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Most liberal ideas are based on a strong emotional component and are wrapped in a moral blanket. Why? Because liberals think from the heart and believe themselves virtuous. Ask them if you do not believe this.If you disagree with their premise then you are heartless. This is how they fight. They are holier than thou and thus you cannot win against a virtuous person. They resort to character assassination as their weapon of choice. but also use other human frailties, such as jealousy, greed when necessary. Basically they will stop at nothing to win because winning is everything and their intentions are so pure.
Since most of their ideas and subsequent legislation is detached from reality, has no rational economic basis when it fails, as is most likely the case, their fall back is the need to spend more money. It is the: "when going in the wrong direction, speed up theory approach to life's solutions."
I offer the second debate as evidence. I submit the participating lions and tigresses sought to one up each other. Their failed ideas, as Ben Shapiro noted, is attributed to causes beyond their control.
If you ran a business the way they run government it is no wonder they love Socialism and why Venezuela's happen from time to time.
There is much that one can argue is uneven about the way capitalism allocates but you cannot argue it has not produced more wealth and more comforts for more people than any other system. The problem with liberals is they are an unhappy lot, they are never satisfied because fairness and completeness are the basis by which they judge everything. They will never be able to achieve total fairness and reach everyone nor can they ever accomplish everything no matter how well intention-ed and how much money, that belongs to others, they are willing to spend. You generally enslave someone to free someone because you take/re-allocate something from someone else because they have more and that generally sets a bad precedent and creates a whole set of new problems.
Liberals need to remain in a constant state of unhappiness and agitation because it gives them causes which drive their every moment of existence. They love solving the problems of the world because that gives them a job for life. There will always be a bottom and top. Suck it up you liberals. (See 1 below.)
Save me from the do-gooders and bleeders! That's my wrap on the second debate. Much to do about nothing and it will bring about the end of America if any one of them becomes president.
You can bank on that and it will begin with the collapse of the stock market etc.
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I have written about Justice Roberts in the past but believe it is worth repeating.
I have a very dear friend named professor Henry (Hank) Abraham. Hank is a retired Chaired Political Science Professor who is the nation's most noted author of the history of The Supreme Court. His closest personal friend on The Court was Justice was Scalia.
I inquired about Hank's thoughts on Roberts and he told me his main interest would be comity not interpreting The Constitution and consequently, he will became a swing voter.(See 2 below.)
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Far too many contemporary black citizens believe they are justified in anti-social behaviour because of past sins carried out against them, believe affirmative action has given them a vaulted position as repayment for those sins and they have finally gained long denied deserved rights and acceptance.
That said, theft is theft and not every wanton act is racially induced though Obama and progressive radicals and the "black lives matter" movement has ginned that belief. (See 3 below.)
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Dick
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1) Grim Lizzie
Warren’s odd brand of populism seeks to expand a corrupt system’s power.
By Kimberley Strassel
It’s a wonder Democratic presidential candidates can face the day. To listen to them debate, they live in an America saddled with historic wealth inequality, governed by rapacious monopolies, burdened with dirty air and water. This alternate America has human-rights violations and treats women as second-class citizens. Mitch McConnell is the Most Powerful Man on the Planet.
The grimmest candidate of all may be Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who dominated Wednesday’s debate stage. Ms. Warren is running on her own unique brand of anti-corporate populism, one that attacks “a small group that holds far too much power.” Every problem she sees in America—climate change, guns, student-loan debt, health-care prices, legislative gridlock—is a product of “systemic” corruption. Only “a thinner and thinner slice at the top” is succeeding, Ms. Warren insisted. Everyone else is failing.
Donald Trump’s election initially inspired Democratic hand-wringing over the party’s failure to pitch to his rural, blue-collar voters. More than two years later, most of them have forgotten that debate and defaulted to courting the usual urban base. But not Ms. Warren. Her campaign has remained singularly focused on the politics of envy, in a bet that this is the Democratic path to those “forgotten” voters.
That pitch has had the benefit of distinguishing her ideas rhetorically from Sen. Bernie Sanders’s socialist approach. And her growing stack of detailed proposals—from shareholder rules to housing benefits to a wealth tax—has earned her the admiration of the liberal intellectual elite. Columnists and TV hosts are paying her gushy attention, which has helped propel her recent (modest) rise in the polls.
All that’s missing is any evidence that this narrative will play with most voters, especially those at whom it is aimed. For all Ms. Warren’s recent boomlet, she remains at 12.8% in the latest RealClearPolitics nationwide Democratic average.
A central problem with Ms. Warren’s strategy was on display with NBC’s Savannah Guthrie’s opening question to her Wednesday. “When 71% of Americans say the economy is doing well, including 60% of Democrats,” Ms. Guthrie asked, “what do you say to those who worry this kind of significant change could be risky to the economy?” She couldn’t answer. For the first time in decades, it’s harder to hire a blue-collar worker than a white-collar one. Wages are growing, feeding an overall sense of economic optimism. Envy is powerful, and Mr. Trump’s tariff-laden economy could still buckle. But it’s far tougher to argue the system is rigged when times are good.
The central flaw in Ms. Warren’s “populism” is her solution: more government. Mr. Trump’s populism was successful in part because it harnessed a sentiment shared by the vast majority of Americans—distrust of a “powerful” and “corrupt” political system. He positioned himself outside that power structure, and promised to drain the swamp. Ms. Warren’s anticorruption populism sounds good until you hear her fix: Give the feds more power. Many Americans might believe corporations are a problem. But how many think replacing the market with government is the answer?
Even Ms. Warren understands the risk. It’s why she goes to such effort to insist she is a capitalist and to claim her only interest is in imposing better “rules” on the system. But the populist spin can’t mask her actual policies. And the agenda she has so meticulously laid out amounts to a ferocious government expansion, unmatched by any candidate other than Mr. Sanders.
It is an odd capitalist who calls for eliminating entire sections of the free market. Ms. Warren was one of only two candidates who vowed Wednesday to abolish all private health insurance. Her climate plan promises an Inauguration Day moratorium on all new fossil-fuel leases offshore and on public land—destroying tens of thousands of jobs. She’d forcibly dismantle Amazon, Google and Facebook .
Taking over many functions would be your friendly neighborhood bureaucrat. The bozos behind the Veterans Affairs waiting lists? Ms. Warren will task them with your health care. She’ll put the federal government in charge of a new renewable-energy plan—Solyndra on steroids. That corporate slush fund called the Export-Import bank? She wants a turbocharged version. And that’s before she puts government in charge of housing, child care and more and pays for (a bit) of it with a whopping new “wealth” tax.
Mr. Trump would have a field day pointing out the realities of Ms. Warren’s agenda. And even Democrats know it. It’s why in poll after poll the biggest concern about the senator is her “electability.” The liberal pundits are now trying hard to convince voters to overlook these fears. But Democrats do so at their peril.
Ms. Warren’s populism may look good at first glance, and she at least gets credit for pitching to the Trump working class. Her problem is that liberal governance is liberal governance, no matter how you dress it up.
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The Chief draws a road map for politicizing administrative law.
By The Editorial Board.
Chief Justice John Roberts is the Supreme Court’s new swing vote, and he’s proving he won’t be pinned down by the law or judicial philosophy. His decision to join the four liberal Justices on Thursday to block a citizenship question on the Census is wrong on the merits and threatens larger damage to the Constitution’s separation of powers.
The question in Department of Commerce v. New York was whether Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross acted within his purview in reinstating a citizenship question on the 2020 Census. That’s not the question the Court ended up deciding. Instead, the Chief held that although Mr. Ross acted lawfully, his motives appear to have been less than pure.
Congress has delegated to the Commerce Secretary broad discretion to conduct the Census “in such form and content as he may determine.” It’s indisputable that Mr. Ross had the legal authority to add the citizenship question. But Democratic states argued that he violated the Administrative Procedure Act by overruling Census Bureau bureaucrats who claimed the question could reduce response rates.
According to the states, a citizenship question could result in a population undercount that would reduce their federal funding and representation in Congress. They also claimed the question was motivated by racial animus toward Hispanics and intended to help Republicans gerrymander. There was scant evidence for either claim.
In a memo explaining his decision, Mr. Ross noted that the Justice Department had requested that the Secretary reinstate the citizenship question to gather more granular data to enforce the Voting Rights Act. The data could be useful in reviewing the make-up of majority-minority districts in which a majority of voters are members of a racial or ethnic minority.
“That decision was reasonable and reasonably explained, particularly in light of the long history of the citizenship question on the census,” the Chief Justice concluded in the part of the majority opinion that was joined by Justices Samuel Alito, Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas. That should have been the end of the judicial inquiry.
But so what? As the Chief acknowledges in the last portion of his opinion that is joined by his liberal colleagues, “decisions are routinely informed by unstated considerations of politics, the legislative process, public relations, interest group relations, foreign relations, and national security concerns (among others).”
Under longstanding precedent, courts may not reject an agency’s stated reasons for decisions merely because it may have other unstated reasons. But the Chief and the Court’s liberals make an exception in this case because all the evidence “considered together, reveal a significant mismatch between the decision the Secretary made and the rationale he provided.”
The Court is winking at the excesses of the lower-court judge and inviting challenges to the political motives of agency actions that are fully justified under the law. As Justice Thomas points out in his partial dissent joined by Justices Kavanaugh and Gorsuch, “the Court has opened a Pandora’s box of pretext-based challenges in administrative law.”
The Court is creating a road map for judges and interest groups to examine the record of interagency discussions to declare decisions invalid. This is breaking new legal ground because never before has the Court held an agency decision arbitrary and capricious because its supporting rationale was pretextual.
The Court’s decision will further politicize the courts and, as Justice Thomas warns, enable “partisans to use the courts to harangue executive officers through depositions, discovery, delay, and distraction” and “could even implicate separation-of-powers concerns insofar as it enables judicial interference with the enforcement of the laws.”
It’s hard to reconcile Chief Justice Roberts’ opinion on the citizenship question with his Auer decision earlier this week. On one hand, he wants to defer to regulators on matters of legal interpretation that are the purview of courts, but on the other he wants to micromanage the motives of agencies when there is no cause for judicial review.
The Chief is also contradicting the message he sent in his gerrymander ruling on Thursday that judges shouldn’t get involved in political questions. He’s inviting more political lobbying of the Court and encouraging lower-court judges to intervene in partisan fights over matters of policy that the Constitution delegates to the political branches.
Maybe the Chief is trying to ensure the Court isn’t perceived as a rubber-stamp on the Trump Administration after upholding the President’s travel ban last year. But the ruling establishes a precedent that will be hard to limit and will surely be used by conservatives during a Democratic Administration.
At least the Chief’s dubious ruling in 2012 upholding the Affordable Care Act under Congress’s taxing power appeared to be a one-time trick to avoid killing the law. This mistake also looks political, but the damage to the judiciary and the Constitution will be hard to undo.
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3) Oberlin’s $44 Million Mistake
By Daniel Henninger
An Ohio jury sends a message about politics to colleges: Enough is enough.
After a Lorain County, Ohio, jury awarded Gibson’s Bakery $44 million this month in its defamation suit against Oberlin College, the store’s owner, David Gibson, said: “We appreciate that the jury understood what we had gone through, and I think they were saying to the entire country that we can’t allow this to happen to hard-working small-business people whose lives are defined by their business, their family, and their community.”
Trumpian, Republican, conservative. Those, I think it is fair to say, are likely to be the word associations called to mind by Mr. Gibson’s remark about a jury siding with hard-working people whose lives are defined by family. In short, a victory for a “deplorable” against the famously progressive Oberlin College.
What happened at Oberlin is a parable for the politics of our times. Its lesson is that you may end up paying a high price for your facile political assumptions about people with whom you don’t agree.
Barack Obama didn’t pay a price for his remark about people who cling to guns or religion, but it proved too much to swallow when Hillary Clinton recast his condescension as the “basket of deplorables.” She paid an unimaginably high price for the increasingly common impulse to say any slovenly thing that comes to mind.
Now that Oberlin College has been hit with that $44 million defamation judgment, colleges and universities across the country are learning that letting the political left run wild across their campuses without adult supervision may be more trouble, and more costly, than it is worth.
Here is the short version of the Oberlin incident: In early November 2016, the owner of a store near the campus apprehended a then-19-year-old black student for shoplifting wine. In response, about 150 students staged protests in front of the store, accusing its owners of racism and racial profiling. This month, a jury said Oberlin’s handling of the incident would cost it $11 million in compensatory damages and $33.2 million in punitive damages (which is $11 million more than Ohio law permits).
The student protesters were only the proximate cause of Oberlin’s problem. The jury wasn’t particularly interested in the student protesters or their accusation of “racism,” which presumably remains protected opinion. What really interested the jury was the actions of senior managers at Oberlin College as they related to the protesters’ other accusation against Gibson’s Bakery—that it practiced racial profiling, which is a substantive act, not mere opinion.
After the protests erupted, Oberlin suspended the college’s baked-goods orders with the Gibsons. In its official fact sheet about the event, Oberlin says it suspended the bakery “in an effort to remove issues that might provoke further confrontation with the students.”
When an Oberlin professor complained this was a “fundamental denial of due process” for Gibson’s, the dean of students replied: “[Expletive] him. I’d say unleash the students if I wasn’t convinced this needs to be put behind us.”
In a text message presented at the trial, an Oberlin professor described the protests as an effort to “smear the brand” of Gibson’s.
If it stands, the decision has significant legal and political implications for colleges and universities. Peter Lake, a law professor at Stetson University, described the legal ramifications to the Chronicle of Higher Education: “This is a game changer. Academic freedom is not a blanket freedom from libel. Just because you work at a college doesn’t mean you have special privileges other media defendants don’t.”
Oberlin’s president, Carmen Twillie Ambar (who was appointed nine months after the incident), visited the Journal’s editorial page Wednesday to discuss the decision and hopefully, she said, some issues on which “conservatives and progressives could agree.”
She told us Oberlin hasn’t decided whether it will appeal, but decried “using the legal system to punish opinion.” Not many in the opinion business would disagree with that.
But President Ambar also said: “You can have two different lived experiences, and both those things can be true.”
Hmmm. This idea, now current among progressives—that all self-defined, lived experiences should be regarded as “true”—strikes me as sophistry. Or as someone used to tell me when I was quite young, “You’re trying to have your cake and eat it too.”
The Oberlin jury said, in effect, enough is enough. College administrators cannot continue to have it both ways. No matter what the Oberlin faculty and students imagined about their experiences inside Gibson’s Bakery, the Gibsons were not engaged in racial profiling. They manifestly were protecting their business from shoplifters.
Inside and outside academia, a lot of people in recent years have been accused of violating someone’s idea of their lived experience, often with “hurtful speech.” Leading, in turn, to being suspended from their jobs or ostracized by people they considered colleagues.
Agreed. One shouldn’t need a multimillion-dollar liability judgment against a college to define recognizable boundaries of common sense. But given the intensity of political animosities these days, maybe that’s what it takes.
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