During the Obama administration, all these Democrats were silent

AGREED: "it’s worth a full-on embed" writes Glenn Reynolds
— of Ted Cruz's pointing out the double standards of
Congressional Democrats’ newfound concern for the rule of law

Legal Insurrection: When a blog is "a bit too effective at tweaking" the "left wing cry-bullies", the Left strikes back

It's a sad Friday the 13th for the Legal Insurrection blog, for the conservative movement, and for free speech generally (thanks to Instapundit's Glenn Reynolds):

YouTube took down Legal Insurrection’s Channel without any prior notice based on “multiple third-party claims of copyright infringement,” but we never received any claims of infringement.

We have lost hundreds of videos, including a lot of original content on important news subjects. You now will see disabled videos in hundreds of our posts.

The following will hardly come as relief for William A. Jacobson, but I figured out some basic rules years ago: For the past years, every video (and audio) that I have made and every TV show (or radio show) I have appeared in, I have duly downloaded to my hard drive—in addition to copying it to an external drive.

Besides that, we regularly — about once a month — copy the No Pasarán blog onto our hard drive as well (Blogger > Settings > Other > Back up Content).

From Legal Insurrection's comments section:

Comments

Redneck Law | January 13, 2017 at 8:05 am

LI clear violation of TOS: PWC
(*posting while conservative)

Sanddog | January 12, 2017 at 11:03 pm

No proof necessary, just the claims of left wing cry-bullies.

nyc | January 13, 2017 at 7:35 am

Whining–no one does it better than the liberal left.

Tom Servo | January 12, 2017 at 11:17 pm

You were obviously a bit too effective at tweaking the progs.
 This is how faithful progs with power take their revenge.

The only consolation is that this is just a minor, minor taste of what the left would have done to all of us from now on if Hillary had won. Scratch a leftist and you will always find a vicious totalitarian hiding under the surface.

DINORightMarie | January 13, 2017 at 12:44 am

Twitter Gulag.

FB account suspension.

YouTube Channel shut down. Etc. Rinse, repeat.

You are hitting the right people in the right places.

And this is how they retaliate. Alinsky-tactics.

(My guess – BDS sees you’re effective, so you’re their target.)

Granny | January 13, 2017 at 1:20 am

Sadly, I am not in the least surprised.
Always keep a copy of every video you post.

RodFC | January 13, 2017 at 1:52 am

BTW. The videos may not be lost, but you should always have your own copy just in case.

Believe me, this is a painful lesson for a lot of people.

Chaosman | January 13, 2017 at 5:01 am

Best of luck. If/when your channel is restored, make sure to download your videos from the video manager and keep three copies of each video you want to save. Two copies on premises one copy off premises.

Update — from Fox News:

On Friday the publisher received notification from YouTube that the copyright claims were filed by the Modern Languages Association (MLA) based on audio posted of a recent MLA vote on a resolution to boycott Israeli universities. The boycott resolution at the MLA Delegate Assembly failed.

"Clearly this was a politically motivated move," he told FoxNews.com. "I never received any request or complaint from MLA. These were perfectly legitimate fair use excerpts with great news value."

"This is an attempt to silence our reporting on a matter of great public importance," added Jacobson, whose website reported on the vote. "We intend to pursue all available remedies, and call on YouTube to restore our account."

There ain’t a word, thought, deed, symbol, piece of legislation, or news item that cannot be imbued with a racial angle when there’s a determined race hustler around

As President Obama prepares to make his merciful exit from office

writes Benny Huang incredulously over at the Constitution website,

he’s taken time to tell a Chicago reporter that race relations have improved on his watch.

He spoke these words in the same city where four young blacks recently kidnapped and tortured a mentally retarded white man while shouting “F**k white people!” and “F**k Donald Trump!” as they livestreamed the whole thing on Facebook. And he did all of this with a straight face.

“The good news is that the next generation that’s coming behind us…have smarter, better, more thoughtful attitudes about race,” said the failed president. What he means by this is that an entire multiracial generation of Americans has been raised on lessons about white privilege and minority victimhood. They’ve internalized this ideology so completely that they simply can’t interact with people who don’t share it.

Barack Obama’s historic presidency was supposed to unite us. I don’t think his “failure” to do so is an accident. He spent eight years agitating just like his hero Saul Alinsky and his mentor Frank Marshall Davis did. The results were predictable—anger, chaos, and violence. Cops have been murdered, neighborhoods have been torched, and innocent people have had their lives ruined. Before Barack Obama came along we were making progress in this country toward demoting race to a nonissue. Now it’s the issue, the all-consuming concern that supersedes all others. Race is everything and everything is racial.

It’s killing our nation.

President Obama’s remarks remind me of a creeping feeling I’ve had of late that I write entirely too many columns about race. It wasn’t always this way. Back when I was in college I made a name for myself on the staff of the student newspaper as a rabid “anti-choice” activist because I wrote regularly about our on-going baby holocaust. These days I rarely address the subject and I feel a little guilty about it. Planned Parenthood is still running its Murder, Inc., so why aren’t I writing more about it?

The answer is that I, like too many other conservatives, play defense. I respond to what’s happening in the political realm. In my college years I wrote so much about the evils of the abortion industry because race was not nearly as important as it is now. These days, with so much emphasis on race, I feel compelled to respond to the all the idiocy that people spout about “white privilege” and our poor, maligned president who just can’t catch a break because no black man can in this horrible, racist country. I want to point out that white-on-black crime is exceedingly rare, that no one cares when cops shoot white people, and that the Department of Justice does not dispense equal justice under the law but instead prefers blacks above all others.

And yet here I am writing another column about race. It’s very difficult to write about anything else when every issue has been racialized. Race and racism are inescapable.

There isn’t a word, thought, deed, symbol, piece of legislation, or news item that cannot be imbued with a racial angle when there’s a determined race hustler around.

Gun control? You betcha. Michael Moore, producer of the anti-second amendment “Bowling for Columbine,” racialized that issue in 2012. Said Moore:

“We’ve got over a quarter-billion guns in people’s homes. And they’re mostly in the suburbs and rural areas where there is virtually no crime and no murder. So why is that? What are they really afraid of? What do they think of — who’s going to break into the house? Do they think it’s little freckled-face Jimmy down the street? I don’t think so. I don’t think that’s who they’re afraid of. And it cuts down to the heart of our race problem that we still haven’t resolved.”

Moore’s argument is self-defeating. For starters, he’s essentially admitting the validity of the “more guns less crime” argument advanced by John Lott in his book by the same name. Furthermore, does it make any sense to believe that people who live far away from blacks are really afraid that blacks are going to break into their homes? No, those are the worries of urban dwellers, many of whom favor gun control because they don’t want blacks to have them. No matter, Michael Moore has declared the exercise of our right under the US Constitution to be a form of racist neuroticism. End of discussion.

The issue of illegal immigration (often called just “immigration”) has become so intertwined with race that it’s hard to believe that anyone ever saw it through any other lens. I recall being a soldier stationed in Germany in 2002 when I met a Bulgarian girl who flippantly mentioned that her best friend from Bulgaria was living as an illegal alien in Chicago. (Bulgarians are white Eastern Europeans, by the way.) I was shocked. At the time I didn’t consider any racial dimension to the illegal immigration issue. I didn’t care then, just as I don’t care now, what color the illegal immigrants are. They should come in the right way or not at all. It’s not a racial issue, it’s a rule of law issue.
 
But there I go again using those racial dog whistles. My “law and order” rhetoric is racist according to National Public Radio. During the 2016 campaign NPR ran an outlandish piece entitled “Is Trump’s Call For ‘Law and Order’ a Coded Racial Message?” Apparently only a racist could want that. Non-racists prefer lawlessness and disorder—which happens to be what Barack Obama has wrought.

Just when I thought that the constant racialization of everything couldn’t get any worse, it did.

Even I was taken aback when New York City legalized (or “decriminalized”) public urination because those kind of laws are raaaaaaacist!

“We know that the system has been really rigged against communities of color in particular,” city council member Melissa Mark-Viverito, a Democrat, told the New York Times. “So the question has always been, what can we do in this job to minimize unnecessary interaction with the criminal justice system, so that these young people can really fulfill their potential?”

My guess is that minorities are disproportionately punished for public urination because they disproportionately offend just as they disproportionately violate most other laws—except Asians of course, but I guess the system isn’t “rigged” against yellow people.

We’re living in a racial bonfire and our public officials just keep pouring gasoline on it. Speaking in defense of the Black Lives Matter movement, President Obama bemoaned the problem of the unfair treatment blacks receive at the hands of police. “The African-American community is not just making this up…It’s real.” Well yes they are making it up and Obama should acknowledge this if he wants to be called a leader. They made up the Ferguson narrative which was a complete fabrication. They tried to railroad the cops in Baltimore before the prosecution disintegrated in court. They made up a ridiculous story about a supposed unarmed black man in Charlotte, Keith Scott, reading a book in his car before being besieged by racist cops. The officer who shot him, by the way, was black. He also wasn’t charged with anything because he did nothing wrong.

 … But that’s what scummy race-baiters like Eric Holder do. They tell lies to agitate, to divide, to make this group of people resentful and that group of people defensive. There’s no excuse for it. Let’s hope that this kind of poison politics goes out with Obama.

We Americans are ruled by a non-religious elite and we seem unbothered by it—and not just in politics but in culture and education as well

News flash from National Public Radio: There aren’t enough atheists in Congress! This is really a problem and NPR wants to rally the electorate to remedy it. In an article entitled “Non-Religious Americans Remain Far Under-Represented in Congress” NPR bemoaned the lack of unbelievers serving on Capitol Hill.

Thus does Benny Huang start another outstanding column.

I’ve got news for NPR—there are plenty of godless heathens in politics. Very few elected officials publicly claim atheism or agnosticism but their actions betray what’s in their hearts. For all of the talk about how rabidly religious Americans are we continue to vote for people who are very secular in their outlooks and in their voting records. There is no pandemic of religious fervor in the United States. We’re ruled by a non-religious elite and we seem unbothered by it—and not just in politics but in culture and education as well. Among those non-religious elite I would certainly count Donald Trump. Perhaps he has certain qualities that are needed at this moment but he’s not a religious man.

I realize that I am treading on thin ice here. There’s an unwritten rule in politics that an elected official’s professed faith should never be questioned—or at least not if you think the person’s religious deception is a bad thing. Barack Obama is a good example of this. The media have spilled plenty of ink “debunking” the supposed myth that the president is not a Christian.

Here’s one from Timothy Stanley at CNN. His opening sentence: “One of the strangest right-wing conspiracies is that Barack Obama is not really a Christian.” I think he meant to say “conspiracy theories” but whatever. It’s not a conspiracy or a theory, it’s just Barack Obama telling lies which I’ve noticed he does quite a bit. This is a man who once said that “Sin is being out of alignment with my values.” Seriously? Actually, sin is being out of alignment with God’s values. I can only conclude that Barack Obama is his own higher power.

Which leads me to my next question—who are these fools who think Obama is a Muslim? That’s ridiculous. Barack Obama is a secular humanist just like the mother who raised him and the absent father he idolized. He joined a church that teaches black victimology while calling it Christianity—and he likely only did that because he had political aspirations.

But the late Christopher Hitchens speculated with some certainty that Barack Obama is an atheist and I don’t recall him being chastised for it. Why? Because Christopher Hitchens was also an atheist and therefore considered Obama’s atheism a plus. Hitchens’s doubts about Obama’s purported religion were somehow acceptable but if you happen to be a Christian who’s sick of seeing President Obama fraudulently sporting your religion on his sleeve, you’re a conspiracy theorist.

So there are actually plenty of non-religious people in politics. Why don’t they identify themselves? There are several reasons, I think. The first is prejudice, which I gather from the NPR article is their preferred explanation.

 … But there are other reasons why more atheist politicians don’t just fess up. One reason is that it inoculates them from accusations of anti-Christian bigotry which is rampant in the jackass party. Take Nancy Pelosi, for example. I consider Pelosi to be an anti-Christian bigot but she’s able to parry the accusation by claiming to be just as Catholic as Catholic can be. This is a woman who never misses an opportunity to mention her Catholicism, sometimes misrepresenting Catholic doctrine to justify her Left Coast policy positions. Nancy Pelosi may have a baptismal certificate but she really worships at the altar of statist liberalism. She should probably just admit it and stop making a mockery of her (and my) religion.

But why would she do that? Then she couldn’t smother criticisms that she despises Christianity. That’s the real reason why she misrepresents herself. It’s not as if San Francisco voters would send her packing if they thought she was an apostate. A 2015 study from the Public Religion Research Institute found San Francisco to be the third least religious city in the country. Only Portland and Seattle had higher proportions of non-believers. Pelosi’s constituents are comfortable with atheism, just as they are comfortable with sodomy on parade down Castro Street. It’s Catholicism that make them squirm—especially its teachings on butt sex. She would pay no penalty at the polls for admitting the obvious fact that she isn’t really Catholic after all. Still she persists with her lies.

The NPR article left me wondering just what’s wrong with too few atheists or, as I think they really meant to say, too many of those darn Christians serving in Congress.

 … Maybe NPR should start looking more like America and give a show to someone who isn’t a coastal liberal elitist for a change. Might I suggest Larry the Cable Guy?

French Conservaties Chat About Donald Trump's New America

Évelyne Joslain, the author of Trump: For Better or Worse, chatted with Radio Courtoisie's Henry de Lesquen about President Donald Trump's New America and the Reasons for His Success.

Libre Journal d'Henry de Lesquen du 19 décembre 2016 : “La nouvelle Amérique du président Donald Trump ; Chronique du grand-large : « Les raisons du succès de Donald Trump » ; Apologie de la peine de mort”

Par Henry de Lesquen | 19 décembre 2016 | Libre Journal d’Henry de Lesquen | Mots clés : Amérique . Charles-Henri d'Elloy . Donald Trump . États-Unis . Evelyne Joslain . Nicolas Stoquer . Patrick Simon . peine de mort

Henry de Lesquen, assisté de Joëlle, recevait Evelyne Joslain, politologue, essayiste, spécialiste du monde anglo-saxon, Nicolas Stoquer, diplômé de l'IEP, fondateur du Rassemblement Pour la France, défenseur du patrimoine ; Patrick Simon, avocat, président de l'ALEPS ; Charles-Henri d'Elloy, écrivain. Thèmes : “La nouvelle Amérique du président Donald Trump ; Chronique du grand-large : « Les raisons du succès de Donald Trump » ; Apologie de la peine de mort ; Chronique du courrier des auditeurs”.

Première partie

Seconde partie

Référence bibliographique

Trump, pour le meilleur et pour le pire (Évelyne Joslain), Éd. Presses de la Délivrance (juin 2016)

Henry de Lesquen

Familier depuis 1988 des émissions de Radio Courtoisie, où il était fréquemment invité en tant que président du Carrefour de l'Horloge, Henry de Lesquen y a créé le libre journal des idées politiques en 2003. Après la mort du fondateur de Radio Courtoisie, Jean Ferré, en 2006, et selon les vœux de celui-ci, il lui a succédé, d'une part comme patron de la radio, d'autre part comme patron du libre journal du lundi soir. Membre du conseil d'administration de l'association depuis 2005, il en est le président depuis 2007. Né en 1949, marié, père de cinq enfants, Henry de Lesquen est haut fonctionnaire. Il habite avec son épouse à Versailles, où il est conseiller municipal depuis 2001 sous l'étiquette "divers droite". Il préside en outre le Club de l'Horloge et a participé dans le cadre de ce cercle de pensée politique indépendant des partis à la rédaction d'une vingtaine de livres, dont La Politique du vivant et Penser l'antiracisme. Il préside également l'association Voix des Français : www.vdfr95.com. Twitter : @hlesquen.

Chicago's Hate Crime as Presented in France: Only One Mention of the Perpetrator's and Victim's Races, and That as an Aside

Coverage of the hate crime in Chicago is no better in the French press than in the whitewashing press in the United States, as evidenced by this 20 Minutes and AFP report.

The title, first:

The Aggression of a Mentally Handicapped Young Man Broadcast on Facebook

Then, the opening paragraph:

Traumatized, the victim is having a hard time communicating. Four persons have been caught and arrested, announced the Chicago police, after the broadcast of a video where they are seen mistreating a young man while shouting racist insults.

Still nothing unusual about race, with the "shouting racist insults" part giving the idea that, if anything, it seems to be whites hectoring an African-American.

When the races of the perpetrators and victims are finally presented, it is almost as an aside, in a pair of secondary adjective clauses, and only once, in a single sentence:

The suspects, who are black, and the victim, who is white, are all young adults.

For some reason, you see, what matters is that all the "actors" are young.

If the races of perpetrators and victim were reversed, don't you think that sentence would be written quite differently? (The suspects and the victim, all of whom are young adults, are respectively white and black.)

Of course. And, indeed, race would be featured — prominently — in the headline as well as in the opening paragraph and, in fact, throughout the entire article.

From that point on, race disappears from the rest of the article, although one sentence does admittedly hint at the subject, since it contains the shouts « Fuck Donald Trump ! Fuck white people ! »

VIDEO. Etats-Unis : L’agression d’un jeune handicapé mental diffusée en direct sur Facebook

Traumatisée, la victime peine à communiquer. Quatre personnes ont été appréhendées et placées en garde à vue après la diffusion d’une vidéo où on les voit maltraiter un jeune homme en criant des insultes racistes, a annoncé ce jeudi la police de Chicago, dans le nord-est des Etats-Unis.

Les suspects, qui sont noirs, et la victime, qui est blanche, sont tous de jeunes adultes.

To no one's surprise, Newsbusters' Curtis Houck is on the story—the story of the non-story: ABC, NBC Skip White Chicago Man Being Tortured Live on Facebook by Four African-Americans, while shouting “fuck Trump” and “fuck white people.” (Equally unexpectedly, CBS’s coverage left out those last two details.) Leading Ed Driscoll to remind us that

CBS’s blackout on the details of this story, and their competitors’ embargo of the story itself, dovetails perfectly with Iowahawk’s observation that “Journalism is about covering important stories. With a pillow, until they stop moving,” and Jim Treacher’s line that in the 21st century, the profession “is all about deciding which facts the public shouldn’t know because they might reflect badly on Democrats.”

Related: “The Left’s insane hatred of Donald Trump has spun out of control, and there have been far too many instances of this sort of depraved violence,” John Hinderaker writes at Power Line. “I don’t want to hear another damn word about ‘hate crimes’ against minorities supposedly inspired by Donald Trump’s campaign or election, not unless they equal this level of depravity.”

The Boston Herald's Howie Carr (thanks to Instapundit):

Why can’t the alt-left call a hate crime a hate crime?

Is it because some hate crimes are more hateful than others? Or less?

Finally, yesterday, the Chicago police charged the four aspiring rappers with a hate crime for allegedly beating, torturing and kidnapping a white mentally disabled kid from the suburbs.

They were screaming “Bleep white people!” and “Bleep Trump!” but none of the PC posse wanted to … uh, jump to any conclusions.

Take Obama — please. His flack Josh Earnest was asked if this was a hate crime.
“I think it’s too early to tell.”

No call from Obama for a “national conversation” about hate crimes. He didn’t even call it “workplace violence.”

Then there was Don Lemon, last seen drunk on New Year’s Eve on CNN. Apparently, he’s still on his bender, because this is what he said:

“I don’t think it’s evil. I think these are young people and I think they have bad home training.”

Bad home training. Hey, I’ll bet these at-risk youths were turning their lives around too. That’s why one of Lemon’s guests, one Symone Sanders, said that we shouldn’t be “callously classifying” a kidnapping accompanied by a few chants of “Bleep white people!” as a hate crime.

Yeah, they’re lovely people — Tanashia and Brittany Covington, Tesfaye Cooper and Jordan Hall. Tanashia is 24 and the others are 18. Which, according to Chicago PD Commander Kevin Duffin, makes them “kids.”

“Kids make stupid decisions … That will certainly be part of whether or not we determine this is a hate crime or whether or not this is stupid ranting and raving.”

Here was the Boston Globe headline on the hate crime: “4 questioned after video of apparent racial attack in Chicago.”

Apparent. On MSNBC it was called an “apparent beating.” Apparently, whoever wrote these headlines didn’t see the video.

Various local newscasts said the thugs had “detained” the white kid, who was “picked on” and/or “bullied.”

What if this had happened to some Muslim terrorist at Gitmo? The same pajama boys now averting their eyes from the truth would be hollering for war crimes trials.

This wasn’t the first post-election black-on-white hate crime on the West Side. In November, a 50-year-old white man was dragged from his car by four people screaming obscenities about Trump. That hate crime was likewise recorded on videotape.

Police arrested Rajune Lewis, Dejuan Collins, Julian Christian and a juvenile and … do you remember seeing anything about this on the network newscasts? Me neither.

Compare this kid-glove treatment for all these thugs to what happened to the two Babson College students who drove over to Wellesley College after the election. Let’s let Babson President (and former Lt. Gov.) Muffy Healey describe how her students “engaged in behavior that was, at a minimum, insensitive, unacceptable and contrary to our core values.”

Their crime? They were yelling “Trump 2016!” and “Make America Great Again.”

Muffy banned them from campus and they were kicked out of their frat. They had to hire lawyers to fight Muffy’s fake news.

If it wasn’t for double standards, the alt-left wouldn’t have any standards at all.

In contrast, tweets Anthony Bialy, “Those who believed ‘Hands up, don’t shoot’ right away are unsure if the Chicago assault was a hate crime.”

Plus: Remembering (not) the horrific Christian-Newsom murders — Glenn Reynolds:

There was no White House commentary, and no mass marches or riots. And not all that much press attention. Because these horrors did not Advance The Narrative.

“Parachute politics” is systemic in the Democrat party, the party whose members never take “no” for an answer

Representative Maxine Waters of California has a curious explanation for why Democrats were so thoroughly humiliated in 2016 

writes Benny Huang (in disbelief)

—they were just too nice. “That has been a problem in my party, that when we’re in power we’re nice,” said Waters. “We bend over backwards to work with people.”

Any hope that the Democrats would conduct a serious post-mortem was dispelled with these remarks. The Democrats lost this year and they’ve been losing with some degree of consistency since Barack Obama swept to power in 2008 but they’re still avoiding introspection. As usual, they’re finding ways to flatter themselves in defeat, convinced that it was their own virtue that did them in—plus Russia, racists, and fake news, of course.

The real explanation for why Democrats lost and have continued to lose is rather complicated but the nitty-gritty is this: Trump’s positions on certain issues helped win over several rust belt states that everyone had hitherto considered safely blue while holding onto the traditionally red ones. This happened despite substantial voter fraud in at least one of those rust belt states—Michigan. Was it the Democrats’ nicety that lost these states? Oh, I doubt it. I think it had something to do with their war on coal and on in industry in general. Barack Obama spoke openly of bankrupting coal-fired power plants and Hillary Clinton, his would-be successor, bragged that she would “put a lot of coal companies and coal miners out of business.” Killing people’s jobs is not very nice.

Compromise is something the modern Democrat party just does not do. They’re quite skilled at all sorts of subterfuge intended to look like compromise but the real thing eludes them. In some rare instances, when the votes simply aren’t there for their pet projects, they may be forced to give a little ground. But it wounds them deeply. They quickly turn to the judiciary or to Daddy Obama to achieve what they can’t achieve through the legislature. By hook or by crook, they get what they want.

What ails the jackass party is what I call “parachute politics,” named in honor of Maxine Waters’ fellow California Democrat, Nancy Pelosi. During the 2010 Obamacare debate Pelosi displayed an arrogance that I found shocking. “We’ll go through the gate,” said Pelosi at a press conference. “If the gate’s closed, we’ll go over the fence. If the fence is too high, we’ll pole vault in. If that doesn’t work, we’ll parachute in but we’re going to get health care reform passed for the America people.”

Does that sound like someone who’s bending over backwards to work with others? Or does that sound like a fanatic, someone so sure of the righteousness of her cause that nothing—certainly not the will of the people—could have dissuaded her from her path? Pelosi spoke these words just days after Scott Brown pulled off an upset victory in a Massachusetts special election by promising to be the forty-first vote against Obamacare. Yes, running against the “Affordable Care Act” (snort!) was a winning proposition even in ultra-liberal Massachusetts. People didn’t want the crap sandwich Pelosi was trying to force feed them and they want it even less today.
 
Sure, Americans generally agree that they want some kind of health care reform but they mean something that will make health care more affordable both at the point of sale and in the final analysis. Obamacare has only made it more expensive. Back in 2010 there were at least a few gullible Americans who believed all of Obama’s lies about keeping their current plans and saving the average family of four some $2500 per year. If there are still people who believe these falsehoods they must be delusional.

“Parachute politics” is systemic in the Democrat party. Whether the issue is killing the unborn, stopping voter ID, redefining marriage, or any number of other issues, they absolutely do not take “no” for answer.

Voting rights for felons is a good example. This year, Governor Terry McAuliffe of Virginia took the bold step of restoring voting rights to all felons in his state who had completed their sentences. He did not attempt to amend Virginia’s constitution. He did not work with legislators to build consensus. He simply decreed it.

 … McAuliffe was undeterred. If the Virginia Supreme Court told him that he could not restore voting rights en masse he would do it on a superficially “individual” basis. He got to work “signing” stacks of clemency documents using an autopen to replicate his signature. Governor McAuliffe’s unilateral and constitutionally dubious scheme was a gift to his dear friend Hillary Clinton, to himself, and to his party—the “nice” party that Maxine Water says “bends over backwards to work with people.”

Not that I doubt Maxine Waters’ sincerity when she says this. Her problem isn’t that she doesn’t mean what she says, her problem is that she considers every concession made by her party, no matter how small and no matter how begrudgingly extracted, to be an enormous sacrifice. If the “arc of history” bends toward her own demented definition of justice why should she ever give an inch to the evil forces of reaction? In her mind she and her friends should get 100% of what they want 100% of the time because they are self-evidently right. It’s this attitude that makes compromise nearly impossible.

 … When asked if she would accept a hypothetical invitation from Trump to meet and find common ground, Waters replied unequivocally that she would not.\

She’s not alone. Congressman Keith Ellison, who is a strong contender to replace Donna Brazile as the next chairman of the DNC, said that “All there is to do is vote ‘no’” to whatever Trump and the Republicans propose. Now there’s some of that famous bipartisanship! I hope the Republican leadership heard Ellison and realizes that he and much of his party cannot be won over. They can be opposed and hopefully defeated but they can’t be swayed from their reflexive opposition. Please don’t try.

I can recall a time not long ago when Ellison’s and Waters’ defiant attitude would have been called “obstructionism.” Of course that was when some Republicans weren’t kowtowing to President Obama. (Others were kowtowing their asses off, by the way.) Things are different now. I also recall that “obstructionism” was not just unseemly but racist to boot. Not anymore. Now that I think about it, there was also a time in the recent past when Republicans’ “obstructionism” justified presidential end-runs around Congress. Is that still fair play or did that change too?

But don’t let Maxine Waters fool you. She may try to pretend that extraordinary circumstances have driven her to adopt a never-before-seen attitude of resistance but that just isn’t true. She was a partisan warrior before November 8th just as she’s a partisan warrior now. She was not “nice” when the Democrats ran the show and neither was the rest of her party. Their 2006 and 2008 victories convinced them that the country had gone left for good. What was the sense in reaching across the aisle to the moribund minority?

Liberals are rewriting history before our very eyes, inventing some mythical time when the Democratic majority extended a hand of mercy to those evil Republicans only to have it slapped away. Those of us with memories longer than a goldfish’s know better.

Trump Book Author Evelyne Joslain Discusses the Republicans' Election Victory with GOP Guests

The Republican onslaught during America's presidential elections were the subject of Radio Courtoisie's Libre Journal du nouveau monde segment as Évelyne Joslain (the author of Trump: For Better or Worse) chatted with Paul Reen, a leader of Republicans Overseas, and blogger/journalist/author Erik Svane.

Libre Journal du nouveau monde du 23 novembre 2016 : “Les succès électoraux des Républicains”

Par Évelyne Joslain | 23 novembre 2016 | Libre Journal du nouveau monde | Mots clés : Donald Trump . élections . Erik Svane . États-Unis . Les Républicains . Paul Reen . primaires

Evelyne Joslain, assisté de Nathalie, recevait Erik Svane, journaliste, écrivain et Paul Reen, vice-président des Républicains Outre-mer, sur le thème : « Les succès électoraux des Républicains ».

Welcome to 2017: A Handful of Non-Negative Donald Trump Books on the French Market

Among the rare non-negative books about Donald Trump that appeared on the French market in 2016 were Evelyne Joslain's Trump : Pour le meilleur et pour le pire (Trump, For Better and Worse), Guy Millière's Après Obama, Trump ?, André Bercoff's Donald Trump. Les raisons de la colère (Donald Trump: The Reasons for the Anger), and Laure Mandeville's Qui est vraiment Donald Trump ? (Who Is Donald Trump Really?).

TrumpLand and Clinton Archipelago

Vivid Maps has created a pair of revelatory maps

using IDW (Inverse distance weighted) technique in ArcGIS.

(See also their post on the 2016 U.S. presidential election results in three maps…)

Voter ID: Apparently not allowing minorities to cheat is a form of racial oppression

We can thank Jill Stein and her hopeless recount effort for bringing about at least some positive change in our election system

writes Benny Huang.

In the face of incontrovertible evidence of voter fraud in Michigan’s most populous county, the Michigan House passed a much needed voter ID bill. Unfortunately, the Michigan Senate will probably not vote on the bill this session. Pray that they get to it in the New Year.

The bill is long overdue though it won’t fix the particular problem discovered during the Michigan recount. Here’s what happened: when state officials reviewed the Michigan vote tally they began to notice an odd trend at polling places found mostly in Wayne County, the heavily Democratic area where Detroit is located. At some polling places more ballots were cast than names checked off the voter rolls.  The problem was particularly pronounced in Detroit where 247 of the city’s 662 voting precincts counted more ballots than voters. The city was rife with broken seals on ballot boxes, a strong indicator that ballots were either added, removed, or swapped out. According to a spokesman for Michigan’s Secretary of State, election staff attributed irregularities at polling places in Detroit to human error. Apparently there’s a lot more “human error” in big corrupt cities than in other places.

“There’s always going to be small problems to some degree, but we didn’t expect the degree of problem we saw in Detroit. This isn’t normal,” said Krista Haroutunian, chairwoman of the Wayne County Board of Canvassers. I’d venture to say that she’s likely wrong on that point. This degree of suspicious irregularity is probably very normal—for Detroit.

The excess ballots should be considered the absolute minimum level of cheating. There may have been other forms of chicanery layered on top of that—voter impersonation, for example, or non-citizens voting. Those types of voter fraud are more difficult to detect especially when people in power have a vested interest in turning a blind eye. Liberals will deny that any such thing took place but of course they’re also denying the blatant ballot-stuffing, sheepishly explaining it as “human error.” The lesson to be learned here is that Democrats always deny and minimize voter fraud when they’re the ones behind it—which happens to be most of the time. Their denials are nothing but meaningless noise.

What then can voter ID law do to clean up this mess? Not much. Voter ID is intended to stop voters from misrepresenting themselves not crooked poll workers from fiddling with the ballots after they’ve been cast. Voter ID is not enough. The real solution to the problem of voter fraud is to break the backs of the corrupt urban Democratic machines that run most of our big cities.

That won’t be easy of course, and it will be downright impossible as long as Loretta Lynch and her Department of “Just-Us” is around to protect them. The current administration views any effort to restore integrity to our chaotic elections as a furtive attempt at disenfranchising minority voters. Apparently not allowing minorities to cheat is a form of racial oppression.

 … Just don’t expect the corrupt Democratic machines to go softly into the night. They will sue, they will protest, and they will slander good people with spurious accusations of racism. They will make those of us who care about electoral integrity wonder if it’s really worth the fight. I assure you, it is.

We don’t have much time. There are midterm elections in two years and another presidential election two years after that. If the Democrats learned anything from their 2016 debacle it’s that they didn’t cheat nearly enough. Next time they’ll really cheat their asses off—worse than Bill Belichick, I mean.

Cheating is a long-standing tradition within the Democratic Party dating back to New York’s Tammany Hall. Some of their world-class cheaters have included Lyndon Johnson in Texas, Richard Daley in Chicago, and Honey Fitz in Boston. They’ve elevated cheating to an art form.

In 1965 we passed the Voting Rights Act which enabled federal officials to crack down on corrupt Democrats in the rural South who engaged in voter intimidation while conveniently doing nothing about corrupt Democrats in the urban North who engaged in voter fraud—and sometimes voter intimidation as well. Though the law wreaked of northern hegemony, it was sold to the naïve public as a sincere effort to keep election officials honest.

It was the age old story of our nation—we northerners using the federal government as the means and racism as the pretext to force our will upon southerners. Sure, there was a problem in the South; but there was a similar problem in the North and the federal government didn’t post outsiders at our polling places to babysit us. We northerners were permitted to run our own elections which were then, just as they are now, hopelessly tainted with corruption. Southerners, on the other hand, were placed under some adult supervision—by which I mean Yankee supervision.

Voter fraud is very real. Anyone who tells you otherwise either benefits from it or is simply foolish. I’ve noticed that a curious kind of circular logic surrounds the crime of voter fraud that doesn’t apply to other kinds of crime. The fraud deniers refuse to consider any incidents of voter fraud because no one has proven to their satisfaction that it ever happens more than a few times per election cycle in disparate locations. Mere “anecdotes,” they say. They then cite a lack of convictions for voter fraud as proof that it never happens. I wonder if it ever occurs to them that there aren’t many convictions because no one is on the lookout for it and anyone who tries to stop it is smeared as a racist?

 …  Examples of voter fraud abound. In Indiana, the state police are investigating the Indiana Voter Registration Project for running what appears to be a massive absentee ballot scam in 56 counties. Stay tuned for some final resolution on that one. A CBS affiliate in Los Angeles found 265 deceased Californians who had apparently voted from beyond the grave. In Virginia, the Public Interest Legal Foundation discovered 1,046 non-citizens on the voter rolls in just the eight counties that responded to their request. In Wisconsin, A Hillary Clinton surrogate bragged on camera about busing voters around to vote at multiple polling places.

Who raped and trafficked teenage girls in Coventry? Evil "men," we are told

Why is it that I do not feel like I am wrong, or unfair, or racist, or guilt-ridden when (I guess that must be what I am doing) I racially profile the Five men [who] have been convicted of sexually abusing and trafficking six teenage girls in Coventry?

The "sex gang" of "evil" men treated victims "like pieces of meat," we are told by the BBC.

Waqaar Khan, Kadeem Bourne, Kenan Kelly, Marcus Woolcock and Zahid Chaudhary were accused of almost 40 offences, Warwick Crown Court heard.

Ringleader Khan befriended the girls, aged 15 to 17, on social media before picking them up and forcing them to have sex, sometimes filming it.

West Midlands Police described them as "brazen, calculating and evil".

The court heard the men took the girls, some of whom were in care, to secluded areas of the city and sometimes gave them alcohol or drugs before abusing and trafficking them for sex.

One girl, aged 17, said she was knocked out by one of the men and came round to see them watching a video of herself being raped while she was unconscious.

[Detective Chief Inspector] Ian Green said Khan came to the attention of police in March when he was a mutual "friend" on the accounts of several vulnerable young girls in the city.

When police subsequently examined his phone, officers found thousands of text messages containing "sexualised conversations and several videos of graphic sexual abuse".

The girls identified the other men and a "comprehensive investigation" was started.

"It was the brazen nature of their offending that they actually thought they were untouchable and these girls wouldn't report it through fear," Mr Green said.

I wonder why on Earth these men might have thought they were untouchable?!

Economic Dependency and Feelings of Victimhood: What Exactly Is the Precise Subtext of Hope 'n' Change ?

Perhaps the best quote about Michelle Obama's hopelessness comes from Ann Althouse (thanks to Glenn Reynolds).

“Michelle Obama seems to confuse the past and the future in a strange way that relates to a criticism of Democrats one often hears: Their political strategy relies on maintaining economic dependency and feelings of victimhood. To say you must have hope is — think about it — a euphemistic way to say you must continue to feel needy.”

Yes, He Can: Yes, Obama Could Have Won a Third Term; But Not for the Reason He Thinks

Actually, it is entirely possible that Barack Obama may be right when, as Fox News reports, he says that, had he been able to run, he could have won a third term in the White House.

Describing his confidence in an America that is “tolerant” and “full of energy,” Obama said: “I am confident in this vision because I'm confident that … if I had run again and articulated it, I think I could've mobilized a majority of the American people to rally behind it.”

However, he would not, might not, have won again because of who he is, or because of what he stands for, or because of what his programs contain.

The victory would be because of decades of efforts by "neutral" and "independent" "journalists" (aka Democrats with bylines) in the mainstream media to whitewash (sic?) the Apologizer-in-Chief and members of the Democrat Party as well as the policies they stand for.

“I know that in conversations that I've had with people around the country, even some people who disagreed with me, they would say the vision, the direction that you point towards is the right one,” Obama told Axelrod, defending his assertion.

The truth is, that if reporters were generally fair and neutral and balanced, you would be hard-pressed to wonder if a member of the Democrat Party could ever win an election again.

Let's get down to basics:

What do the Democrats stand for?

Helping the victims of society while bashing and berating the members of society who don't want to help same, punishing the latter in all sorts of ways, not least by increasing their taxes.

In other words, they think of everyone as children: innocent tykes who must be protected, along with spoiled, ill-behaved brats who must be given dressing-downs and be punished by having (parts of) their allowances removed.

What do the Republicans stand for?

The Republicans don't want to help blacks, they do not want to help women, they do not want to help Latinos and immigrants, and they do not want to help gays and transgenders.

Just as the Republicans do not want to help… (wait for it)… whites and males and straights!

Why?

Because they think — they know — that the average man, woman, person, is a grown-up, an adult who can be expected to manage his or her life without dramatics and intervention by hordes of professional politicians and armies of career bureaucrats, or too much thereof.

Isn't this what the revolution of 1776 was all about?

Isn't this what the constitution of 1787 is all about?

We Americans are grown-ups!

And we expect to be treated as such.

Related: Another thing the mainstream media might have
found out about Obama's past had he been a Republican

Michelle Obama's Response Is Far Worse
Than Saying Life Under Trump Is Without Hope:
She Considers that Americans Are Kids
in Need of a Father Figure for President

"The only thing surprising about Barack Obama's latest blow against Israel" wrote Thomas Sowell, in… 2011 (!), "is that there are people who are surprised"

The only thing surprising about Barack Obama's latest blow against Israel is that there are people who are surprised

wrote Thomas Sowell back in… June… 2011 (Obama's general approach to foreign policy — selling out our allies to curry favor with our adversaries)!

Whether as a radical student, a community organizer or a far left politician, Barack Obama's ideology has been based on a vision of the Haves versus the Have Nots.

 … Israel is one of the Haves. Its neighbors remain among the Have Nots, despite their oil. No wonder that Barack Obama has bent over backward, in addition to bowing low forward, to support the side that his ideology favors.

Israel is not simply to have its interests sacrificed and its security undermined. It is to be brought down a peg and-- to the extent politically possible-- insulted. Obama has already done all these things. His latest pronouncement is just more of the same.

Whether at home or abroad, Obama's ideology is an ideology of envy, resentment and payback.

 … All of this is consistent with Obama's general approach to foreign policy-- selling out our allies to curry favor with our adversaries.

My four favorite memes among those chosen by Powerline's Steven Hayward to illustrate Thomas Sowell's thoughts (thanks to Ed Driscoll) are reproduced in this post.

Which brings up a question:

Wouldn't it be great if somebody in the Trump administration would nominate Thomas Sowell to become 2017's choice for the Nobel Prize in Economics?
Related: • "The poor" are the human shields behind whom advocates of ever bigger spending for ever bigger government advance toward their goal

• "If you look at the first 100 years after slavery, black communities were a lot safer"

Let's end this post with a Thomas Sowell quote from November 2008:

[Barack Obama has] accomplished nothing other than to advance his career through rhetoric

says Thomas Sowell (thanks to Frank) as he speaks with Peter Robinson (6:00),

and it reminds me of a sophomore in college who thinks he can change the world because he's never had to run anything.

Good-Bye, Princess: Carrie Fisher Is Dead at 60

Incredible: at only 60, the Star Wars movies' Princess Leia is gone…

Now, some of us are feeling really old!

WARNING: SPOILER BELOW

Carrie Fisher had just come out with a new part-time autobiography, The Princess Diarist, besides appearing in a surprise cameo, with one brief line or two, as her younger self in the final scenes of Rogue One… (Thanks for the Instapundit link, Ed Driscoll)

(Somewhat) Related: What was the one single biggest plot hole in The Force Awakens?

Update: 14 Other Movies Featuring Star Wars Actress Carrie Fisher

Oppression Olympics: AIn't it a nice change to see the victimhood pathology eating away at the grand coalition of the oppressed rather than at our nation as a whole?

The University of California’s “Students of Color Conference” ended in disarray earlier this month

notes Benny Huang,

with various racial, ethnic, and religious groups vying for the “Biggest Victim” prize. Though it was intended to foster thoughtful discussion about issues that affect minorities, the conference devolved into a “safe space gone wrong” according to The Daily Bruin’s Jacqueline Alvarez.

Rather than hating white people, the various groups turned on each other. “[T]he conference eventually turned into a kind of ‘oppression Olympics,’ where students argued over which minority group was oppressed the most rather than finding solidarity and understanding amongst each other,” wrote Alvarez. One point of contention was the conference’s theme: “Fighting anti-Blackness.” The whole conference was geared toward America’s premiere victim group, blacks, which displeased some members of other groups. When one student asked why other groups’ issues weren’t being discussed a black student replied that blacks were the most oppressed which elicited a negative response from a Muslim student who said that her people were being bombed in the Middle East.

I don’t know about you but I find this whole story very entertaining. It’s a nice change to see the victimhood pathology eating away at the grand coalition of the oppressed rather than at our nation as a whole.

Modern progressivism is an identity politics stew consisting of divergent groups that don’t always agree. What binds them together is a visceral hatred of Western civilization which they associate with white people, Christianity, capitalism, individual rights, and “the patriarchy” (men). They’ve shown great progress in vanquishing all of these things.

The Left has an obsession with tearing down the status quo, a task it has been engaged in for more than two hundred years. Armed with rhetorical sledge hammers they go about smashing everything they see. Smash monogamy! Smash the patriarchy! Smash capitalism! Smash this! Smash that! Smashing is what they do best and for that the Left deserves to be called a demolition crew.

Leftists won’t admit this of course. In their own minds they are building a better, more egalitarian future. But in order to usher in that future they must first demolish Western civilization and sweep away the wretched rubble. This task has become their fixation. So focused are they on undermining the current order that they’ve almost lost sight of their supposed long term goal of building an earthly paradise in its place.

In all likelihood, they never will get around to the construction phase of their strategy because the demolition phase will never be complete. Consider for a moment their obsession with racism. Leftists perceive it everywhere and concoct phony examples of it where it doesn’t exist. Here’s a good example: Just before the election, a black church in Mississippi was torched and spray-painted with the words “Vote Trump.” Police have since arrested a man named Andrew McClinton for the heinous act. Who is this scoundrel? A klansman, perhaps? Nope. McClinton is a black member of the church. This man actually burnt down his own spiritual home just to make a point about the imaginary racists who live in his head.

In order to sustain our hysteria about racism the Left needs to provide teachable moments from time to time. The Mississippi church burning was one such moment. The lessons they wanted us to learn from it were that white supremacism still reigns supreme and that we must continue smashing it with all due ferocity. Therefore, demolition is still called for—and always will be. There’s never a good time to declare victory in the war on racism.

Unfortunately for them, a movement so tightly bound up with destruction runs the risk of devouring itself from within.

… We conservatives should take every opportunity to point out that the Left’s many strange bedfellows don’t have much in common. Sometimes we do illuminate the absurdity of a movement that counts both Muslims and homosexuals as members. Don’t “gays” know that most Muslims hate them? Many don’t. But we haven’t done a good enough job explaining to Muslims that homosexuals hate them too. We might want to mention that after the social justice warriors complete their incremental criminalization of Christianity they’ll have all the right precedents in place to do the same to Islam.

“No fair!” shout the Leftists. “That’s the politics of divisiveness!” Yes, I suppose it is. But they started it.

 Conservatives want people in this country to unite behind a common national identity—as Americans—whereas  liberals want to split the population into many different groups based on sex, sexuality, class, race, and religion before bundling the majority of those splinter groups into a coalition that will act as a battering ram against the dreaded System. They really don’t like it when we try to dilute the glue that binds their various constituency groups together.

 …/… I do believe that Trump was trying to split the Obama coalition but that’s okay because it richly deserves to be split. Black people’s interests are not the same as Hispanics’ interests and on the issue of illegal immigration blacks’ interests are in fact diametrically opposed to what Hispanic advocacy groups demand. Our unsecured borders have worked out great for dishonest employers but not for blacks who have found themselves competing for entry-level jobs with people who will work for less.

Trump was not, however, trying to drive a wedge between blacks and Latinos but rather between blacks and illegal aliens. There’s a difference. Perhaps it’s time for blacks to ask themselves where their true interests lie. What exactly do they gain from illegal immigration? Nothing, as far as I can see.

There are other reason why blacks should not rejoice in the booming Hispanic population, many of whom came here illegally.

 … Van Jones doesn’t like people messing with the “Obama coalition” because his goal is to unite black and brown against white. Am I guilty of wanting black and white to unite to against brown? No. I want Americans of all colors to come together against illegal alien invaders—not all of whom are Hispanic. This is our country. It belongs to a multiracial group of people called Americans and we decide who may enter our house.

The coalition of the oppressed is in fact very fragile. Don’t hesitate to do everything in your power to aggravate its inherent schisms. Their goal is to destroy Western civilization so don’t feel bad about wanting to destroy their contrived sense of solidarity.

When conservatives appeal to the Bible, we hear the inevitable “you can’t impose your morality on other people”; but social critics are quick to (mis)quote the Bible when they can make it seem to support their quirky political views

Twitchy's Brett T deadpans that ABC News political analyst [is] shocked that Christians didn’t treasure his gift of politicizing the holiday (thanks to Ed Driscoll).

Why would Christians be uncivil to ABC News’ chief political analyst on Christmas Eve, of all days? It’s impossible to know for sure, but his contribution to the holiday might have something to do with it.

Here you go people. A nativity scene without any Jews, Arabs, Africans, refugees, poor people pic.twitter.com/1eoxIIAxu5

— Matthew Dowd (@matthewjdowd) December 24, 2016

Ah, the gift of politicization that absolutely no one asked for! Just chuck that over in the pile with the “Joseph and Mary were homeless” lectures from Hillary Clinton and Al Gore and Jesse Jackson and …

Every Christmas, liberals who despise the Bible and the message of the Bible try to find something from the Bible in an attempt to advance some liberal cause based on the Bible

writes Gary DeMar (while ignoring

the Bible when it addresses same-sex sexuality/marriage and killing of unborn children).

As usual, they get it wrong, similar to the way they get the Bible’s “my brother’s keeper” message wrong.

At first, the Christmas story became a political message about homelessness. Then liberals claimed that when Mary and Joseph could not find a room in Bethlehem – you guessed it – it’s just like today’s refugee problem. Never let a contrived Bible story go to waste.

The problem with the refugee analogy is that Joseph was not a foreigner seeking refuge from his homeland since he was from Bethlehem, the place of his birth. He was a citizen of Israel. As we’ll see, the existing government was oppressing people. In this case, through taxes.

The latest claim has been made by ABC News chief political analyst Matthew Dowd who tweeted the following:

“Let us remember today 2 immigrants, a man and his very pregnant wife, sought shelter & were turned away by many. She gave birth in a manger.”

  … You can’t be an immigrant in your own country.

Jesse Jackson was the first liberal to turn Christmas into a political propaganda piece. It was in the December 26, 1988, issue if Jet Magazine. The title of the article was “Jesse Jackson Tells the Real Meaning of Christmas.”

He made the same claim in 1991 when George H. W. Bush was president. He repeated his “homeless couple” theme at the 1992 Democratic National Convention

 … 

Barbara Reynolds, a former columnist for USA Today, scolded the “Christian Right” for opposing government welfare programs by appealing to the birth narrative of the Bible: “They should recall,” she writes, “that Jesus Christ was born homeless to a teen who was pregnant before she was married.”

Hillary Clinton, in comments critical of former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s homeless policies, sought to remind the easily manipulated and ill-informed that “Christmas celebrates ‘the birth of a homeless child.’”

Rev. William Sterrett told The Providence (RI) Journal that the true Christmas story is about the poor and needy. “We have a very clear picture about the whole thing,” Sterrett said. “But the truth is Mary and Joseph were homeless. She gave birth to Jesus in a barn. This image captures the essence of a Christmas story because you cannot get any poorer than that.” There’s no evidence that Jesus was born in a barn.

Pat Nichols, writing for The Berkshire Eagle (Pittsfield, MA), concludes, “At the core, the story of Christmas is about a homeless couple about to have a baby. It is a story about poverty that most of us never experience, people with little more than they carry on their backs and a donkey to provide transportation.”⁵

Have these people ever read the Bible? The Christmas story is set during a time of government control, high taxation, and political oppression (what we would be getting more of if Hillary had been elected in 2016).

 … Politicians and social critics are quick to quote and misquote the Bible when they can twist its message to support their quirky and dangerous political views.

When conservatives appeal to the Bible, we hear the inevitable “separation of church and state,” “you can’t impose your morality on other people,” “religion and politics don’t mix.” But they are quick to impose their distorted view of biblical morality on the rest of us through the power of civil government.

The Advent story, in addition to being a demonstration of God’s love toward sinners, is also about how taxes hurt the poor and government decrees can turn productive families into the disenfranchised by enacting and enforcing counterproductive laws.

Kitten in the Breadbasket

My parents' 3-month-old cat
joins us for Christmas dinner…

Merry Christmas, everybody!