underscored by the fact that over the past 10 years, hate crime convictions, as opposed to “criminal complaints of hate crimes,” have not increased at all. In a state with 40 million people, hate crime convictions were a minuscule 109 in 2021, and a negligible increase from 107 in 2012.

The hate industry is a vast agglomeration of lucrative hustles, now institutionalized and expanded into multiple and overlapping sectors. There is the diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) sector; the equity, social, and governance (ESG) sector; the activist sector comprising countless groups, including Black Lives Matter and Antifa; the corporate, academic, and government sectors; the media sector; the politicians; and the pundits. All of these sectors have spawned scores of thousands of well-paying jobs.

If these institutions weren’t able to point to rising levels of hatred in America, then their specialty, the business of hate, would no longer be a growth industry. Where there is no hate, they must manufacture it. Where hatred has diminished, they must discover new forms of hate, often so subtle that we foolishly fail to recognize it without their assistance.

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In Israel, Inga Avramyan, 80 years old, died under a collapsing ceiling. The elderly immigrant from Armenia heard the sirens warning of an Islamic terror strike, but did not reach the bomb shelter in time because she was trying to help her disabled husband make it along with her.

Sergei, Inga’s husband, had lost a leg in a car accident and needed a wheelchair to get around. The rocket smashed through the side of the building, the ceiling collapsed and Inga was killed.

Four days before the Islamic Jihad rocket killed Inga, Senator Bernie Sanders helped host an event promoting Islamic Jihad in the Senate building.

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U.S. agencies under President Joe Biden have proposed restrictions on deli meats and are considering a ban on chocolate milk in school cafeterias.

The Department of Agriculture is “considering a ban on flavored milk—including chocolate, strawberry, and other varieties—in elementary and middle schools when it adopts new standards for school meals,” the Wall Street Journal reported Monday. While supporters say flavored milk contributes to childhood obesity, opponents say the ban “will lead to children drinking less milk.”

“We want to take a product that most kids like and that has nine essential nutrients in it and say, ‘You can’t drink this, you have to drink plain’?” asked Urban School Food Alliance executive director Katie Wilson.

Scott Johnson at Power Line.

Minneapolis’s Ward 10 bisects Lake Bde Maka Spa, formerly known as Lake Calhoun. It includes the Uptown neighborhood running up to the lake as well as the Whittier neighborhood running from Lake Street to Franklin Avenue. It is, you might say in the current lingo, “diverse,” insofar as such diversity is understood to be consistent with one-party rule.

Minneapolis’s one party called a convention to endorse a candidate for the Ward 10 city council at Ella Baker Global Studies & Humanities Magnet School yesterday. Incumbent Aisha Chugtai (the council’s first Pakistani Muslim woman) is opposed by Nasri Warsame (a Somali Muslim man). As I say, it’s a “diverse” ward.

When Chugtai’s supporters took the stage for Chugtai’s speech, Warsame’s supporters advanced towards the stage and began pushing and shoving. It turned into a brawl and Chughtai was prevented from addressing the convention.

The problem with Normal Democrat Tactics is that their Subject Races think it applies to fellow Democrats.

Scott Johnson at Power Line.

The letter of the Deep State 51 condemning the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop reportage as consistent with a Russian information operation or Russian disinformation, as advertised by Natasha Bertrand and Politico, must be the dirtiest American political dirty trick of all time. At any rate, it is up there with the Steele Dossier.

Read it.

There was something deeply demoralizing about the recent Mayoral election in Chicago, once among America’s greatest cities. The good news is that the catastrophic reign of a deeply corrupt and crazed mayor, who piled egregiously racist policies on top of one of the worst COVID responses in the country, came to an end. The bad news is that a guy who is arguably worse took her place.

As Allysia Finley put it in the Wall Street Journal, “Brandon Johnson’s victory in last week’s Chicago mayoral race is a reminder that no matter how bad things get, they can always get worse.”

The city itself is facing bankruptcy but that economic reality is changing nothing about city policies. Crime is out of control. Poverty and despair are on the rise. And the residents who can leave are fleeing. Businesses are closing up shop and 175,000 people have left the city in the last two years, leaving the place at the mercy of people who only vote for more handouts and union controls.

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Illegal demonstrations apparently are continuing to take place at the homes of the Supreme Court justices despite federal law forbidding such activities.

Far-left activists with Our Rights DC posted video on Thursday evening showing them demonstrating at Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s Maryland home, chanting, “We want ethics on the court.” Their remarks come as Democratic lawmakers call for the Supreme Court to adopt new processes for recusals and ethics allegations—essentially making the court answerable to Congress.

This protesting has frequently occurred in spite of 18 U.S. Code 1507, which forbids picketing or parading “in or near a building or residence occupied or used by such judge, juror, witness, or court officer” with the intent of intimidating or influencing that person.

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A Heritage Foundation economist called out Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., for his membership in a whites-only club in response to the senator’s attack on the conservative think tank.

Diana Furchtgott-Roth, director of the Center For Energy, Climate, and Environment at The Heritage Foundation, also made clear fossil fuels played a larger role in Whitehouse’s personal wealth than the budget of Heritage. (The Daily Signal is the multi-media news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)

“I don’t have the benefit of being able to rely on a family fortune made in the Minnesota gas business, or having my spouse’s family fortune come from United Gas,” Furchtgott-Roth said. “And The Heritage Foundation is a club that anyone can join, not just white people. During 2021, it had hundreds of thousands of individual, foundation and corporate supporters representing every state in the United States.”

Washington Free Beacon.

Young Democrats are abnormally nervous, depressed, bisexual, and eager to defund the police, according to a new poll from the Harvard Kennedy School of Politics.

Politico.

It’s rare to have an open congressional seat in Rhode Island. So when there is one, ambitious pols pounce on what could literally be a once-in-a-generation shot to go to Washington.

More than a dozen Democrats have declared their candidacy for Rhode Island’s 1st Congressional District — a crowded field that has formed before outgoing Democratic Rep. David Cicilline, who has represented the district for over a decade, even officially resigns. He’s set to leave Congress in just a few weeks to become CEO of the Rhode Island Foundation, a philanthropic organization in the state.

It’s a reliably blue district, all but guaranteeing the victor of the Democratic primary will prevail in the general election.

I think it’s safe to say that each and every one of them sees it as a chance to grow fat from a government paycheck while coercing the citizens of the U.S. into Wokery. (The pension you get for being a member of Congress, vested after five years, is also pretty sweet.)

The Foundry.

The Supreme Court is activist, abortion is healthcare, pro-life laws are confusing, and abortion drugs are safe.

Those were the talking points from Democratic senators and their witnesses at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing held on April 26 titled “The Assault on Reproductive Rights in a Post-Dobbs America.”

Committee chairman Richard Durbin, D-Ill., opened by criticizing the Supreme Court’s “judicial activism” in overruling Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which invented and affirmed a constitutional right to abortion.

No one attempted, or even suggested, that Roe had properly interpreted the Constitution or explained how correcting such a grave error could be called “activist.”

Instead, it was clear that, to Durbin, an “activist” decision was simply one he didn’t like.

Read it.

Kentucky’s Democratic governor wants a left-wing writer who believes Appalachia is “homophobic” and says a majority of his state’s voters are “bigots” to be his state’s “ambassador to the rest of the world.”

The Foundry.

Once upon a time, it was a tragedy to become an orphan.

Now, at least in two deep blue states, it’s in.

In Washington state, both the House and Senate have passed a bill that would allow the state Department of Children, Youth and Families, not the parents, to be the contacts if a child who runs away is trying to get an abortion or transgender medical procedures. The bill is currently on Democrat Gov. Jay Inslee’s desk.

In California, a bill that would let 12-year-olds leave home if a mental health professional OKs it, no parental permission required, has passed in the state Assembly and is now winding its way through the state Senate.

Is this the future?

Shades of the old Communist regimes of Eastern Europe.

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Uh, yeah….

Cal Thomas.

“As long as there exist stupid people supporting stupid governments in their countries, people living in those countries will continue fluttering badly in the cesspool created by this utter foolishness!”—Turkish playwright Mehmet Murat ildan

That didn’t take long. The mayor-elect of Chicago, Democrat Brandon Johnson, responded to a group of teenagers who attacked cars and assaulted drivers in the Loop last weekend by what sounds like justification for their behavior.

While saying he does not “condone the destructive activity” (there’s a euphemism) and that it “has no place in Chicago” (when it increasingly does), Johnson added that “it is not constructive to demonize youth who have otherwise been starved of opportunities in their own communities.”

The second part of his statement nullifies the first.

Time to leave.

Read it.

From Russia smears to fake news to a lawsuit accusing former President Trump of rape, the money behind some of the dirtiest Dem tactics come from an obscure Big Tech billionaire.

Washington Free Beacon.

Protesters attempted to disrupt a debate on transgenderism at the University of Pittsburgh on Tuesday night, detonating a smoke bomb and burning a dummy featuring the face of one of the debate’s speakers.

Campus police released an emergency notification near the start of the debate, between commentators Michael Knowles and Brad Polumbo, after an explosion was heard on campus, the Pitt News reported. Police later identified the source of the explosion as a combination of a firework and smoke bomb. More than 250 people participated in the protest of the debate, which concerned the question of whether transgenderism should be regulated by law.

“This was not a protest like for the other ones,” said Dylan Mitchell, president of Pitt College Republicans. “This was a riot.”

But, of course, as we all know, only Republicans engage in political violence.

John Hinderaker at Power Line.

Chicago continues its descent into an unlivable dystopia. Last night, mobs rioted, taking over portions of the city and wreaking devastation of various kinds.

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Everyone knows about Chicago’s sky-high murder rate, but this kind of wanton lawlessness, apparently beyond the power of the police and normal citizens to control, is more devastating to the life of a city. Who in his right mind wants to be anywhere near Chicago?

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When University of Kentucky swimmer Riley Gaines was accosted by a pro-trans mob at San Francisco State University, it revealed the irrational anger displayed by so many on the Left. We have seen it directed against conservatives all across the nation. So, what explains the anger and its justification of canceling all those who oppose them?

First and foremost, it is a characteristic of the Manichean worldview of the postmodern Left. The forces arrayed against them, which are essentially White Anglo-Saxon civilization along with its traditional values, are considered evil incarnate. They see them as the forces behind racism, misogyny, colonialism, exploitation, and the destruction of the environment. Who in his right mind would want to be “nice” to such thoroughly evil people? There is no small amount of righteous indignation behind their calls to “cancel” their opponents.

Second, since at least the 1960s, protest for the Left came to be seen as “shutting down” the opposition, taking over their buildings, preventing them from speaking. Much of this goes back to the conventional wisdom of the radical left expressed by Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, which took the Marxist approach of eliminating opponents rather than “debating” them. This is not a battle about ideas and influence, it is the pursuit of advantage and power. The Left has, for a long time, used violence and intimidation as a strategy for “taking over” and gaining control. The occupied zone in Seattle was not a bug, it was a feature of the anarchist, Antifa Left.

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The Democratic National Committee has cut ties with Marc Elias, the party’s scandal-plagued election lawyer who was behind the infamous Steele dossier that falsely accused Donald Trump’s campaign of colluding with Russia.

The DNC and Elias are parting ways over “strategic disagreements,” according to Punchbowl News. It is a surprising divorce for the DNC and Elias, considered one of the Democratic Party’s top elections lawyers. Elias has worked for the DNC since 2009 and made over $1.9 million from the DNC this cycle alone. Elias has suffered a number of high-profile legal setbacks in recent years, most notably when a federal judge dismissed one of Elias’s lawsuits as a “Hail Mary” pass meant to undermine free elections.

A spokesperson for the DNC said the committee was “appreciative” of Elias’s years of service. A spokesperson for Elias’s firm, Elias Law Group, said the firm was “proud of the work it has done for the DNC.”

Washington Free Beacon.

1) The rampant crime

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2) The crippling taxes

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3) The corruption

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4) The population decline

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5) The Jussie Smollett hate crime hoax

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6) The memories (of the 1968 riots)

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7) The Obamas

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8) The fatass billionaire who wants to be president (but never will)

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9) The health care facilities

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UPDATE: Democrats Choose to Advertise Failures of Single-Party Democratic Rule by Holding the 2024 DNC in Chicago (Reason)

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Thinking that billionaires are a policy failure has become pervasive in the United States. Politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Elizabeth Warren are leading the charge in the demonization of billionaires. Left-leaning politicians and their allies think that billionaires corrode society by accumulating large fortunes, which amplify inequality. As such, many propose taxation as a tool to promote fairness by redistributing resources, yet such intentions are not always virtuous and could instead be guided by envy.

Envy is the foundation of the modern Democrat party.

However, a shocking research finding is that envy and self-interest play a pivotal part in explaining support for redistribution. According to evolutionary psychologists in a 2017 paper: “evolved motives for navigating interpersonal interactions clearly predict attitudes about redistribution, but a taste for procedural fairness or distributional fairness does not.” More recent evidence also points to the influence of malicious envy in initiating support for redistribution.

A single billionaire gives more to charity in one year than all of the Democrats in Congress will make in their entire lives, even with their corrupt dealings.

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A jury in Travis County, Texas found Army Sgt. Daniel Perry, 33, guilty of murder on Friday, nearly three years after he shot a BLM protester who had a history of threatening people with rifles, after a Soros-funded DA withheld nearly 100 pages of exculpatory evidence from the grand jury according to the lead investigator in the case.

Travis county is the blue pustule in the center of red Texas, containins Austin and its environs.

While driving for Uber, Perry shot protester Garrett Foster during a July 2020 protest in downtown Austin, after Foster and other protesters surrounded his car. After Foster raised his rifle at Perry, the Army Sergeant shot and killed Foster, then called the police to report what happened.

Perry told police he shot in self-defense, which both the Austin police department and the lead detective in the case agreed with – concluding it was justifiable homicide.

José Garza is a blight on Texas law enforcement.

The Other McCain.

“The failure of our education system to teach America’s young people their own history,” I wrote nearly four years ago, “is perhaps best illustrated by the fact that almost no one under 40 today knows anything about Sam Adams except as a popular brand of beer.” And many have suspected that this historical ignorance is not accidental, but rather that the dumbing-down of American education serves a specific political agenda, as those who are conscious of the pedigree of their liberty are apt to be more zealous in defense of their rights. Our liberties were “purchased . . . with toil and danger and expense of treasure and blood,” Sam Adams declared in 1771, and thus Americans should never allow themselves to be cheated out of their inheritance.

Steven Hayward at Power Line.

Americans are fleeing the cities for suburban and rural areas, as well as moving en masse from blue states to red states.

Politico.

Gavin Newsom is showing up behind political enemy lines, taking on conservatives in southern states like Alabama and Texas, where the California governor’s presence is not always welcome — even among the people he’s supposedly there to help.

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Many Democrats will be glad to spend his money, but it’s far less clear that they’ll want his advice or his obsessive focus on the culture-war contrasts between Democratic and Republican states.

Read it.

The Red Chinese know who their friends are.

Victor Davis Hanson.

We are in a Jacobin revolution of the sort that in 1793-94 nearly destroyed France. And things are getting scary.

The Democratic Party vanished sometime in 2020.

It was absorbed by hard-left ideologues. They were bent on radically altering, or hijacking, existing institutions to force radical, equality-of-result agendas that otherwise do not earn majority support.

The American people want affordable power and fuel and energy autonomy. They do not want a Green New Deal that results in dependence on the Middle East.

They want fiscal sobriety, not a permanent stagflationary economy marked by bank failures, soaring interest rates, crony capitalism, and subsidies for those who choose not to work.

They know no country can exist without a border, much less while offering blank checks to foreign cartels that kill 100,000 Americans yearly.

They demand realist deterrence abroad, not the current woke military whose erosion is spelling the end to American credibility and global stability.

Read it.

In a nutshell: Makes trouble for people who don’t deserve it.

The BLM (Burn Loot Murder) types and their fellow rioters are just one arm of a well-organized machine. Their footsoldiers are the payload, not the mechanism. The mechanism is the corrupt governance which allows them to mass in public, to wreak havoc, and to bail out if arrested at all. The Brownshirts are ordinary thugs. The local governments which put them to use to oppress to normal folks are the real problem.

When His Excellency Colonel Obama “organized” his footsoldiers at the national level, it wasn’t only the thugs in the streets who got trained (and identified, and filtered by capability, literally organized). Places like Ferguson and the Occupy protests were training runs, not only for the footsloggers, but for the local, state, and national government arms who now incite, condone, and defend block-burning riots from coast to coast. Those “bail cards” and the phone banks of lawyers standing by are the products identified as needful from these operational exercises.

Vox.

The actual felony counts arise out of allegedly false entries that Trump made in various business records in order to make the payment to Daniels appear to be ordinary legal expenses paid to Cohen.

But Bragg built his case on an exceedingly uncertain legal theory. Even if Trump did the things he’s accused of, it’s not clear Bragg can legally charge Trump for them, at least under the felony version of New York’s false records law.

As Mark Pomerantz, a former prosecutor in the Manhattan DA’s office who played a significant role in the Trump investigation prior to his resignation in 2022, wrote in a recent book, a key legal question that will determine whether Trump can be charged under the felony version of New York’s false records law has never been resolved by any appellate court in the state of New York.

The felony statute requires Bragg to prove that Trump falsified records to cover up a crime. Bragg has evidence that Trump acted to cover up a federal crime, but it is not clear that Bragg is allowed to point to a federal crime in order to charge Trump under the New York state law.

The answer to this “gnarly legal question,” as Pomerantz put it, is simply unknown. So there is a serious risk that a New York judge will toss out the charges against Trump on technical legal grounds unrelated to the former president’s actual conduct.

As we’ve always known, this is a trumped-up case brought in the hope that somehow they can convince a New York jury to convict Trump of something, anything.

Read it.

They really want to rub it in our faces. Nothing says “I’ll do whatever I want and you can’t do anything about it” like having brain-dead politicians and ciphers in political office. Although there are a number of politicians throughout history who have not been particularly bright, not a lot had vascular dementia. At the moment, we have two that are no doubt documented, but you will not be allowed to see the documentation: President Biden and Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman.

There used to be a joke about Yellow Dog Democrats, Democrats who would vote for a yellow dog if it ran as a Democrat. I guess it isn’t a joke anymore.

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Democrats are just appalled that Republicans would dare call a “mostly peaceful” storming of a Capitol building an “insurrection.” Any comparison to what happened on Jan. 6, 2021, is just outrageous, they say.

Following a mass shooting by a transgender person at a Christian school in Nashville, Tennessee, several protests erupted in Tennessee and other state Capitols.

When the protests in Nashville and elsewhere became not quite so peaceful, legacy media “fact-checkers” leaped into action. They twisted and turned to assure everyone that when left-wing activists take over a capitol, it’s totally different than if Donald Trump’s supporters do it.

Videos of protesters scuffling with police were quickly “contextualized” by our “objective” press to make sure your lying eyes didn’t deceive you.

UPDATE: Tennessee House speaker strips Democrats of committee roles after Capitol protest

UPDATE: 3 Democrats in the TN House face possible expulsion, the first time in state history it would not be bipartisan  Because the Democrats aren’t keeping to the old rules.

UPDATE: Protestors Arrested After Multiple Warnings

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San Diego County supervisor Nathan Fletcher (D.) announced his resignation last week after two women accused him of sexual assault. Hours later, California governor Gavin Newsom (D.) featured Fletcher in a video announcing a multimillion-dollar campaign to unseat Republicans.

Washington Free Beacon.

For over two decades, attorney Philip Howard has endeavored through his nonpartisan organization Common Good to promote a restoration of “common sense” in government operations by replacing bureaucratic red tape and legal roadblocks with individual accountability. His previous four books, starting with the 1995 bestseller The Death of Common Sense, and notably including one titled Life Without Lawyers, have earned acclaim from across the mainstream political spectrum, from George Will to Arthur Schlesinger Jr., to the New York Times.

In his newest tome, Not Accountable, Howard traces the lack of government accountability to what he concludes to be its underlying source: the rise of public employee unions. Whereas his earlier studies described “a flawed governing philosophy” that overemphasized procedural rights at the expense of the public good, “applied by people acting in good faith,” this one “is a story of raw power and democratic disloyalty.”

Job security (‘you can’t fire me’) is a cornerstone of labor union practice.

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“We have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents,” MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry argued. “Educators love their students and know better than anyone what they need to learn and to thrive,” the NEA asserted. “Parents claim they have the right to shape their kids’ school curriculum. They don’t,” a Washington Post op-ed bluntly asserted.

A Minnesota bill now proposes to take children away from parents who don’t agree to have them sexually mutilated. Similar bills are working their way through other states.

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A Democratic operative linked to the Clintons claims he was the catalyst for the Manhattan district attorney’s hush money probe into former president Donald Trump.

Lanny Davis, a lawyer for former Trump attorney Michael Cohen, told Politico that he sparked the investigation thanks in part to his political connections to Cyrus Vance Jr., the predecessor to Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg (D.). Davis said he was able to arrange interviews between Manhattan prosecutors and Cohen after Cohen was sent to prison on federal tax evasion charges. Davis, who said he knew Vance’s father from the Carter administration, also said that prosecutors visited Cohen three times at the federal penitentiary.

A reminder that the Biden Crime Family is a mere pale shadow of the Clinton Crime Family. “Goodness! Rose Law Firm billing records! How did they magically appear in the White House?”

The American Spectator.

These DEI deans are malignancies on the body academic, absolute poison. They get paid boatloads of money collected from overblown tuition, which saddles students and their parents with debt for life, to provide an ostensibly valuable service that my law degree, rabbinical degree, advanced history degree, and other educational attainments still leave me unable to fathom. What do these noxious DEI warts do to better society other than to promote reverse racism, divide people by ethnicities and skin color, in many cases promote anti-Semitism, and preach virtue-signaling effluvium that, once analyzed objectively between the lines, promote nothing but hate, the good woke kind of hate, hate for the values that once made America great?

Steve Sailer.

It’s a been big day for the good guys in the growing struggle over academic freedom. While the New York Times is still trying to get tenured law professor Amy Wax fired for telling the truth at the Penn Law School, tenured business professor Bryan J. Pesta filed suit today against Cleveland State for in effect firing him for co-authoring one of the most important DNA-race-IQ studies of this century (see post below).

And University of Central Florida tenured psychology professor Charles Negy, who was fired in effect for retweeting my best stuff during the first week of the Mostly Peaceful Protests….

Read it.

Authors Bethany Mandel and Karol Markowicz encountered screaming protesters Wednesday night in Manhattan at a launch party for their book “Stolen Youth: How Radicals Are Erasing Innocence and Indoctrinating a Generation.”

The protesters, described as young white women, threw their drinking glasses at the wall where the pair’s books were displayed, Markowicz told The Daily Wire, and Mandel had books and drinks thrown on her, leaving the author soaking wet.

Guess they were right.

Steve Sailer.

I was going to write another heavy duty current events data analysis column, but then I got distracted and/or lazy, so this essay is going to wander off to a more fun topic.

When I saw the headline that senator Diane Feinstein (D-CA) had finally announced she would retire in 2025 at age 91, I got to thinking about just how slowly the Democrats’ old white leaders have been put out to pasture to make way for the diverse next generation of politicians.

Joe Biden, who hopes to stay in office until he’s 86, is only the most obvious example of the Democrats’ recent tendency toward white gerontocracy, perhaps out of fear that its nonwhite politicians still aren’t ready for the big stage.

Read it.

There’s a consultant-driven playbook for candidates: Ditch the khakis for jeans, roll up your sleeves, and start talking like your constituents. Missouri Democrat Lucas Kunce, who recently announced a Senate bid, may have taken that last piece of advice a little too far.

Since launching his campaign on Jan. 6, Kunce speaks with a soft Southern drawl. The accent was on full display in his campaign launch video, with one scene featuring a meditative Kunce sitting on a porch ripping Sen. Josh Hawley (R., Mo.) for his “banker daddy.”

That campaign ad was followed up by appearances on MSNBC where Kunce, sitting in front of his collection of vintage Magic: The Gathering trading cards, he said “Missourians don’t tolerate cowards and frauds.” Listeners familiar with Kunce, who ran unsuccessfully for U.S. Senate last cycle, will observe that he sounds notably different from his time as a staffer for the left-wing American Economic Liberties Project just two years ago.

Read it.

Cartels are groups of organizations that collude with each other to drive up prices, crush competition, and ultimately extort huge amounts of money to redistribute to the cartel members. While the word is often associated with drugs, oil-producing countries, or anti-competitive business practices, politicians from nine blue states are attempting something new in the U.S.—a tax cartel.

State legislators from California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Minnesota, New York, Oregon, and Washington announced a coordinated set of bills to hike taxes on wealthy individuals, families, and businesses. The purpose of coordinating is to try to keep these taxpayers in their respective states by making it seem like crushing taxes are inevitable wherever they move.

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Remember when the Paul Pelosi story was big news for a while, then weird things started coming out, and then suddenly everyone stopped talking about it?

Yeah, I do.

Axios.

U.S. Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.) told the Israeli government she doesn’t want the bipartisan Senate delegation she is leading to Israel this week to meet with any members of two Israeli far-right parties that are in the government coalition, according to two Israeli officials and a source close to the senator.

I guess the Democrat understanding of ‘bipartisan’ doesn’t include any Heretics or Sinners. Very kind of them to even include Republicans.