It’s Monday, October 29th, 2018…but before we begin, we’re still not down with the fact an amateur American Indian body-builder/strip club worker with a long arrest record, including making a bomb threat, and whose cousin described as a “lunatic” pulled off these…”bombings”…

…on his own, let alone is, in any way, shape or form, even remotely related to… 

…The Donald, let the responsibility of the President.

We further find the pronouncement of Progressives, be they politicians or pundits, this somehow makes violence the province of The Right particularly repugnant, not to mention, as Matt Vespa reminds us at Townhall.com, an outright falsehood:

“…While not acceptable in any stretch of the imagination, none of these devices went off. We’re lucky on that end, yes—but none of them went off and no one was injured. On the Left, James Hodgkinson, a far left, pro-Bernie Sanders activist, grabbed a rifle and opened fire on congressional Republicans practicing for the annual baseball game in 2017. Rep. Steve Scalise was shot and could have died. It was a mass assassination attempt. In 2018, Minnesota GOP candidates have been assaulted. The spokesperson for the Minnesota Democratic Party said that Republicans should go to the guillotine. Sens. Ted Cruz and Mitch McConnell have been harassed by mob-like behavior. Former Attorney General Eric Holder said Democrats should kick Republicans. Rep. Maxine Waters has egged on her supporters to harass Trump officials. Oh,and let’s not forget the ricin letters sent to Secretary of Defense James Mattis or the death threats hurled at Sen. Susan Collins.”

And let’s not forget where it all started:

From his “the Cambridge police acted stupidly” to “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon“, his defense of Michael Brown to his silence following the murder of Kate Steinle, Barack Hussein Obama’s record of sowing racial and class division makes Donald Trump’s tweets look like love sonnets.

That being said, we’re in agreement with the Dodgers’ Rich Hill when he defended Manager Dave Roberts’ decision to pull him in the sixth inning of Game 4 of the World Series against Trump’s Monday-morning quarterbacking…

…criticizing the move:

“There was a mass shooting yesterday,” Hill initially told reporters when asked about Trump’s tweet Sunday, according to the Los Angeles Times. “I understand you’re watching the World Series, but there was a huge tragedy that happened and people will say what they want to say. The focus, in my opinion, of the president is to be on the country, and not on moves that are made in a World Series game.“

Meanwhile, as this forward from Shannon Wood suggests, following in the footsteps of Andrew Cuomo, a number of self-important Liberal legends-in-their-own-minds like Sheila Jackson Lee were left wondering…

And in the MSM madness emanating from the Pittsburgh shootings, the concept central to an article forwarded by Balls Cotton as set forth in the Constitution is bound to be lost.

Now, here’s The Gouge!

First up, since we’re on the subject of Progressive-inspired political violence, NRO’s Kevin Williamson correctly concludes…

Rage Makes You Stupid

People have the strongest feelings about the things they know the least about.

“What are we supposed to think about political rage?

Before and after the arrest of Cesar Sayoc, the suspect in the recent string of bombs sent to prominent Democrats and media figures, we were treated to any number of homilies about “rage” and its origins in “toxic” political rhetoric. Many of these homilies were pointed directly or indirectly at President Donald Trump and his immoderate Twitter habits. That political rage is necessarily linked to political violence was assumed, and sometimes asserted, but rarely argued.

Five minutes before that, rage was all the rage. Rebecca Traister, an editor for New York magazine, has just published a book celebrating the “revolutionary power” of anger, which was celebrated at The Atlantic on 4 October under a headline noting the “seismic power” of “rage.” On 21 September, the Washington Post affirmed that “rage is healthy, rational, and necessary for America.” On Friday, NBC news praised a television show for depicting “anger as righteous and necessary.” Before that, it ran a segment encouraging certain political partisans to “embrace their rage.”

Earlier in the year, Leslie Jamison wrote a very interesting and intelligent essay for The New York Times Magazine exploring anger as a “tool to be used, part of a well-stocked arsenal.” Right as the bombing suspect was being arrested in Florida, Rewire shared “All the Rage That’s Fit To Print,” its assessment of four books on “fury.”

I’ve omitted the word “women” in several instances above, on the theory that we’re all adults here, and that we would recognize the obvious hypocrisy and illogic of any “my rage good, your rage bad, bad, bad,” construct.

The signals, then, are decidedly mixed.

Put me in the anti-rage camp. Rage makes you stupid. (Rage and Wild Turkey . . . . Well, enough said.)…”

Which, when combined with the nonsensical tenets of Progressivism, makes for a dull-wittedness of truly monumental…and incredibly dangerous…proportions.  For as the Ghost of Christmas Present observed in what is, in our humble opinion, the greatest production of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol ever brought to the silver screen…

Dimocrats have deliberately elevated the boy as a virtue.

In a related item, also courtesy of NRO, David French opines on a subject we raised in the October 26th edition:

The Trump Administration Isn’t ‘Dehumanizing’ Transgender Americans

The administration is proposing to conform the law to the truth.

“Today I learned something truly new. I’d lived my life on this earth almost 49 years before I understood that federal anti-discrimination law defines human existence. Changing that law can thus literally “negate the humanity of people.”

At least that’s what I’m learning in response to the news that the Trump administration is considering rolling back the Obama administration’s lawless expansion of Title IX, the federal civil-rights statute banning sex discrimination in federally funded education programs. At issue is the definition of the word “sex.”

In April 2014, the Obama administration quietly expanded the definition — without an act of Congress or even a regulatory rulemaking process. In a document called “Questions and Answers on Title IX and Sexual Violence” it stated that “Title IX’s sex discrimination prohibition extends to claims of discrimination based on gender identity or failure to conform to stereotypical notions of masculinity or femininity.”

Empowered by this new definition, the Obama administration issued extraordinarily aggressive mandates to schools across the nation, requiring that schools use a transgender student’s chosen pronouns and that they open bathrooms, locker rooms, overnight accommodations, and even some sports teams to students based not on their biological sex but their chosen gender identity.

Again, this was done without an act of Congress and without even a regulatory rulemaking process. Democratic members of Congress had tried — and failed — to amend federal nondiscrimination statutes many times. So the Obama administration did it without Congress. Obama’s legendary “pen and phone” purported to change the law.

When the Trump administration gained power, it rolled back Obama-era transgender directives, including the sweeping education mandates, but it has not formally responded to the previous administration’s expansion of the scope of the statute.

According to a story in Sunday’s New York Times, however, that might change. The administration may issue formal guidance establishing a biological definition of sex. Specifically, the administration may define sex to mean “a person’s status as male or female based on immutable biological traits identifiable by or before birth.”

This is the basic definition of sex that has existed for millennia. It’s the basic definition of sex as understood by the men and women who drafted and passed Title IX. In our constitutional republic, if one wishes to amend this definition, then the proper path is through legislation, not the Obama administration’s bureaucratic memo. Indeed, in multiple jurisdictions across the country, legislators have done exactly that — amended nondiscrimination law to explicitly protect “gender identity.”

This is Civics 101. But news that the Trump administration was merely considering returning the bureaucratic interpretation of the relevant statute to its original meaning brought a truly puzzling reaction. The administration wasn’t merely interpreting a statute, it was defining transgender people out of existence. It was dehumanizing them.

No, really.

…This makes no sense. Even if the Trump administration changes regulatory definitions to match the obvious statutory intent, it doesn’t deny any person’s humanity or existence. Every single American is still protected by every single provision of the Bill of Rights (and every other constitutional right). Every single American still enjoys the benefit of every other generally applicable statute.

In reality, the claim that you “dehumanize” a person if you hold contrary beliefs about sex and gender is a common, inflammatory rhetorical tactic that creates a false choice. Either you recognize a transgender person on their own terms, or you “deny their humanity.” You “deny their existence.”

Wrong. I believe that each and every single human being is created in the image of God. We are of equal worth and value in His eyes. I also recognize that some percentage of those human beings have gender dysphoria, but that condition does not transform a man into a woman or a woman into a man. To hold to the belief that men cannot get pregnant and women do not have penises is not to deny any person’s humanity. It’s to reject an argument about identity.

Transgender people did not flash into existence on April 29, 2014, when the Obama administration altered its interpretation of Title IX. They will not flash out of existence if the Trump administration returns to traditional and intended statutory definitions…”

The rest is so much politically-correct, factually-bereft bullsh*t peddled by Progressives looking to secure special rights for their pet, protected classes…and to further divide the country.

Next up, again at NRO, Mark Krikorian offers some ideas for…

Stopping the Caravan

Only Congress can fix this.

“…The president’s threat to cut off foreign aid to the source and transit countries south of the border is less fanciful but still counterproductive. The whole point of that money is to reduce emigration pressures, so eliminating it would seem to be a case of cutting off your nose to spite your face. If the aid isn’t doing any good, we should just cut it off, caravan or no caravan, rather than using it as a threat.

The president’s threat to shut down the border is a more realistic way to pressure Mexico to stop the caravan. President Nixon did essentially that in 1969 to pressure Mexico on drugs. President Reagan did the same in 1985 in the wake of Mexican recalcitrance in investigating the kidnapping of DEA agent Kiki Camarena. Or, if some large share of the caravan descends upon a single port of entry, we just close that one. This would cause more pain on our side than in decades past, because our economy is more integrated with Mexico’s than it was in the 1960 or even the 1980s, but the pain would still be significantly greater for Mexico.

Other measures could include deputizing state and local law enforcement to make immigration arrests (which the law permits in the case of “an actual or imminent mass influx of aliens arriving off the coast of the United States, or near a land border”), setting up emergency tent-city detention centers on the border, and/or using the travel-ban authority to prohibit the admission of anyone participating in a caravan.

All that and more may well already be included in the existing contingency plans for coping with a “Mass Immigration Emergency,” which the president could well declare if the caravan reaches our border with the kinds of numbers we’re seeing in southern Mexico. The Washington Post reported Thursday that such measures are under active consideration.

But the caravan, and new ones forming behind it, are merely symptoms. The problem is an overly permissive asylum system (including rules for dealing with illegal-alien minors) that has become the preferred way to penetrate our borders for those with no other way to do so. And only Congress can fix that.

In a sense, forcing Mexico to stop the caravans before they get to our border, or even declaring a Mass Immigration Emergency, really just lets congressional Democrats off the hook. Given the persistence of the filibuster rule requiring a supermajority for the passage of any legislation to plug border leaks (like the Flores agreement and the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act — both regarding minors — and low standards for establishing the “credible fear” needed to justify asylum) or to increase detention capacity, Chuck Schumer has an effective veto over efforts to enforce the border. Political pressure must be brought to bear on Democratic lawmakers, not just through White House statements, but also by the Republican leadership in Congress forcing them to vote on targeted measures addressing specific vulnerabilities.

…Another long-term objective should be to limit the grounds for asylum. Currently the U.N. language, incorporated into the 1980 Refugee Act, says asylum is for those persecuted because of their “race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion.” It is the fourth of these five categories that has been the source of much mischief; “membership in a particular social group” is a catch-all that activist lawyers and their judicial accomplices have used to try to pry open our borders, concocting non-existent “groups” as a way of finagling asylum. As Justice Samuel Alito wrote when he was still a circuit-court judge, “read in its broadest literal sense, the phrase is almost completely open-ended. Virtually any set including more than one person could be described as a ‘particular social group.’” The attorney general is instructing immigration judges to interpret the term narrowly, but only excising it from the law altogether can prevent its use by the opponents of borders.

But the U.N. treaty mandates “particular social group” as a basis for asylum. For that reason, and more generally to reassert control over who is allowed into our country, the president should withdraw from the treaty. As it stands now, we have created a “right” to asylum in the United States, a surrender of sovereignty whose consequences are becoming increasingly clear. Only the American people, through their elected representatives, should decide who gets to move here, not individual foreigners asserting a “right” created by the U.N. and vindicated by post-national anti-borders activists. The subtitle of John Fonte’s 2011 book poses the first question we must ask ourselves in assessing asylum policy: “Will Americans Rule Themselves or Be Ruled by Others?”“

Friends, as the bard so eloquently observed…

Meanwhile, as this video relates, though the Russians may have hit upon a way to at least scatter the invaders…

…Walter Hill’s 1981 classic Southern Comfort offers what might prove a more effective deterrent:

By the way, if you haven’t seen the movie, those were blanks…and film is well worth watching in its entirety.

Then there’s this forward from Military Times via our eldest son Major Jon McKee, who’s currently deployed overseas…in a “dry” country:

Iceland’s bars ran out of beer trying to serve drunk US sailors and Marines

And no one, at least in our experience, is as yearning to drink beer as a member of the United States Navy and/or Marine Corps enjoying some well-deserved liberty.

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

Then there’s this series of memes forwarded by our sister-in-law Amy:

Finally, we’ll call it a wrap with News You Can’t Use, and the results of yet another useless “study”:

Pets can judge time, study says

Pets understand time; yeah,…when it’s time to eat!  Sorry, but pets judge time about as well as they comprehend human speech:

Magoo