“A phenomenon of politics on the Left as practiced today is that new and ever more radical orthodoxies continually pop up and demand adherence from all members of the faith. No longer is the common agenda just a simple commitment to more government spending to enhance perceived justice and fairness in society. Instead, a list of new demands for government actions grows ever longer and more extreme. Examples: de-funding of police and reducing prosecution of many crimes to decrease conviction and incarceration rates of criminals; forcibly transforming the generation of electricity, and then the transportation system, and now agriculture, in the name of the weird pagan climate cult; promoting Critical Race Theory, including the concepts that our society is “systemically racist” and pervaded by “systems of oppression,” and that all persons of the white race are racists and oppressors by reason of their skin color; promoting gay and trans sexual practices to elementary school students; and many more such.
Many long-time Democrats of my acquaintance consider themselves political moderates, although generally supportive of government efforts to uplift the poor through spending and programs. But the internal councils of the Democrats are now dominated by radicals demanding complete loyalty to the full agenda. Thus the question is, if you vote for any Democrat for public office, do you inevitably get someone who will go along with every single element of the most radical agenda of the Left?
I think that the answer is yes.
Consider a few examples…
…The reasons why every single Democrat votes radical Left when called upon could be simple or complex. Undoubtedly, there are various forms of “party discipline” in play, like plum committee assignments or premium pay perks in the legislature. Also, if you don’t play along you are likely to get primaried by a radical leftist in the next election cycle, and the primary electorate is dominated by the most radical elements of the party.
But whatever the reasons, the lesson is clear: every single Democrat in a legislature will vote for whatever the radical Left wants.”
In a related item, writing at NRO, Becket Adams highlights how…
“Left-wing opposition to the Trump administration was rarely about principle. It was usually about power.
Put another way, Trump’s critics didn’t object so much to whathe did, but to the fact that they weren’t the ones with the power to do it. For all the talk about lawfulness, norms, decency, etc., Democrats and Democratic-aligned interests keep proving that they don’t care all that much for lawfulness, norms, decency, etc.
They seem to care only that they are seated at the head of the table.
That Democrats and members of the press themselves promote the sort of lawlessness they claimed to oppose during the Trump administration was on display yet again in the recent fight over the national debt. To wit, certain members of the press and Democrats argued that Section 4 of the 14th Amendment grants the president the power to borrow and spend as he pleases regardless of whether Congress extends the debt ceiling — as in, regardless of whether the branch with the power of the purse has any say. Throughout this process, they were asking explicitly for Biden to do an end run around Congress, encouraging him to issue debt not approved by Congress, which alone has the power “to borrow Money on the credit of the United States,” and all in explicit violation of the Constitution and the president’s oath of office.
It was an exceptionally short-sighted, dangerous, and even dim-witted proposal, one that Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen herself claimed would trigger a “constitutional crisis” should the president attempt it. But you try telling this to the “norms” crowd. They were awfully excited there for a moment at the prospect of executive lawlessness.
Indeed, though the debt-ceiling deal has been passed, and we’ve moved on from yet another fiscal showdown, we’re still left with the stench of the partisan desperation that came before, including the calls for the president to waltz himself into a “constitutional crisis.”
…In Congress, Trump’s loudest and most frequent critics, the ones who spent much of the years 2015 through 2020 declaring their great love for law and democracy and beating their chests about threats thereto, drafted letters demanding that Biden invoke the so-called 14th Amendment option. Five senators, Democrats Tina Smith of Minnesota, Elizabeth Warren and Edward Markey of Massachusetts, and Jeff Merkley of Oregon, and independent Bernie Sanders of Vermont, circulated a letter recommending that Biden prepare to deploy the congressional “workaround.” On social media, Democratic senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island also called on Biden to invoke the 14th Amendment. In the House, 66 Democratic representatives, including Pramila Jayapal, Ilhan Omar, Jamaal Bowman, Katie Porter, Eleanor Holmes Norton, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Jerrold Nadler, and Sheila Jackson Lee, sent a similar letter to the president, pleading with him to make their jobs even more irrelevant.
Begging the chief executive to ignore Congress in favor of One Weird Trick that former President Obama himself dismissed as a nonstarter during 2011 budget negotiations, and all of it in clear violation of the language of the Constitution and even the purpose of the three separated branches, is not exactly what one would expect from the same people who spent the Trump years weeping and wailing about our beloved “norms.” Indeed, the 14th Amendment solution in Republican hands, particularly Trump’s, would earn weeks of negative coverage, congressional condemnation, and maybe even another round of impeachment.
Then again, as is obvious by this point, much of the opposition during the Trump years was never about “norms” and lawfulness. It was always about “we’re not in power, and that’s a problem.”
There’s lies, d*amned lies…and then there’s anything uttered by a Progressive politician or their MSM shills.
Next, speaking of rank duplicity, Jim Geraghty offers the sordid details of…
“Up until a few days ago, in the country of Uganda, it was literally a crime to identify yourself as gay, lesbian, transgender, or nonbinary — a crime that carried a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison.
Now, I don’t really care how you feel about gays or lesbians or anyone else, as long as you follow the law. Maybe you see nothing wrong with it at all. Maybe you find that way of living to be opposed to the Bible or some other holy teaching. I hope you treat everyone you encounter with kindness and respect, not because I think gays and lesbians deserve to be treated with kindness and respect, but because everyone deserves to be treated with kindness and respect. Lord knows, there aren’t enough of those virtues in this world.
But left, right, or center, I’d like to think that we could all agree that if you say, “I’m gay,” your government’s response should not be to put you in prison for two decades. (For perspective, here in the United States, as of 2016, “Persons sentenced for murder or non-negligent manslaughter served an average of 15 years in state prison before their initial release,” according to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics.)
Existing, colonial-era law in Uganda already allows life sentences for homosexuality, but no one has been convicted of consensual same-sex relations since the country gained independence from Britain in 1962. The new bill reaffirms that punishment and allows prison terms of up to five years for actions such as touching another person “with the intention of committing the act of homosexuality.”
Uganda also keptthe provision that included a “death sentence for what it calls ‘aggravated homosexuality,’ acts that include same-sex intercourse with a minor or an HIV-positive person convicted for the second time for intercourse with someone of the same gender.”
…Add it all up, and Uganda looks like a deeply troubled country beset by poverty, instability, violence, lack of infrastructure, insufficient educational and economic opportunities, corruption, and ineffective government policies. And in this light, gay and lesbian Ugandans start to look like a very convenient scapegoat for the state. (For example, the challenges connected to the country’s high birthrate are really not the fault of the country’s gays and lesbians.)
With so many problems, you might wonder who would want to do business in a place like Uganda. The answer turns out to be quite a few multinationals: Coca-Cola, Unilever, Diageo, Citibank, Hilton and Sheraton hotel chains and . . . wait for it . . . Anheuser-Busch InBev. Yes, the same company that is seeing plummeting sales of Bud Light over the perception that it jumped into the culture wars in the United States also operates breweries, factories, and distribution networks in a country that criminalizes homosexuality. Call me crazy, but I think I see some inconsistencies there.
So far, there is no sign that any U.S. or multinational company is rethinking its decisions to do business in Uganda, despite the country’s enactment of laws that will put a person in prison for five years for attempting to have homosexual sex.
You don’t have to look too far to find social or cultural conservatives who dislike or even seethe about “Pride Month,” as many chain stores suddenly put up giant rainbows in every display and window. It’s a free country, and you can feel about this phenomenon any way you like. But I’d argue that the most compelling objection to corporate America’s Pride Month is that it represents big companies’ support for the rights of gays in the cheapest and most consequence-free way possible.
You know where else Target has a sourcing center? Karachi, Pakistan, where “same-sex sexual activity is prohibited under the Penal Code 1860, which criminalizes acts of ‘carnal knowledge against the order of nature’. This provision carries a maximum penalty of life imprisonment.” Target also operates a sourcing center in Jakarta, Indonesia, where gay men get publicly flogged for violating Sharia law.
Big multinational corporations love standing up for gay rights, as long as it means more people buying their stuff. They are not interested in standing up for gay rights if it might cost them something.
Big American companies will throw their weight around in opposition to all kinds of state laws, from restrictions on explicit materials in school libraries to limitations on hormone treatments, but then turn around and avert their eyes from governments that literally execute people for being gay. Disney objects to Florida’s new Parental Rights in Education law. The company also has no problem staging “Disney on Ice” in Saudi Arabia. Not that long ago, a Saudi court sentenced a man to 450 lashes for “setting up a Twitter account to promote and practice homosexuality.”
What this demonstrates is that vast swaths of corporate America have no fundamental, principled objection to violent anti-gay views, as long as the profits are high enough. Apparently, c-suite executives’ real objection to the American opponents of gay rights is that they aren’t a sufficiently lucrative market. And in this light, the gay and lesbian communities of the West look gullible, not triumphant. Slapping a rainbow on the corporate logo on the website is the minimal-effort way to “support” the protection of the rights of gays and lesbians. It takes, what, five minutes for the graphics and website teams to do that? How much time and effort does it take for any clothing brand to put “PRIDE” on its shirts? How many of those “PRIDE” garments are actually created, sourced, assembled, or distributed in countries where it is illegal to have pride in being gay or lesbian?
The United States, and many countries, have seen dramatic changes in attitudes toward gays and lesbians over the course of my lifetime. There are still divisions and impassioned arguments. But I’d like to think that there’s a big, broad, bipartisan majority that believes that people shouldn’t be killed for being gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, or anything else, and that nobody deserves to be put in prison for it, either. “Stop killing gay people for being gay” seems like a really reasonable request. And while the U.S. can’t control other countries or force them to adopt better human-rights policies, we do have a considerable amount of economic and diplomatic influence.
But exercising that influence would require U.S. and multinational corporations to reevaluate their existing business practices all over the globe, from Uganda to China to Saudi Arabia to Pakistan to Indonesia. And apparently, that’s just too darn inconvenient for boards of directors to even contemplate, much less actually do.
So, I would say no one should grind their teeth at the ubiquitous rainbows in store windows in June. When you see them, keep in mind that they’re the easiest, cheapest, shallowest, most minimally consequential way for big companies to appear to support gay rights, while never having to contemplate how they could actually stand up for some of the most oppressed people in the world.
We must disagree with Jim’s use of the term “American opponents of gay rights” highlighted in red above. No one we know objects to members of the ever-expanding LGBTQRSUVWXYZ+ community enjoying the same rights as others. What we’re opposed to is granting them special rights and privileges not afforded others, particularly heterosexual White males…
…as well as the unconstitutional requirement not only to accept but celebrate their perversions and/or psychoses.
And in today’s installment of the EnvironMental Moment, in a letter to the editor of the Journal opinion page again forwarded by energy correspondent Jeff Foutch, one David Hoopman offered a concise commentary wondering…
My only quibble with “Your Coming Summer of Blackouts” (Review & Outlook, May 27) is its reference to “the green-energy transition,” as if this transition were well under way. The Energy Information Administration might differ. Itexpects worldwide reliance on electric generation from coal to remain unchanged over the next three decades, while reliance on natural gas increases modestly.
A major reason might be that prehistoric energy sources like wind and solar can be counted on to perform as needed only between a third and a quarter of the time, and never mind their environmental downsides—extractive mining, extravagant land-use requirements, etc. To voluntarily depend on them for all our energy requirements is to consent to returning to a Medieval—and dirtier—economy.
This is probably irrelevant to comfortably situated members of the full-time environmental movement, interested mainly in harvesting taxpayer subsidies and immune to any serious personal inconvenience, but it’s a sure path to misery for the working classes. This can be attested to by Germans whose mandated “green-energy transition” has them paying the highest electricity prices in the world for no detectable benefit to the climate.
One correction: It’s not a question of whether power outages “may” be coming your way, as, in many areas, they’ve already arrived. Just ask, having both experienced the impact of utterly ill-advised power policies, any Texan or Californian.
Moving on, we offer another sextet of special selections certain to pique the interest of inquiring Conservative minds:
(3). Once again, though the story suggests, “The individual behind the information that then-Vice President Joe Biden was involved in a criminal bribery scheme with a foreign national is a “highly credible” FBI confidential human source who has been used by the bureau in multiple investigative matters dating back to the Obama administration“, we’ll believe it when Biden’s indicted or impeached.
(5). In what he terms “no ordinary foreign policy stumble,” Darrell Issa says the Biden clown car’s latest misstep marked “a concession demanded by the Chinese and granted by a White House and State Department willing to bend”, noting, ” It’s a major coup for Xi, and America’s position in the world just got weaker – where it matters most.”
Is the Biden Administration sending senior officials to China as we remember the anniversary of the massacre in Tiananmen Square? https://t.co/5IGUcj2cAO
— Rep. Darrell Issa (@repdarrellissa) June 3, 2023
Few parties in the history of the planet have received the returns Xi Jinping’s investment in the Biden family has produced.
(6). Townhall.com‘s Guy Benson informs us, following in the footsteps of another incredibly despised and inept politician, former criminal-coddling San Francisco D.A. Chesa Boudin has found a new home in…drumroll please…academia:
Welcoming @chesaboudin! As founding executive director of Berkeley Law’s new Criminal Law & Justice Center (@BerkeleyLawCLJC), Boudin sees an exciting opportunity to build on his work of transforming the criminal legal system in profound ways. https://t.co/Eo6jMkHf3s
Ithaca College men’s lacrosse head coach Jeff Long announced Thursday that he is retiring after 36 seasons. Long is the winningest coach in program history and boasts a record of 362-182 — which ranks 11th all time across all divisions of college lacrosse.
“This has simply been an incredible journey that has lasted more than half of my life span,” Long said in a statement. “The quality of life that my family and I have experienced South Hill and in the Ithaca Community is second to none. With 31 seasons of women’s soccer and 36 seasons of men’s lacrosse under my belt, I could not ask for anything more from Ithaca College. I walk away with fond memories, forever relationships, extremely proud of being a Bomber and with no regrets.”
Long became Ithaca’s head coach in 1988 and transformed the Bombers into a top contender. His teams had 19 seasons of 10 or more wins, including a program-record 20 victories in 2016. That season, the Bombers reached the No. 1 ranking in the USILA Top 20 and advanced to the third round of the NCAA Division III tournament. Long was named the Empire 8 coach of the year six times (2002, 2005, 2006, 2008, 2014 and 2016) and was inducted into the National Lacrosse Hall of Fame in 2009. He was inducted into the Ithaca College Hall of Fame in 2010. Ithaca won four Empire 8 championships and made 10 NCAA appearances under Long.
Before Ithaca, Long worked as an assistant coach at Virginia. Long’s first head coaching job was at Navy, his alma mater, where he worked one year with the “B” team and another season with the preparatory school unit. Long was then an assistant at Norfolk Academy for a year before moving to Alfred, where he worked as a graduate assistant.
Long was a three-time All-American at Navy and is still Navy’s career points and assists leader and played in four NCAA tournaments with the Mids. Long played on U.S. national teams in 1978 and 1986.
We played against Jeff in high school, and with him all four years at Navy, though in practice we might as well have been wearing different jerseys. He was a fierce competitor who drove himself relentlessly; And as we had to guard him every day in practice, we in turn were forced to keep up.
The highest compliment we can ever pay Jeff is to acknowledge we never would have developed into the defenseman we were had he not enabled us to hone our game to the point playing on most any other Division I attackman was a cakewalk. We wish Longman all the best, ’cause he was the the best.
Magoo
Video of the Day
Dennis Prager puts “Pride Month” into proper perspective, and he NAILS it!!!; i.e., TOTALLY UNDESERVING of of your attention, let alone CELEBRATION.
Tales of The Darkside
Ben Shapiro lists the worst woke corporations, none of which deserve your business.
On the Lighter Side
J.R.R. Tolkien answers a question we ourselves have previously posed. We’re only glad we didn’t ask the great man in person!
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