Nancy's Favorite Verse : That's Not Even in the Bible

After a brief, self-deprecating introduction, Speaker Pelosi launched into the religious pandering portion of her speech. Saying, "I can't find it in the Bible" even though she claims she keeps "reading and reading," Pelosi shared her favorite verse with an audience that consisted mainly of Christian college and university presidents and administrators. The verse, which "is supposed to be in Isaiah," according to the speaker, is, "To minister to the needs of God’s creation is an act of worship. To ignore those needs is to dishonor the God who made us."

While I appreciate the quote's sentiment, it's not a Bible verse. And I would remiss if I didn't point out that Speaker Nancy Pelosi utterly ignores that sentiment
    when it comes to God's creation still living inside their mother's womb  . 

So, the irony of a professing Roman Catholic not knowing her Bible to the point of insisting a quote not from the Bible is her favorite verse gives way to the irony of a Catholic failing to even adhere to the teaching of her favorite verse-yet-not-a-verse. 

Sadly, those ironies are the norm in a Democratic Party that believes that religion can be whatever they want it to be as long as it gets them votes.

SOTU Donald Chooses GREATNESS: Shouldn't the Dems

ROGER KIMBALL:

Donald Trump chooses greatness — and so should we.

“Shouldn’t Democrats as well as Republicans rejoice that unemployment is at a generational low and that Black and Hispanic unemployment is at an historic low?

Shouldn’t Democrats as well as Republicans rejoice that economic growth, well north of three percent, is at a level declared impossible under the anemic leadership of Barack Obama?

Shouldn’t Democrats as well as Republicans rejoice that manufacturing is flooding back to the US?

Shouldn’t Democrats as well as Republicans rejoice at the president’s attack on the regulatory state, the monstrous regime of Title IX fanatics, and other efforts to transform ‘the land of the free and the home of the brave’ into a safe-space chest-less pajama boys?

Shouldn’t Democrats as well as Republicans rejoice that wages are rising, that inflation is stable, that the stock market is booming?

Shouldn’t Democrats as well as Republicans rejoice that 2018 marked the first time in 46 years that that cost of prescription drugs dropped?

Shouldn’t Democrats as well as Republicans rejoice that the president is endeavoring to rationalize our immigration policy and enforce our immigration laws?

Shouldn’t Democrats as well as Republicans rejoice that the president has made historic inroads in negotiations with pariah states like North Korea and adversarial states like China?

Shouldn’t Democrats as well as Republicans rejoice in his rebuilding and modernizing the US military? 

The answer to all these questions is ‘Yes, they should.’ But will they?”


Outlook not so good.

158Posted at 11:05 pm by Glenn Reynolds   

A

MS13 Murder in AOC District

Murder in AOC Congressional District

It’s Time to Get Real About Our Enemies

It’s Time to Get Real About Our Enemies

By Karin McQuillan| January 29th, 2019

Out here in Realville, to borrow from Rush Limbaugh, Donald Trump’s supporters could be very happy. For ordinary Americans—from the top to the bottom of the economic spectrum, black, white and brown—President Trump has brought good times. Except for the screeching drama queens in the Democratic Party and among #TheResistance—and our serious mass immigration problems—life is good and the country is secure.

In a sensible world, we would be basking in this period of unprecedented prosperity and peace.

The country should be unified and full of bonhomie. The whole world has advanced to inconceivable levels of global peace and prosperity. Life is easier, healthier, and more comfortable for more people than ever before in history.

Socialism and Communism—those tragic sisters from the 1800s that led to the greatest human suffering, poverty, and mass starvation in human history—should barely be remembered.

Instead, they are ascendant in the Democrat Party. Cultural Marxism and socialism are the new Democrat chic. The entire country is in an uproar. Everyone feels a sense of doom and gloom. 

There is more to #TheResistance than the political panic inspired by the likes of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.). They are riding a monster not of their own making. In order to survive, they are providing cover and normalization of something not at all normal.

Conservative pundits have latched onto the fun words “hysteria” and “Trump derangement syndrome.” These words, though cute, mask the seriousness of what is actually happening. The mass hysteria is a goal and a tactic, whipped up by cool-headed, purposeful people. It was not caused by Trump’s tweets or orange coloring. It has everything to do with a long game to change our country. Things are so weird in American politics on purpose or, rather, for purposes—radical left purposes.

The exaggerated, weird loathing of President Trump and all Republicans—that flies in the face of our peace and prosperity—is the daily work of thousands of professional leftists. #TheResistance is their dream come true, as in Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father.

Their plan has long been public. As Saul Alinsky taught Obama, “[An] organizer must shake up the prevailing patterns of their lives—agitate, create disenchantment and discontent with the current values, to produce, if not a passion for change, at least a passive, affirmative, non-challenging climate. [You must] fan the embers of hopelessness into a flame of fight.”

The tactics of the Trump #Resistance were developed decades ago by Leninists Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven along with Alinksy. They were taught by Barack Obama as both a community organizer and a University of Chicago lecturer. There’s a photo of Obama standing before a blackboard teaching Alinsky. Obama never taught constitutional law—he taught three courses on “race, rights and gender,” exploring the legal basis for reparations, the history of lynching and the failure of the Bill of Rights to redistribute wealth.

The socialist plan to create anger and chaos to undermine America is happening all around us right now. Yet we ignore it. It doesn’t fit into our image of America. It comes with an aura of unreality. We’d rather make snarky comments about snowflakes and peoples’ heads exploding than get serious.

You can’t defeat an implacable enemy you refuse to name or wilfully underestimate.

This is not to say there is nothing new here. The anger, chaos, and activist pressure, the corruption of the FBI and Department of Justice, are new in our lifetimes. Our parents and grandparents saw them in the 1930s with Communist and Fascist agitprop and infiltration of key institutions. We seem helplessly naïve, not understanding what has hit us.

Today, the American Left is empowered with unprecedented funding. Soros is only one among a number of radical billionaires, from the Green promoter Tom Steyer, to the Pritzkers of Chicago (Hyatt Hotel heirs), who launched Obama’s U.S. Senate run. One of the Pritzkers is transsexual and a Democrat mega-donor. ActBlue raised well over $1 billion dollars for Democrats in 2018.

Conservative groups aren’t even playing the same game. The Koch brothers don’t make the list of top 50 “heavy hitters’”political donors in the country, compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics—only two out of the top 20 give to Republicans. David Horowitz and Jacob Laksin in their book The New Leviathan, count 122 leftist foundations worth $104 billion. Conservative political groups? Eighty-six in the whole country, worth a measly $10 billion.

Radicalized progressive groups also get federal funding not given to conservative groups, under the guise of being apolitical nonprofits for health care, poverty programs, the environment and even for helping illegal aliens.

Federal support for radicalism exploded under Obama. He illegally transferred money from the U.S. Treasury—some $500 million, not small seed money—and distributed it among leftist nonprofits like La Raza, to create havoc in the name of social justice. His own organization, Organize for Action, for which he raised money as president, has a database of 2 million volunteers.

We are talking about billions of dollars in total and tens of thousands of professional activists—or more. That pays for a lot of agitation, lawsuits, demonstrations, and “resistance.” That’s why the country is in turmoil.

America is in trouble. We never understood that a community organizer is not a feel-good social worker looking to help people. (I was a social worker, so I know.) A community organizer is a paid agitator, out to make poor people so mad they will storm the barricades and destroy the system. They don’t respect political norms. They are out to smash norms and politicize everything.

Conservatives are appalled that progressives have politicized every area of life, from fast food chicken and football to wedding cakes and shaving. These are classic leftist campaigns. Professional agitators are trained shake-down artists who go where the money and power is easiest to grab—American business.

Corporate shakedowns were perfected by race hustlers after federal dollars corrupted the Civil Rights Movement. Agitators learned they could fund themselves by threatening banks and others with bad publicity and lawsuits for alleged racism. Now they target corporations as pure power moves in the culture wars.

Just because it’s on Twitter, doesn’t mean corporate shaming is spontaneous. Twitter does make leftist campaigns more effective, but it is the same old agitprop.

Seven years ago, way before Trump, the Color of Change, a “social justice” nonprofit headed by self-proclaimed Marxist/Maoist communist and former Obama “green jobs czar” Van Jones, launched a “name-and-shame campaign,” against corporations which support public-private partnerships. The tactic is hard-core American Marxism.

Trump could shave his head and stop tweeting tomorrow, stop counterpunching, start acting like the milquetoast Romney and it would make not an ounce of difference.

Out here in Realville, we better get real about our opponents. They are not well-meaning liberals. They are dangerous. The target is not Trump. They are out to get all of us.

Photo Credit: Philip Pacheco/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

Shout Your Abortion !!!

On Wednesday, in a shocking revelation about the nature of the pro-abortion Democratic Party, Virginia Governor Ralph Northam, a supposed moderate, endorsed the notion that a woman should be able to let an infant, born alive, die on the table if she decided she did not want the child.

Appearing on WTOP’s Ask The Governor, Northam was asked whether he supported a Virginia legislator’s statement that Virginia Democrats’ proposed legislation would permit abortion for a woman in labor. He stated:

This is why decisions such as this should be made by providers, physicians, and the mothers and fathers that are involved. When we talk about third-trimester abortions, these are done with the consent of the mother, with the consent of physicians, more than one physician by the way, and it’s done in cases where there may be severe deformities, there may be a fetus which is non-viable. So in this particular example, if the mother is in labor, I can tell you exactly what would happen, the infant would be delivered, the infant would be kept comfortable, the infant would be resuscitated if this is what the mother and the family desired, and then a discussion would ensue between the physician and the mother.

This is pure infanticide. It's also an argument for eugenic murder (see his comments about deformities). Northam is specifically talking about delivering an infant alive and then asking the mother whether the infant should live or not. This is not an argument about the morning-after pill. It’s not an argument over whether a fetus feels pain. This is a statement that a fully-formed infant, born alive, ought to be murdered if the mother says the infant ought to be murdered.

This is pure evil.

And yet this is the position of Democrats across the country. Northam was speaking about a bill proposed by Virginia House member Kathy Tran, which would legalize abortion up to birth. Tran had explained just yesterday that a woman should be able to opt for abortion as she is dilating for birth.

In New York, this is already the law – and Governor Andrew Cuomo (D-NY) celebrated that new law by lighting up state sites pink in honor of the killing of fully-formed infants. In Rhode Island, Governor Gina Raimondo (D-RI) has already signaled that she wishes to support a similar law.

Northam excuses his evil by stating that men shouldn’t be making these decisions – as though having male genitalia excuses the moral fecklessness necessary to stand by and watch the killing of a newborn baby. But this is no excuse, obviously. The Democrats have decided that the era of safe, legal, and rare is over – the era of “Shout Your Abortion” is here. And if that means dehumanizing already-born children, so be it.

Simply put, the American people do not deserve the care of a benevolent God if they embrace such evil.

The Real Deconstruction of the Administrative State

The Real Deconstruction of the Administrative State

By Ken Masugi| January 31st, 2019

I must see Marini!!!” My boss, Clarence Thomas, then chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, wrote that command in bold script across the first page of an essay by John Marini on how the deterioration of Congress led to the administrative state. The future Supreme Court justice was reading his work because he had asked me to recruit some additional staff, and I presented him with a sheaf of Marini’s publications.

When Thomas discussed Marini and me in his memoir, My Grandfather’s Son, he maintained that having hired us political theorists as speechwriters who functioned more as fellow seminar participants was a critical part of his constitutional education. Decades later, Justice Thomas would issue critical opinions on the administrative state.

Thomas and Marini are two counterrevolutionaries from vastly different backgrounds who see the same truths: What Thomas learned at the EEOC, on the Hill, in Yale Law School, and growing up Catholic under the firm hand of his remarkable grandfather in segregated Georgia and what Marini—who never had any professional connections to Washington, D.C. prior to his appointment at the EEOC—learned by reading great books and studying human nature led them to the same truths about the American republic.

While Justice Thomas writes about constitutional principles in his opinions, Marini produces incisive commentary, culminating in his just published book, Unmasking the Administrative State. He chronicles the collapse of constitutional government and the rise of the administrative state. Appeals to the Constitution are no longer salutary without the requisite citizen character to support the self-government upon which its forms depended.

Rejecting the Constitution
In various ways Marini exposes the demagoguery inherent in Franklin Roosevelt’s view that politics can relieve men of insecurity in life: “Necessitous men are not free men.” But could anyone but a god actually release men from necessity? The god of History, as articulated by its academic prophets and popularizing pundits and now worshiped by the presidents and partisans of both parties, claims such power. But does this god’s record merit our subordination of politics to him in exchange for this “gift”?

In rejecting this divine gift, former White House adviser Stephen K. Bannon spoke of the “deconstruction of the administrative state” as one of President Trump’s goals. But for Marini, the administrative state is not simply an agglomeration of bureaucracies, a congeries of despotic rules, or an inefficient mechanism: it is a rejection of the constitution that the citizen spirit of republican self-government requires for its perpetuation.

The administrative state reflects a mentality fostered by the modern university, living in the legal and other professions, in the leadership of the bureaucracies and prestigious institutions of modern life. As Tocqueville described the gentle or soft despotism of contemporary democracy, it smothers dissenting voices. Marini’s subject is the life and death and possible rebirth of democracy in America.

In the course of his explanation of the American founding, the powerful influence of modern theories of History, their clash in Progressivism, and the triumph of the security of the administrative state over the conflicts of constitutional government, he presents the improbable rise of Donald Trump: It may be that the reality show star Trump turns out to be the one who best knows the difference between truth and illusion in our age and is thus the Constitution’s best hope and even last protector. Trump speaks for ordinary citizen interests against those of the coastal elites and their intellectual boosters in the media and Washington, D.C. think-tanks.

This is not merely a cold academic treatise—as radio talk show host Mark Levin’s blurb states, “we must take heart.” Our love of country and our countrymen is what must propel us in the here and now. While appreciating the work of brilliant legal scholars such as Philip Hamburger, Marini unmasks the scandal at the center of today’s political crisis for the purpose of encouraging us to address it, not merely to study it.

The Politics of Budget ControlMarini illuminates the partial government shutdown of the last few weeks in the dispute over budgets and over border security. In his chapter on budgets, he writes,

It seems that both parties are in agreement insofar as they believe that the powers of the national government are unlimited. The Republicans deny any limitations on the power of government in terms of national security and foreign policy. The Democrats believe that government has unlimited power as regards domestic policy (emphasis in the original).

Thus, particular factious policies result in a general bipartisan rejection of the separation of powers—the arrangement that permits boldness and moderation within a constitutional order. The rejection of this constitutional principle means that all such appeals to the constitution that are made today are actually merely opportunistic attempts to game it. Bursts of indignation sometimes sweep aside prevailing policies for an attempt, again, to find the common good. Trump seized upon such a moment and made that prevailing (and righteous) indignation the center of his campaign.

By exaggerating the actual impact of a wall or barrier on border security, essential though it is, Trump may have overlooked the vice that is greater than illegal immigration: that immigrants, illegal or legal, and native-born Americans as well, fail to recognize they are part of a social compact of citizens mutually recognizing each other’s rights and duties and limiting the reach of government.

Immigrants, Marini argues in a chapter on immigration, should join in promoting the common good as citizens, not as members of identity groups. “America established the ground of political citizenship in the equal natural rights of man.” But the Left constructed the administrative state on the basis of group identities. Trump would blow up the left’s project by emphasizing “America First”—citizens over identity groups, a great America over tribal factions.

“A Thrilling Proposition”This taste of Marini’s approach leads to a feast of other suggestions about how to interpret American political history: Is the judiciary a protection against the administrative state or it now a part of it? Does Harvey Mansfield, who produced a magnificent edition of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America and extraordinary commentaries on Tocqueville, understand the “soft despotism” of democracies? Could it be that Nixon, not his enemies, was the real defender of the Constitution before and during the Watergate crisis?

These are just some of the fascinating questions Marini raises. They and other questions are all part of the larger, political question he leaves for his readers to ponder: whether Trump will be able to bring about a “political realignment, perhaps of a magnitude not seen since FDR.” For those who understand the stakes in the battle, it is a thrilling proposition. “On the other hand,” Marini reminds us, “there is no guarantee that Donald Trump can or will prevail against the organized forces that inhabit the administrative state.”

Marini’s daughter was born when Gorbachev visited Washington, D.C in 1987. When John left the hospital with his wife and newborn baby, a barricade began going up, walling off Gorby’s motorcade. He told a cop that no tyrant should keep a free man from taking his family home. Agreeing, the cop removed the barrier, and the three Marinis went home.

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Photo Credit: Claremont Institute 

Green Book

An article by Steve Williams, I Tried to Keep Hushing Him,  caught my eye today that brought me back to a movie Ginny and I saw a great movie this week; The Green Book

The movie is set in the early sixties when civil rights was coming to a head in America.
It's a "must watch" for our kids and grandkids - as it shows attitudes and behavior that were a part of the times.

 Read the article; see the movie.