They’re America’s new Puritans.
It’s worth noting that the American Left are in fact the ideological descendants of the people who originally populated New England from old England. It’s why Massachusetts and the northeast in general are such a blue region. The primary difference is merely what they’re puritanical about.
And the WaPo celebrates it by publishing “Palestinian” propaganda.
[h/t Sarah Hoyt]
“His loyalty was more to Chuck Schumer.”
Whatever admiration I’ve ever had for James Comey continues to spiral down.
When the Shuttle didn’t come home. An NPR story with Wayne Hale.
He won’t stop talking. He used to call me and bend my ear quite a bit. But he means well.
The overreaction to this, from people like Larry Tribe, has been hyperbolic. I’ve been having some arguments on Twitter with people, including Bob Zubrin (who is the Never Trumper’s Never Trumper), on the roles and responsibilities of the branches of government and of the federal workforce. Bob thinks that someone should disobey (or even countermand) a presidential order that they consider illegal, and somehow still keep their job. My position is that while no one is required to break the law or violate the Constitution, they are not the law unto themselves. Employees of the executive branch report ultimately to the president, and are accountable to him or her. The president is accountable either to the states in an election, or to the Congress, who can impeach and remove him. There is nothing in the Constitution about insubordination to the White House being a check on executive power, and to allow it would be to remove the unelected employees of the executive branch from any accountability to any one at all, giving us a tyranny of the bureaucracy. I don’t think that Bob has fully thought this through. I’m sure that Madison et al would never have intended this.
[Afternoon update]
I agree with Ben Sasse:
Sasse also emphasized the importance of three separate, co-equal branches of government, including ensuring the Justice Department is “very, very insulated from partisan politics.”
“We have three branches of government, not one, not 17, right? And so you need to have investigative and prosecutorial functions be in the Article II branch of government. They need to be in the executive branch, but there should be lots of insulation from the career civil servants and the leadership of the Justice Department from political decision-making at the White House,” he said.
It would help if we had an educational system that actually taught about the Constitution. And a president who had read it.
[Friday-morning update]
Bad news for SLS is good new for those of us who want an actual, vibrant space industry.
Commemorating (but not celebrating) a century of it:
It would be simplistic to blame all of these events on ideology. We live in an imperfect world and those imperfections have been unequally distributed. No conceivable government of Russia, or China, or Venezuela would have left no citizens impoverished or oppressed. Nonetheless, a hundred years of communism has presented us with an intimidating record of catastrophe, in a moral, political, and economic sense. Time and again, ambition has exceeded potential. Time and again, coercion has encouraged conflict. Time and again, violence has perpetuated itself. Time and again, absolute power has hardened into tyranny.
These disasters were concealed, excused and exacerbated by Western apologists and traitors. Walter Duranty of the New York Times lied to America about the scale of the Soviet famine. Intellectuals from George Bernard Shaw to Jean Paul Sartre to Eric Hobsbawm rationalised atrocities. Spies in British and American institutions betrayed military and intelligence secrets. As Europe reeled from the horrors of world war, and as the West endured the austerity of the depression, the impulse towards radicalism was understandable. But as the reality of communism was exposed even dull-minded apologists ran out of excuses.
A recent article in the New York Times offers a nostalgic account of growing up as a communist. Its author implies that the reality of Stalinism was made clear by Kruschev in 1956. But two decades earlier, Gareth Jones and Malcolm Muggeridge had exposed widespread starvation in the Soviet Union. The show trials had been reported across America and Europe. The Madden Committee had revealed the truth of Katyn. Orwell had published Animal Farm, and Koestler Darkness at Noon. By 1956, ignorance was abominable.
And it should be even more so today, but it has a sick appeal to something in human nature.
[Update a few minutes later]
I wish this were less related: The Cruelty Of Blue. As goes Puerto Rico, so will go many Democrat-run cities on the mainland.
“My husband would have died if he’d relied on it.”
All of the mendacious hysteria over this bill has been incandescent, especially compared to the very real disaster that the ACA has been (and which many of us warned about).
Who would've guessed the same folks who said Mitt gave a lady cancer & plans to kill Big Bird would exaggerate about GOP legislation.
— Razor (@hale_razor) May 6, 2017
Who would've guessed the same folks who said Mitt gave a lady cancer & plans to kill Big Bird would exaggerate about GOP legislation.
— Razor (@hale_razor) May 6, 2017
Dems telling even more lies to prevent this bill than they did to pass Obamacare. Impressive, in a way. Wouldn't have thought it possible. https://t.co/qkzzPcYw8c
— Rand Simberg (@Rand_Simberg) May 6, 2017
A long rant from a “progressive.”