Long Live the Tea Party

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I don’t usually agree with Rick Moran, who posts at PJ Media. But his piece “The Tea Party Is Dead, Long Live the Tea Party” was linked on Instapundit, and it had a few good thoughts, going back to the inception of the Tea Party groups in 2009:

But the tea party's real value to the country is that for the first time since the ratification debates over the Constitution, millions of people across the country were actually reading and discussing our founding document.

These weren't constitutional scholars sitting around some Ivy League lecture hall esoterically discussing the foundations of America. These were millions of ordinary people sitting at kitchen tables, in small church meeting rooms, on front porches and backyards probing the reasons America came into existence.

. . . What mattered was that ordinary people had taken a keen interest in preserving the spirit of the Constitution and the essence of our founding principles that are "self-evident" in that document at a time it has been under relentless attack.

. . .

This side of the tea parties was never widely reported on by the media, for very good reasons. The left hates getting into a discussion about what the Constitution says because they can't defend most of their ideas. Despite the fact that the founders wrote the Constitution so that basically anyone who could read could understand it, the left keeps insisting the Constitution says things that it doesn't.

Any clever lawyer or willing judge can twist the meaning of the Constitution so that it says anything they want it to say to accomplish any end they wish to accomplish. So the budget deal may have killed fiscal sanity in Washington and -- perhaps -- the tea party's political power to some extent. And the GOP may have co-opted most of the larger tea party groups to do the party's bidding.

What remains of the tea party is, to my mind, the best part. The desire of ordinary people to govern themselves, to take personal responsibility for their own lives, and to try to do something about the denigration and increasing irrelevance of the Constitution.

As Glenn Reynolds concluded: Don’t give up the ship.

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Falcon Heavy rocket boosters perfect landing

YouTube 

INSANE! SpaceX Falcon Heavy Side Boosters Landing Simultaneously at Kennedy Space Center

Off topic, but just "awesome." The Falcon Heavy SpaceX test launch earlier this week was as astonishing to watch as was Neil Armstrong taking his first step on the Moon. And Elon Musk put a Tesla inside the rocket as payload. Nice touch. 

But it was the booster rockets that disconnected from the main rocket and guided themselves back to earth, hitting their landing pads perfectly - sort of like pencils landing directly on their erasers. The split screens show the booster coming down to Earth feet-first, as it were, and the cameras on the boosters themselves let you watch the landing pads come into focus as the boosters approach their target. I've never seen anything like it. 

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Houston: we have a man-splaining problem

image credit: memegenerator.net

Until recently, Doug Powers blogged at Michelle Malkin’s blog site. When he posted his final blog on her website a week or two ago, he pointed to his own blog, and since then, I’ve visited him several times a week. He’s irreverent, but I rather like that. He posted the other day on Canada’s Justin Trudeau's moronic response to a question at a townhall:

Questioner: “My question is about volunteering. So, the World Mission Society Church of God is truly growing and changing society through our volunteer work. We have received the Queen’s Award in the UK… [and] have received many awards throughout the whole word; however, unfortunately in Canada, our volunteering as a charitable religious organization is extremely difficult. Extremely. That’s why, in actuality, we cannot do free volunteering to help our neighbors in need as we truly desire. So, that’s why we came here today to ask you, to also look into the policies that religious charitable organizations have in our legislation so that it can also be changed, because maternal love is the love that’s going to change the future of mankind…”

Trudeau: “We like to say peoplekind, not necessarily mankind, because it’s more inclusive.”

Cue: eye rolling.

But the humor that Doug Powers brought to this craziness is why I am posting his commentary below. Cue: belly laugh:

Can you imagine if somebody like this had been in the control room at NASA in 1969?

***

“That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”

#Beep

“Ok Neil, Um, I’ve got a couple problems with that. Can you climb back up there and come back down instead with maybe ‘one small step for a non-binary hu-person, one similar step for person-kind’? ‘Giant leap’ seems a bit presumptuous, and it could be a little triggering for those with the inability to leap.”

#Beep

“Houston, this is the first manned mission to another celestial body, could we save this discussion for later?”

#Beep

“Manned? Have you not been paying attention, Neil? … Neil?”

#Beep

“Uh, Houston, Buzz, Michael and I have decided to just go ahead and stay up here if it’s ok with you.”

Political correctness is out of control. Doug Powers showed how pathetic it is in this one little sketch.

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Diversity 360 – huh?

image credit: thedailysheeple.com

Our friend Steve Salvi at Ohio Jobs & Justice Pac posted about this on FB:

The universities have become cults, pushing BS ideas...An example from one of Cleveland's most prominent Universities...Case Western Reserve University. You can learn about your "privilege" and about "microaggressions" from the CWRU website:

Diversity 360^o is a new campus-wide diversity education program for students, faculty and staff developed in collaboration with the Office for Inclusion, Diversity and Equal Opportunity, the Division of Student Affairs and the Office of Multicultural Affairs.

Diversity 360^o can be implemented and customized into modules for undergraduate and graduate students, faculty and staff that will assist the campus community in advancing its efforts to be a welcoming, inclusive environment for learning, leading, and innovation.

Based on research from higher education and the corporate sector about cross-cultural competency and on results from university climate surveys, the modules will engage participants in learning to:

• Increase capacity to recognize and engage in dialogue across the breadth of differences;
• Deepen understanding of how affiliations in privileged and marginalized groups impact treatment on campus, campus climate and productivity;
• Deepen awareness of types of microaggressions and how they affect experiences on campus and in the local community; and
• Discover ways to become a change agent and diversity champion with new knowledge, ideas and resources about university policies, programs and best practices.

Diversity 360^o includes pre- and post-assessment of diversity-related knowledge, as well as, ongoing programming to assist members of the campus community with the goal of creating a welcoming campus climate at CWRU.

It’s worse than “ugh.” It’s politically correct indoctrination.

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Devin Nunes, a deplorable dairy farmer

photo credit: impactlab.net

Historian Victor Davis Hanson always comes up with insights on today’s headlines, and in his latest, he offer perspectives not only as a scholar and professor, but also as a California farmer. His column at American Greatness on “Counterfeit Elitism” starts off:

Those damn dairy farmers. Why do they insist on trying to govern? Or, put another way:

Why are Republicans trusting Devin Nunes to be their oracle of truth!? A former dairy farmer who House intel staffers refer to as Secret Agent Man because he has no idea what’s going on.

Thus spoke MSNBC panelist, Yale graduate, former Republican “strategist,” and Bush administration speechwriter Elise Jordan.

Jordan likely knows little about San Joaquin Valley family dairy farmers and little notion of the sort of skills, savvy, and work ethic necessary to survive in an increasingly corporate-dominated industry. Whereas dairy farmer Nunes has excelled in politics, it would be hard to imagine Jordan running a family dairy farm, at least given the evidence of her televised skill sets and sobriety.

Republicans “trust” Devin Nunes, because without his dogged efforts it is unlikely that we would know about the Fusion GPS dossier or the questionable premises on which FISA court surveillance was ordered. Neither would we have known about the machinations of an array of Obama Administration, Justice Department and FBI officials who, in addition to having possibly violated the law in monitoring a political campaign and unmasking and leaking names of Americans to the press, may have colluded with people in the Clinton campaign who funded the Steele dossier.

The rest of his article is here. It’s a long look at the insulated elites who know better than the basketfuls of deplorables.

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Yet another reason not to watch today's Super Bowl

This lovely report is by Colin Flaherty at American Thinker:

Everything you need to know about the Super Bowl can be found in the rap hit “Dreams and Nightmares,” by Meek Mill. But which more truthfully could be named after a line in the song: "The Murder Game" or "All I Know Is Murder."

Everything about how far professional football has fallen and how the NFL celebrates the obscene, the vulgar, the dangerous, and the foolish will be on full display as that song blares as the Eagles take the field.

This song that the Eagle players have chosen is about guns, drugs, money, bitches, and murder, over and over and over. Just like the rest of Meek Mill songs, which also include a healthy dollop of the evils of the white man.

We do not know whether the Eagles will be kneeling prior to the big game as they have during the season. Or whether they will be following the dictates of their union which, after accepting $100 million from the owners, decided that white racism and police brutality were not so bad after all.

Meek Mill will not be there. He’s in the joint. The slammer. All for a violating his parole over and over and over. All for committing crimes over and over and over.

The Eagles don’t think that is fair. Don’t you know that crime is the new black entitlement? The mayor and district attorney of the City of Brotherly Love certainly do: That was their platform during their recent elections.

. . .

The rest of Flaherty’s report is just as bad.

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Memo fallout

 image credit: eutimes.net

Which is worse?

The Media response to “The Memo” as reported by George Neumayr at The American Spectator (Obamagate : Confirmed”)

The media’s response to the release of the Nunes memo surpasses the level of Pravda covering a Soviet show trial. No sooner had the memo appeared than journalists immediately began throwing sand into their audience’s eyes. The story, according to the media, is not that Obama’s Justice Department/FBI snookered FISA court judges and used Hillary’s purchased Steele dossier to spy on Trumpworld. No, the scandal is that the evil Republicans exposed this outrage, and that Trump, the ultimate target of this espionage, has the gall to defend himself. How dare a defendant in our kangaroo trial defend himself with the truth — that’s the upshot of all the media’s bleating.

or Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s initial reactions:

         “No department is perfect”

and this headline at Sparta Report:

Jeff Sessions Today: [FISA Fraud] Rod Rosenstein Represents‘The Kind Of Quality And Leadership That We Want In The Department’

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