Politics

[Irish YJ]

Bernie quotes Aquinas against usury:

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He should also quote Aquinas on abortion. While Aquinas's view on abortion is no longer the Church's view, it would be nice if he didn't cherry pick the quotes he liked.

 

[wizards8507]

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">This apparently how the left pictures ⁦<a href="https://twitter.com/SpeakerPelosi?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@SpeakerPelosi</a>⁩ as featured in the ⁦<a href="https://twitter.com/AOC?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@AOC</a>⁩ comic. <a href="https://t.co/oINkC7NnVM">pic.twitter.com/oINkC7NnVM</a></p>— Brandon Morse (@TheBrandonMorse) <a href="https://twitter.com/TheBrandonMorse/status/1123596912098185216?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">May 1, 2019</a></blockquote>
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[Irish YJ]

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">This apparently how the left pictures ⁦<a href="https://twitter.com/SpeakerPelosi?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@SpeakerPelosi</a>⁩ as featured in the ⁦<a href="https://twitter.com/AOC?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@AOC</a>⁩ comic. <a href="https://t.co/oINkC7NnVM">pic.twitter.com/oINkC7NnVM</a></p>— Brandon Morse (@TheBrandonMorse) <a href="https://twitter.com/TheBrandonMorse/status/1123596912098185216?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">May 1, 2019</a></blockquote>
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I picture Pelosi as Melisandre without her amulet.

 

[connor_in]

I love ya wiz, but seriously, post a link with a warning instead. I spent the last few minutes dry heaving after seeing that.

 

[ulukinatme]

 

[Whiskeyjack]

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">What unites millennial "socialists" and MAGA types is that they both want the kind of security and promise of improving standards of living that previous generations took for granted that we no longer do despite being four times richer than we were in 1970 as measured by GDP.</p>— Wesley Yang (@wesyang) <a href="https://twitter.com/wesyang/status/1125779242468429826?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">May 7, 2019</a></blockquote>
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[connor_in]

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Become an official member of the Cartel! <a href="https://t.co/NldVtTeJgj">pic.twitter.com/NldVtTeJgj</a></p>— Team Mitch (@Team_Mitch) <a href="https://twitter.com/Team_Mitch/status/1126119955928367104?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">May 8, 2019</a></blockquote>
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This is the official account for Mitch McConnell #CocaineMitch

 

[NorthDakota]

Mitch is the greatest senator...probably ever

 

[ulukinatme]

That's actually pretty damn funny. Apparently the shirt is selling like hotcakes. They're turning sour grapes into wine.

 

[Whiskeyjack]

Ben Sixsmith just published an article in First Things titled "The Fusionism That Failed":

Understanding the upheavals of American conservatism requires the study of its *history—in particular, the fortunes of Frank Meyer, inventor of the Cold War synthesis that reigned for decades as conservative orthodoxy and has only recently met with serious challenge.

Like many other figures on the Cold War right, Meyer had a communist background. He had studied at the London School of Economics, but was expelled and deported from the United Kingdom in 1933 for subversive activities, including publishing the Marxist newspaper Student Vanguard.

He was still a communist in 1940. That year, in an essay for the theoretical journal of the Communist Party USA, he saluted the “brilliant power of Marxism in the hands of so great a master as Stalin.” During World War II and its aftermath, however, Meyer had second thoughts. Many communists turned away from their beliefs in light of the horrors of the Soviet Union; Meyer’s conversion was bookish by comparison. His reading of Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom and Richard Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences led him to reject Marxism and the Communist party in favor of limited government and individualism. Veering to the right, he contributed first to the libertarian magazine The Freeman and then to the young National Review, and he soon made a name for himself as a defender of liberal conservatism against the traditionalist ideas of Russell Kirk. He argued that the fundamental political division facing the U.S. was between, on the one hand, “collectivism and statism which merge gradually into totalitarianism,” and on the other hand, “individualism: the principles of the primacy of the individual, the division of power, the limitation of government, the freedom of the economy.” His analysis reflected the Hayekian fear that once the state begins to grow, it swells inexorably into a totalitarian force. The threat of the Soviet Union around 1950 seemed to confirm this analysis all too well.

In 1961, Meyer wrote The Moulding of Communists, which explained the means by which communists recruited and indoctrinated members. Drawing on his own experience, he described how young Americans were signed up and put to work by the Communist party. Whittaker Chambers’s Witness was a moving meditation on the author’s time as a communist. By comparison, Meyer’s book was as cold and impersonal as a medical text that details the treatment of a dangerous infection. Meyer detested his former beliefs. But as the libertarian Murray Rothbard observed in a perceptive review, this detestation clouded Meyer’s judgment. He viewed communism as uniquely diabolical and showed no understanding of the fact that inflexible dogmatism can seep into other systems. In doing so, Meyer revealed that though he had abandoned communism, he had not moved beyond his ideological cast of mind.

His 1962 book In Defense of Freedom further developed his individualist ideas. It laid the foundations of the settlement for which Meyer is best known: “fusionism.” The conservative contributors to National Review had fierce disagreements over concepts of freedom and virtue, with libertarians on one side and traditionalists on the other. *Meyer’s fusionism appeared to bridge the gap by advocating a political commitment to libertarianism and a moral commitment to traditional values. One should preach virtue, in other words, but not prohibit sin.

This would have been an interesting synthesis even had it been born of pure pragmatism, but Meyer was more idealistic than that. Virtue, for him, depended on the individual’s having a free choice between good and bad deeds. “Freedom can exist,” he wrote, “at no lesser price than the danger of damnation.” Freedom was “the essence of man’s being,” and so man “must be free to choose his worst as well as his best end.” Otherwise, he is not virtuous, but slavish.

From their platform in National Review, Meyer and fusionism came to set the agenda for conservatism in the United States. “Anti-*Communism,” as Daniel McCarthy has written, “was the [conservative] coalition’s glue,” and freedom was a potent value for the West to wield against the grim dictators of the communist states. And Meyer seemed to be vindicated by history. In the 1980s, as the Soviet Union slumped and liberal economics thrived, *Ronald Reagan saluted Meyer as a “great thinker” who had helped to guide the movement that swept him to power.

Amid the triumphalism, astute Americans might have observed how much Meyer’s early critics had been vindicated. L. Brent Bozell Jr. of National Review was troubled early on by the hard individualism of his colleague and friend. In his 1962 essay “Freedom or Virtue?” he argued that these two concepts could not be aligned as easily as Meyer maintained. If Americans ought to maximize their virtue by maximizing their freedom, then societal as well as legal restraints should be abandoned. “Social disapproval,” after all, “can be as persuasive a deterrent against scribbling on walls as the threat of a legal fine.”

We will want to make our own divorce laws even laxer. We will also want to launch a public education campaign (privately endowed of course) aimed at breaking down residual social prejudices; and perhaps, to help overcome the mechanical difficulties, a special fund could be set aside for periodic newspaper notices advising dissatisfied spouses of the most convenient cut-rate agency or mail order house.

Bozell framed this scenario as a reductio ad absurdum, but in hindsight it looks prophetic. In the decades following Bozell’s essay, no-fault divorce was legalized, Roe v. Wade was instituted, obscenity laws were weakened, and the United States experienced unprecedented levels of divorce, single parenthood, abortion, and *pornography consumption. Meyer wrote of “fibers of tradition and civilization” that were “carried in the minds of men from generation to generation,” but it is clear that to expect traditional values to survive the abolition of legal and social restraints is to exaggerate the strength of a people’s moral fabric.

Other contemporary critics of Meyer predicted that a political commitment to hard individualism would enable not just cultural decline but social atomization. “*Meyer’s *society is not actually a society,” *Stanley Parry wrote in Modern Age. “It is a collectivity, i.e., a multitude of . . . free autonomous individuals.” *Meyer’s individualism was the wrong strategy for the 1960s, a decade of social fragmentation in which families were separating, civic engagement was declining, and communities were withering as old industries began to die. In Defense of Freedom blamed the “social boredom” that traditional conservatives diagnosed in Western culture on an “excess of state-enforced community.” But later analysis by Christopher Lasch, *Robert Putnam, and others of the effects of commodification, technology, and diversity on Western life suggests that Parry was right.

Fusionism became the organizing principle of American conservatives because it united the American right around free-market principles and against communism. With the end of the Cold War, the communist threat receded and fusionism faced opponents in nationalists such as Pat Buchanan. His challenge to the establishment went nowhere, however, as a thriving economy allowed social and economic liberals such as Bob Dole and George W. Bush to sustain fusionism, and 9/11 kept American conservatives united against a common foe.

Failure in Iraq and the financial crisis of 2008 made the old freedom arguments less persuasive. No major external threat held the coalition together, and an unstable economy made the fusionist emphasis on market deregulation less compelling. Republican voters elected the reactionary, protectionist Trump, raising the question: Whither conservatism?

Against the Dead Consensus,” a manifesto for a new conservatism, published by First Things and signed by Sohrab Ahmari, Patrick Deneen, and Rod Dreher, among others, offers direction. Cold War conservatism, the statement maintains, “often tracked the same lodestar liberalism did—namely, individual autonomy,” and thus surrendered to cultural progressivism and unmoored capitalism. “Against the Dead Consensus” argues for a more socially conservative, communitarian right that would distinguish itself from what Dreher calls “Zombie Reaganism”—which is to say, fusionism.

One critic of the manifesto, Noah Rothman of Commentary magazine, wrote:

It is not my job to tell you how to realize your maximum potential and happiness, so long as those aspirations do not infringe on the rights and aspirations of another.Beyond those infringements, the public has no role and assuming it does is hubris. Down that road lies tyranny.

This is the liberalism of John Stuart Mill refracted through the conservatism of Frank Meyer, in a compromise that made sense in 1960 but is unworkable today. A state that encourages marriage, for example, and insists that husbands and wives must have good reasons to seek divorce, need not be an austere, totalitarian one. This is, in fact, how the United States governed such matters through the 1950s. And in the hyper-commodified twenty-first century, a state that fails to encourage marriage is misgoverning.

Representing the establishment view, Rothman has argued that conservatives “undervalue” the accomplishments of fusionism, which include:

The creation of a series of global frameworks that prohibit protectionist industrial and trade policies, the revitalization of First and Second Amendment freedoms, the scaling back of organized labor’s privileges, and the reformation of the nation’s welfare programs with the aim of inculcating in beneficiaries a work ethic.

But these advances in economic liberalization must be assessed against a background of rising rates of suicide and death by opioid abuse, and declining rates of birth and family formation. Conservatives know that no society can be perfect. But there is something to be said for viewing a nation’s wealth as a means to an end—that of its citizens’ flourishing—and not as an end in itself.

Murray Rothbard was right: Meyer was an ideologue, after his conversion as before. His account of fusionism, though it purports to be universal, made only superficial sense. In truth, virtue is necessary for freedom, not freedom for virtue. In the twenty-first-century West, we are afflicted with a mediocre libertinism, which is as unstable as it is unsatisfactory. We need a new conservative fusion, one that prioritizes social connection instead of atomization.

 

[Whiskeyjack]

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">This is the key to ending abortion in America. <br><br>Join us in changing hearts and minds:<br><br>➡️ <a href="https://t.co/amwEaECz6W">https://t.co/amwEaECz6W</a> <a href="https://t.co/KLUq0nyqNo">pic.twitter.com/KLUq0nyqNo</a></p>— Live Action (@LiveAction) <a href="https://twitter.com/LiveAction/status/1126178020585365504?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">May 8, 2019</a></blockquote>
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[Irish#1]

Beating heart bill signed into law in Georgia. A win fir the good guys.


3 production companies say they won't film in Georgia after abortion law signed


https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/10/entertainment/georgia-movies-heartbeat-law/index.html

 

[connor_in]

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Must watch & share:<br><br>This is one of the most dishonest bills we have passed out of the House.<br><br>A purposefully mislabeled bill on “pre-existing conditions” meant to mislead Americans and limit choice and innovation in healthcare. <br><br>Don’t believe the spin, here’s my explanation: <a href="https://t.co/kQMzfIkfXN">pic.twitter.com/kQMzfIkfXN</a></p>— Rep. Dan Crenshaw (@RepDanCrenshaw) <a href="https://twitter.com/RepDanCrenshaw/status/1126846220486565888?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">May 10, 2019</a></blockquote>
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[Legacy]

Alabama House approves near total abortion ban (AP, April 30, 2019)

MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) — The Alabama House voted overwhelmingly Tuesday to outlaw almost all abortions in the state as conservatives took aim at the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion nationwide.

The Republican-dominated House of Representatives voted 74-3 for legislation that would make it a felony to perform an abortion at any stage in a woman’s pregnancy. The proposal passed after Democrats walked out of the chamber after sometimes emotional debate with opponents and supporters crowding the gallery. The bill now moves to the Alabama Senate.

Supporters said the bill is intentionally designed to conflict with the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion nationally, hoping to spark court cases that might prompt the justices to revisit Roe. The bill contains an exemption for situations in which there is a serious risk to the mother’s health, but not for rape and incest.

“The heart of this bill is to confront a decision that was made by the courts in 1973 that said the baby in a womb is not a person,” said Republican Rep. Terri Collins of Decatur.

Republicans in the chamber applauded after the bill was approved after more than two hours of sometimes emotional debate. Collins acknowledged that such a ban would likely be struck down by lower courts, but she said the aim is eventually to get to the Supreme Court.

Without the numbers to stop the bill, Democrats walked off the House floor ahead of the vote, calling the proposal both extreme and fiscally irresponsible. They said the ban would cost the state money for a potentially expensive legal fight that could be spent on other needs.

Rep. Louise Alexander, a Democrat, said the choice to give birth to a child should be left up to a woman, and the decision should not be made on the floor of the Alabama Legislature.

“You don’t know why I may want to have an abortion. It may be because of my health. It may be because of many reasons. Until all of you in this room walk in a woman’s shoes, y’all don’t know,” Alexander said.

Emboldened by new conservatives on the Supreme Court, abortion opponents in several states are seeking to incite new legal fights in the hopes of challenging Roe v. Wade. The Alabama bill comes on the heels of several states considering or approving bans on abortion once a fetal heartbeat is detected, which occurs in about the sixth week of pregnancy.

The Alabama bill attempts to go farther by banning abortion at any stage of pregnancy.

House Republicans voted down Democrats’ attempt to amend the bill to add an exemption for rape and incest. Representatives voted 72-26 to table the proposed amendment.

“They would not even allow an exception for rape and incest. ... What does that say to the women in this state,” House Minority Leader Anthony Daniels.

Collins argued that adding exemptions would weaken the intent of the bill as a vehicle to challenge Roe. She said if states regain the ability to decide abortion access, Alabama lawmakers could come back and decide what exemptions to allow.

The bill drew a crowd of opponents and supporters to the House gallery. A group of abortion clinic escorts wore their rainbow-colored vests in the House gallery. A demonstrator was arrested on disorderly conduct charges after shouting “dumb,” attempting to write on the glass window overlooking to the House chamber and throwing paint at legislative security officers, House spokesman Clay Redden said.

Rep. Rolanda Hollis, a Birmingham Democrat, read a poem that criticized Republicans’ embrace of gun rights but not abortion rights, and later referred to the state as “Ala-Backwards.”

The text of the Alabama bill likens legalized abortion to history’s greatest atrocities, including the Holocaust.

Tuscaloosa Republican Rep. Rich Wingo, a supporter of the bill, likened abortion to murder and read statistics that estimate that there have been 60 million abortions since the Supreme Court’s landmark decision.

“I believe this chamber, this body, will never make a greater decision than today... protecting the life of an unborn child,” Wingo said.

Amid Chaos, Alabama Senate Postpones Vote On Nation's Strictest Abortion Ban
(NPR, May 10, 2019)
- Includes video.

Alabama's House passed the bill last week. As NPR's Debbie Elliott reported, the House version would mean a near-total ban on abortion: "The bill criminalizes abortion, meaning doctors would face felony jail time up to 99 years if convicted. The only exceptions are for a serious health risk to the pregnant woman, or a lethal anomaly of the fetus. There are no exceptions for cases of rape or incest. A woman would not be held criminally liable for having an abortion."

Alabama is among more than two dozen states seeking to restrict abortion rights this year, testing federal legal precedent that prevents states from banning abortion before the point at which a fetus could survive outside the womb. Mississippi, Ohio and Georgia have all recently passed legislation that bans abortions after a fetal heartbeat is detected, in about the sixth week of pregnancy. Federal judges in Kentucky and Iowa have blocked the laws or struck them down as unconstitutional.

The AP notes that state Rep. Terri Collins, the bill's sponsor, argued against any exceptions for rape or incest, "saying any exceptions could hurt the goal of creating a court case to weigh whether embryos and fetuses are people with rights of personhood. She has argued that lawmakers could come back and add exemptions if states regain control of abortion access."

Why one Alabama man is suing on behalf of an aborted fetus (Catholic New Service)

First two paragraphs:

Montgomery, Ala., Mar 9, 2019 / 04:30 pm (CNA).- In what is believed to be the first case of its kind in the United States, an attorney will represent the estate of an aborted child, after the father filed a wrongful death lawsuit on behalf of the six-week old fetus.

Court documents allege that a then-16-year-old Alabama woman obtained a medication abortion in February 2017, despite the protestations of her boyfriend, who says he is the father of the child.

The above article does not include the information that the judge is a probate judge. Since Alabama law does not permit family members of a deceased person to bring a wrongful death claim, only the personal representative of the deceased person’s estate can sue for the “wrongful act, omission, or negligence” that caused the person’s death.

Probate Judge Frank Barger allowed the ex-boyfriend, Ryan Magers, to become the legal representative of the medically aborted embryo (to use the medical term) and to proceed on its behalf with a wrongful death lawsuit against the abortion clinic and as well as the pharmaceutical company that produces the medication that terminated the pregnancy. Magers was 19 years old at the time and was unemployed.

Alabama approved a personhood amendment last year to the Alabama Constitution that gives constitutional rights to fertilized eggs, embryos, and fetuses. Last year, 59 percent of voters approved an amendment to the state constitution that declares “it is the public policy of this state to recognize and support the sanctity of unborn life and the rights of unborn children, most importantly the right to life in all manners and measures appropriate and lawful; and to provide that the constitution of this state does not protect the right to abortion or require the funding of abortion.”

 

[IrishLax]

Omar + AOC + Tlaib are single handedly trying to lose the Democrats the 2020 election. They can't go a week without being Anti-Semetic or Anti-American.

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">CNN Fact Checks Dem Rep. Rashida Tlaib’s Comments On Israel<br><br>John King: Tlaib "ignored the fact that Palestinian leaders at the time allied themselves with Hitler and that total war is how the Arab world reacted to the declaration of Israeli independence." <a href="https://t.co/mvSa7gTn4P">pic.twitter.com/mvSa7gTn4P</a></p>— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) <a href="https://twitter.com/SteveGuest/status/1127985333990305792?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">May 13, 2019</a></blockquote>
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[NorthDakota]

Omar + AOC + Tlaib are single handedly trying to lose the Democrats the 2020 election. They can't go a week without being Anti-Semetic or Anti-American.

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">CNN Fact Checks Dem Rep. Rashida Tlaib’s Comments On Israel<br><br>John King: Tlaib "ignored the fact that Palestinian leaders at the time allied themselves with Hitler and that total war is how the Arab world reacted to the declaration of Israeli independence." <a href="https://t.co/mvSa7gTn4P">pic.twitter.com/mvSa7gTn4P</a></p>— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) <a href="https://twitter.com/SteveGuest/status/1127985333990305792?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">May 13, 2019</a></blockquote>
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I'm not sure if you are sexist or racist or maybe both. I'm gonna assume both.

 

[ACamp1900]

I'm not sure if you are sexist or racist or maybe both. I'm gonna assume both.

He's also mixed so go ahead and toss "sell out" in there too I guess...

 

[NorthDakota]

He's also mixed so go ahead and toss "sell out" in there too I guess...

IrishLax is also a sellout. Shout it from the rooftops.

 

[Irish#1]

Alabama House approves near total abortion ban (AP, April 30, 2019)



Amid Chaos, Alabama Senate Postpones Vote On Nation's Strictest Abortion Ban
(NPR, May 10, 2019)
- Includes video.





Why one Alabama man is suing on behalf of an aborted fetus (Catholic New Service)

First two paragraphs:


The above article does not include the information that the judge is a probate judge. Since Alabama law does not permit family members of a deceased person to bring a wrongful death claim, only the personal representative of the deceased person’s estate can sue for the “wrongful act, omission, or negligence” that caused the person’s death.

Probate Judge Frank Barger allowed the ex-boyfriend, Ryan Magers, to become the legal representative of the medically aborted embryo (to use the medical term) and to proceed on its behalf with a wrongful death lawsuit against the abortion clinic and as well as the pharmaceutical company that produces the medication that terminated the pregnancy. Magers was 19 years old at the time and was unemployed.

Alabama approved a personhood amendment last year to the Alabama Constitution that gives constitutional rights to fertilized eggs, embryos, and fetuses. Last year, 59 percent of voters approved an amendment to the state constitution that declares “it is the public policy of this state to recognize and support the sanctity of unborn life and the rights of unborn children, most importantly the right to life in all manners and measures appropriate and lawful; and to provide that the constitution of this state does not protect the right to abortion or require the funding of abortion.”

Good for Alabama.

 

[Irish#1]

Omar + AOC + Tlaib are single handedly trying to lose the Democrats the 2020 election. They can't go a week without being Anti-Semetic or Anti-American.

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">CNN Fact Checks Dem Rep. Rashida Tlaib’s Comments On Israel<br><br>John King: Tlaib "ignored the fact that Palestinian leaders at the time allied themselves with Hitler and that total war is how the Arab world reacted to the declaration of Israeli independence." <a href="https://t.co/mvSa7gTn4P">pic.twitter.com/mvSa7gTn4P</a></p>— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) <a href="https://twitter.com/SteveGuest/status/1127985333990305792?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">May 13, 2019</a></blockquote>
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They are constantly amazing me with what they say. Do they ever check facts first?

 

[ACamp1900]

They are constantly amazing me with what they say. Do they ever check facts first?

THEY know what THEY are saying... they also learned long ago that repeating the lie enough will often times change the perception(s) and or stances. Boiling the pot slowly but surely.

 

[Bluto]

The statements by those CNN analysts are in many ways as much an oversimplification and misrepresentation of the creation of the State of Israel as that presented by Tlaib. It makes sense that Palestinians were aligned with the Axis, they were after all under British occupation at the time of WW2. Both pre WW2 and post WW2 Zionists engaged in terror bombing campaigns against the British in order to undermine the British occupation. As to the Arabs engaging in “total war” against Israel, the new King of Jordan hedged his bets in the Arab Israeli War and was communicating with Israel on a regular basis. He used the conflict as an opportunity to expand the newly created Jordan. So yeah, each of those narratives from Tlaib and CNN present a selective view of a complex and multifaceted conflict and while they might be representative of a particular perspective neither captures the whole story. “The medium is the message”.

 

[ACamp1900]

Met Beto at my daughters baseball game today... dude is as phony when the cameras aren’t rolling as when they are. I was almost impressed by his bullshit levels.

 

[ulukinatme]

Met Beto at my daughters baseball game today... dude is as phony when the cameras aren’t rolling as when they are. I was almost impressed by his bullshit levels.

But his ear and nose hair was perfectly manicured, right?

 

[ACamp1900]

But his ear and nose hair was perfectly manicured, right?

Dude was trying SO hard to fit with the sports parents,... he threw like a little girl.

 

[BGIF]

Dude was trying SO hard to fit with the sports parents,... he threw like a little girl.

Misogynist!


Beto is shrewdly courting the Title IX voters.

 

[Whiskeyjack]

The Week's Matthew Walther just published an article titled "The American Solidarity Party is a third party that actually makes sense":

In the nightmare of the dark, all the dogs of Europe bark. Or throw ice cream at each other, as the case may be.

Difficult as it may be to sympathize with the Farages and Salvinis and Weidels of the world, it is even harder to find anything good to say about the leaders of Europe's established political parties, who have responded to the great crises of the last decade — the financial collapse of 2007-8 and the surge in migration from the Middle East and North Africa — with stolid indifference or worse.

Still, I for one will mourn the final defeat, if it ever comes, of the old European Christian Democratic parties, especially the German CDU. With its origins in the encyclicals of the Leo XIII and other modern popes, Christian Democracy rose from the ashes of Europe with the promise of a third way between the decadence of Anglo-American capitalism and the tyranny of the Soviet Union. Christian Democrats stood for collaboration rather than conflict between social classes, for broad-based, sustainable prosperity without greed, for freedom without gross license, and for the inalienable metaphysical dignity of all people. They came as close as any statesmen could to realizing the dreams of Goethe and Schiller and Cardinal Ottaviani and all the other great humanists and romantics in the modern history of the continent. All coalitions must sooner or later fail. Theirs was a beautiful thing while it lasted.

Unlike those of the European countries that had been either liberated or defeated, the pre-war political parties in the United States continued to exist after 1945. There has never been a proper Christian Democratic party in this country, but once upon a time we did not really need one. The ideals of the movement were to some extent embodied by both of our major parties. Party allegiance was a complicated matter that had more to do with regional and ethnic loyalties than with ideology. There were right-wing Democrats in the South in those days who opposed unionization and civil rights, just as there were liberal Republicans in the Northeast. But in the broad middle there were politicians who believed in a mixed economy and welfare while rejecting the servile state; they were cautiously supportive of the civil rights movement and committed Cold Warriors. It would be anachronistic to refer to them as “social conservatives,” but this is only because what we now think of as mainstream liberal views on abortion and other issues were then the exclusive province of a mostly unheard antinomian minority and would remain so until 1972.

The conditions that made this two-party consensus possible remain very much in place today. Survey after survey shows us that the vast majority of Americans hold views that are best described as socially conservative and economically moderate to progressive. Their viewpoint is also, incidentally, the most underrepresented in American media (its logical and polar opposite, libertarianism, is naturally the most overrepresented). As Thomas Frank and Tucker Carlson have both observed — albeit from radically different angles — there is no logical reason that opponents of infanticide should also be in favor of payday lending or NAFTA.

It is a curious thing then that only now, in the twilight of the movement in Europe, are we seeing anything like an attempt to create a proper vehicle for Christian Democratic principles in the United States. The American Solidarity Party was founded in 2011 as a curious alliance between criminal justice reformers, ecologically minded conservatives, disaffected labor activists, and radical pro-lifers. Its motto is "Common Good, Common Ground, Common Sense." Though it has nominated two presidential candidates and taken part in other elections in states ranging from Californa to New Jersey, Chuck Adams, now serving his second term as the city attorney of Sheboygan, Wisconsin, is the only public member of the ASP currently holding political office.

The most striking thing about the platform of the ASP (formerly the "Christian Democratic Party USA") is how un-radical most of it sounds. Why should there not be a socially conservative party that is for a living wage, workplace protections, strong welfare programs, and opposed to the imprudent use of American force abroad? On paper this sounds like a recipe for winning 60 or so percent of the national popular vote.

But the two-party system is an integral part of America's unwritten constitution. Most Americans regard a vote for a third-party candidate as synonymous with staying home on election day. Which is why I think the best strategy for American Christian Democrats is to run for local or state office on the party ticket and later seek to be nominated as either Republicans or Democrats — depending upon which is more electorally advantageous — in national elections. This is exactly what happened with the Democratic Socialists of America in 2018, when two members, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib, were elected to the House of Representative as Democrats. So far they have won no legislative victories, but they have captured the attention of both the media and the Democratic grassroots. Having two of its own elected as Democrats has raised the profile of what was already a flourishing minor party.

Americans who are sympathetic to the ASP should recognize the potential for replicating the success of the DSA. They should also take heart in the fact that there already American politicians — John Bel Edwards, the pro-life Democratic governor of Louisiana, and Patrick Hawley, the occasionally market-skeptical freshman Republican senator from Missouri — who to varying degrees embody the principles of Christian democracy. Christian Democrats in this country have nothing to lose and the majority of the U.S. electorate to gain.

 

[Whiskeyjack]

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Senator Josh Hawley grilling judicial nominee over his anti-Catholic rhetoric:<br><br>"No, you specifically compared this Catholic family's adherence to their religious beliefs with the views of the KKK."<br><br>Senator Hawley then reminds everyone of the Masterpiece Cake Shop SCOTUS Case <a href="https://t.co/4YsoDKy8x0">pic.twitter.com/4YsoDKy8x0</a></p>— The Columbia Bugle ���� (@ColumbiaBugle) <a href="https://twitter.com/ColumbiaBugle/status/1131248041631948800?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">May 22, 2019</a></blockquote>
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Watch the video if you have time. Hawley's impressive.

 

[Legacy]

Some background info on Josh Hawley from KC Star:
Can Missouri’s young man in a hurry outrun his state’s scandal?
SEPTEMBER 10, 2018
Excerpt:

The son of a banker and a schoolteacher, Hawley grew up in Lexington, Missouri, spending a lot of time at his grandparents’ nearby farm. For high school he commuted 50 miles each way into Kansas City to attend the Catholic all-boys Rockhurst High School (Jesuits), even though Hawley was raised United Methodist and identifies as Evangelical Protestant. You wouldn’t guess it from his beanpole frame, but he played on the football team’s offensive line — “I was a bigger boy back then.” The valedictorian embraced challenges and was not aloof like other star students, says Eric Berg, Hawley’s football coach. “He didn’t apologize for the talent and ability that he had, and he didn’t hold that over anybody’s head either,” Berg says. “To see what he’s doing now, no, I gotta be honest, it really is not a surprise.”

At Stanford, Hawley found his political opinions shaped by the university’s conservative Hoover Institution — and sharpened during debates with classmates in a left-leaning environment. “You learn what you believe, and you learn to articulate and defend it,” he says. He interned at the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank in Washington, where he was thrilled to meet the likes of former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and columnist George F. Will — two men who reflect their movement’s divide. While Gingrich has become one of Trump’s most prominent defenders, Will renounced the Republican Party altogether. Count Hawley in Newt’s camp: “The president is trying to take the country, but also the conservative movement, in a different direction, which I think is needed. And it’s disruptive.”

As a student at Yale Law School, Hawley was inspired by Justice Antonin Scalia to become a constitutional lawyer. He later clerked for Chief Justice John Roberts, marveling at the panoply of legal issues that filled the Supreme Court’s docket, and he shared an office with fellow clerk Erin Morrow, who would become his wife. The Hawleys were both hired by high-powered D.C. law firms, but in 2011 they moved to Missouri to teach law at the University of Missouri and start a family: Their towheaded sons are now 5 and 3. Josh Hawley also worked for the nonprofit Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, pursuing cases such as Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Inc., in which his side convinced the Supreme Court to allow private employers with a religious objection to deny employee health insurance coverage for contraceptives. Paul McCaughey, a friend who describes Hawley as a “caring man,” says Hawley led an engaging men’s Bible study and cooks a mean dry-rubbed flank steak.

Josh Hawley's law career includes:

Following law school, Hawley clerked for Judge Michael W. McConnell of the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit,[1] and later served as a law clerk to Chief Justice John Roberts. During this year, Hawley met his future wife, fellow Supreme Court clerk Erin Morrow.[3][5]

After Hawley's clerkships, he began working as an appellate litigator at Hogan Lovells in Washington, D.C (then called Hogan & Hartson) in 2008.[1] From 2011 to 2015, he worked for The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty; he worked for them full-time at their Washington, D.C. offices before moving to Missouri.[6] With Becket, he wrote briefs and gave legal advice in the Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. EEOC Supreme Court case that was decided in 2012 and in the Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Supreme Court case which was decided in 2014.[7][8] In 2011, Hawley moved to Missouri and became an associate professor at the University of Missouri Law School, where he taught constitutional law, constitutional theory, legislation, and torts.[1][9]

In June 2013, Hawley served as a faculty member of the Blackstone Legal Fellowship, which is funded by Alliance Defending Freedom (a conservative Christian organization).[10]

In May 2015, Hawley was admitted to the Supreme Court bar and became eligible to argue cases before the Court.[7][8]

Bio - Wikipedia, includes under A.G. in Missouri:

Catholic clergy investigation
In August 2018, after reports of over 1,000 cases of sexual abuse by Catholic clerics were detailed in a report released by a grand jury in Pennsylvania, as well as protests by survivors of clergy sexual abuse in Saint Louis, Hawley announced that he would begin an investigation into potential cases of abuse in Missouri.[16] Missouri was one of several states to launch such investigations in the wake of the Pennsylvania report; the attorneys general in Illinois, Nebraska, and New Mexico began similar inquiries.[17] Hawley promised that he would investigate any crimes, publish a report for the public, and refer potential cases to local law enforcement officials. Robert James Carlson, the archbishop of Saint Louis, pledged cooperation with the inquiry.[18][16]

Hawley is pro-life and has called for constitutionalist, pro-life judges to SCOTUS and all federal judgeships.

Wife, Erin, is also a member of the Federalist Society.
Bio - Federalist Society:

Erin Morrow Hawley joined the University of Missouri School of Law in 2011 following several years as an associate in the national appellate practice at King & Spalding LLP in Washington, DC. Prior to joining King & Spalding, she worked at the Department of Justice as counsel to Attorney General Michael Mukasey and at Kirkland & Ellis LLP.

Professor Hawley is a former clerk to Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. of the Supreme Court of the United States and Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. Professor Hawley has briefed cases in the Supreme Court of the United States as well as numerous federal courts of appeals and state courts of last resort. She has twice argued before the D.C. Court of Appeals and also represented the United States in oral argument before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit.

While at Yale Law School, she served as a Coker Fellow (teaching assistant in constitutional law) and on The Yale Law Journal.

At the School of Law, Professor Hawley teaches federal income taxation, partnership tax, agricultural law and environmental law.

Power couple with the right connections in D.C. and who resided in DC prior to going to U. of Missouri Law. Mitch McConnell recruited Hawley to run for the U.S. Senate. Hawley was grilling Michael S. Bogren, a Michigan attorney and a nominee to be a District Judge of the United States District Court for the Western District of Michigan, a lifetime appointment.

Will Sen. Hawley vote for or against the Trump nominee? He's backed Trump on almost every issue, including for
separation of children from their parents at the border and against funding the government without the border wall funds and against overturning Trump's emergency declaration.

 

[Irishize]

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Senator Josh Hawley grilling judicial nominee over his anti-Catholic rhetoric:<br><br>"No, you specifically compared this Catholic family's adherence to their religious beliefs with the views of the KKK."<br><br>Senator Hawley then reminds everyone of the Masterpiece Cake Shop SCOTUS Case <a href="https://t.co/4YsoDKy8x0">pic.twitter.com/4YsoDKy8x0</a></p>— The Columbia Bugle ���� (@ColumbiaBugle) <a href="https://twitter.com/ColumbiaBugle/status/1131248041631948800?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">May 22, 2019</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

Watch the video if you have time. Hawley's impressive.

Wow. Hawley didn’t appear simply briefed by his staff...he seemed to have researched the nominee’s history himself. That was impressive.