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JULY 3,  2017

SHORT TAKES ON THE DRIFTING WRECKAGE – AT 11:55 P.M. ET:

JUSTICE KENNEDY HINTS AT RETIREMENT – FROM THE NEW YORK POST:   Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy may retire next year, giving the Trump administration the opportunity to fill the vacancy and move the court to the right for years to come.  Kennedy, who turns 81 on July 23, has told people who are applying to be his law clerks for the court’s term beginning in October 2018 that he is considering retirement, NPR reported.  The first response of liberals to this possibility will probably be to increase their attempts to get Trump removed from office, to prevent him from nominating another justice. 

HARVARD HONORS SCALIA – FROM THE COLLEGE FIX:   Harvard Law School has announced the establishment of the Antonin Scalia Professorship of Law in honor of the late US Supreme Court justice.  The professorship is endowed by the Considine Family Foundation, the benefactors both Harvard graduates (Terry from the Law School in 1968, and Betsy from the Business School in 1977).  “Justice Scalia had a singular impact on statutory analysis and legal thought. He also had a great love of learning, so it is especially meaningful that he will be honored with a professorship that will provide enduring support for teaching and scholarship at the Law School and beyond,” said Martha Minow, dean of the Law School.  You may be sure that the party liners at Harvard will work to have a leftist named to the professorship.  It's a game played all the time.

ANYONE IN FAVOR OF THIS? – FROM THE INDEPENDENT:  Within three decades people will no longer be having sex to procreate, a professor from Stanford University has said.   Hank Greely, the director of Stanford’s Law School’s Center for Law and the Biosciences, believes the reproductive process will begin with parents choosing from a range of embryos created in a lab with their DNA.  Although this can already take place, Mr Greely believes it will become far cheaper to do so and couples will opt for this method to prevent diseases.   And what if people prefer the more traditional approach, which has several billion years of tradition behind it?  Will they be called bigots?  Will their medical plans cover the quaint idea of childbirth?  Will potential parents be fined for making the wrong choice?  Maybe we'd better talk this out.

July 3, 2017       Permalink

LEARNING THE HARD WAY – AT 2:34 P.M. ET:   Each party, over the years, has had its extremist elements.  One thing you've got to learn about extremism – it will consume a party unless stopped early.  Another thing you learn is that extremists, especially on the left, have no loyalty.  If you don't go along with them a hundred percent, they will destroy you, no matter what you've done for them in the past. 

California Democrats are learning these lessons.  From Fox:    

California Democratic lawmakers are facing a brutal backlash from union activists and others on the left after shelving a universal health care bill – a debate that has grown so intense that lawmakers say they’ve faced death threats and other violent rhetoric.

Assembly Democrats publicly decried the “bullying tactics” in a written statement over the weekend, maintaining that lawmakers are committed to improving health care but need to have an “open discourse.”

“In recent days, we have become alarmed and disheartened by bullying tactics, threats of violence, and death threats by a few who disagree with the decision of Speaker Anthony Rendon to postpone the advancement of SB 562,” they said, referring to the scrapped single-payer health care bill. “While it is appropriate for persons of varying views to express concern, disapproval or disfavor about the delay, it is never acceptable to engage in those tactics.” 

COMMENT:   Never acceptable?  It happens on California college campuses far too often.  Maybe the liberals will learn from this experience that the leftist fringe is simply using them, as it has used civil rights, feminism, and the LGBTQ movement to advance its own narrow, Marxist agenda.  But, sad to say, liberals are very slow to learn.  And they become frightened at the very people they've empowered.

July 3, 2017       Permalink

HANSON ON THE TWEET REVOLUTION – QUOTES OF THE DAY – AT 11:58 A.M. ET:  Victor Davis Hanson has  written the best piece on the crisis of the tweet.  Today's journalists probably consider it the greatest, most stupendous crisis in human history.  Davis doesn't think so, and gives us real gems in this piece.  From American Greatness: 

Finally, no one has calibrated quite the nation’s deep antipathy toward the coastal media-university-political-cultural nexus, most specifically its utter hypocrisy. Half the country sees not so much Democrats or progressives, but rather a bankrupt class whose venom for others is used to excuse their own exemptions from the ramifications of their own ideology.

And...

Trump in this context is seen by his supporters as a fighter in a way no prior conservative president or presidential candidate since Reagan has been. The conservative base remembers the dark years of 2005-6 when the media and progressive activists smeared Bush daily—without riposte.

And...

First, half the country despises the mainstream media and sees it as arrogant, corrupt, hypocritical, and in need of comeuppance. Trump is not running against a centrist populist Democrat like John Kennedy or Harry Truman, but a crude Resistance of foul mouths like Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez and U.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), unhinged celebrities like Maher and Colbert, street theater, thuggery on campuses, and not very bright media talking heads imploding as they try to top their rivals’ hatred for Trump and what he represents.

And...

CNN is now no longer a news organization, but has been reduced to caricature by Trump hatred. It has been exposed not just as unprofessional and dishonest (firing reporters for fake news reports; apologizing and retracting constant errors of content; producers caught on tape denigrating voters and bragging of their hyper-partisanship and anti-Trumpism), but also has run the gamut from scatology (Anderson Cooper and Reza Aslan) to violence porn (Kathy Griffin, or the jokes about Trump’s plane crashing) to simple fraud (last year’s Donna Brazile revelations).

COMMENT:  Read the whole piece.  It's impossible to summarize, but it's filled with good stuff like that.  Hanson concludes:  "I would urge the president to stop tweeting about nothings and to keep his powder dry for bigger game to come than Joe and Mika. But considering that I have been urging just such pruning of tweets as a matter of strategy for Trump for a long time and that I have been mostly wrong about the downsides of his twitter invective for just as long, perhaps the president knows something I don’t."

July 3, 2017       Permalink

STOP ALREADY! – AT 11:41 A.M. ET:  It's a holiday weekend.  Things are slow.  So all the attention is on the tweet issue.  There is rage, there is defiance, there is deep upset...all of it in the media...over President Trump's anti-media tweeting.  Has he gone too far?  Is he unpresidential?  Is the Constitution at risk?  Is the world at risk?

Gee, the last time I heard those questions was at Watergate.  We survived. 

While the agony of the media is part of political theater, and thin-skinned journalists are part of our culture, maybe it is time for the president to change the subject, stop his baiting of the press, and concentrate, in his tweets, on the issues before him.  This is one of the most active, and potentially effective, presidents I've seen, but his tweets are distracting attention from his accomplishments and agenda.  While much of what he says in his messages is true, the controversy is diminishing him and giving the press an excuse to cover itself and its hurts, rather than little issues of war, peace, and governing.

Mr. Trump might argue that George W. Bush tried to be a gentleman with the press, and look what it got him.  It got him the same kind of contempt from the media being heaped on Trump.  No, the press can probably not be reformed.  The current generation of journalists is beyond redemption.  But the president has the bully pulpit, and he should use it more to advance his presidency, not simply settle scores. 

The president goes to Europe this week, his second foreign trip.  He will be in eastern Europe, where he'll undoubtedly get a much better reception than in western Europe, where the fashionable left is still in fashion.  He should note that there are statues to Ronald Reagan in eastern Europe, but, to the best of my knowledge, none in the west. 

So, Mr. President, please cool it for a time.  You're taking on the right issues.  Let us hear about that.

July 3,  2017     Permalink

JULY 2,  2017

SHORT TAKES ON THE DRIFTING WRECKAGE – AT 11:57 P.M. ET:

REAL NEWS – FROM THE CHICAGO SUN-TIMES:   At least 49 people were shot across Chicago, four of them fatally, by Sunday night of the Fourth of July weekend.  Last year’s Independence Day weekend ended with 66 people shot — a total that actually stoked cautious optimism with the lowest death toll for the July 4 weekend in nearly a decade.  On Saturday, Chicago Police touted a 14 percent decline in shootings this year compared to the first six months of 2016, and they hoped to tamp down the holiday weekend violence with the help of a new gun violence strike force that includes ATF agents.  At least 1,786 people have been shot in the city this year, 310 of them fatally, according to data maintained by the Chicago Sun-Times.   That is considered progress in Chicago.  And where is Chicago's number one citizen through all this horror?  Barack Obama is in Indonesia warning Americans against showing too much patriotism.

FANTASY LAND – FROM THE HILL:  Democratic Rep. Brad Sherman (Calif.) on Sunday called on other congressional lawmakers to join the efforts of impeaching President Trump, as thousands of people in Los Angeles participated in an impeachment march, the Los Angeles Times reported.  "We have to act now to protect our country from abuse of power and impulsive, ignorant incompetence," Sherman said to audience members while on stage, the newspaper reported...Most Democrat leaders in the lower chamber rejected and warned against the calls to impeach the president, maintaining their distance from such measures.  “We have to find out what the facts are,” Rep. Adam Schiff (Calif.), the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said last month.  What a farce.  Some Democrats started talking impeachment before Trump was even inaugurated.  They cannot accept that they lost the election.  At least some other Democrats are behaving rationally and warning against premature calls for impeachment.  I'd like to see some evidence against Trump, but apparently that's an old-fashioned concept.

VERY SHREWD GUY – FROM GULF NEWS:  Manama: Saudi King Salman Bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud has called for the suspension of a columnist after he published a piece that praised him with God-like attributes.  The Saudi monarch also ordered action against Al Jazeera, the Saudi daily that published the column on Friday, Saudi news site Sabq reported.  In a letter to Information Minister Awad Bin Saleh Al Awad, King Salman said that he was shocked by the headline and some of the expressions in the column that contained excessive words and descriptions of praise, including attributes that God used for Himself or to describe Prophet Abraham.  Now here's a shrewd king – complaining that he's getting too much praise.  He's learned the humble pie routine.  Maybe he's preparing for a Saudi move toward democracy, where he'd have to run for office.  Next, watch the humble king polish his own crown.

July 2,  2017    Permalink

THERE IS SANITY – AT 1:32 P.M. ET:   Many college campuses have descended into madness.  But there are still some points of light, even among faculty members.  One of them is John McWhorter, an African-American linguist at Columbia University.  He cuts through the haze of racial rhetoric to remind us of actual reality.  From College Fix: 

Columbia University linguistics Professor John McWhorter, a black Democrat, recently appeared at the Aspen Ideas Festival and weighed in on the latest campus trends afflicting higher education, including safe spaces and white privilege.

McWhorter, author of the 2001 book “Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America,” said when students bemoan constant oppression and extreme racism — those claims are “not true,” and there’s a performance aspect to their outcries, reports The Atlantic.

“I think anybody in their more sober moments understands that even though racism exists and microaggressions are real, college campuses are perhaps the least racist spots on earth. And the idea that any student is undergoing a constant litany of constant racist abuse is theater, it’s theatrical––you hate to say that to somebody 19 years old, but it’s not true,” McWhorter said.

The Atlantic transcribes much of McWhorter’s commentary, in which he also critiqued the white privilege drumbeat on campuses:

COMMENT:  Read the whole thing.  John McWhorter makes Barack Obama sound like the undergraduate that he is.

July 2, 2017       Permalink

THE PHILOSOPHER SPEAKS – AT 12:58 P.M. ET:  Amazing, isn't it?  Barack Obama has been out of office less than six months, and no one particularly misses him.  Even the Dems aren't chanting, "Bring back Barack!"  Gee, I wonder why.

But Obama continues to give us the benefit of his wisdom.  From American Mirror:

While most Americans are gathering with family and community this weekend to celebrate the most exceptional country in the history of the world, Mr. Hope and Change is halfway around the world talking doom and gloom — and criticizing his successor.

Barack Obama visited Indonesia this weekend, and in a series of appearances, attacked love of country and the policies of Donald Trump.

The Guardian reports:

The former US president said some countries had adopted “an aggressive kind of nationalism” and “increased resentment of minority groups”, in a speech in Indonesia on Saturday that could be seen as a commentary on the US as well as Indonesia.

“It’s been clear for a while that the world is at a crossroads. At an inflection point,” Obama said, telling a Jakarta crowd stories of how much the capital had improved since he lived there as a child.

But he said that increased prosperity had been accompanied by new global problems, adding that as the world confronts issues ranging from inequality to terrorism, some countries – both developed and less developed – had adopted a more aggressive and isolationist stance.

“If we don’t stand up for tolerance and moderation and respect for others, if we begin to doubt ourselves and all that we have accomplished, then much of the progress that we have made will not continue,” he said.

“What we will see is more and more people arguing against democracy, we will see more and more people who are looking to restrict freedom of the press, and we’ll see more intolerance, more tribal divisions, more ethnic divisions, and religious divisions and more violence,” Obama asserted.

While former presidents rarely criticize their successors at home, Obama took the unusual step of going to a foreign country to do it.

COMMENT:  Meanwhile, back in the United States, President Trump has been working overtime cleaning up the mess that philosopher Obama left him.  Obama is a college-level ideologist who never quite understood how to make things work, and never much liked his own country.  Not a good combination for a president, as we found out.

July 2, 2017       Permalink

OFFENSIVE – AT 12:31 P.M. ET:  This sounds like the old Soviet technique of declaring opponents mentally ill.  It was first tried against Senator Barry Goldwater in 1964.  From the Daily Mail:

A Democratic congressman has proposed convening a special committee of psychiatrists and other doctors whose job would be to determine if President Donald Trump is fit to serve in the Oval Office.

Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin, who also teaches constitutional law at American University, has predictably failed to attract any Republicans to his banner.

But the U.S. Constitution's 25th Amendment does allow for a majority of the president's cabinet, or 'such other body as Congress may by law provide,' to decide if an Oval Office occupant is unable to carry out his duties – and then to put it to a full congressional vote.

Vice President Mike Pence would also have to agree, which could slow down the process – or speed it up if he wanted the levers of power for himself.

The 25th Amendment has been around since shortly after the John F. Kennedy assassination, but Congress has never formed its own committee in case it's needed to judge a president's mental health.

Raskin's bill would allow the four Republican and Democratic leaders of the House and Senate to each choose a psychiatrist and another doctor. Then each party would add a former statesman – like a retired president or vice president. 

The final group of 10 would meet and choose an 11th member, who would become the committee's chairman.

Once the group is officially seated, the House and Senate could direct it through a joint resolution to conduct an actual examination of the president 'to determine whether the president is incapacitated, either mentally or physically,' according to the Raskin bill.

COMMENT:  In 1964 a group of psychiatrists ran an ad declaring the Republican candidate for president, Barry Goldwater, mentally unfit for the presidency.  The backlash against the ad within the medical profession led to new rules barring psychiatrists from making evaluations without direct, medical examination of the individual involved.

I doubt if this new Democratic gimmick will get anywhere.  Trump is eccentric, but he isn't sending nuclear bombers over foreign targets.  I would rather depend on a president's cabinet, those who know the president's actions best, to make these decisions. 

Once again the Democrats are tempted by the idea of government by non-democratic means.

July 2,  2017     Permalink