Update: National Popular Vote Compact

Michael P Ramirez cartoon via scoopnest.com

This blog posted previously on the dangers of the National Popular Vote Compact and its goal of end-running the Electoral College. J.R.Dunn reports on a hopeful development:

. . . on May 30 Gov. Steve Sisolak of Nevada vetoed the bill, which had been passed by the state senate nine days before. This action may very well break the momentum of the march to 270, marking the high tide of the Democrat’s latest attempt to subvert representative democracy.

The Electoral College has outdone the Founder’s fondest hopes for it. Over the past twenty years alone, in has prevented two utterly unworthy candidates from occupying the White House – Al Gore, a flake at the very least, and Hillary Clinton, the most corrupt American politician since Aaron Burr.

Both, of course, were Democrats, which raises a very interesting question, because so too is Steve Sisolak. The motive behind the national popular vote movement is unquestionably a search for a means for the Dems, who can no longer command a national following, to gain the presidency by hook or by crook. So why did Sisolak turn against his own party and its future presidential hopes? Sisolak gave as his reason the fact that  “Nevada’s interests could diverge from the interests of large states,” which at least shows that he was thinking, unlike the governors of Colorado, New Mexico, or Washington, just to mention three.

It has often been pointed out that the end result of the popular vote movement would be national elections effectively decided by New York, Southern California, D.C., and a handful of other high-density districts. The government of the U.S. would be effectively handed over to the Northeast, a few spots on the West Coast, and a couple of Midwestern cities. As a second-order development, media coverage and interest in any other areas would simply cease. Even today, coverage of the flyover states is as minimal as mass media can get away with. Under the new system, it would be nonexistent.

And so would flyover politics. From that point on, all presidential candidates would come from New York, the Massachusetts Bay area, LA, and perhaps Chicago. Politicians from those areas would be the sole recipients of national coverage. 

Everybody else – all the Trumans, the Jacksons, the Coolidges, the Lincolns – would be as unknown as if they were living in the Mato Grosso.

It’s likely that this occurred to Steven Sisolak.

Fingers crossed. Full report at American Thinker is here.

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Good headline news

image credit: breakpoint.org

At Conservative Treehouse: True The Vote Wins Historic $2 Million Settlement Against IRS….

At Legal Insurrection: VERDICT: Jury awards Gibson’s Bakery $11 million against Oberlin College

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Circumventing the Electoral College

Jeff Parker cartoon credit: capoliticalreview.com

The 2020 elections will probably involve so many types of corruption that Al Capone would be envious. Stuffing the ballot box. Voters casting ballots more than once, including in different states. Voting early and often. Counting the votes of the deceased. Tampering with electronic voting machines. There are efforts to grant felons the right to vote – while they are serving their sentence. The Democrats don’t play by the rules, so they are busy trying to change the rules.

At American Thinker, David Horowitz of FrontPage Magazine explains the Democrat party’s plan to end-run the Electoral College. It’s a must-read. Here’s the opener:

While you were sleeping, the Democrats (abetted by some deviant Republicans) have been working on a plan that would destroy the diversity of the American political system and bring the nation to the brink of civil war. The plan is called the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, and tens of millions of dollars have already been spent over several decades trying to implement it. Fourteen blue states and the District of Columbia have already joined the Compact, which means they are 70% on the way to making their proposal the law of the land.

The Democrats’ plan is designed to eliminate the influence of the Electoral College in choosing the nation’s president, no doubt because while Hillary won the popular vote she failed [to] win necessary votes in the Electoral College. Eliminating the influence of the Electoral College would end the diversity now embodied in the federal system with its division of powers between Washington and the fifty states. 

The fact that a party which presents itself as a defender of diversity should be leading the charge to eliminate the nation’s most powerful source of diversity should be all that is required to understand the threat their agenda poses to what has been the nation’s constitutional way of life for 232 years.

The Electoral College and the division of powers are features of the Constitution. But the National Popular Vote movement does not propose to amend the Constitution because it doesn’t have the votes to do that. Instead, in the name of “democracy,” it proposes to circumvent the Constitution and its requirement of large national majorities for amending what has been the fundamental law of the land. Think how Orwellian that is, and how concerning it should be for anyone believing the Founders created the most practical, realistic, democratic, diverse and successful polity the world has ever seen.

This is how the Democrats’ circumvention of the Constitution and its provision for an Electoral College would work. Instead of abolishing the College, which would require the support of two-thirds of the states, they are hoping to put together a coalition of states representing 270 electoral votes that would agree to award all their votes to whoever wins the national vote. In other words, if the popular vote is won by 10 votes, every state in the Compact would award 100% of their votes to that party, even if a majority of the voters in their state voted against them.

The bottom line (and goal) of this devious plan is to eliminate the influence of rural voters or “Middle America” and create an electoral lock for the large urban population centers, e.g., California and New York, which would then decide the direction of the country.

The rest of Mr. Horowitz's article is here. The good news: Ohioans dodged a bullet this time, as the organizers dropped plans to try to get the issue on the ballot in November 2019:

[April 2019] Secretary of State Frank LaRose announced in a press release Tuesday that the amendment had been formally withdrawn by its backers, Ohioans For Making Every Vote Matter. The group said in a statement there wasn't sufficient time to gather enough signatures to qualify for the Nov. 5, 2019 ballot.

On Twitter, LaRose called the decision "nothing but good news." 

"The only thing this flawed amendment would have accomplished is to make sure your vote for president is essentially meaningless," he wrote.

The bad news: This issue surely will not go away.

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A salute to our military

Here a few fading photographs taken on this blogger's father's Brownie Box. He was the skipper of LCT 2454 that delivered troops and equipment onto Utah Beach on June 6, 1944. Today marks the 75th anniversary. 

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Why we remember D-Day

Photo credit: Real Clear Defense

Lots of reports on commemorations of D Day this week. Here's a succinct report by Emma Watkins and Alexandra Marotta in a column for The Daily Signal:

If the invasion of Normandy had been unsuccessful that day, Europe might have remained under Nazi control, and our world might look much different today. That battle was the tipping point needed to liberate Europe.

The American troops who fought in D-Day were not fighting to liberate their own land. They fought to preserve the free world.

Most of those troops probably didn’t wake up that morning anticipating that their sacrifice would change the world. They got up knowing only that they had work to do.

That’s a valuable lesson for a generation that often sees going to work as an obligation, rather than an opportunity to effect change.

Some 6,603 American troops were killed, wounded, or missing in action in the Normandy invasion. They fought for a cause that was larger than simply securing the beaches. That sacrifice is often taken for granted today. It is essential that we do not let the significance of what was achieved on D-Day be forgotten.

Read the rest here. Recently discovered color photographs of D-Day (see above photograph) and the Liberation of Paris are here. 

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Remembering D Day this week

cartoon by Tom Stiglich via Townhall

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Do you donate to conservative PACs?

Some years ago, our household stopped contributing to conservative PACs that supported various conservative candidates in a particular election cycle. One reason was that we did not always agree on their choice of candidates. So now we contribute directly to candidates we like, whether at local, state, or federal level.

Today I read about even more reasons to pause before writing out your check or filling out your credit card details. Here’s part of a sobering report at National Review by Jim Geraghty (via Instapundit):

Back in 2013, Conservative StrikeForce PAC raised $2.2 million in funds vowing to support Ken Cuccinelli’s campaign for governor in Virginia. Court filings and FEC records showed that the PAC only contributed $10,000 to Cuccinelli’s effort.

Back in 2014, Politico researched 33 political action committees that claimed to be affiliated with the Tea Party and courted small donors with email and direct-mail appeals and found that they “raised $43 million — 74 percent of which came from small donors. The PACs spent only $3 million on ads and contributions to boost the long-shot candidates often touted in the appeals, compared to $39.5 million on operating expenses, including $6 million to firms owned or managed by the operatives who run the PACs.”

. . .

In the 2018 cycle, Tea Party Majority Fund raised $1.67 million and donated $35,000 to federal candidates. That cycle, Conservative Majority Fund raised just over $1 million and donated $7,500 to federal candidates. Conservative Strikeforce raised $258,376 and donated nothing to federal candidates.

Full report (“The Right’s Grifter Problem”) is here. Let the buyer contributor beware.

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The Last Longest Day - Fernandez

This coming week will mark the 75^th anniversary of the landings on the Normandy beaches. I’ll be posting a few blogs on the landmark remembrance of D-Day. Today, Richard Fernandez at PJ Media) contemplates the historical consequences of the Allied victories:

it is likely to be the last major D-Day anniversary while veterans are still alive.

. . .

Seventy-five years ago, the human impact of the invasion could scarcely be understated. Over 4,400 soldiers died in a single day, the Longest Day, so named in popular culture after Erwin Rommel's prescient observation: "The first twenty-four hours of the invasion will be decisive. . . . For the Allies as well as Germany, it will be the longest day."

It was an all-out throw of the dice. A maximum effort. There was no plan B if it didn't work.

. . .

And what of D-Day? Like the fading black and white chemical film on which its images were captured, modern culture has lost the detail, emotional tone and context once provided by living memory. What still remains is posterized, compressed and pixellated to the point where, to paraphrase Tennyson, "they are become a name." The Longest Day grows less distinct with each passing year.

Less distinct but no less real. . . .

Mr. Fernandez's full article, "The Last Longest Day," is here.

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Progressive Dark Money

Image credit: cincinnati.com

Joe Schoffstall at The Washington Free Beacon reports:

Liberal billionaires George Soros and Scott Wallace are helping bankroll a new fund hosted by an intricate dark money organization and focused on helping Democrats make inroads with midwestern voters for the 2020 elections.

The deep-pocketed donors moved the money from the Open Society Foundations, Soros's foundation, and the Wallace Global Fund, Wallace's foundation, to the newly launched Heartland Fund, a collaborative effort focused on building "power across the divides of the American heartland" as overall Democratic efforts have veered towards the region.

. . .

Future Majority, a Washington, D.C.-based Democratic strategy center, was also founded to focus on midwestern states in an effort to help "rebrand" the party and provide support to liberal organizations. The group is a registered 501(c)4 "social welfare" nonprofit and also does not have to disclose its donors.

Future Majority is planning to spend at least $60 million during the 2020 election cycle and is receiving help from megadonors Philip Munger, son of Berkshire Hathaway Vice Chairman Charles Munger, and Dan Tierney, who was the managing director of KGB Holdings, a global financial services company, before it sold in 2017. Munger and Tierney co-chair Future Majority's board.

The headline of this report is “Soros, Wallace Help Bankroll Dark Money Fund Aimed at Midwestern Voters.” Er, Ohio is in the Midwest. Full report is here.

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More censorship at YouTube

Image credit: steemit.com

From Sparta Report:

YouTube is constantly tweaking and changing their algorithm. Most of the time these changes are small and are barely noticed.

Lately, however, YouTubers large and small have been complaining about how little growth their channels have experienced. Apparently, YouTube’s algorithm has been changed to favor mainstream media outlets like CNN over small, independent content creators.

YouTuber Mark Dice reported on this just the other day.

The result is that YouTubers aren’t seeing their channels grow in the way that they should.

Justin Derby of Truth: The Objective Reality has noticed that YouTube’s latest round of censorship means that many YouTubers are gaining more subscribers on their BitChute channels…and he has the evidence to back it up.

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Memorial Day sign

Via social media

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Memorial Day: remembering

photo credit: nbclosangeles.com

We just watched the Memorial Day episode on Watter’s World, and Jesse Watters was doing one of those man-on-the-beach interviews with twenty-somethings. These beach-and-valley boys and girls could not name the country that bombed Pearl Harbor; who we fought in the Revolution; who we were fighting in World War 2; which side won the Civil War; who was US President during WW2, etc etc. Frightening.

We had dinner at our neighborhood pub the other evening, and one of our favorite waitresses asked if we had plans for Memorial Day. We said yes, we were gathering with family for a cook-out and that we would be saluting and remembering our men and women in uniform who gave their lives protecting our freedoms. We had no way of knowing her views, but she immediately responded. She always gathers with her family and she also salutes the military. But she is concerned that younger generations do not know about the sacrifices made by our military to protect America and its allies. We exchanged ideas about how we pass on the war stories to younger generations, but the heartwarming point is that she is very concerned about it and makes it a point to pass on those parts of our history to her kids.  

Happy Memorial Day from Cleveland Tea Party
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As we head into the Memorial Day weekend

Making the rounds on social media:

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“Hate speech” and Facebook

image credit: hubpages.com

Petr Svab at The Epoch Times:

While in the United States, most of what Facebook labels as “hate speech” would be lawful to utter publicly because of First Amendment protections, some European countries have laws against “hate speech,” forcing Facebook to take such content offline. Facebook could theoretically make such content only available to users in locales where it’s lawful, but the company has apparently subscribed to the “hate speech” doctrine, tripling its content policing force to some 30,000.

The document with [Candace] Owens’s name was posted into an internal discussion group set up by former Facebook senior engineer Brian Amerige, who left the company due to disagreements over content policing.

“I’m glad to see the group continues to be used to raise awareness inside the company about Facebook’s slippery slope of a content policy,” he said via the Facebook Messenger app. “In a very sad way, it’s comically predictable to see people listed as ‘extra credit’ to watch and investigate. Evolution into the ‘thought police’ is the inevitable result of their dangerous and ineffective approach to promoting the truth.”

The core issue Amerige hit an impasse on with Facebook executives was their insistence on suppressing “hate speech,” which Amerige deemed misguided.

“Hate speech can’t be defined consistently and it can’t be implemented reliably, so it ends up being a series of one-off ‘pragmatic’ decisions,” he previously said. “I think it’s a serious strategic misstep for a company whose product’s primary value is as a tool for free expression.”

Read the rest of this report here. As Thomas Lifson at American Thinker summarizes:

Facebook is being exposed as a naked propaganda organ that ought to be treated by law as a "publisher" legally responsible for the content it hosts, and not as a "forum" — the status it currently enjoys, exempting it from libel laws and other downsides to the content it spreads out to the world.

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If today's media covered the original Tea Party

Cartoonist Gary Varvel at TownHall

Election advice from Down Under

image credit: timesofmalta,com

Many news sites and bloggers covered this weekend's surprise upset election in Australia. Polls predicted a win for Labor but the Liberal party (their conservative party) won re-election. One reader on the thread under the Conservative Treehouse's report was on point:

Query says: 

May 18, 2019 at 7:51 pm 

And here’s a hint for the US. 

Australia does manual voting with paper ballots marked by hand, double counted by the Aust. Electoral Commission, with scrutineers from both parties observing. No hanging shards [chads], no second rate voting machines, no boxes of ballots conveniently found to sway a close election. The US merely needs to scale up the operation. That way there are multiple counting sources and no computer algorithm that someone somewhere has a key to.

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Next target: Michelle Malkin

image credit: medium.com

Jeffrey Lord has more on Big Tech censorship at American Spectator:

Facebook has censored Michelle Malkin — for protesting censorship.

. . .

Michelle rejects identity politics out of hand, proudly calling herself an “American.” Amen and Amen! But in the Jim Crow-style of the Left she is what the Left loves to call a “woman of color.” Thus her posting standing up for free speech and opposing censorship has to be silenced. Because, like Diamond and Silk, Michelle Malkin is a threat to the totalitarian mind-set of Facebook rulers who have appointed themselves the Gods of who gets to say what and where.

The battle against the totalitarian mindset that is increasingly, vividly targeting conservatives with social media to unperson and de-platform them has now reached out to get Michelle Malkin.

Read the rest here.

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Today: Armed Forces Day

In the United States, Armed Forces Day is celebrated on the third Saturday in May. It falls near the end of Armed Forces Week, which begins on the second Saturday of May and ends on the third Sunday of May.  

That's today, Saturday, May 18.

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Ways to Stuff the Ballot Box

This blog recently reported that 

Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose announced a plan to create a work group that will focus on modernizing the state's voter registration, which would include automatic voter registration. (via Watchdog Ohio)

California serves as a How-To Manual of facilitating voter fraud. Here’s Monica Showalter at American Thinker:

California's election has unsettled many, given the role of ballot-harvesting in supposedly flipping Reagan-country Orange County entirely blue in the last midterm.

But the details rolling out now are getting far more disturbing. RealClearPolitics investigative reporter Susan Crabtree has put together a string of criminalities surrounding the way California runs its elections which makes one wonder if California has adopted the Venezuela Model of electoral governance.

She starts with a sickening new report that California's election was hacked through its "motor-voter" system, the system the state has to register as many votes as possible. If a California resident applies for a drivers license in the state, he (or she) gets registered to vote whether he likes it or not. An applicant can only say 'no' to the registration, not 'yes,' the 'yes' is embedded into the system. It's a set-up that relies on the "honor system" for a voter's claims of valid citizenship to vote and there is no verification. 

Read the rest here. Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose’s website is here, with multiple ways to let him know what you think.

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Censorship creep

Thomas Lifson at American Thinker reports (“The next stage in tech overlords' censorship: De-platformingun-PC blogs”):

It's no longer just Facebook, Twitter, and Google who are censoring online content that offends political correctness.  Wordpress.com, a blog-hosting site that offers anyone the opportunity to create and publish a blog at no cost, has decided to de-platform — in other words, kill — a blog that has been operating for 15 years: Creeping Sharia.

As Pamela Geller points out, this move by Wordpress.com is itself an example of the blog's focus of creeping sharia happening in real time.  Shutting down a critic of creeping sharia is an example of creeping sharia.

Related: Newsbusters reports on a development (which may be a start, but doesn’t seem to me to go far enough):

The White House has announced a new system that gives Americans the power to call out foul play by tech companies.  

As of May 15 it read, “SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS should advance FREEDOM OF SPEECH.” 

“Too many Americans have seen their accounts suspended, banned, or fraudulently reported for unclear ‘violations’ of user policies,” it continued before delivering a bipartisan message that freedom of speech is a right held by all Americans. “No matter your views, if you suspect political bias caused such an action to be taken against you, share your story with President Trump.”

The submission form begins with a survey asking users to submit their names and confirm that they are citizens of the United States. It then asks whether they were censored via major Big Tech platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. It also listed an option for “Other” acknowledging that there are plenty of other platforms which deplatform users.

It then asks, if possible, for a link or screenshot of the restricted post. 

In a reversal of Trump’s earlier praise of Twitter as a way to reach his audience free of being filtered by the media, this White House page asked users for permission to send newsletters via email so that the administration “can update you without relying on platforms like Facebook and Twitter.”

The Trump administration said it was “fighting for free speech online,” while the liberal Washington Post characterized the new system as part of Trump’s “war against Facebook, Google and Twitter.” 

Rest of the report is here. Hmm. Either these companies need to be trust-busted, or they need to be subject to regulation by the FCC.

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Stephen Moore goes to Cleveland

Stephen Moore recently withdrew as a nominee for the Federal Reserve Board, but he had a look at Cleveland in his report on “Ohio The Comeback State” at Townhall:

I recently traveled to the Cleveland area and the renaissance of this once-Rust Belt city is remarkable and visible to the naked eye. The downtown area was bustling with economic activity and building cranes. Great restaurants, a vibrant music scene, museums, wonderful and accessible sports stadiums and swanky new office buildings and condominiums.

Research by the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland documents that thanks to the increase in jobs in construction and manufacturing, the unemployment rate is down to 5.1% and the "labor markets remain healthy." Per capita GDP rose 3.4% in 2017 and the per capita GDP is closing in on a record-high $70,000 a year.

Cleveland certainly has its problems, but it’s nice to read some good news. The rest of Mr. Moore report is here.

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Happy Mother's Day

image credit: pinterest.com

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First Amendment under attack again

image credit: sott.net

Today’s targets: James Woods and Pamela Geller. Via 100 Percent Fed Up:

He has over 2.1 million followers and is one of the most active and important conservative accounts on Twitter, but conservative actor James Woods is finished with Twitter until Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s CEO, stops being a “coward,” and affords conservatives the same free speech rights as liberals in his platform.

. . .

“Twitter demanded that I rescind my tweet paraphrasing Emerson,” Woods said in a statement to The Daily Wire. “It now seems they have chosen to delete that tweet from my account without my permission. Until free speech is allowed on Twitter, I will not be permitted to participate in our democracy with my voice. As long as Jack Dorsey remains the coward he seems to be; my Twitter days are in the past.”

President Trump and his outspoken, conservative son Don Jr., both came to the defense of James Woods over his censorship on Twitter.

Don Jr. pointed out the hypocrisy of the social media giants censoring the voices of popular conservatives while allowing terror groups to openly post on their platforms. Tweeting directly to Twitter and Facebook, Trump Jr. asked if they consider James Woods to be more dangerous than Hamas?

It’s interesting how @twitter and @facebook both seem more concerned with silencing non-violent people who hold political opinions they disagree with, than violent terrorist organizations and the people that support them,” Donald Trump Jr. tweeted. “Is @RealJamesWoods really more ‘dangerous’ than Hamas?”

And Pamela Geller was censored on Facebook. After complaints, her post was restored. Just another “mistake” by Facebook.

Ms. Geller’s advice:

Attention readers: Challenge ever ban, appeal every deletion. Do not stand by while left wing corporate managers and paid foreign operatives strip us of our unalienable rights as Americans.

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Mark Steyn on “The Big Shut-Up”

image credit: webjunction.org

More censorship this way comes, and Mark Steyn nails it:

In this week of second-birthday celebrations for The Mark Steyn Club, the thing most worth celebrating is mere existence: We haven't yet been vaporized. Every day the Big Shut-Up advances: Last week Facebook eighty-sixed Alex Jones, Milo Yiannopoulos, Paul Joseph Watson and for good measure Twitter suspended the Hollywood contrarian James Woods. It's a bit unfair on poor old calypso conspiracist Louis Farrakhan, who found himself de-platformed with all the right-wing haters just because Speech Commissar Zuckerberg needed a bipartisan figleaf. He won't require that much longer, and indeed Big Social is growing ever more brazen in its preference for monitored speech over free speech. (See, for example, Google's thuggish and moronic censorship of the Claremont Institute.)

As readers may have noticed, I don't do Facebook posts or Tweet: We have social media accounts but we use them only to link to content here or to promote radio, TV and stage appearances. To be honest, I don't really understand why so-called "conservatives" write (for free) on Facebook and Twitter, providing the Big Social cartel with more free content and thus enriching them and cementing their near total control of the Internet. Nor do I understand why Dennis Prager, for whom I have almost boundless admiration, sued YouTube for giving his Prager University videos insufficient prominence. Conservatives demand that YouTube cease "de-monetizing" their videos. For what it's worth, the first time I was de-monetized on YouTube, I self-de-monetized all my other videos on the platform. Because whatever percentage of ad revenue you might get from them, YouTube takes more - much more. So you're getting pennies while they're getting even more stonkingly mega-rich: Conservatives who think more YouTube revenue is the way to close the gap don't seem to grasp that they're actually widening it.

In the end, the solution to Facebook and Google/YouTube is to break them up before they police every aspect of human existence on the planet. And right now the only prominent politician pledging to do that is ...Elizabeth Warren. In the meantime, in our modest corner of the Internet, our policy is to try and do as much as possible independent of the Big Tech oligarchies - because anything else just accelerates the shrinking number of entities that control access to all information.

A decade ago, we free-speechers were fortunate enough to fight our battles in Canada just before Facebook and Twitter came along and wrecked the Internet. Today, Twitter's main function is to provide a pretext for destroying random lives pour encourager les autres.

. . .

These are very dark times for a meaningful culture of free speech. Its subordination to identity politics and political correctness is now taken for granted by the Institute of Directors, Rugby Australia, the Philadelphia Flyers and on and on. In such a world I am grateful still to be here, and I thank all of you who swing by each morning even as the lights flicker and die around a once lively Internet.

And today we read that David Horowitz (Freedom Center, Front Page Magazine) has been suspended from Twitter. Anyway, read the rest of Steyn’s column here.

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Another bad idea: renaming Columbus Day

Robert Higgs at cleveland.com reports:

A typically united City Council divided Monday night over a non-binding resolution calling for the city to recognize the second Monday in October as Indigenous Peoples’ Day rather than Columbus Day.

Councilman Basheer Jones proposed the resolution, saying he wished to recognize that a culture already existed in North America when Italian explorer Christopher Columbus arrived in Oct. 12, 1492.

Council approves most proposed resolutions with little or no comment, but Jones’ proposal struck a nerve with colleagues Matt Zone, a second-generation Italian American, and Mike Polensek, who also is of Italian descent.

Zone spoke for several minutes in opposition to the resolution. He said that he grew up celebrating Columbus Day as a proud symbol of immigration to the United States. And it was a day important to Italian Americans who themselves had to endure bigotry in this country.

“It now is a universal theme with all people who come into this country,” Zone said. “One of the highest honors I ever had was in 2015 when I was the grand marshal in the Columbus Day parade.”

Zone said he had no problem doing something to honor indigenous people, but not at the expense of Columbus Day.

. . .

(Full report is here.) But it’s not about identity politics, in this case Native Americans vs Italians. It’s about using identity politics to push another attempt to erase the history of America. Yes, of course, Native Americans were here before Columbus, but it was the Old World coming to the New World that marked the inception of the early European settlements that led to the founding of the United States.

If you live in Cleveland, find your councilman here. The general phone number for council members is 216.664.2840. Give ‘em a call.

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