“California Democratic Party leaders took a step to the left Saturday night, endorsing liberal state lawmaker Kevin de León for Senate in a stinging rebuke of Democratic icon Sen. Dianne Feinstein. De León’s victory reflected the increasing strength of the state party’s liberal activist core, which was energized by the election of Republican President Trump.

The endorsement was an embarrassment for Feinstein, who is running for a fifth full term, and indicates that Democratic activists in California have soured on her reputation for pragmatism and deference to bipartisanship as Trump and a Republican-led Congress are attacking Democratic priorities on immigration, healthcare and environmental protections…”

We’re certainly no fan of Lady Di, an anti-gun hypocrite of the first order who, while possessing a concealed-carry permit for her own protection, seeks to deny the same to others.  Yet we’re at a loss to recall a single bi-partisan measure she’s ever supported, least of all anything involving illegal “immigration, healthcare or environmental protections”.

Then again, since Kevin de León is to the left of Leon Trotsky, perhaps, as in Venezuela, it’s just time for a change…regardless of whether said “change” is more harmful than the Liberal status quo.

Since we’re on the subject of acting, and bad acting at that, writing at NRO, Andy McCarthy details how Paul Ryan’s House GOP was…

“An investigation is one of two things: a search for the truth, or a farce. The House is conducting a farce. (Just as it did with Lois Lerner and John Koskinen.) That fact was on full display during ten hours of testimony by Peter Strzok, the logorrheic lawman who steered the FBI’s Clinton-emails and Trump–Russia probes.

The principal question before the joint investigation of the House Judiciary and Oversight Committees is whether the Democratic administration’s law-enforcement and intelligence arms strained to manufacture an espionage case against the Republican candidate, having buried an eminently prosecutable criminal case against the Democratic presidential nominee.

It should be straightforward to answer this question, provided that the investigative process has the one attribute central to any credible probe: the capacity to compel the production of evidence and testimony, with the corollary power to hold witnesses in contempt for defiance.

The House investigation has devolved into farce because it lacks this feature.

Oh, it exists on paper. There is even a statute making contempt of Congress a crime, punishable by up to a year in prison (and not less than a month). That may not sound like much, but the months can pile up: A separate offense occurs each time a question is ducked or a document is not surrendered. As the Wall Street Journal’s Bill McGurn explains, Congress has inherent power to enforce its subpoenas unilaterally, or it can seek assistance from the other branches.

But then reality intrudes. The committees pursuing the probe lack either the will or the votes — or perhaps both — to hold witnesses in contempt. This, despite audacious refusals to answer questions and turn over documents that would explain when and why the Trump–Russia investigation commenced. (And unrestricted Republican control of the House!)

It is an elaborate game of chicken…”

And the Paul Ryan-Republican-controlled House, as exemplified once-again by Trey Gowdy’s righteous…but toothless…indignation, blinked.

As long-time reader and frequent contributor Bill Meisen so eloquently opined:

“What if we uncovered old text messages from Kavanaugh stating  he couldn’t believe anyone in the United States could be in favor of abortion, and if it were placed on a ballot he believed the vote against abortion would be 100 million to nothing? I’m sure Chuck Schumer and the rest of the Democrats would happily accept an explanation that he would never let his own personal beliefs influence his decisions from the bench. Yeah,…

In a related item, as the Editorial Board of the Journal observes…

“FBI agent Peter Strzok’s appearance before Congress Thursday was a predictable political circus, and here’s what we learned: President Trump will have to declassify a host of documents if he wants Americans to learn the truth about what happened in 2016.

Mr. Strzok was combative, and he pointed to an FBI lawyer in the room as reason not to disclose much of anything about his investigation into the Russia connections of the Trump campaign. Under pressure from Ohio’s Jim Jordan, Mr. Strzok did reveal that Justice Department official Bruce Ohr acted as a channel between the opposition-research firm Fusion GPS and the FBI in 2016. We already knew that Mr. Ohr’s wife Nellie worked for Fusion.

Not to mention lying, hypocritical, self-serving swamp dwellers like these…

…go scot-free!

Next up, in a must-read entry at Townhall.com deserving of presentation in full, Larry Elder offers an uneducated friend a primer in…

Slavery: What They Didn’t Teach in My High School

“A man I have known since grade school changed his name, years ago, to an Arabic one. He told me he rejected Christianity as “the white man’s religion that justified slavery.” He argued Africans taken out of that continent were owed reparations. “From whom?” I asked.

Arab slavers took more Africans out of Africa and transported them to the Middle East and to South America than European slavers took out of Africa and brought to North America. Arab slavers began taking slaves out of Africa beginning in the ninth century — centuries before the European slave trade — and continued well after.

In “Prisons & Slavery,” John Dewar Gleissner writes: “The Arabs’ treatment of black Africans can aptly be termed an African Holocaust. Arabs killed more Africans in transit, especially when crossing the Sahara Desert, than Europeans and Americans, and over more centuries, both before and after the years of the Atlantic slave trade. Arab Muslims began extracting millions of black African slaves centuries before Christian nations did. Arab slave traders removed slaves from Africa for about 13 centuries, compared to three centuries of the Atlantic slave trade. African slaves transported by Arabs across the Sahara Desert died more often than slaves making the Middle Passage to the New World by ship. Slaves invariably died within five years if they worked in the Ottoman Empire’s Sahara salt mines.”

My name-changing friend did not know that slavery occurred on every continent except Antarctica. Europeans enslaved other Europeans. Asians enslaved Asians. Africans enslaved other Africans. Arabs enslaved other Arabs. Native Americans even enslaved other Native Americans. He accused me of “relying on white historians” who, he insisted, had a “vested interest to lie.” (Why…because they had a vested interest in the slave trade?!?)

What about Thomas Sowell, the brilliant economist/historian/philosopher, who happens to be black? Sowell writes: “Of all the tragic facts about the history of slavery, the most astonishing to an American today is that, although slavery was a worldwide institution for thousands of years, nowhere in the world was slavery a controversial issue prior to the 18th century.

“People of every race and color were enslaved — and enslaved others. White people were still being bought and sold as slaves in the Ottoman Empire, decades after American blacks were freed.”

Sowell also wrote: “The region of West Africa…was one of the great slave-trading regions of the continent — before, during, and after the white man arrived. It was the Africans who enslaved their fellow Africans, selling some of these slaves to Europeans or to Arabs and keeping others for themselves. Even at the peak of the Atlantic slave trade, Africans retained more slaves for themselves than they sent to the Western Hemisphere…Arabs were the leading slave raiders in East Africa, ranging over an area larger than all of Europe.”

I asked my friend if his anger over slavery extended to countries like Brazil. “Brazil?” he said.

Harvard’s Department of African and African American Studies professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. — who also happens to be black — (And is a close, personal friend of The Obamao; indeed, he was the reason for Barry’s “The police acted stupidly” comment, which began The Great Divider’s war on law enforcement!) wrote: “Between 1525 and 1866, in the entire history of the slave trade to the New World, according to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, 12.5 million Africans were shipped to the New World. 10.7 million survived the dreaded Middle Passage, disembarking in North America, the Caribbean and South America. And how many of these 10.7 million Africans were shipped directly to North America? Only about 388,000. That’s right: a tiny percentage. In fact, the overwhelming percentage of the African slaves were shipped directly to the Caribbean and South America; Brazil received 4.86 million Africans alone!“

African tribes who captured other tribes sold them into slavery. For this reason, in 2006, Ghana offered an official apology. Emmanuel Hagan, director of research and statistics at Ghana’s Ministry of Tourism and Diaspora Relations, explains: “The reason why we wanted to do some formal thing is that we want — even if it’s just for the surface of it, for the cosmetic of it — to be seen to be saying ‘sorry’ to those who feel very strongly and who we believe have distorted history, because they get the impression that it was people here who just took them and sold them. It’s something we have to look straight in the face and try to address, because it exists. So we will want to say something went wrong. People made mistakes, but we are sorry for whatever happened.”

Over 600,000 Americans, in a country with less than 10 percent of today’s population, died in the Civil War that ended slavery. (Though, admittedly, not nearly all those 600,000 died to end it.) “While slavery was common to all civilizations,” writes Sowell, “…only one civilization developed a moral revulsion against it, very late in its history — Western civilization…Not even the leading moralists in other civilizations rejected slavery at all.”

And, no, after all this, my friend did not reconsider his name change.

Truly, there are none so blind as those who will not see!

This is yet another demonstration why it’s futile to confront die-hard Leftists with facts; not because they’ll refute them, rather they’ll simply refuse to believe the truth.

And one more reason Progressives revel in their successful dumbing-down of America’s education system.  To borrow a phrase from George Santayana, those who never learned the past are incapable of comprehending history.

Which brings us, appropriately enough, to The Lighter Side:

Finally, we’ll call it a wrap with yet another titillating tale torn from the pages of The Crime Blotter, and this just in from the Peach State:

Georgia cops use coin flip to decide whether to arrest woman

“A flip of a coin by Georgia cops determined a woman’s fate during a traffic stop in April, body camera footage showed. The video showed Roswell police officers laughing as they used a coin-flip app to decide whether to detain Sarah Webb during a traffic stop…”

“Wow, these people put my freedom in the hands of a coin flip,” Webb told 11 Alive. “And that’s disgusting.” Webb said she would like to see the officers fired. “I think they should be fired. I don’t think at all that they should be getting a paid vacation,” she said…”

Why is this “hard to believe”?  She deserved to be arrested.  The news team, reporter and Ms. Webb all seem to have forgotten it was doing 80 mph in a 45 mph zone that put her freedom in the balance.  That’s reckless driving.

As for their laughter, maybe the cops simply found it humorous someone driving that fast in poor conditions would offer as lame-ass an excuse as being late to work.  And is there a law against cops enjoying their work?!?

Here’s the juice: unless these officers broke some law or written guideline, we’re of the opinion police chief Rusty Grant left Brown and Wilson hanging.

And given her attitude, which we can only describe as lacking a certain sense of grace, something tells us the next time Ms. Webb’s stopped for speeding in Roswell, the officer may be equally unforgiving. 

Magoo