Oregon killer singled out Christians

From the Washington Post.

Witnesses... said he seemed to seek specific revenge against Christians, and police examined Web posts that hinted of wider antipathy toward organized faith... 

In one classroom, he appeared to single out Christian students for killing, according to witness Anastasia Boylan. 

“He said, ‘Good, because you’re a Christian, you’re going to see God in just about one second,'” Boylan’s father, Stacy, told CNN, relaying his daughter’s account while she underwent surgery to treat a gunshot to her spine.
“And then he shot and killed them.” 

Another account came from Autumn Vicari, who described to NBC News what her brother J.J. witnessed in the room where the shootings occurred. According to NBC: “Vicari said at one point the shooter told people to stand up before asking whether they were Christian or not. Vicari’s brother told her that anyone who responded ‘yes’ was shot in the head. If they said ‘other’ or didn’t answer, they were shot elsewhere in the body, usually the leg.”

Cardinal George of Chicago famously said 'I expect to die in bed, my successor will die in prison, and his successor will die a martyr in the streets.' We already have a Christian sent to jail for her beliefs--more will follow. And we now have Christian martyrs in America. There will be many more. 

Do you think I exaggerate? The 20th century gave us more Christian martyrs than all of the martyrs of the past 2000 years combined. The Soviets, the Nazis, the Spanish communists, the Mexican government in the Christeros War deliberately slaughtered Christians by the millions. 

Christians are undergoing a holocaust today in the Middle East, while the world, including our own government, is silent. 

May God bless our brothers and sisters who are perishing for their faith in Christ our Lord. They are with Him now, in paradise. May we live with even a tiny fraction of their courage and faith. 

Global warming fascists may get a taste of RICO

Heh.

Last week I posted about 20 global warming fascists who wrote a letter to Obama demanding RICO investigations of global warming skeptics.

Oops.

Things haven't been going so well for them since:

Uh, oh. Jagdish Shukla and the #RICO20 has captured the attention of Congress, and FOIA documents are coming out

It seems that the little Himmlers have some legal problems of their own, including using $63,000,000 of taxpayers' money to fund their little political action committee. That's a violation of federal law.

The House Committee on Science, Space and Technology sent Dr. Jagadish Shukla, the organizer of the warmist mob, this letter:

Chairman Smith: “IGES [Shukla's taxpayer-funded organization] appears to be almost fully funded by taxpayer money while simultaneously participating in partisan political activity by requesting a RICO investigation of companies and organizations that disagree with the Obama administration on climate change. In fact, IGES has reportedly received $63 million from taxpayers since 2001, comprising over 98 percent of its total revenue during that time.” 

In light of the non-profit’s decision to remove the controversial letter from its website, Smith directs IGES to preserve “all e-mail, electronic documents, and data created since January 1, 2009, that can be reasonably anticipated to be subject to a request for production by the Committee.”

As Anthony Watts said at WUWT: "The Streisand effect has been unleashed Mr. Shukla, enjoy the ride."

RICO for the goose, RICO for the gander. Nail these scum to the wall. All of them. 

How to stop spree shootings

Another spree shooting, at a college campus in Oregon. At least ten people dead, and many wounded. Please pray for the victims and their families.

There is a simple way to stop this. To stop it completely. Two things:

1) Stop reporting spree shootings in the media. These bastards are imitators, and they vent their hate and anger in a way that will give them total power (for 15 minutes) and will make them famous. Stop making them famous. The press should agree: The scumbag's name should never be mentioned. No name, and no pictures. Make the killer an non-person. Tear up his manifesto--never let it see the light of day. Never mention his name. Report about the shootings once, briefly, and then never again. The media is driving this. The media is a hateful psycho's ticket to immortal fame. Take that away and the shootings will stop.

2) Eliminate gun-free zones. Gun-free zones are spree-killing magnets--nearly all spree killings are committed in gun-free zones, for the obvious reason. A spree killer wants two things: immortal fame, and 15 minutes to vent his hate with complete power over his victims. Deny him the power. Make sure there will be people around him who will shoot back--immediately. And he won't know who. Bad guys with guns are only stopped by good guys with guns (they don't quit voluntarily), and gun-free zones simply ensure that the good guys with guns will arrive at least 15 minutes late--time to kill, time to have complete power. Take that power away. Allow responsible citizens to be armed in schools and other places where spree shooters choose to kill.

Of course the media will never stop reporting on this stuff, and as long as there are dumb-fuck Democrats there will be gun-free zones.

But don't believe for a minute that spree shootings can't be stopped. They can be stopped, quite easily. We just choose not to. 

Conrad Black: Pope nailed it

The Pope Didn’t Attack Capitalism in His U.S. Visit

Pope Francis’s visit to Cuba and the United States last week was another tour de force, and he remains the supremely agile and likeable incumbent on a high-wire where he is admired by a full range of Catholic opinion, enjoys great popularity generally, and continues to leave the anti-Catholic Western media and conventional adherents to the multi-state established religion of atheism mute and gape-mouthed in their inability to torment him and his institution, as they did his predecessors, as an anachronism. It became much more difficult, once he said, in reference to those of homosexual orientation in the clergy who maintained their vows of sexual abstinence, “Who am I to judge?” and after he made the point in his famous interview with Civiltà Cattolica that it was not the role of the Roman Catholic Church to scold people about their sex lives but to be the ark of the Christian message and that all souls were of equal importance. The numerous media choristers and other purveyors of conventional wisdom, who had been catechismally incanting for years that the Roman Church was just a hypocrisy-and-superstition factory run by a creaking gerontocracy of celibates and closet queens trying to put a hex on any non-marital sex, have become steadily more impatient to find a new line of attack. This visit did not provide it...

No occupant of his position will please everyone, but there is a good deal of evidence that the Roman Catholic Church is strengthening appreciably in many places, and that the deafening proclamations and smug assumptions of its imminent demise have again been proved false. Francis enjoys far greater prestige and popularity than any secular leader, and he represents something a good deal more compelling than any current statesman; his first visit to the world’s most important country was a distinct success.

Again, I believe that Francis' conservative critics misunderstand what he is doing. He is not a leftist--the left in Argentina, who knew him well, hated his guts. He is an Argentinian with a profound hatred of crony capitalism, which in the U.S. is called socialism. His beliefs and instincts are Catholic to the core, and everything on faith and morals he teaches is straight out of the Catechism. We have to listen to what he says, not to what the media say about what he says.

What Pope Francis is accomplishing is quite remarkable: he is stealing (back) the memes of the Left, and showing the world that love for the poor and humility and forgiveness and stewardship of nature and simple human decency are deeply Catholic traditions that have been co-opted by the Left is a sort of demonic counterfeit.

My wife loves this pope. She is not Catholic, and not even really Christian, but she loves the guy. She told me a couple of days ago "I love him more than you do". That's not true, but it's clear that Francis is doing great things for the Church of God. 

Why are folks only "Gay" when they do good things?

You see it in the news incessantly--

"Gay couple gets married after waiting 40 years!"

"Gay actor speaks out on gender bias"

"Gay congressman sponsors bill on LGBT rights"

"Gay football player reports to training camp"

"Gay basketball star scores to win game"

"Gay CEO named to run Apple"

"Gay author wins Pulitzer Prize"

"Gay screenwriter wins Oscar"

"Gay filmmaker wins at Cannes"

"Gay musician wins Grammy Award"

"Gay man appointed Secretary of the Army"


But when a Gay man (who happens to be a Catholic priest) molests a teen boy:

"Priest arrested for molesting boy"


Odd, that. It's almost like a marketing campaign conducted by people who love homosexuality and hate Christianity. 

Looks like the Pope met with Kim Davis

Very nice.

Some of my conservative friends will say that the meeting should have been public, but I think the Pope's mission here was pastoral, and the press frenzy about such a meeting would have sucked all of the oxygen out of the room from the Pope's message of Christian charity.

It is wonderful that the Holy Father met with two very prominent victims of anti-Christian persecution in the U.S.--Davis and the Little Sisters of Mercy. 

Looks like the U.S. military is finally sticking up for gay rights

Why Our Commanders Look The Other Way During Child Rape

The gay rights movement has deep roots in pederasty.  

The mistake conservatives make about the Pope

I'll try to blog in detail on the Pope's visit and speech shortly. Short version: I love his address to Congress. One of the most beautiful speeches I've heard. He is right about everything in the speech. I ask my conservative friends to wait before they blow a gasket.

Just a brief note on a comment by my friend Ilion:

I'm sorry, Michael, but this pope is a fool, top to bottom, and he is a socialist (and he seems to be a Marxist, at least a "soft" one) ... just as almost all "intellectual" Catholics are. And while I do understand your very human impulse to put his deeds and words in the best light, you risk making yourself a fool if you go too far in doing this.
The sad fact is that there is in Catholicism a profound hatred, or at least fear, of general human freedom. This is why, for example, Catholics are always at the forefront of laying false charges against capitalism; for capitalism is just the natural result of human freedom with respect to one's labor and the fruit of one's labor.

I respectfully disagree. Pope Francis is certainly a fool--a fool for Christ, in the Pauline sense. The battle the Holy Father is engaging is a spiritual battle, not a political battle. Working for the common good, love and respect for the vulnerable, the weak, the poor, and sinners is basic Christian life. Living one's life in accordance with Matthew 25 is not socialism. Care for the poor is not Marxism, soft or otherwise.

Conservatives make a horrible mistake to create an idol of political ideology. That's what liberals do, and it is ultimately satanic, literally. Satan, as Rene Girard has pointed out, is an imitator. He imitates Christian charity to wage spiritual war on mankind--that is a particularly succinct definition of liberalism and its socialist and Marxist congeners.

Socialism is the (satanically inspired) imitation of Christian charity.

This is the conservative mistake: by denigrating Christian charity as so beautifully expressed by the Pope, we abandon all the best motives and works of man to the Left. I can't imagine a more unwise thing a conservative can say than: "all the stuff the Pope is saying about love and respect and human decency is socialist".

!

Is human dignity socialist? Is care for the foreigner socialist? Is love for the poor socialist? Is respect for our neighbor socialist? Is mercy for sinners socialist? Is forgiveness socialist? Is sacrifice to help the less fortunate socialist?

Why not just hand the socialists the victory trophy right now and get it over with?

Goodness gracious, Satan pops a champagne bottle every time a conservative says such things. Hell's agenda is this: to portray evil as good, and good as evil. To equate the Pope's entirely Christian exhortations--exhortations that come right out of the Lord's words in the New Testament and right out of 2000 years of Catholic magisterium-- with evil is to do the devil's work for him.

Sometimes, I suspect, the devil loves conservatives.

Conservatives are the natural defenders of Christian culture. Conservatives should enthusiastically embrace the Pope's beautiful exposition of Christian morality. I believe that the Pope is (very shrewdly) proving to be the Left's worst enemy, because he's taking back Christian charity from Marxists and socialists and liberals who have expropriated it for ends that are plainly evil.

The task before conservatives is to show that socialism is fake Christian morality. Socialism is an impostor. Socialism is a lie--a clever stratagem from the father of lies. Conservatives lend powerful credibility to Satan's lie when they insist that Christian charity is socialism.

Conservative values--freedom (the freedom to work towards God's purposes for our lives), hard work, respect for the natural world, rule of law, centrality of the family, traditional marriage, chastity--are the means to achieve the ends of Christian charity, an end so eloquently evoked by the Holy Father in his breathtakingly beautiful speech. 

Planned Parenthood: the video

Abortion-lovers have claimed that Carly Fiorina wasn't telling the truth about that Planned Parenthood video showing the intact fetus baby alive on a platter about to have his organs removed for sale.

A PAC has released this. You can see the baby's heart beating, and he's moving his legs.

It's hard to watch.

"[Planned Parenthood] helps prevent more than 500,000 abortions a year"

Ed Brayton has a real howler:

Getting rid of Planned Parenthood would significantly increase the number of unwanted pregnancies (studies have found that PP helps prevent more than 500,000 abortions a year)...

Wow. Planned Parenthood dispenses contraceptives (especially to poor minority women), so it's really saving lives! There's fewer little (black) babies to abort!

New Planned Parenthood motto:

"Prevent 'em now or kill 'em later."

Too bad the Nazi doctors didn't think of this defense at the Nuremberg trials: "Hey we gave the Jews contraceptives and we sterilized a lot of them, so think of how many lives we saved!"

Nice way to tip-toe around a holocaust.  

About the Pope...

Pope Francis is currently in Cuba, bring Christ and the Catholic idea to that beleaguered isle. He has come under substantial attack from conservatives who believe that he should not visit Cuba, or that he should do more to denounce the Castro regime. Many of these conservatives also believe that the Pope is a leftist and that he has Communist sympathies.

I don't agree. First, I must note that I take second place to no one in my hatred of communism. Socialism in general, and communism in particular, are raw evil, and they are the scourge of modern man. Castro(s) is a totalitarian thug, and he should be tried for crimes against humanity. I'd love to give the Cuban community in Miami a few minutes alone with the guy. He's get the justice he deserves.

That said, I think that conservatives seriously misread this Pope. Francis is not a leftist. He is an orthodox Catholic, and his teaching on economics and government and the environment are mainstream Catholic teaching, straight out of the Catechism. The content of his teaching is little different from that of St. John Paul II or Pope Benedict, or from the teachings of any of the modern popes.

Francis does provide a different emphasis, which is his privilege. Each Pope stresses the things he believes need to be stressed. And what Pope Francis is stressing-- mercy, care for the poor, care for sinners, the very real problem of gluttony (in the sense of compulsive consumption), lust for wealth and possessions, and all of the enormous dangers and evils of capitalism-- are things that really need to be stressed. Goodness, look at the filth and greed and lust for possessions that is poured on us each day by advertisers and media. It makes Sodom and Gomorrah look like a convent. We are so embedded in our culture that we often fail to see our own depravity.

Francis is right about most things--Laudato Si is a beautiful encyclical. His emphasis is nearly perfect, and he really nails the evils of opulent Western society. It is the responsibility of Catholics and all people of good will to listen to him carefully. He has much to teach humanity, and nearly all of it is good.

A couple of provisos are in order. I believe that Pope is wrong about global warming-- AGW is an obvious scientific hoax, and I'm disappointed that he doesn't see it. And I believe that Francis has not sufficiently condemned socialism, which is pure evil, as opposed to capitalism, which is concupiscence, but not evil in itself. And there is no question that capitalism has been a tremendous engine of prosperity for billions of people--it is the most successful anti-poverty program mankind has ever known, without parallel.

But capitalism has dangers just like sex and food have dangers. All are inherently good, but all can be misused in very sinful ways.I think the Pope's political heritage, which seems to be not communist nor capitalist but Peronist, influences his thinking on economics and leads him to wrongly deemphasize some of the evil of socialism.

And I do caution readers to pay attention only to what Pope Francis says and does--his actual words and actions, not to what the media says about him. The media coverage is utterly mendacious, and should be ignored.

The Pope's visit to Cuba and America is a pastoral visit, not a political visit. He is coming to care for his sheep, and the Catholics in the prison that is Cuba desperately need his guidance and inspiration, which presupposes diplomacy and tact. I hope his pastoral visit to America is similarly one of inspiration and love of Christ and our neighbor, and that the politics--particularly the distortions of the politics by the liberal media and to a lesser extent by conservatives--doesn't get in the way. 

A plug for a great book: "SJW's Always Lie; taking down the thought police"

I just read Vox Day's new book SJW's Always Lie. It's an ebook on Kindle. I can't recommend it highly enough.

Day (aka Theodore Beale) has had his share of run-ins with the libtard thought police (Beale has been a major player in GamerGate), and he's a very smart and ballsy guy who really understands SJW's (Social Justice Warriors).

I'll try to post more on the book, but I should briefly mention his three Laws of SJW's:

1) SJW's always lie. They lie because their entire plan is to advance the Narrative, and the Narrative is their religion. The Narrative has no necessary connection to the truth; it is only a means of advancing their power and satisfying their egos. If there is a transient conjunction with an aspect of the Narrative and the truth (which is rare), it is accidental and still basically a lie.

SJW's always lie.

2) SJW's always double-down. Because SJW's always lie, and because the Narrative is never about any aspect of the truth, when SJW's are caught lying, they merely intensify the lies. They always double-down, even when caught red-handed lying. The Narrative must be protected at all times, and the SJW response to refutation of the Narrative is always more intense Narrative--more intense lying.

3) SJW's always project. This is a very important observation, and one that I have noticed for a while. It's quite remarkable: when an SJW is accusing an opponent of something--racism or lying or incompetence or whatever-- it is almost invariable that the accusation is precisely what the SJW himself is doing. There are no more flagrant racists in America than progressive Democrats, yet to be a progressive Democrat necessarily entails calling everyone else a racist. There is no one more responsible for gun crime in the U.S. than progressive Democrats--they govern and populate every crime-infested city and they create gun-free zones in which spree shooters can kill so easily and successfully--yet progressive Democrats accuse everyone but themselves of being responsible for gun violence. The list of SJW projections is endless. I have my own rule: if you want to know what a SJW is up to, just note what he's accusing you of. It's a remarkably reliable indicator of his motives.

Please buy Beale's book. It's a superb insight into SJW tactics and worldview, and it contains excellent strategies for dealing with SJW attacks. I'll try to post more on it.

Global Warming fascist provides a succinct description of climate science

As you're probably aware, a coterie of 20 global warming fascists wrote a letter to the Attorney General demanding criminal prosecution under RICO statutes of organizations who are skeptical of global warming "science". Here's a great link at Red State with the email addresses of the Stazi scientists. Give'em a piece of your mind.

One of the bastards--Barry A. Klinger-- provided an explanation for his effort to criminalize scientific dissent.

He quoted a RICO judgement against tobacco companies to define the five elements of fraud:

Generally, a plaintiff must prove five elements by "clear and convincing evidence" to prevail on a fraud claim. See e.g., Armstrong v Accrediting Council Continuing Educ. & Training, Inc., 961 F. Supp. 305, 309 (D.D.C. 1997). They are: (1) a false representation, (2) in reference to a material fact, (3) made with the knowledge of its falsity, (4) with the intent to deceive, and (5) on which action is taken in reliance upon the representation. ( p. 1564)

Hmmm... 'deliberate deception by false representation of facts on which action is taken' is a stunningly precise description of climate science.

R.I.C.O. prosecution is a great idea. The entire climate science community should be investigated. Let's start with their emails.   

P.Z. Myers says something really dumb about Carson and Muslims

Myers is on a roll.

Ben Carson recently said that he "would not advocate that we put a Muslim in charge of this nation. I absolutely would not agree with that."

A perfectly sane viewpoint, and one I share.

Myers is shocked--shocked-- that Carson would... wait for it... violate the Constitution(?).

Myers cites the First Amendment, which prohibits Congress from making a law respecting an establishment of religion, and Article IV, which prohibits a religious test for holding public office.

*Pounds head on desk*

The Constitution constrains government from establishing a religion and from imposing a religious test to hold office, but it does not restrain American citizens from voting in accordance with their best judgement and conscience. And a candidate's most deeply held religious views are fair game-- we wouldn't elect a pagan who believed in human sacrifice.

Myers' post is one of the dumbest I've read on his blog, and that says a lot. Now it's perfectly fine to hold the opinion that a Muslim would make a fine president, and it's perfectly fine to hold the opinion that a Muslim wouldn't make a fine president. That issue can be debated, but it has nothing--nothing-- to do with the Constitution.

The Constitution constrains the government, not American voters.

And of course I agree with Carson that electing a Muslim president would be a bad idea. I mean, look how the first one worked out.

P.Z. Myers says something really dumb about Ahmed the little clock-maker

Big surprise.

Myers has been at his libtard best recently.

He bought into the Texas clock kid hoax. Little Ahmed Mohammed brought a "clock" into school--it turns out it was the guts of a 1970's electric clock (the kid didn't "make it") in a little suitcase, and the kid's dad is an Islamic nut case with an ax to grind. The whole point here was obviously to invoke a bomb scare and then blame the folks who (correctly) were alarmed about the "clock" of being Islamohpbic. Obama invites the little I.E.D. clock maker to the White House, and the loony Left internet lights up with outrage at this brazen act of Islamophobia against the enterprising little scientist who just likes to take the parts out of old electronic devices, package them like bombs, and bring 'em to school.

Looks like the kid's Islamic nut case Dad set him up to get arrested and take one for Allah.

At least he gets a White House visit out of it. Of course, if the kid shows up at the White House with an electronic device in a little suitcase with wires and circuit boards hanging out, he'll be tackled by a hundred Secret Service agents and carted off to jail in manacles and leg irons until the whole thing gets sorted out--kind of like what happened in school. If you don't believe me, try entering a government building with something like this and see what happens.

Question: if someone sent Professor Myers this "clock in a box" thing in the mail, would he duck under the desk, pee his pants, and call the police.

Damn right he would. 

Can fetuses feel pain?

Several commentors have challenged my observation that fetuses can feel pain, probably before 10 weeks of gestation. There is actually no real debate about this: there are simply people who acknowledge the truth, and people who deny it.

Much ink has been spilled in the medical literature by scientists claiming that mature cortical development and connections are necessary for pain perception. According to the fetal pain deniers, children in the womb cannot experience pain until at least 26 (or so) weeks.

How can such an issue be resolved?

The obvious resolution is this: identify human beings who lack a cortex or who lack normal thalamocortical projections, and ascertain whether they can experience pain. "Knock out mice" are an example of the use of this strategy in determining gene function. We study the effects of the absence of a gene in deficient mice to understand the normal function of the gene.

To understand the normal experience of pain as a function of neuroanatomy and neurophysiology, we should similarly study pain reaction in human beings who lack a cortex or who lack normal thalamocortical projections.

Fetuses are one such subset of human beings--the fact is that they react violently to pain at very early stages of gestation, and efforts of 12-week gestation fetuses to withdraw from noxious stimuli are very well documented (Silent Scream). Ultrasounds of fetuses undergoing various stressful procedures show obvious reactions to pain--the fetuses open their mouths as if to scream, they withdraw violently from the stimulus, and sampling of fetal blood shows massive release of stress-related hormones.

But the evidence for pain experience in the absence of normal cortex or normal thalamocortical projections goes far beyond evidence from fetuses.

There are two kinds of birth defects that leave a person without any cortex at all: hydranencephaly and anencephaly. Patients with hydranencephaly completely lack a cerebral cortex and white matter.  The usual cause is a massive stroke during prenatal life. They are  left only with a diencephalon (thalamus) and a brainstem and cerebellum. Patients with anencephaly also completely lack a cerebral cortex and white matter.  The usual cause is a genetic abnormality that precludes normal brain formation. They too are  left only with a diencephalon (thalamus) and a brainstem and cerebellum. I've taken care of scores of patients with these handicaps over 30 years. Their survival after birth is limited. Many die after several months, some live into later childhood (my longest survivor is 10 years).

They all feel pain, despite having no cortex at all. When stuck with a needle or in any way given a painful stimulus, they scream, cry, withdraw, and exhibit intense discomfort. Their autonomic response is identical to that of people without handicaps--their heartbeat increases markedly, their breathing becomes fast and shallow, etc.

They feel pain as surely as you and I feel pain. In fact, my impression is that they feel pain more intensely than people without handicaps.

Furthermore, there are tens of millions of people with neurological disabilities that severely impair cortical function or impair thalamocortical connections. These disorders include lissencephaly, microencephaly, polymicrogyria, among others. These patients often have limited life expectancies, but they all experience pain and are all treated medically with full analgesic therapy--pain killers, local and general  anesthesia for surgery, etc.

Probably the largest group of people with markedly deficient corticothalamic projections are people with perventricular leukomalacia (PVL), which is one of the most common causes of cerebral palsy. Many people with PVL have massive global loss of cerebral white matter, which is the brain tissue that comprises connections between the thalamus and the cortex.

Yet people with cerebral palsy obviously experience pain. No one but a sadist would subject a child with cerebral palsy to surgery or other painful procedures without anesthesia. To do so would be worse than malpractice. It would be an actual prosecutable crime.

The claim by some pro-abortion doctors and scientists that lack of a mature cortex or thalamocortical projections precludes the experience of pain is a damnable lie.

Pain is experienced at a subcortical (probably thalamic) level. The cortex is necessary for the interpretation of pain, but is not necessary for the experience of pain. The traditional neuroscientific teaching holds true: pain enters awareness at the thalamus, not the cortex. There is massive evidence to support this: the daily experience of tens of millions of neurologically handicapped people, who experience pain in a very real way. 

The only reason this long-understood and uncontroversial fact about the neuroscience of pain perception has been tossed down the memory hole is that this scientific fact casts a bad light on our abortion industry. Ideology trumps science, and when science conflicts with pro-abortion ideology, science gets tossed aside.

Fetuses (once they have a thalamus, which is about 7 weeks) feel pain, just as surely as children with hydranencephaly and cerebral palsy feel pain. To kill a fetus by dismemberment in the womb is the moral equivalent of killing a child with cerebral palsy by dismemberment.

Fetuses feel pain, just as people with severe neurological handicaps feel pain. That the scientific and medical profession does not universally acknowledge this simple fact is disgusting and profoundly evil.

Democrat justice

This is what they do when they're not jailing Christians:

At a congressional hearing on campus sexual assault, Colorado Rep. Jared Polis suggested that expelling students based solely on the idea that they might have committed a crime is an acceptable standard. And the hearing audience applauded him. 

Polis, a Democrat, was discussing due process and standards of evidence as they apply to colleges and universities adjudicating sexual assault. Currently, colleges must be only 50.01 percent sure that an accusation is valid before punishing an accused student (more on that later). Polis began advocating for allowing colleges to use a lower standard than that. 

"I mean, if there's 10 people that have been accused and under a reasonable likelihood standard maybe one or two did it, seems better to get rid of all 10 people," Polis said. "We're not talking about depriving them of life or liberty, we're talking about their transfer to another university." 

For this, the audience applauded.

Democrat congressman says it's ok to expel a student for rape, even if there's only a 10% chance he did it.

And the (Democrat) audience applauds.

But think about it: if, consequent to a rape allegation, there's a 10% chance the guy committed rape, then there's a 90% chance the girl is lying.

If you expel him, you have nine times more reason to expel her.

Lord help us. 

Atheists even attack Christians in prison

Atheist Group Protests Prisoners’ Gift for Pope Francis 

Group: Prison system ‘appears to be showing impermissible favoritism to one religion’

An atheist group claimed that a hand-carved gift made by Philadelphia prisoners for Pope Francis violated the First Amendment in a recent letter. 

The Freedom from Religion Foundation sent a letter to Louis Giorla,Philadelphia’s commissioner of prisons, outlining concerns over prisoners being used to carve, refinish, and upholster the chair for Pope Francis ahead of his visit on Sept. 27. The pope is scheduled to meet with approximately 100 inmates at the Curran-Fromhold Correctional Facility. 

“[The prison system] appears to be showing impermissible favoritism to one religion over all others, and religion over non-religion, by inviting Catholic religious leaders to its facilities and then bestowing gifts on them,” Annie Laurie Gaylor, the foundation’s co-president, wrote in the letter. Gaylor noted that prisoners also made a special chair earlier this year for Charles Chaput, the Archbishop of Philadelphia. 

The foundation cited the First Amendment, which, it said, “mandates governmental neutrality between religion and religion, and between religion and non-religion.”

The atheist totalitarians are busy at work attacking Christians in every crevice of American life.

The First Amendment of course does not mandate government neutrality between religion and non-religion--it nowhere proclaims neutrality, and the only constraint in religion is the Establishment clause that prohibits Congressional enactment of a federal church. A few Christian prisoners building a chair as a gift for Pope Francis does not establish a national church. And atheists can't put them in prison for it--they're already there.

In fact, the First Amendment explicitly favors religion over non-religion by guaranteeing Free Exercise of Religion (it says nothing about non-religion).

Atheism is a disease on the American body politic. 

New York TImes publishes its 'Jew-Tracker'

Anti-Semitism is a powerful force on the Left and is taking hold in much of the Democrat party:

NY TIMES LAUNCHES ITS JEW-TRACKER [UPDATED]

The New York Times today offers up a table examining the Democratic (but not Republican) Senators and House members opposed to Obama’s Iran agreement, noting whether they are Jewish and the proportion of Jewish constituents in their state or district. Like this:

If they had to wear yellow stars, it'd be even easier to keep track of them. 

A voice in the gay wilderness

Marc Ambinder:

...[W]hat really made me angry was the assumption by Bunning that the government best enforces marriage laws at the point of its gun... 

I find the government's conduct more offensive to my sense of justice than I do Davis' refusal to comply with the law. And I say this as a dude who had to wait years to marry another dude. 

A lust for vengeance deprived Kim Davis of her freedom rapidly and comprehensively. And no, her refusal to recognize gay marriage rights is not nearly as offensive as what was done to her. Her clerk issued the marriage licenses she refused to issue. The context matters, as does the actual harm done by her to gay people, which, really, isn't that much.

What made me steaming mad was the delight expressed by many of my own fellow travelers at her imprisonment. We bathed in the glory of her personal life, too. That's offensive. Her personal life has no relevance at all to the issue at hand. And no, she did not invite such scrutiny by taking a public stand against gay marriage. All that matters is her conduct in office. 

Those on the side of what's right should never revel in the pain of others. Gays and our allies are in the right. Now, let us set an example for how to treat those who are not.

Ambinder certainly understands that what was done to Davis was a crime. He regrets it because it was an affront to law and justice, not (he says) because it was a strategic catastrophe for the gaystapo.

He is in the minority in the gay-marriage supporting community: most of the gaystapo reveled in Davis' imprisonment. What Ambinder (and the other few gays and allies who don't support imprisoning Christians for living in accordance with their faith) don't yet understand is that destroying the livelihood and jailing Christians is the purpose of gay marriage. Gay marriage is a tool for excising Christianity from the public square. What is happening to Davis and to many Christian businessmen and women across the country is central to the strategy of gay marriage activists.

Only a tiny fraction of gays will ever 'marry', and all of the legal and social benefits are offered with civil unions. But Christians are being persecuted, so the gaystapo can rightfully celebrate the growing success of their cause.

The strategic outcome of Davis' jailing is that the true nature of the gay marriage movement is being revealed with stunning clarity. 

David French on the Obergefell Coup

This is a must read.

Excerpt:

It’s not the first time the Supreme Court has stepped into the most consequential of legal questions, removed them from the Democratic process, and did so by essentially making it all up. The Court’s horrific Dred Scott opinion helped spark the Civil War. Roe v. Wade legalized mass murder. And the instant after each judicial coup, its defenders solemnly invoke the “rule of law” to force the masses to comply. Yet the rule of law requires both lawful enactment and lawful enforcement.

In fact, the rule of law has increasingly become a mere talking point, a weapon wielded by the Courts and the Obama administration when it likes a given legal outcome, but disregarded when pesky things like “democracy” and “procedure” interfere with the demands of social justice. For the Obama administration, even proper regulatory rulemaking can be too burdensome. Rule by executive order or even departmental letter replaces constitutional process, with the social-justice Left cheering every step of the way...

I have deep respect for the rule of law, for our Constitution, and for our federalist democratic traditions. And that’s exactly why I have no respect for Roe, for Obergefell, or for any assertion that enforcing those revolutionary acts represents American constitutional government in action. Kim Davis committed a lawless act. But so did Justice Kennedy. His superior power and influence does not change that salient fact. The American people are indeed “ruled,” but increasingly it is by men, not law.

I disagree by the way that Davis committed a "lawless act"-- she was fully within her Free Exercise rights, and both federal and state law required that her constitutional right to Free Exercise of Religion be accommodated in the least coercive manner (i.e. that the couples be referred to another clerk in another county), which the judge (criminally) failed to do. 

Kennedy, Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan are the people who broke the law. In a just nation they would already be impeached, removed and on trial for violating the constitutional rights of 300 million people. 

Read the whole thing. It is the best analysis I've read of our nation's crisis of democracy and judicial lawlessness. 

Good news: epidemic of violence against blacks isn't a threat to Ed Brayton

Ed Brayton reassures us that everything is ok.

It seems to Ed that the Republican outcry against incitement to murder cops and the resulting crime wave in black communities is just a Republican political ploy:

All that is going on here is that the Republicans are pandering to their base. Psych studies show that those who identify as conservative tend to be highly focused on stability, authority and in-group vs out-group morality. That’s why conservative politics is so universally concerned with being anti-minority and anti-immigrant. It’s also why the focus is always on looming and vastly exaggerated threats to our well-being. In short, fear is the primary motivator for the Republican base and so that is what they sell.

Liberals cheer the jailing of a Christian clerk who asserts her First Amendment rights vis-a-vi gay marriage, and then they accuse conservatives of "obsession with authority and in-group vs out-group morality".

Try expressing a conservative opinion on a college campus today, and you'll learn a thing or two about liberal obsession with "authority and in-group vs out-group morality".

The culture of political correctness, which is totalitarianism with a velvet glove, is nothing more than an obsession with authority and in-group vs out-group morality.

And conservative politics is not "so universally concerned with being anti-minority and anti-immigrant". Segregation was a Progressive Democrat social program--social engineering writ large. The first Progressive Democrat president--Wilson-- re-segregated the federal government, after conservative Republicans had desegregated it for the half-century after the Civil War.

Segregationists were part-and-parcel of FDR's New Deal coalition, and even the (few) Democrats who weren't racists themselves prostituted themselves to segregationists to keep hold of power. FDR put Hugo Black on the Supreme Court--Black was a senior-level Klansman from the Alabama Klan who championed FDR's New Deal through the Senate. Black later applied the phrase from the Klan's initiation oath--"separation of church and state" (designed to defund Catholic schools) to the Establishment Clause in Everson.

Most of the major segregationists of the mid-20th century--George Wallace, William Fullbright, Al Gore senior, Orval Faubus--were Progressive Democrats, not conservatives and not Republicans.

Conservatives and Republicans were the most prominent opponents of segregation, and they remain the most prominent defenders of real civil rights--color-blind application of the law in accordance with the 14th Amendment.

Perhaps the most disturbing line in Ed's witless post is this:

It’s also why the [conservative Republican] focus is always on looming and vastly exaggerated threats to our well-being.

The reality is that neither conservative Republicans nor pasty-white liberal Democrats like Ed Brayton face a significant threat to their well-being from violence.

The people who are threatened by the massive Democrat-caused crime wave of 2015 are blacks living in inner cities, who daily have to face the catastrophe of liberal Democrat policies that have decimated their neighborhoods and policies that have now made the police reluctant to pursue effective policies against crime.

Crime has sky-rocketed since the Black Lives Matter "movement", and it is black people who have been paying the price for liberal moral preening and the Democrat party get-out-the-vote drive.

Conservatives and Republicans--the same folks who fought Progressive Democrat segregation a couple of generations ago--are still fighting for black lives and for safety and prosperity in black neighborhoods.

Rudy Guiliani saved thousands of black lives with his remarkably successful policies on crime reduction. What has Al Sharpton saved, besides money?

Ben Carson and Milwaukee Sheriff David Clarke are two black Americans who understand the importance of conservative principles and good police work in protecting black lives.

Ed Brayton has dismissed Sheriff Clark with the racial epithet "Uncle Tom".

Ed Brayton is content as long as he is not personally threatened by the massive wave of violence Democrats have caused in black neighborhoods across America. After all, from Ed's perspective, it's not white liberals who are being killed in the streets of Baltimore, and vilifying cops certainly serves Democrats' political ends.

I've worked in inner city hospitals, and I've spent many nights digging bullets out of the brains of young black men raised in a culture that is largely the product of liberal Democrat politics. I've had nights where we had to stack the bodies in a corner of the trauma room because we couldn't get the dead people to the morgue fast enough to make room for the new people who just got shot.

I've worked in abattoirs fed by Progressive Democrat politics--broken families, multi-generation welfare  dependency, liberal approaches to crime control and moronic police policies. I've seen what Democrats do to communities.

But as long as Ed Brayton is safe and able to morally preen, that's what counts.

Ed Brayton doesn't give a shit about black lives.

All that is going on here is that the Republicans are pandering to their base. Psych studies show that those who identify as conservative tend to be highly focused on stability, authority and in-group vs out-group morality. That’s why conservative politics is so universally concerned with being anti-minority and anti-immigrant. It’s also why the focus is always on looming and vastly exaggerated threats to our well-being. In short, fear is the primary motivator for the Republican base and so that is what they sell. - See more at: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/dispatches/2015/09/09/so-much-for-the-war-on-cops-part-2/#sthash.oHkbEfBW.dpuf

All that is going on here is that the Republicans are pandering to their base. Psych studies show that those who identify as conservative tend to be highly focused on stability, authority and in-group vs out-group morality. That’s why conservative politics is so universally concerned with being anti-minority and anti-immigrant. It’s also why the focus is always on looming and vastly exaggerated threats to our well-being. In short, fear is the primary motivator for the Republican base and so that is what they sell. - See more at: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/dispatches/2015/09/09/so-much-for-the-war-on-cops-part-2/#sthash.oHkbEfBW.dpuf

All that is going on here is that the Republicans are pandering to their base. Psych studies show that those who identify as conservative tend to be highly focused on stability, authority and in-group vs out-group morality. That’s why conservative politics is so universally concerned with being anti-minority and anti-immigrant. It’s also why the focus is always on looming and vastly exaggerated threats to our well-being. In short, fear is the primary motivator for the Republican base and so that is what they sell. - See more at: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/dispatches/2015/09/09/so-much-for-the-war-on-cops-part-2/#sthash.oHkbEfBW.dpufAll that is going on here is that the Republicans are pandering to their base. Psych studies show that those who identify as conservative tend to be highly focused on stability, authority and in-group vs out-group morality. That’s why conservative politics is so universally concerned with being anti-minority and anti-immigrant. It’s also why the focus is always on looming and vastly exaggerated threats to our well-being. In short, fear is the primary motivator for the Republican base and so that is what they sell. - See more at: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/dispatches/2015/09/09/so-much-for-the-war-on-cops-part-2/#sthash.oHkbEfBW.dpuf

It’s also why the focus is always on looming and vastly exaggerated threats to our well-being. - See more at: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/dispatches/2015/09/09/so-much-for-the-war-on-cops-part-2/#sthash.oHkbEfBW.dpufv

Feminazis vrs Frat Boys: Act 1

This is funny (with my comments):

College Promises To Punish Students Who Heckled Mandatory Play 

A liberal arts college in North Carolina is pledging to identify and potentially punish students who heckled a play about sexual assault the college forced them to attend.“It Stops Here,” an original play produced by students at Greensboro College, was first performed last Wednesday before a crowd of students, but the performance didn’t go as planned. According to people at the play, members of the audience frequently heckled the cast and shouted sexually explicit remarks.

They no doubt learned the sexually explicit remarks in their Queer and Gender Studies classes .

“Many of the boys started calling out ‘She wanted it, it’s not rape,’ and making masturbation noises,” stage manager Claire Sellers told a local news station. Sellers said the remarks were so excessive that cast members “became physically ill and vomited after the show because they were so vulgar.” 

They should have people heckle the rehearsals, to get the cast used to it.

Sellers also criticized school faculty members, saying some were near the hecklers but did nothing to stop them.

The students were seated in Sanctuary Rows, so they were legally immune from the rules.

Notably, though, the hecklers do not appear to have been invading the performance to disrupt it. Rather, attendance at the play was mandatory for all incoming freshmen at Greensboro, as well as for some older student-athletes who were required to attend by coaches. 

One of the play’s performers, Emily Parker, told theater blogger and professor Howard Sherman that the attendees were apparently unhappy about being forced to see the play. 

It actually sounds rather entertaining.

“A particular group of boys was talking rudely,” said Parker. “They were talking loudly about how they didn’t want to be there and how they thought he [the male actor] was gay. Typical teenage boy stuff. ‘He’s so gay’.

What's wrong with being gay? It was a compliment.

”Greensboro has responded firmly, not only condemning the playgoers’ heckling but promising to punish it. Severely, if necessary... 

The worst punishment they could impose would to make the audience see it again.

The college says it has launched an investigation under Title IX, the federal law banning sex discrimination in education.“Under our new Sexual Misconduct policy, the comments that have been reported qualify as sexual harassment,” said college president Lawrence Czarda in a campuswide email. “The college is pursuing a formal complaint of sexual misconduct against the students and is working to identify them. Upon results of the investigation, those found responsible will face disciplinary consequences.” What sort of consequences the students could face is unclear, but the school’s penalties for sexual harassment go all the way up to expulsion."

The students could defend themselves in a disciplinary hearing by saying that they thought the actors were conservative speakers invited to speak on campus. No one ever gets punished for disrupting them.

It seems that Ed Brayton doesn't give a damn about the slaughter of cops or of black Americans

My my. Ed Brayton really steps in it.

Ed:

So Much for that ‘War on Cops’ the Right is Imagining

A police officer is killed in the line of duty. Right wing pundits and talk show hosts immediately seize on the opportunity to blame it on their political enemies, claiming that President Obama and Black Lives Matter is fomenting a “war on cops” and that this is the deadly result of their attempts to make the police stop engaging in widespread abuse, particularly against dark-skinned people. The problem: The evidence clearly disproves their argument.

[quoting link] Despite urgent warnings from police and others about a “war on cops” allegedly linked to the Black Lives Matter protest movement, statistics show 2015 is in fact shaping up to be one of the safest years for law enforcement in a generation.
According to the Officer Down Memorial Page (ODMP), which keeps data on officer deaths going back over 100 years, 24 officers have been shot and killed by suspects this year. This puts the US on pace for 36 non-accidental, firearm-related police fatalities in 2015. Each one of such deaths is a tragedy for the officers killed, their families and the communities they serve, but this would be the lowest total in 25 years, aside from 2013 which saw 31 such deaths.

Let's take a look at this. 

There certainly have been assaults on and killings of cops that can be linked to the anti-cop hate peddled by Black Lives Matter--the execution in December of the two NYC cops by Ismaaiyl Brinsley who put up a message on Instagram:“I’m Putting Wings on Pigs Today,” he wrote with hashtags #RIPErivGarner and #RIPMikeBrown. “They Take 1 Of Ours … Let’s Take 2 of Theirs.” And of course there was the very recent murder of police officer Don Allen, in which the killers wrote anti-police slogans in his blood. There have been several ambush attacks on police officers in the past couple of weeks. All of this is taking place in an environment of hatred vented against police officers, including public protests chanting "What do we want?-- Dead Cops!--When do we want them? Now!"and "Pigs in a blanket--fry 'em like bacon!"

There is obvious organized incitement to kill cops, and several cops have been murdered execution-style.

But Ed cites statistics that show that murder of police officers is down considerably over the past year--one of the lowest totals in many years.

How so?

The answer is obvious. Since police officers were vilified and attacked following the completely justified shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson in 2014, police officers across the nation have been reluctant to proactively engage criminals--not only for fear of being killed, but for fear of having to use deadly force and face the liberal lynch mob.

The consequence of this police withdrawal from confrontation is evident. The murder rate in American cities has risen sharply over the past year, and this is clearly the result of a change in police tactics--a movement away from stop and frisk and away from proactive policing.

The result has been the worst slaughter of young black men in 20 years:

As the The New York Times reported, murder is up 76 percent in Milwaukee, 60 percent in St. Louis, 56 percent in Baltimore, and 44 percent in D.C. Blue America is awash in red.

So in reply to Ed's moronic argument that diminished murders of police means that BLM is not killing cops: the reason cop murders are down is that cops are not doing their jobs as aggressively and as well as they have since the early 1990's. Cops are laying low, and avoiding confrontations, and the result is a massive wave of violence that is killing hundreds of young black men.

Black Live Matter has not only killed several police officers in execution-style ambushes, but it has killed hundreds of people--mostly blacks--because it has seriously hampered police from doing their job effectively.

The evidence Brayton cites to downplay the violence incited by BLM in fact points to massive violence caused by BLM against black people.

In fact, one can even do a calculus of police sacrifice to save black lives: when police were aggressively doing their jobs, more cops were dying but more black lives were being saved. The numbers show that police officers have been sacrificing their own lives to save the lives of the people in the communities they protect--mostly black communities.

The drop in murdered cops and the corresponding rise in inner city murders poignantly demonstrates the sacrifices police officers have made to protect their communities.

A lazy libtard blogger like Brayton pops his Cheetos and types away, uncaring that his idiot screeds are inciting the killing of cops execution-style and the slaughter of blacks in horrendous numbers.

All Brayton cares about is moral preening, which is all any liberal really gives a shit about.

Meanwhile, police officers--a million hard-working courageous men and women of all races--will go tonight into neighborhoods Brayton would never enter and risk their lives to save the lives of people who have been incited to hate them.

The 2015 Democrat murder wave--the slaughter of hundreds of people in inner cities, mostly young black men-- was caused by liberal scum like Brayton and Black Lives Matter.  

Schlafly: jailing of Kim Davis is unconstitutional and illegal

Phyllis Schlafly:

David Bunning... has wrongly sent Kim Davis to jail for her beliefs, without respecting or accommodating her sincere Christian beliefs.

Local officials are required to support the laws of the United States, but no federal law requires every county official to issue marriage licenses, which are available in many other offices throughout Kentucky. Even Judge Bunning admitted that “plaintiffs have one feasible avenue for obtaining their marriage licenses” by traveling to another county, so the Supreme Court’s marriage ruling was not violated by the clerk’s decision to suspend all licenses while she seeks accommodation under the Kentucky Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

Judge David Bunning previously came to national attention when he required the students and staff of the public schools in neighboring Boyd County to attend mandatory diversity training, “a significant portion of which would be devoted to issues of sexual orientation and gender harassment.” Bunning, who also ruled against a law banning partial-birth abortion, was nominated for his lifetime job at the age of only 34, and was confirmed because his father was a Senator, despite having inadequate legal experience and an “unqualified” rating from the American Bar Association.

As an elected public official, Kim Davis should not have been sent to jail by an unelected federal judge who can cite no federal law that she ever violated. Her imprisonment is the result of a judicial supremacy unrestrained by the checks and balances that apply to all other branches of government...

A federal court has imprisoned a county official to force her to change the way she does her job, without any federal statute to justify such an order.

It is not “rule of law” to imprison someone based on judge-made law; it is “rule by judges.” Kim Davis is not committing civil disobedience, because she has not violated any law. She was arrested, humiliated with a mug shot and imprisoned, merely for abiding by state law and the Bible...

If San Francisco can be a sanctuary city, let's allow Rowan County, Kentucky to be a “sanctuary county” where the Biblical view of marriage continues to be honored and respected.

The government has a legal and constitutional obligation to accommodate Davis' religious beliefs. Davis is complying with the law--there is not a single law she has violated. Bunning's order to jail her is illegal--he has not cited a single federal law that Davis has violated.

Davis has complied with all laws. She, not Judge Bunning, is enforcing Kentucky law, which prohibits SSM. She is under no obligation to obey an illegal order by an unqualified federal judge who is fabricating law based on an unconstitutional Supreme Court ruling.   

American Bar Association ranks Judge David Bunning as "unqualified"

Interesting tidbit from Phyllis Schlafly:

[Judge] Bunning... was nominated for his lifetime job at the age of only 34, and was confirmed because his father was a Senator, despite having inadequate legal experience and an “unqualified” rating from the American Bar Association.

Kim Davis was jailed by an unqualified judge based on a Supreme Court decision that was, in Chief Justice Roberts' words, "an act of will, not legal judgment. The right it announces has no basis in the Constitution or this Court’s precedent."

Unqualified judges are putting Christians in jail for not obeying illegal unconstitutional judgments--in the opinion of the ABA and the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. 

Wonder why Ben Carson is missing in liberal polls?

Jazz Shaw:

Yesterday we took a look at that new NBC News / Marist poll out of New Hampshire and Iowa which had the cable news talking heads all excited for a few hours. It was a pretty good poll as these things go and certainly contained plenty of information relevant to the current state of the race heading into the next GOP debate. But having had a while to ponder the findings I noticed something odd. They’re polling pretty much the entire relevant field in both parties when it comes to the primary battles, but when they go to the hypothetical matchups for the general election, isn’t there somebody missing?

Just as a reminder, they put up the allegedly full results on scribd.com for Iowa and New Hampshire. As you’ll see toward the end of the questionnaire they matched up Hillary Clinton and her chief contender, Bernie Sanders. Those are natural choices, of course. (They tossed in Biden as a wild card in some spots since he’s drawing a lot of headlines this month.) And they put them against Trump which is also a no brainer since he’s the frontrunner pretty much everywhere. But where is the matchup between Hillary and Ben Carson? Or any Democrat and Carson for that matter? The guy is in a virtual tie with Trump in Iowa in some polls (22% in this one) and ranks very high among the rest of the field in New Hampshire. 

Instead, they skipped several slots in the Iowa GOP standings and pitted Clinton against… Jeb Bush? You skipped the guy raking in 22% of the support to go with the guy polling at 6%, folks. What’s up with that? And to top it off, instead of going with Bernie Sanders, you next put Trump and Bush against Joe Biden who isn’t even in the race.

Democrats have a long history of excluding blacks from elections--as voters and as candidates. It's no surprise that Carson becomes an Invisible Man now that he poses a threat to the Democrat plantation.

Democrats are terrified of Carson. Terrified. A brilliant, charismatic, honest, conservative, devoutly Christian black man is the Democrats' primal fear. Look what they did to Clarence Thomas--they tried a high-tech lynching that almost worked. 

A few years after the bullshit lie about Thomas and a public hair on a can of coke, the ever morally upright Democrat party elected Bill Clinton to the presidency. 

Democrats haven't devised a stragegy againt Carson yet, so it's better to make him disappear for now. Should he continue rising in the polls--and I think he will--the Party of Slavery and their media servants are going to have to come to grips with their worst nightmare. 

It will probably be very ugly--think Anita Hill with a million times the stakes--but Ben is gonna be hard to lay a glove on. 

The fact that he's been left out of the polling is evidence of the Democrat panic his candidacy evokes. 

Ed Brayton: if Jefferson had wanted religion in government, he'd have put it in the Constitution when he wrote it!

Ed:

[Jefferson] believed that it forbid the government from taking any position at all about religion. When he was president, he refused to issue even purely advisory declarations of prayer and thanksgiving, something both of his predecessors had done.

Important point, if it had any relevance to the Constitution, which it doesn't.

Jefferson had nothing to do with the drafting or ratifying of the Constitution--he was in Europe during the debate and ratification.

The term "separation of church and state" dates to the 17th century, and was in common parlance during debate and ratification of the Constitution. Except that the term was never used in the debate, according to the minutes of the debate. The Constitutional Congress was fully aware of the concept of separation of church and state, and thought it so irrelevant to Constitutional law that not a single member of the Congress used it on record in the debate.

From my own post a while back:

"[S]eparation of church and state" was first used publicly in America not by Thomas Jefferson but by Roger Williams In Rhode Island in 1644, and was widely discussed prior to ratification of the Constitution in 1789 (most prominently by Madison). Despite extensive public discussion of "separation of church and state" and its implications, or more accurately because of the discussion and its implications, "separation of church and state" was not mentioned even once in the Congressional record from June 7 to September 25 during the Founders' recorded official debate on the First Amendment in 1789. 

"Separation" was a well-known and vigorously debated concept for 150 years prior to the Constitutional Convention, and was discredited. The separation phrase was debated vigorously and extensively before the Constitutional convention, and "separators" lost the debate so decisively that the phrase wasn't even mentioned in the Convention, let alone in the Constitution.

So how did "separation of church and state" get into Constitutional law? It was put there by a KKK Kleagle--the former Klansman and Kleagle for Klan recruitment in Alabama in the 1920's named Hugo Black, who was put on the Supreme Court by FDR as a payback for Black's support for his New Deal legislation in the 1930's. The Klan was a crucial cog in the Democrat coalition, and "separation of church and state" was a part of the Alabama Klan initiation oath the Black administered for years to new Klan recruits (it was designed to prevent government support of Catholic schools).

I describe Hugo Black's career and the provenance of "separation of church and state" in detail here.

So while Jefferson had nothing whatsoever to do with the Constitution, and his musing in private letters has nothing genuinely to do with Constitutional law, Jefferson did have strong views on the origin of our rights as Americans:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government...

Jefferson noted that our rights come from our Creator.

He also noted that the government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed, and that it is the right of the People to alter or abolish it when Government becomes destructive of its rightful ends.

We're getting there.

People who destroyed Detroit have a great idea about what to do with its carcass

Democrat loon Ed Brayton doesn't understand irony.

Brayton:

[There's] an intriguing plan to repopulate the city of Detroit, which has lost more than a million residents from its peak. The idea: Bring in a million or so refugees from the Syrian civil war.

Detroit is Liberalism writ city-sized. The once thriving metropolis made the fatal mistake of electing liberal Democrats for a half-century, and thus committed the predictable municipal suicide. Baltimore and Chicago and Washington D.C. and Ferguson and New Orleans are lining up to quaff the same liberal kool-aid. Democrats ladle it fresh to each generation.

As wry observers have noted, Detroit would have been better off nuked than governed by liberal Democrats.

I'll leave aside the merits of importing a million new Democrat voters Syrian refugees to repopulate the carcass of a city destroyed by Democrats. Taking a liberal Democrat's advice on rebuilding Detroit is like asking Jeffrey Dahmer's advice on gay dating.

I point out to Brayton that Detroit has plenty of refugees already--a half million men, women and children, mostly black, whose lives have been decimated by liberal policies for a half-century.

We've got refugees from the Democrat war in our own cities. Let's save our own refugees first.  

Democrats have been busy solving the problem of too little crime

Lloyd Green at The Daily Beast:

Welcome to the 90s. Crime Is Back: Will the Spike in Help the GOP? 

High crime is good for Republican political prospects—and, with murder rates increasing nationwide, that should have Democrats worried about 2016. 

From New York to Chicago, Baltimore to New Orleans, and Milwaukee to Dallas, the hydra-headed scourges of crime, murder, and mayhem have returned. And as the country hurtles towards 2016, this grim reality could prove to be a political nightmare for the Democrats. But, for the Republicans, crime represents a well-trodden pathway to power.
Let me explain. As in 1968, crime again stands to dislodge the Democrats from the White House, in the same way that in 1988 crime helped propel George H.W. Bush to Ronald Reagan’s third term. 

Look around—history can repeat itself. This past week, three men gunned down police Lt. Joe Gliniewicz in the President’s adopted home state of Illinois, even as people were mourning the execution-style killing of Darren Goforth, a Harris County Texas Sheriff’s Deputy. 

Yet Obama and his party appear helpless, hostages to the same demographic forces they courted, and then rode to power. Having staked their future on the volatile axes of race and income, the Democrats are now witnessing crime reemerge as a campaign issue, and they are out-of-touch and ill-prepared, to say the least. 

While America’s law-abiding taxpaying middle class was looking at all this in horror, the best that Obama could muster was a statement that, “Targeting police officers is completely unacceptable—an affront to civilized society,” and a phone call to Deputy Goforth’s widow. The President’s response felt nonchalant, lacking the urgency of now that the Justice Department poured into Ferguson.

Meanwhile, the Democratic National Committee was spending its time and political capital on a resolution embracing the Black Lives Matter movement. Even in the midst of the blood and the din, it was all about the base.

And the money quote:

As the The New York Times reported, murder is up 76 percent in Milwaukee, 60 percent in St. Louis, 56 percent in Baltimore, and 44 percent in D.C. Blue America is awash in red. 

Please read the whole thing. Green is remarkably candid about the political consequences of the Democrat crime wave, and he's quite close to admitting that the crime wave is a deliberate policy on the part of the Democrats to stimulate their base.

But there's an astonishing aspect to the essay that's easy to miss if you don't step back and look at it.

The Democrat crime wave of 2015 isn't primarily a political catastrophe. It's a human catastrophe--hundreds of people--mostly young black men--are being slaughtered in this abattoir of political calculation.

For goodness sakes, Democrats, your political tactics are killing people.

In a very real sense, the Democrat Crime Wave of 2015 is a metaphor for the Democrat Party's consistent strategy for 200 years: kill as many blacks as you have to to get out the vote.

Before 1960, Democrats killed blacks to get out the white vote. After 1960 they kill blacks to get out the black vote.

The worst thing that can happen to a black man in America is to be governed by a Democrat. Destroying black lives is core tactic of Democrat politics. And liberal Democrat shills like Lloyd Green hew to form--Green describes Democrat incitement to slaughter as a political tactical faux-pax rather than a deliberate criminal atrocity perpetrated by America's largest political party against our citizens, and especially against our black citizens.

The perennially dumbf*ck American electorate needs to learn this: electing Democrats is like playing Russian roulette with a fully loaded revolver. No matter how high your hopes, someone always dies.