Althouse: "It seems as though WaPo can't report this story without pushing the usual agenda, characterizing Republicans as bent on disenfranchising people."

WaPo "analyzes" Trump's voting commission.

Althouse Blog

To the federal judges in Seattle and Hawaii

LAW PROF JACOBSON ON IMMIGRATION RULING: LOWER COURT CHAOS SLAPPED DOWN BY EVEN LIBERAL SCOTUS JUSTICES

From last night's Tucker Carlson interview:

Q. I think we’re bordering on legal chaos [because of the action of the lower courts]. Am I wrong?

A. I describe what the Supreme Court did the other day as really a slap down to the lower courts. They issued this ruling on a preliminary basis, which basically said lower courts, what you did was wrong. And not only that, nine Justices, every single Justice of the Supreme Court said that. Now they said it in varying degrees….

Not a single Justice, not even Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the leading liberal light on the Court, was supportive of what the lower courts did. And that’s why I think this was a tremendous slap down. I hope the [lower] courts will learn their lesson from this, I’m not confident that they will ….

I don’t know if it’s legal chaos, but what the lower courts did was really pretty outrageous …. [The Supreme Court said] no, you cannot strip the presidency of its constitutional and statutory power to control who enters the country.”

Legal Insurrection

 

DILBERT AT HIS BEST:  WHY TRUMP'S TWEETS HAVE DESTROYED CIVILIZATION

One of my favorite lines, among many: "Trump is like a 'blind squirrel' who has just happened to find a nut 1,000 times in a row."

Scott Adams Blog

Time to do something radical

Survey: Pain patients overwhelmingly prefer medical marijuana over opioids

Though the survey, involving 2,897 medical cannabis patients, didn’t track actual drug use or efficacy, the findings fits with previous data. Decades of research suggest marijuana is effective for pain treatment. And recent studies have found that in states with medical marijuana availability, there are fewer opioid overdose deaths and doctors fill fewer opioid prescriptions.

Article

ALTHOUSE: WORD THAT DOES NOT APPEAR NOW ON CNN'S FRONT PAGE - RUSSIA

"The narrative has changed."

Althouse Blog

1964: Psychiatrists say Goldwater unfit to be president.  Goldwater sues for libel and wins.

The Goldwater Rule: Wikipedia

Project Veritas

CNN PRODUCER: "TRUMP VOTERS STUPID AS SH**. "

KELLYANE CONWAY "LOOKS LIKE SHE GOT HIT WITH A SHOVEL"

Project Veritas III

On this day in 1950

TRUMAN ORDERS U.S. FORCES TO KOREA

On this day in 1950, Democrat President Harry S. Truman ordered U.S. armed forces to South Korea to defend against an invasion by North Korea.  Truman also ordered the U.S. Air Force to bomb military targets in North Korea and directed the U.S. Navy to blockade the North Korean coast.  China responded by entering the war on the side of North Korea a few months later.  The war lasted three years before ending in a stalemate that exists to this day.  37,000 American boys were killed and over 100,000 were wounded. 7,800 Americans remain unaccounted for 67 years later.  Some estimate the cost of the war for all sides as high as $20 billion and claim that up to 5,000,000 civilians and soldiers were killed.

Charlie Hurt.  This is too good to edit.

Mad genius of Trump drives schoolmarms of political press crazy

Oh, the mad genius of Donald Trump!

On the cusp of one of the biggest victories of his administration, cracking down on illegal aliens who commit vicious crimes inside our country, President Trump took to Twitter.

“I heard poorly rated @Morning_Joe speaks badly of me (don’t watch anymore). Then how come low I.Q. Crazy Mika, along with Psycho Joe, came to Mar-a-Lago 3 nights in a row around New Year’s Eve, and insisted on joining me. She was bleeding badly from a face-lift. I said no!”

The only thing missing from this electronic presidential address was the Marine Band playing “Hail to the Chief.”

She was bleeding badly. Face-lift. Low I.Q. Psycho Joe.

It is all so delicious. Mercilessly inventive. Joyously vicious. Like an entire season of pro wrestling drama, all sewn up into two little Twitter messages.

The Trump presidency is a little like having a dog. Every day that passes, you love the dog more and more until it seems impossible to love her any more.

But — sadly — every day also brings that nagging dread that one day she will be gone, seven times sooner than she should. What will we do when it is all over? There will never be another dog like her (sad face).

Of course, the puritanical schoolmarms of the political press went absolutely bonkers over Mr. Trump’s broadside of their fellow travelers. They scolded him that his Twitter missives were beneath the office of the president.

Really, you mean like molesting an intern in the Oval Office? “Presidential” like that?

MSNBC — the afterthought cable channel that airs “Morning Joe” — responded on Twitter: “It’s a sad day for America when the president spends his time bullying, lying and spewing petty personal attacks instead of doing his job.”

But the funny thing about it is that nobody actually disproved anything that Mr. Trump alleged. Just like Russia and obstruction of justice and everything else, there is not one single shred of evidence that Mr. Trump is not 100 percent in the right.

“The Amazon Post” — the paper-of-record for Never Trumpers — rushed to the defense of Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough with a laughably illogical and twisted explanation.

“The notion that Brzezinski and Scarborough were desperate to hang out with Trump on New Year’s Eve but were rebuffed seems dubious, at best,” reporter Callum Borchers wrote on the paper’s website.

“For one thing, the New York Times spotted the co-hosts at Trump’s New Year’s Eve party at Mar-a-Lago.”

So, wait a minute? The proof that Mr. Trump is lying about Ms. Brzezinski and Mr. Scarborough slumming around Mar-a-Lago around New Year’s Eve is that — well — Ms. Brzezinski and Mr. Scarborough were slumming around Mar-a-Lago around New Year’s Eve?

Oof. Mr. Borchers probably learned this in journalism school. He should have gone to logic school instead.

But the correspondent was still not finished changing diapers for Ms. Brzezinski and Mr. Scarborough.

“For another,” Mr. Borchers writes, “Scarborough followed the report of their appearance [of Brzezinski and Scarborough slumming around Mar-a-Lago around New Year’s Eve] by angrily protesting any suggestion that he and Brzezinski were trying to cozy up to the president-elect.”

Let’s put this in terms the young reporter might understand: O-M-G.

Then Mr. Borchers goes on to accuse Mr. Trump of a “blatantly sexist attack” on Ms. Brzezinski because the president called her “unintelligent.”

Whoa! You mean that accusing someone of being “low I.Q.” is the equivalent of calling them female?

You might want to get a little “woke” to modern times.

Ms. Brzezinski (that would be she of “low I.Q.” and “crazy”), meanwhile, proved herself entirely worthy of Mr. Trump’s tirade by attacking the size of his manhood on Twitter.

I wish I were making that up, but that is what she did.

She posted a picture of a Cheerios box with a small child reaching a tiny finger out for a little toasted Cheerio. The box reads: “Made for Little Hands.”

Get it?

Such classy people. And they have been a respected part of the establishment for years. Donald Trump just got here.

Oh, one last thing. What about the bloody face-lift? No one seems to be addressing the issue of her traipsing around Mar-a-Lago bleeding from a face-lift.

Either way, Mika, you should ask for your money back.

Source Article

NYT Finally Retracts Russia-gate Canard

The New York Times has finally admitted that one of the favorite Russia-gate canards – that all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies concurred on the assessment of Russian hacking of Democratic emails – is false.

On Thursday, the Times appended a correction to a June 25 article that had repeated the false claim, which has been used by Democrats and the mainstream media for months to brush aside any doubts about the foundation of the Russia-gate scandal and portray President Trump as delusional for doubting what all 17 intelligence agencies supposedly knew to be true.

In the Times’ White House Memo of June 25, correspondent Maggie Haberman mocked Trump for “still refus[ing] to acknowledge a basic fact agreed upon by 17 American intelligence agencies that he now oversees: Russia orchestrated the attacks, and did it to help get him elected.”

However, on Thursday, the Times – while leaving most of Haberman’s ridicule of Trump in place – noted in a correction that the relevant intelligence “assessment was made by four intelligence agencies — the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National Security Agency. The assessment was not approved by all 17 organizations in the American intelligence community.”

The Times’ grudging correction was vindication for some Russia-gate skeptics who had questioned the claim of a full-scale intelligence assessment, which would usually take the form of a National Intelligence Estimate (or NIE), a product that seeks out the views of the entire Intelligence Community and includes dissents. . . .

Full article here

Ronald Reagan, Working Class Hero: New Book Speaks Loudly to Donald Trump’s America

A familiar narrative of recent American history runs like this: The modern conservative movement started bubbling in the 1930s and 1940s, in opposition to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal.  Then, in 1964, “The Movement” started really roaring, when Barry Goldwater, a fervent opponent of the New Deal, won the Republican presidential nomination.  Goldwater lost in a landslide that year, and yet even in defeat, he laid the seeds for the future victories of his logical successor, Ronald Reagan.  Reagan won the governorship of California in 1966, amidst the national backlash against Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society liberalism, and then, in 1980, he won the White House, thus finally redeeming Goldwater’s anti-New Deal vision.

This narrative shapes much of Republican thinking to this day.  In domestic policy, Republicans, styling themselves as latter-day Reaganites, tend to judge their “purity” based on their opposition to such pillars of the New Deal as Social Security, even as they pursue post-Reagan agenda items such as the flat tax and school vouchers.  Meanwhile, in foreign policy, Reagan wannabes have gone hunting overseas for new “evil empires” to bring down.

These crusaders might admit that ideas such as Social Security privatization and Iraq-style regime-change are distinctly unpopular, and yet, this thinking continues, if they are in the tradition of the Gipper, they must be good.  And so Republicans should keep pushing them, they insist, in the prayerful hope for some ultimate rendezvous with Reagan.  After all, what Republican would want to break faith with the 40th president, the last truly popular two-term GOP chief executive?

Yet now comes author Henry Olsen with another interpretation of Reagan’s life and work.  He argues that the familiar narrative is, in fact, wrong, that it badly misreads the real Reagan.  In his new book, The Working Class Republican: Ronald Reagan and the Return of Blue-Collar Conservatism, Olsen, a fellow at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, DC—a group founded by a man, Ernest Lefever, whom President Reagan would later nominate for a top job at the State Department—argues that Republicans today are getting the Reagan record wrong.  In misremembering Reagan’s life, they misapprehend Reagan’s legacy.

More here: Jim Pinkerton - Breitbart

Henry Olsen

Trump Won the White House by Recapturing Reagan’s Magic

The conservative movement would be wise to do the same

Ronald Reagan often said that he did not leave the Democratic party, the party left him. That statement is usually considered to be mere political fluff, a ruse to make himself politically palatable to the voters who revered FDR and the New Deal. Yet, that view is both condescending and wrong. A close reading of Reagan’s thought shows that he was always more concerned with what government sought to do than the fact that government was used to do it. 

Reagan’s preferences always matched those of working-class Americans. Like him, these men and women voted for the Republican Dwight Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956. Like him, these voters were increasingly willing to vote for other Republicans who promised to respect the New Deal’s achievements while maintaining America’s traditional values. Reagan’s political transformation was more thorough and complete than his compatriots’, but it occurred at the same time and for the same reasons. . .

If Reagan’s New Deal conservatism was so politically powerful, why do Republican presidential candidates lose so often today? The answer is simple: even as every candidate pledges allegiance to Reagan, none clearly conveys his or her genuine love for, and belief in, the average American in the way Ronald Reagan did. 

Whether they are of the “establishment” variety (Paul Ryan, Rob Portman) or the Tea Party flavor (Ted Cruz), today’s conservatives fundamentally misunderstand Ronald Reagan’s legacy, because they remain unreconciled to the New Deal’s core principle: the primacy of human dignity sanctions government help for those who need it. 

Conservatives like these men fail to understand that conservative election victories since 1980 have not been rejections of the New Deal’s promises but rather representations of the public’s wish for their fulfillment. Correcting that error will give conservatives control of the moral high ground in American public life. 

NRO

The biggest health issue of our time

Men Die Much Earlier than Women, Who Spend 25% More on Health Care

Heard of any women protesting that life has shafted men?

Of course not

New Study: Guess Who’s Getting The Shaft From Seattle’s Minimum-Wage Hike?

 The new study has found that jobs and work hours fell for Seattle’s lowest paid employees after the city raised the minimum wage to $13 last year. 

The analysis shows that jobs and hours for those workers declined faster in Seattle than in surrounding control areas, where the minimum wage did not increase. . .

It’s not just the scope of the losses, but the losses themselves which are remarkable for the public debate. Advocates of minimum-wage hikes routinely decry the plight of low-wage earners (and not for no good reason), but the impact of this policy doesn’t improve their lives; it actively makes matters worse. As the opportunities for unskilled workers dry up, they have fewer opportunities to earn any living, while the labor market shifts to better-skilled workers who already had an advantage in the marketplace. In the meantime, the added labor costs also will force the cost of living upward, making the decline for unskilled workers even more dramatic.

Article f/ Hot Air

SCOTUS REINSTATES TRAVEL BAN AND REVERSES NUTJOB JUDGES IN SEATTLE AND HAWAII

In a per curiam Order (full embed at bottom of post), the Supreme Court agreed to hear the Trump Travel Order cases, and also substantially lifted the injunctions, with the exception of people seeking admission who already have a bona fide connection to the U.S.

This represents a huge win for Trump. The key element of his Second Travel Order (the one at issue on appeal) was to exercise his constitutional and statutory power to exclude persons from the U.S. The lower courts effectively took that power away, and substituted their own judgments as to security threats. With a relatively narrow exception, that power has been reinstated to the presidency, pending a full decision on the merits of the case.

Great Analysis here at Legal Insurrection