Jeanne Mancini, President, March for Life:

Pro-Life Women Are Not A Minority, And The Media Can’t Comprehend This

As a woman, I do not identify at all with the opinions expressed in Cosmo’s recent article “Abandoning Abortion Rights Means Abandoning Women”.

We are not abandoned, we are empowered.

Anyone who says otherwise does not speak for me, nor for the millions of women across the United States who firmly believe that being pro-life and pro-woman go hand in hand.

Pro-life women are not a “fringe minority”. In fact, we are a part of the nearly 8 in 10 majority of Americans that support major abortion restrictions, including restricting abortion to the first 3 months of pregnancy.

Politically speaking, respect for the dignity of all human life is a consistently a winning issue that both parties should embrace. The 2016 election is clear evidence of this.

In an extreme departure from the “safe, legal and rare” mantra, in last year’s presidential election, the Democratic National Committee platform not only abandoned the 26% of Democrats who identify as pro-life, but the 44% of their base who do not want their tax dollars funding abortion, by advocating for unlimited abortion access and a full repeal of the Hyde amendment, which, until that time had widely been considered popular, bipartisan policy. Meanwhile, Donald Trump committed to “work to support the dignity of human life from conception to natural, dignified death” during his campaign and was elected President.

This is not “fringe”.

Pro-life women are not a “discomforted set” of society clinging to an archaic anthem of female subservience. We are CEOs, lawyers, doctors, teachers, writers, baristas, college students, and everything in between, and we believe that our unique capacity for motherhood does not lessen our ambition, but rather, furthers our potential for greatness. . .

Asserting that women are nothing without unrestricted access to Planned Parenthood, abortion and birth control is degrading. Abortion access does not constitute feminism. True female empowerment means ensuring that all women have equal and full access to the resources and opportunities to that they need to achieve their dreams, whatever those may be.

Though dressed in trappings of pink pu**y hats and girl-power positivity, organizations like Planned Parenthood and NARAL speak to further their own political agenda, personal funding, and self-promotion; not women’s interest. Abortion opens the door to exploitation, but choosing life leads to love.

In contrast, we speak not just for ourselves, but for the unborn. It is our own decision to be both unabashedly pro-life and unwaveringly pro-woman; and we will not be voiced over.

Feminists for Life have a wonderful slogan, “Women deserve better than abortion.” Women deserve to have political allies that recognize this. It is time to invest in true women’s empowerment and in life.

Daily Caller

 

The Violence in Charlottesville

The vast majority of people in the United States have no interest whatsoever in street battles between the alt-right (better described today in more poignant terms) and the counter-protesters. Most people have normal problems like paying bills, dealing with kids, getting health care, keeping life together under all the usual strains, and mostly want these weird people to go away. So, of course, people are shocked at scenes of young people in the streets of this picturesque town with a university founded by Thomas Jefferson screaming, “Jews will not replace us.”

It’s hard to see, hard to hear. But they are not going away. For some people with heads full of violent ideology, what's happened so far is not enough. They imagine that with their marches, flags, uniforms, slogans, chants, screams, and guns, they will cause history to erupt and dramatically turn to favor them over the people they hate. Indeed, what is unfolding right now, with real loss of property and life, has gone beyond politics as usual and presages something truly terrible from the past, something most of us had previously believed was unrepeatable. 

What in the world causes such a thing? It’s not about bad people as such. Many of the young men and women involved in this movement were raised in good homes and, under normal conditions, would never hurt anyone. What this is about is bad ideas. They crawl into the brain and cause people to imagine things that do not exist. It can be like a disease that a person doesn’t even know that he or she has. It causes people to seeth with hated for no apparent reason, to long for the extermination of people who have never done anything wrong, to imagine insane outcomes of social struggles that have zero chance of succeeding. . .  

The question is: what to do now? The answer lies in the source of the problem. The huge mess began with bad ideas. The only means available – and it is the most powerful – is to fight bad ideas with good ideas. We all need to throw ourselves into the intellectual battle most of all and as never before. What are those good ideas? 

The progress of the last 500 years shows us precisely what the good ideas are: social harmony, human rights, the aspiration of universal dignity, the conviction that we can work together in mutual advantage, the market economy as a means of peace and prosperity, and, above all else, the beauty and magnificence of the idea of liberty itself. 

Let us all – those who love peace, prosperity, and human flourishing for all – not despair but rather rededicate ourselves to the mission of replacing bad ideas with good ones. Our predecessors in this mission faced far worse odds and they prevailed, and they were far fewer than us. We can too, provided we think, speak, and act with courage and conviction in favor of all that is beautiful and true. This is how the left/right cycle of violence will be replaced by the highest longings of the human heart.

Jeffrey Tucker - Foundation Economic Education 

The Art of the Deal

China Changes Tone On N. Korea: From Not Our Problem To We’ll Deal With It

Daily Caller

On this day in 1939,

WIZARD OF OZ PREMIERES IN OCONOMOWOC, WISCONSIN

WISN.com

On this day in 1981,

IBM ANNOUNCES IT WILL SELL DESKTOP COMPUTER

The birth of the IBM PC

David Brooks:

GOOGLE CEO SHOULD RESIGN

When it comes to the genetic differences between male and female brains, I’d say the mainstream view is that male and female abilities are the same across the vast majority of domains — I.Q., the ability to do math, etc. But there are some ways that male and female brains are, on average, different. There seems to be more connectivity between the hemispheres, on average, in female brains. Prenatal exposure to different levels of androgen does seem to produce different effects throughout the life span.

In his memo, Damore cites a series of studies, making the case, for example, that men tend to be more interested in things and women more interested in people. (Interest is not the same as ability.) Several scientists in the field have backed up his summary of the data. “Despite how it’s been portrayed, the memo was fair and factually accurate,” Debra Soh wrote in The Globe and Mail in Toronto.

Geoffrey Miller, a prominent evolutionary psychologist, wrote in Quillette, “For what it’s worth, I think that almost all of the Google memo’s empirical claims are scientifically accurate.”

Damore was especially careful to say this research applies only to populations, not individuals: “Many of these differences are small and there’s significant overlap between men and women, so you can’t say anything about an individual given these population-level distributions.”

David Brooks NYT

IT WAS A BRENNAN OPERATION

Even lefty Seymour Hersh agrees that the Russian fable begin in the mind of Obama’s CIA director.

American Spectator

Japan Sends Surprise To US Fleet In Massive Show of Support For President Trump

Will join in defense of U.S. territories, including Guam.

WorldNewsPolitics

Ann Althouse's Rule for Discussing the Differences Between Men and Women

I tried to help you guys long ago when I devised the rule that many people have repeated and called The Althouse Rule (e.g., Instapundit, 3 days ago). The rule, as I put it in November 2005: 

Scientists: remember to portray whatever you find to be true of women as superior.

I've said it before, and I must repeat, the rule is: If you do scientific research into the differences between men and women, you must portray whatever you find to be true of women as superior. And when you read reports about scientific research into the differences between men and women, use the hypothesis that the scientists are following that rule. It makes reading the reports quite humorous.

American Thinker

WHY THE SWAMP HATES TRUMP

President Trump is reminiscent of the Founding Fathers – the type of statesmen who surmounts incredible odds to build the greatest country in the world.  Now, after many years of being led by a man who apologized for our country, we have a leader working indefatigably to make America great again!

Bob Weir

On this day in 1964,

WATTS RIOTS BEGIN

On this day in 1964, five days of rioting started in the predominantly black Watts neighborhood of South Central Los Angeles after two white policemen stopped a black motorist suspected of drunken driving. The rioters eventually ranged over a 50-square-mile area looting stores, torching buildings, and beating whites as snipers fired at police and firefighters. The National Guard had to be called in to restore order.  The rioting left 34 dead, 1,032 injured, nearly 4,000 arrested, and $40 million worth of property destroyed. 

This Day In History

On this day in 1984,

President Ronald Reagan: “My fellow Americans, I’m pleased to tell you today that I’ve signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.” 

On this day in 1984, Ronald Reagan joked during a sound check prior to his weekly radio address, “My fellow Americans, I’m pleased to tell you today that I’ve signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.”  

The press (local and foreign), Democrats, moral preeners, and other elitists totally missed the joke – showing the same lack of humor that they exhibit today:

In Paris, a leading newspaper expressed its dismay, and stated that only trained psychologists could know whether Reagan’s remarks were “a statement of repressed desire or the exorcism of a dreaded phantom.” A Dutch news service remarked, “Hopefully, the man tests his missiles more carefully.” Other foreign newspapers and news services called Reagan “an irresponsible old man,” and declared that his comments were “totally unbecoming” for a man in his position. In the Soviet Union, commentators had a field day with Reagan’s joke. One stated, “It is said that a person’s level of humor reflects the level of his thinking. If so, aren’t one and the other too low for the president of a great country?” Another said, “We would not be wasting time on this unfortunate joke if it did not reflect once again the fixed idea that haunts the master of the White House.” 

This Day in History

Don't be a Google.

It’s Long Past Time To End All Discrimination Policies And Restore Equal Protection 

Every single special preferences policy based on group identity needs to go. . . If a law is good enough for one American, it should be good enough for all Americans, or it’s not a good law. This is what true equality means.

The Federalist

The (liberal) Nation

A New Report Raises Big Questions About Last Year’s DNC Hack

Former NSA experts say it wasn’t a hack at all, but a leak—an inside job by someone with access to the DNC’s system.

We come now to a moment of great gravity.

There has been a long effort to counter the official narrative we now call “Russiagate.” This effort has so far focused on the key events noted above, leaving numerous others still to be addressed. Until recently, researchers undertaking this work faced critical shortcomings, and these are to be explained. But they have achieved significant new momentum in the past several weeks, and what they have done now yields very consequential fruit. Forensic investigators, intelligence analysts, system designers, program architects, and computer scientists of long experience and strongly credentialed are now producing evidence disproving the official version of key events last year. Their work is intricate and continues at a kinetic pace as we speak. But its certain results so far are two, simply stated, and freighted with implications:

• There was no hack of the Democratic National Committee’s system on July 5 last year—not by the Russians, not by anyone else. Hard science now demonstrates it was a leak—a download executed locally with a memory key or a similarly portable data-storage device. In short, it was an inside job by someone with access to the DNC’s system. This casts serious doubt on the initial “hack,” as alleged, that led to the very consequential publication of a large store of documents on WikiLeaks last summer.

• Forensic investigations of documents made public two weeks prior to the July 5 leak by the person or entity known as Guccifer 2.0 show that they were fraudulent: Before Guccifer posted them they were adulterated by cutting and pasting them into a blank template that had Russian as its default language. Guccifer took responsibility on June 15 for an intrusion the DNC reported on June 14 and professed to be a WikiLeaks source—claims essential to the official narrative implicating Russia in what was soon cast as an extensive hacking operation. To put the point simply, forensic science now devastates this narrative.

First Tom Friedman, now T.A.. Frank/Vanity Fair has a stopped clock moment

THE DEMOCRATIC CASE FOR RESTRICTING IMMIGRATION

Regulations never work out entirely as planned or hoped, but, in an ideal world, a skills-based selection system and an end to illegal immigration would lead to dramatic improvements for Americans in the coming decades, similar to the period of wage compression and social cohesion that characterized the four-decade stretch of low immigration prior to 1965. It would mean a more harmonious and caring country with a stronger social safety net. It would mean a prioritization of equity over pace of economic growth. So here’s an attempt to lay out a non-hostile—meaning non-Trumpian—vision of what might happen with a Trumpian immigration policy, a best-case theory for a world that admittedly tends to surprise us in practice.

With stricter border enforcement, employers would immediately start to feel a reduction of available labor, as is already happening. Wages would tick up. On the more gradual front, with a system that selects for skill, most immigrants coming to the United States would out-earn the native-born, raising per-capita productivity for everyone and boosting our fiscal health. With the share of low-skill workers becoming smaller, many sorts of employment would start to pay better: home care, security work, massage therapy, dishwashing, gardening, housekeeping, cleaning, construction, gardening, manufacturing. Out in the fields, agricultural wages would likewise start to rise little by little. Union drives would go better, as employers stopped being able to threaten workers with deportation. We’d see more productivity innovations as labor costs forced businesses to make better use of their human resources or to mechanize, as in Japan. . .

T.A. Frank Vanity Fair

The Anasazi of Mesa Verde

Archaeologists discover evidence of a vanished civilisation from 1300s

Prehistoric mitochondrial DNA of domesticate animals supports a 13th century exodus from the northern US southwest

This study thus provides the first direct genetic evidence, by way of a domestic animal proxy, in support of the hypothesis that Tewa communities occupying the NRG region today derive in large measure from the migration of 13th century CMV populations. If true, this would support a scenario in which migration was a primary solution of CMV populations in the face of significant social and environmental problems, as it often is for human groups under extreme duress today.

Journals.Plos.org

Black Unemployment Hits Historic Low Under Trump

Bureau of Labor Statistics

Can someone show us a climate prediction that has ever come true?

Instead of facts, these articles always give us theoretical predictions.  I would ask the reporters how many previous predictions of the last 30 or 100 years have been accurate.  I can't think of any.  Why should we believe the new predictions?

We were told after Hurricane Katrina in 2005 that hurricanes would be more frequent and stronger than ever.  Instead, we have had more than eleven years where hurricanes have been mild to nonexistent.  Tornado activity has also been lower than normal, so why are we told that storms are getting more extreme? . . . 

American Thinker

 

A sign of The End Times?

TOM FRIEDMAN HAS A STOPPED CLOCK MOMENT

You know what they say about a stopped clock being right twice a day? Tom Friedman, the New York Times‘s second most predictably dismal columnist, had one such moment in yesterday’s column. . .

The main point of the article was a list of four issues where, Friedman says, “Trump has a point.” I assume Friedman is safely sequestered in Martha’s Vineyard this week and beyond the reach of pitchfork-wielding Times readers. (Actually, since most Times readers wouldn’t know which end of a pitchfork to pick up, just what do angry Times readers brandish? An old Smyth & Hawken trowel perhaps?)

Heeeere’s Tommy:

What issues? Here’s my list:

• We can’t take in every immigrant who wants to come here; we need, metaphorically speaking, a high wall that assures Americans we can control our border with a big gate that lets as many people in legally as we can effectively absorb as citizens.

• The Muslim world does have a problem with pluralism — gender pluralism, religious pluralism and intellectual pluralism — and suggesting that terrorism has nothing to do with that fact is naïve; countering violent extremism means constructively engaging with Muslim leaders on this issue.

• Americans want a president focused on growing the economic pie, not just redistributing it. We do have a trade problem with China, which has reformed and closed instead of reformed and opened. We have an even bigger problem with automation wiping out middle-skilled work and we need to generate more blue-collar jobs to anchor communities.

• Political correctness on college campuses has run ridiculously riot. Americans want leaders to be comfortable expressing patriotism and love of country when globalization is erasing national identities. America is not perfect, but it is, more often than not, a force for good in the world.

Power Line Blog

DHS: 23% of all federal prisoners are illegals, just 7 of 42,034 saved from deportation

Nearly one-quarter of all federal inmates are illegal immigrants and virtually all are in deportation proceedings or already face removal orders, according to a new Homeland Security report.

The Justice Department's Bureau of Prisons, fulfilling a presidential executive order requiring transparency on prisoner immigration status, said that it houses 187,855 inmates of which 42,034 are foreign born.

The DHS report said that only seven of those 42,034 have been granted deportation "relief."

Washington Examiner