Bookworm Room

Conservatives deal with facts and reach conclusions; liberals have conclusions and sell them as facts.

The Ever Greater Outrageous Outrage of the Progressive Left

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If you disagree with me, that means that you are evil incarnate, demonic and deplorable, and that you need to be punished, killed figuratively in the public square if not literally.

No, that is not my personal belief.  But I think it is certainly what many on the left side of the aisle believe and it is reaching a crescendo.  This today from Eric Erickson regarding the progressive left’s very selective outrageously outrageous outrage over separating children from parents at the border while the parents are being processed:

I was opposed when Barack Obama was doing this, but all these people comparing Trump to Hitler were perfectly fine with it then. The problem now is that the left has decided violence against the policy is moral because they have determined the policy is immoral. They have released a horde of angry young fascists to go after government employees and cabinet secretaries. This is as wrong as the policy of separating families, if not more so, before the separation of families is a policy with which Democrats themselves were once okay.

For those who thought James Hodgkinson, who attempted a mass assassination of Republican members of Congress, was an anomaly, it looks more and more like Hodgkinson was a starting point to something violent. “Democratic” socialists stormed a restaurant in Washington to disrupt dinner until the Secretary of Homeland Security fled. Hollywood celebrities have encouraged the kidnapping and raping of the President’s child and his press secretary’s child. Government employees who work for Homeland Security have seen their home addresses put on the internet and, in some cases, pictures of their family displayed by activists intent on harming them.

President Trump engaging in a zero tolerance policy and separating all parents from their children at the border was not normal and was yesterday reversed. But the left is more and more normalizing violence and harassment against their political opponents and justifying it with the language of morality. What should not be normal is becoming normal, and that is a dangerous game. This will not end well for anyone. Violent extremists on the left, including Hollywood celebrities, are only going to emboldened more James Hodgkinsons. It is going to happen. And the condemnation from the left will become more and more faint as it does. They have decided the President and his supporters get what they deserve.

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A Small Victory In The (Cake) War On The Judeo-Christian Religion

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The Masterpiece Cakeshop decision is a small speed bump in the progressive’s war on religion, as well as a roadmap for the future.

 

The progressive attempt to use “gay rights” as a cudgel to destroy the Judeo-Christian religions in this country hit a very small speed bump today with the Supreme Court decision in Masterpiece Cakeshop, Ltd. v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission.  The Court held that Colorado had impermissibly denied a bakers right to free exercise of religion.  Most media are describing the decision as “narrow.”  It was a 7-2 decision, with only the most liberal justices, Sotomayer and Ginsburg, dissenting.  So it was not a narrow decision in that sense.

The decision is “narrow” in the sense that the opinion is closely tailored to the unique facts of the case.  The majority opinion was written by that budding gay romance novelist Justice Kennedy – the same man who has authored every Supreme Court decision finding for homosexuality and, usually, against religion since 1996 (Romer (Equal Protection clause applies to homosexuals) Lawrence (religion cannot be used as a basis for laws), Windsor (striking down the Defense of Marriage Act), and Obergefell (creating a right to gay marriage out of whole cloth)). His opinion is anything but a clear vindication of the Judeo Christian right of religious conscience.  Almost to the contrary, Kennedy’s opinion is nothing more than a warning to progressives that, if you are going to war on Christianity, hide your anti-religious bias.

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The NFL Knee Battle : A Yuge Wager In The Culture War (Edited & Updated With An Op-ed By A Black U.S. Army Officer)

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With 1/5 of the NFL having doubled down on Marxist racism, we are witnessing its bet that, in the culture war, patriotic Americans will take a knee.

NFL players take a kneeBy interjecting radical black Marxist/progressive politics into the NFL, the progressive left has just accepted — and indeed, doubled down — in a huge gamble in the culture wars.  While half of the nation already buys into the poison the progs are selling, the other half has never been faced with the choice of accepting white guilt and pleading guilty to racism (just by being a non-black American) in order to continue to watch NFL games.  The means of voting will be by free market economics — spending dollars at a stadium gate or tuning in to watch the games.

Just to recount the contours of this wager and how it came about: last year, back-up QB Colin Kaepernick (2016 salary $11 million+) began taking a knee to protest all of the horrible racism he and his fellow blacks were being subject to in this country.  It caused enough heart burn even in San Francisco, the prog capital of America, that he was let go by the Forty-Niners.  And Kapernick has been radioactive since; no team has been willing to sign him.  (2017 salary $0).  As Giants co-owner John Mara explained when it was reported that the Giants considered signing Kaepernick:

“All my years being in the league, I never received more emotional mail from people than I did about that issue,” Mara told TheMMQB.com’s Jenny Vrentas. “If any of your players ever do that, we are never coming to another Giants game. It wasn’t one or two letters. It was a lot. It’s an emotional, emotional issue for a lot of people, moreso than any other issue I’ve run into.”

A week ago, basketball’s Stephen Curry (2017 salary $34 million) made noises about not accepting a White House invitation, ostensibly because President Trump is racist.  Trump responded to Curry by withdrawing the White House invitation.  Also in the past few weeks, the media reported that “[a] group of NFL players has asked Commissioner Roger Goodell for a month dedicated to social activism in a letter . . . they titled,  “Player Activism for Racial Equality and Criminal Justice Reform.”  Kneeling is not enough for them.

Then a few days ago in a speech in Alabama, Trump laid down the wager, so to speak:

When people like yourselves turn on television and you see those people taking the knee when they are playing our great national anthem – the only thing you could do better is if you see it, even if it’s one player, leave the stadium. I guarantee things will stop. . . .

Wouldn’t you love to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, “Get that son of a bitch off the field right now. He is fired.”

And over the past few days, many players and several teams in the NFL accepted the wager.  A combined total of 23% of all NFL players including the Ravens, Seahawks and Steelers (less former Army Captain Alejandro Villanueva) in toto, either took a knee during the anthem or stayed off the field while it was being played. (Villaneuva has since apologized for standing for the flag instead of standing with his teammates, while the Steelers, after the fact, contend that they stayed in the locker room, not as a statement about the flag, but in an effort to reset matters to 2008, when teams appeared only after the national anthem was played.) [Read more…]

Bookworm Beat 6/19/2017: Special Counsels, Fracking and More

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A roll up for today to fill the void of Ms. BWR’s absence.  The picture comes from People’s Cube and their latest magazine offering

Comey, Trump, the Justice Dept. and Special Counsel

Victor Davis Hanson, writing at American Greatness, gives an excellent summation of the progressive jihad aimed at toppling President Trump:

In every single week of the Trump presidency, the investigators and attorneys of FBI Director James Comey or, subsequently, of special counsel Robert Mueller, have leaked information that President Donald Trump was under investigation for either colluding with the Russians or obstructing justice—allegations so far without any substantiating evidence.

In the case of Comey, we now know that his office or sympathetic third-parties leaked to the press false stories that Trump was under FBI investigation at precisely the time that the careerist Comey was privately reassuring the president himself that he was in fact not being investigated.

 The appointment of Mueller was a concession to opposition demands that Trump appoint a Lawrence Walsh-type Special Prosecutor. The Comey-Mueller investigations and leaks occur simultaneously with House Intelligence member Adam Schiff’s passive-aggressive and often pompous announcements of evidence of Russian collusion—including raising the specter of a Grand Jury investigation—that are never followed by any evidence.

Since January 2017, the Congress ceased being a legislative body. It is now a Star-chamber court determined to decapitate the presidency.

Never in the history of the republic have there been so many legislative and political simultaneous efforts to 1) sabotage the Electoral College, 2) sue to overturn the presidential vote in key swing states, 3) boycott the Inauguration, 4) systematically block presidential appointments, 5) surveille, unmask, and leak classified or privileged information about the elected president, 6) nullify federal law at the state and local level, 7) sue to remove the president by invoking the Emoluments Clause, 8) declare Trump unfit under the 25th Amendments, 9) demand recusals from his top aides, 10) cherry-pick sympathetic judges to block presidential executive orders, 11) have a prior administration’s residual appointees subvert their successor, and 12) promise impending impeachment.

 And that is only the political effort to remove the president. . . .

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Grade A Horse Manure. Incitement To Violence Is Not A Bipartisan Problem

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After a Bernie bro tried to massacre Republicans yesterday, the NYT ran with the theme that American politics has become too “vicious” and that both sides are at fault.  The MSM are pushing that theme throughout our nation today.  Utter.  Pure. Horse. Manure.

The sole attempt in any of these stories to provide an example of conservative incitement resulting in aggravated violence on the right is the NYT citing to Sarah Palin’s map that, in 2010, targeted Congressional districts.  The NYT claimed at the time – and the other day – that Palin incited a paranoid schizophrenic to shoot Gabby Giffords.  Palin has rightly visited a lawyer to explore a lawsuit for defamation.  The reality is that the worst incitement conservatives have done over the past decade has been to incite Tea Party rally attendees to pick up their trash.

Most other media organizations are simply asserting this is a bipartisan issue without bothering to justify that statement with facts.  Fox news – a centrist organization in their hard news reporting – reports that “lawmakers said afterward that hateful rhetoric has been on the rise on both sides . . .”  I’d love to know the Republican lawmaker who said that.  Regardless, the WSJ’s Peggy Noonan bemoans the “polarization” of our politics.  Really?

Stephen Stromberg, a Wapo editorial writer, does a variation on the theme.  Rather than point to specific conservative incitement, he calls the Bernie bro attempted massacre of Republican Congresscritters “an attack on all of us,” then justifies the progressive rage:

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A Descent Into Progressive, Racial, Post-Modern Madness

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Below, Joe Rogan does a superb interview of Bret Weinstein, the Evergreen College professor at the center of more than one racially charged event playing out on his campus, where victim studies students and faculty are pushing radical agendas founded upon a rejection of the Enlightenment values and the concept of objective facts.  They would make of their victimhood a kind of WMD, impervious to factual challenge and sufficient to destroy any who would stand in the way of their very dark agenda.

Prof. Weinstein describes himself as firmly “progressive.”  He is sorely deluded.  It becomes quickly apparent that he suffers no “white guilt,” he is not hobbled by buying into “white privilege,” and he aspires to the same goal Martin Luther King Jr. articulated in his 1964 “I have a dream” speech — to live in a nation where people are “not . . . judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”  It is hard to imagine something more at odds with the victims’ movements in progressive ideology today, where skin color, gender and sexuality are used to wholly define people, irrespective of their character.

This interview is important.  One, Prof. Weinstein’s situation is hardly unique.  The same radical agenda we see impacting the Prof. at Evergreen is playing out across campuses throughout the U.S., including the Ivy League schools.  Two, these movements are bleeding into the real world with very bad consequences for society.  The Black Lives Matter movement, the war on men on college campuses, the war on Christianity, capitalism, our history . . . and I could go on and on.  Three, Prof. Weinstein is very articulate in highlighting these issues as he discusses his problems on the Evergreen campus.  This is a very long interview.  It is worth every minute to watch.

Learning to love the brilliant and controversial Milo Yiannopoulos *UPDATED*

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Milo Yiannopoulos

[And timing is everything. The day after I wrote an encomium to Milo, who speaks forcefully about (among other things) gender dysphoria and the danger to children in bathrooms, PJ Media claims he supports gay pedophilia — or, at least, being a provocateur, provocatively says things he implies he does. Milo is certainly firm in his outrage against the accusation. His defense makes sense to me, especially given how familiar I am with gay culture thanks to growing up and working in SF. This new data point doesn’t change the main points below. Here’s the deal: gay culture is different and one of Milo’s strengths is that he says America should not subordinate itself to gay culture.]

UPDATE: Milo seems to have been destroyed. Despite his books status as a best seller, Simon & Schuster has dumped it. Breitbart is silent about him.

As best as I can tell, thanks to Stephen Green’s research, these are the two worst things Milo said that would lead to an accusation that he’s a pedophile:

Milo’s money quote, which was edited out of the video, is this:

The law is probably about right, that’s probably roughly the right age. I think it’s probably about okay, but there are certainly people who are capable of giving consent at a younger age, I certainly consider myself to be one of them, people who are sexually active younger. I think it particularly happens in the gay world by the way. In many cases actually those relationships with older men…This is one reason I hate the left. This stupid one size fits all policing of culture. (People speak over each other). This sort of arbitrary and oppressive idea of consent, which totally destroys you know understanding that many of us have. The complexities and subtleties and complicated nature of many relationships. You know, people are messy and complex. In the homosexual world particularly. Some of those relationships between younger boys and older men, the sort of coming of age relationships, the relationships in which those older men help those young boys to discover who they are, and give them security and safety and provide them with love and a reliable and sort of a rock where they can’t speak to their parents. Some of those relationships are the most -”

And this was edited out as well:

“You’re misunderstanding what pedophilia means. Pedophilia is not a sexual attraction to somebody 13-years-old who is sexually mature. Pedophilia is attraction to children who have not reached puberty. Pedophilia is attraction to people who don’t have functioning sex organs yet. Who have not gone through puberty… That’s not what we are talking about. You don’t understand what pedophilia is if you are saying I’m defending it because I’m certainly not.”

In other words, Milo never said that he had sex with little boys or that he intended to do so. What he did say was that older gay men often introduce younger gay men into sex. I certainly saw that enough when I was living and working in San Francisco. It was too common practice for sexually confused 20 or 22 year olds to be taken under the wing of a 30 or 40 year old gay man. It was not pedophilia, it was gay mentoring and it’s obvious that Milo is referring to that practice.

As for Milo’s comment about pedophilia being a perverted passion for children who have not gone through adolescence, he’s correct. He’s also correct that children mature at different speeds. In my neighborhood, one kid at 12 had a nascent mustache and a voice deeper than my husband’s. Another finally got his growth spurt when he went off to college, although he’s still not shaving. Having said that, Milo made it clear that, given this variability, he has no problem with the current age of consent laws.

It’s very disturbing that this take-down of one of the most effective voices for conservativism came from the #NeverTrump crowd having a petty pique fit over Milo’s invitation to CPAC. Having said that, the information was out there, and if the renegade right hadn’t published it, the Lefties would have and in a way that was even worse.

I’ve heard from friends that Lefties are already piling on to this man who did nothing wrong other than making observations about the realities of the gay world and the physical maturation process. More than that, I find it incredibly ironic that this tut-tutting comes from the Left. These are the same people who demand that condoms, birth control advice, and abortion information should be given to kids as young as 11 in their schools, and who insist that a child can get an abortion with an adult okaying it something that is, of course, the best possible way for a true pedophile to destroy any genetic evidence of his crime.

And by the way, if this seems familiar, you’re seeing the same takedown that the Left and #NeverTrumpers did to Trump. He observed accurately enough that, if you’re rich and famous, women will indeed let you do anything to them. He did not say that he took advantage of this reality, yet he was instantly called a molester and subjected to the harshest castigation. And of course, most of the screaming came from the same side that was fine with Clinton raping women and using the pressure of his fame and power to coerce a women young enough to be his daughter to engage in a sordid workplace affair.

This whole thing sickens and disgusts me. We are in a political sewer in our country.

And now back to my original post.

Milo Yiannopoulos — rude and crude, but also smart, brave, funny, and bitchy. He’s a necessary counterweight to Progressives’ lethal Political Correctness.

milo yiannopoulosWith a swirling debate about whether Milo Yiannopoulos will be a keynote speaker at this year’s CPAC, I have a confession: I didn’t like Milo Yiannopoulos when he first popped up on my radar. At a first, superficial, glance, he was everything that rubs me the wrong way: His humor seemed to rely on crude insults and too often to trade in racial and religious stereotypes, he relentlessly leveraged those insults and stereotypes into media face time which seemed to drag conservativism down not build it up, and he had that whole drag queen vibe. I have issues, which I’ll explain in a few minutes, with the drag queen vibe. Having reached these conclusions, I dismissed Milo. There. Done.

The thing is, if you’re a conservative, Milo is not a person who can be — or should be — dismissed. I first got an inkling of this from my teenage son. Sick and tired of being on the receiving end of misanthropic third-wave feminist tirades at his school (which cannot be challenged because doing so is an unacceptable manifestation of cisgender male privilege and domination), he headed to the internet looking for rebuttals to these feminists. Even if the school’s uber-liberal environment bans voicing the rebuttals, at least he had the comfort of knowing they were there.

My son’s research led him directly to Steve Crowder and Milo. He appreciated Crowder’s unflinching, and almost invariably funny, take Islam’s issues with the West and he was completely awed at Milo’s ability to (in my son’s words) “destroy those feminazis.” My son therefore insisted I watch Milo’s epic feminazi destruction in action. I agreed, somewhat worried that I’d get one of Milo’s unpleasant, uber-queenie, racist, shock-value moments. Instead, I got this:

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The Bookworm Beat 1-10: Let the Games Begin

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gladiatorial-combatThe Hunger Games:  DC Edition

The confirmation hearing for Jeff Sessions began today.  It was largely without fireworks — perhaps because Senator Sessions is not the evil, racist, misogynist, card carrying Grand Cyclops of the local Mobile chapter of the KKK (actually I think Sessions had him executed — I wait for the progs to charge that was to eliminate the competition) that the deeply disingenuous progressive left wants to portray him as.  But as Powerline opines, Sen. Sessions appears to be “breezing through” the hearing.

The most pointed questioning of Senator Sessions, somehow appropriately, came from the one-time comedian Al Franken.  Also embedded below is an interesting analysis of the hearing from Fox’s The Five, and a bonus video of Ted Cruz reminding us the progs on the Judiciary Committee that they are only now discovering concern for fair and equal application of the laws after a collective eight year coma:

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Oh Joy. A Political Lecture From Meryl Streep At The Golden Globes

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meryl-streep-golden-globes-speechThe Golden Globes were held last night.  Meryl Streep used her time on stage at the ceremony to launch into a political lecture, attacking Trump and condemning the evil, unwashed masses who voted for him.  Not surprisingly, the Democrats and the MSM (but I repeat myself) are wetting themselves in glee.  You can find the text of her speech here.

She begins her speech with a crie de coeur, playing the victim card.  “You, and all of us in this room right now, belong to the most vilified segment of American society.”

Wha — What?!?

You have got to be kidding.

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The Bookworm Beat 12/30 — Lame Duck Quaking Edition

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lame-duck-fuseNew Year’s Concern Trolling

Kurt Schlichter, concerned for the future well being of our nation’s lefties, has published Some New Years Resolutions For Our Progressive Pals.  Among his noteworthy suggestions:

Leverage Hollywood Star Power: As you know, all normal Americans believe Hollywood stars are powerful role models who we should emulate in our personal and political lives. Want to energize new voters? Well, those tatt-ridden, gangsta rap stars supporting Hillary sure made me want to bust a move – right into the voting booth to elect some Dems! And don’t forget to have Lena Dunham go out there to lecture us about her personal insights on politics and childcare. She’s America’s preeminent feminist icon – I know that pic of her lolling on a beach dressed as a manatee made me reconsider my standards of female beauty. After that, I’ll never again deploy my male gaze!

Progressive Governance

One of the theories regarding fifty sovereign states is that each gets to act as a laboratory, trying out laws and policies that they believe will best serve their state.  California, taking full advantage, is already on the highway to fiscal hell given their radical climate change agenda recently signed into law.  But now they have gone into true pathological altruism with their latest, a children’s bill of rights that invites all sorts of big government mischief on one hand, and worse by far, decriminalizing child prostitution.  While the law seems aimed at not disadvantaging children and teens with a permanent criminal record, the bill also limits the ability of police to detain child prostitutes.  Waiting for the law of unintended consequences to hit in 3…2….1…

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The Progressive / Socialist Left Throws Down The Gauntlet

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gandalf-gauntletThe good news — Ms. BWR should be back to her normal posting by tomorrow.  The bad news — I still have one post left to put up today before resuming my seat.  Thus without further adieu . . .

The progressive movement is totalitarian.  It took a huge hit in November right on the eve of permanent victory.  Obama, by his unconstitutional Executive actions and his weaponization of the regulatory bureaucracies — and supported between John Roberts and the activist progressive wing of the Supreme Court — had taken this nation past the brink of a Constitutional crisis.  All that remained was for Hillary to push it to the point of no return.  And going forward, if Trump fails, the progs well know that they will still have that opportunity.

As an originalist law professor opined today, “I can’t help but wonder whether the many millions who voted for President-elect Trump also understood what the legal academy had all but forgotten, that what was at stake in the past election was nothing less than the rule of law and self-government itself.”  He’s dead on point.

Had Hildabeast been elected, all of Obama’s acts would have been validated.  Progressives would have attained dominance in America that would outlast our lifetimes, given the changes they would have de facto made to our laws and what little remains of our Constitutional system of checks and balances.  Congress would have been an afterthought, with progressives ruling through the bureaucracy, by Executive Orders and through the Courts.  Ever more taxpayer money would have been funneled to cronies, laundered through Democrat organizations such as public sector unions and Planned Parenthood, and sent to the EU for “global warming,” the biggest socialist gambit / theft ever conceived.  The Supreme Court, once in solid control of the progressive left for decades to come, would have reliably rendered political decisions to advance progressive goals.  Conservatives and the religious would have been fully pushed out of the public square, their voices effectively silenced.  So to say that we dodged a bullet a little over a week ago is the mother of all understatements.

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Sanctuaries & Filibusters

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new-sactuary-city-mapThe mayors of twelve major cities have, since the election, announced that they will be “sanctuary cities” for illegal aliens and, in one form or another, refuse to cooperate in the enforcement of federal immigration law.  This is a direct challenge to our Constitutional system, and one no progressive would tolerate if, say, it were conservatives refusing to comply with homosexual marriage.  Actually, the twelve “sanctuary cities” are  the tip of the iceberg, as Victor Davis Hanson explained when opining on the nihilism of this “sanctuary” movement some months ago:

There are an estimated 300 or so jurisdictions — entire states, counties, cities, and municipalities — that since the early 1980s have enacted “sanctuary city” laws, forbidding full enforcement of federal immigration law within their jurisdictions.  Most of these entities are controlled by Democrats in general and liberals in particular. . . . .

If rule of law means anything, then this cannot be allowed to stand.  Unfortunately, while there are some acts that Trump can take unilaterally, his hands are surprisingly tied.  Democrats in the Senate, where Republicans do not hold a filibuster proof majority, have repeatedly refused to authorize the withholding of any funds from cities, etc., because of their failure to cooperate on matters of immigration law enforcement.

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Is Steve Bannon Proof Of Evil Anti-Semitism At The Heart Of Donald Trump’s Inner Circle?

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satan-threeDonald Trump just named Satan’s racist, anti-Semitic second cousin, Steve Bannon, to his cabinet.  Proof, you ask?  Why, just take a look at just a handful of these headlines:

CNN:  White nationalists see advocate in Steve Bannon who will hold Trump to his campaign promises.

Forward.com:  Will Steve Bannon Be The Anti-Semitic Firebrand In Trump’s Inner Circle?

Salon.com:  Steve Bannon runs an anti-Semitic website, is a misogynist and will be one of Donald Trump’s senior advisors

Slate.com:  How Some Outlets Are Avoiding Calling Steve Bannon A Racist Propagandist

Tablet:  Trump’s appointment of Stephen Bannon is a Call to Arms for American Jews and Muslims

The Guardian:  Steve Bannon appointment of ‘white nationalist’ must be reversed, critics declare

NPR:  Ex-Breitbart Executive Brings Alt-Right Ties To The White House

Wow, this joker Steve Bannon must be evil with a capital “E.”

Let’s deal first with the charge that Bannon is an anti-semite.  It has two factual bases.  The first is that Steve Bannon’s ex wife made unsubstantiated charges in her divorce pleadings — charges that Bannon has denied.  This from The Hill:

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Progressives & The Supreme Court

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scaliaDahlia Lithwick, Slate’s correspondent for the courts and law, is apoplectic that the right did not consider Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland (see Ms. BWR’s analysis here)  for the Supreme Court, and now will never do so.  She wrote about this recently in Republicans Stole the Supreme Court. Ms. Lithwick cites no legal or Constitutional authority to support her charge of nefarious action. Her crie de coeur is based solely on notions of fairness – something always important to progressives, but only when it can be argued favorably for them.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell refused to schedule hearings on Garland, stating that such an appointment should be a decision for the next President. That was a political decision that the American people just recently had an opportunity pass judgment upon.

I believe it was no less a personage than President Obama who, days after his victory in 2009, told America “elections have consequences.” Indeed, he said it as justification for ramming a series of acts through Congress without even the slightest attempt to reach across the aisle. I recall exactly zero progs complaining about the unfairness of that in 2009, nor the trickery Harry Reid used to pass the Affordable Healthcare Act later in the year so that it would not have to undergo a final vote in the Senate — a vote the progs would surely have lost after a Republican was elected to fill Ted Kennedy’s vacant seat. Nor did I hear a peep from the left in 2013 when Harry Reid overturned the Senate’s filibuster rule – a rule whose history dated back to 1806 – in order to pack the DC Court of Appeals with progressive judges.

Ms. Lithwick’s histrionics aside, the fact that control of the Supreme Court was at issue was dominant in the election. A nationwide exit poll shows that 61% of voters stated that the Supreme Court nomination was important, or most important, in their decision to vote. The people have spoken.

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Odds, Ends and Civil War

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Bill O’Reilly has his moments of significant insight.  I think his “Talking Points Memo” tonight, Is a civil war brewing in the USA, was one of those moments.  I post it here as it directly relates to Ms. BWR’s post immediately below, identifying the under 40 crowd as being the toxic byproducts of education by radical progressives at odds with capitalism, democracy and the freedoms guaranteed under the Constitution.  Likewise, it relates to my Trumpkins post below that.