op ed review 7/1
THIS WEEK’S NEWS
Three victories this week:
The Supreme Court on upheld President Trump’s ban on travel from several
mostly Muslim countries, rejecting a challenge that it discriminated against
Muslims or exceeded his authority. The 5-4 decision Tuesday is a big victory
for Trump on an issue that is central to his presidency, and the court’s first
substantive ruling on a Trump administration policy.
The Supreme Court ruled in favor of pro-life crisis
pregnancy centers that counsel pregnant women to make choices other than
abortion, invalidating a California law requiring them to prominently post
information on how to obtain a state-funded abortion.
The Supreme Court ruled that government workers can’t be
forced to contribute to labor unions that represent them in collective
bargaining, dealing a serious financial blow to Democratic-leaning organized
labor.
The big news this week: Justice Kennedy announces retirement; the Left
is in a meltdown.
Federal
officers in riot gear moved into the leftie protest siege of ICE headquarters
in Southwest Portland Thursday
Poll: 59% fear violence from Trump haters, 31% predict civil
war
‘Unaccompanied Migrant CHILDREN’ Arrive at NY Airport
-Appear to be GROWN MEN With 5-O’CLOCK SHADOWS and Shaving Kits
Hundreds of gang members and more than 5,000 convicted
criminals were arrested trying to sneak back into the U.S. in just eight
months. Border agents have caught more
criminals than the FBI.
POLL STUNNER: Majority With Trump: Want Wall Built, Migrant
Families Deported or Detained
84 percent of Americans support turning undocumented
immigrants over to authorities
The Cost of Providing Health Care to Illegal Aliens: The total is enough to pay for a border wall.
Illegal alien kids unhappy having to recite the Pledge of
Allegiance
Trump approval rises because of increased Hispanic support.
Judge throws out San Francisco and Oakland climate suits
against big oil.
America’s CEOs are not wasting anytime in taking advantage
of his tax reform plan. Over $300 billion was repatriated to the U.S. in
the first quarter, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) -- the
most on record.
Army training will now focus on actual battlefield skills,
not social issues
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/jun/25/army-training-focus-battlefield-skills-not-social-/
Report: NOAA Set to Abandon Climate Change Mission
RINO alert: Mitt Romney
vows to speak out against Trump if elected to the Senate.
New poll ranks Obama as the worst president since World War
II
Film Director David Lynch: Trump ‘Could Go Down as One of
the Greatest Presidents in History’
Polls of Senate Races Boost GOP Prospects for Retaining
Control
John McCain viewed more favorably by Arizona Democrats than
by Republicans
?? Rep. Barbara Lee accuses Trump administration of
'criminalizing' illegal immigrants.
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/jun/24/barbara-lee-accuses-trump-administration-criminali/
LA Times: Asian
Americans need to wise up and end our blind loyalty to the Democratic Party
___________________________________________________________________
COLUMN OF THE WEEK
Charles Krauthammer succumbed last week to cancer. This is part I of a column he wrote 25 years
ago that is still relevant. Part of an
American Enterprise Institute lecture series.
Defining Deviancy Up
Charles Krauthammer
In 1940, a survey was taken of teachers asking them to list
the five most important problems in school. They were: (1) talking out of turn;
(2) chewing gum; (3) making noise; (4) running in halls; and (5) cutting in
line.
Fifty years later, the survey was
repeated. The 1990 list was substantially revised: (1) drug abuse; (2) alcohol
abuse; (3) pregnancy; (4) suicide; (5) rape.
One could cite a mountain of
statistics. One could supply one’s own anecdotal evidence. But this list will
suffice to make the obvious point that there has been an explosion of deviancy
in American society over the last fifty years. Things have gotten out of hand.
How have we dealt with that? Daniel
Patrick Moynihan offers an arresting view in a recent essay in The American
Scholar entitled “Defining Deviancy Down.” His point is that
deviancy–crime, broken homes, mental illness–has reached such vast and
incomprehensible proportions that we have had to adopt a singular form of
denial: We deal with the epidemic by simply defining away most of the disease.
We lower the threshold for what we are prepared to call normal in order to keep
the volume of deviancy–redefined deviancy–within manageable proportions.
Since 1960, for example, the incidence
of single parenthood has more than tripled. It now afflicts–and anyone
acquainted with the figures for poverty and the various social pathologies
associated with single-parenthood knows that “afflicts” is the right word–more
than one-quarter of all American children. As the problem has grown, however,
it has been systematically redefined by the culture–by social workers,
intellectuals, and most famously by the mass media–as simply another lifestyle
choice. Dan Quayle may have been right, but Murphy Brown got the better
ratings.
Moynihan’s second example is crime. We
have become totally inured to levels of criminality that would have been
considered intolerable thirty years ago. The St. Valentine’s Day massacre,
which caused a national uproar and merited two entries in the World Book
Encyclopedia, involved four thugs killing seven other thugs. An average weekend
in today’s Los Angeles, notes James Q. Wilson. More than half of all violent
crimes are not even reported. We have come to view homicide as ineradicable a
part of the social landscape as car accidents.
And finally there is mental illness.
Unlike family breakdown and criminality, there has probably been no increase in
mental illness over the last thirty years. Rates of schizophrenia do not
change, but the rate of hospitalization for schizophrenia and other psychoses
has changed. The mental hospitals have been emptied. In 1955, New York state
asylums had 93,000 patients. Last year they had 11,000. Where have the
remaining 82,000 and their descendants gone? Onto the streets, mostly. In one
generation, a flood of pathetically ill people has washed onto the streets of
the American city. We now step over these wretched and abandoned folk sleeping
in doorways and freezing on grates. They, too, have become accepted as part of
the natural landscape. We have managed to do that by redefining them as people
who simply lack affordable housing. They are not crazy or sick, just very poor
(as if anyone crazy and sick and totally abandoned would not end up very poor).
Moynihan’s powerful point is that with
the “moral deregulation” of the 1960s, we have had an explosion of deviancy in
family life, criminal behavior, and publicly displayed psychosis. And we have
dealt with it in the only way possible: by redefining deviancy down so as to
explain away and make “normal” what a more civilized, ordered, and healthy
society would long ago have labeled–and once long ago did label–deviant.
Moynihan is right. But it is only half
the story. There is a complimentary social phenomenon that goes with defining
deviancy down. As part of the vast social project of moral leveling, it is not
enough for the deviant to be normalized. The normal must be found to be
deviant. Therefore, while for the criminals and the crazies deviancy has been
defined down (the bar defining normality has been lowered), for the ordinary
bourgeois deviancy has been defined up (the bar defining normality has been
raised). Large areas of ordinary behavior hitherto considered benign have had
their threshold radically redefined up, so that once innocent behavior now
stands condemned as deviant. Normal middle class life then stands exposed as
the true home of violence, abuse, misogyny, a whole of catalog deviant acting
and thinking.
As part of this project of moral
leveling, whole new areas of deviancy–such as date rape and politically
incorrect speech–have been discovered. And old areas–such as child abuse–have
been amplified by endless reiteration in the public presses and validated by
learned reports of their astonishing frequency. The net effect is to show that
deviancy is not the province of criminals and crazies but thrives in the heart
of the great middle class. The real deviants of society stand unmasked. Who are
they? Not Bonnie and Clyde but Ozzie and Harriet.
Read
the rest here:
Another MUST READ: “He
Fights”
Paying the price for breakdown of the country's bourgeois
(middle class) culture.
___________________________________________________________________
FROM OTHER COLUMNS
“If you’re wondering how important the next justice will be,
look at the Supreme Court term that just ended. During this 2017-18 session,
The Washington Times points out, ‘there have been a dozen 5-4 decisions where
Justice Gorsuch sided with the conservative majority. By contrast, during the
court’s last term with a full nine-justice court, the 2014-2015 term, there
were only four 5-4 decisions from the conservative majority that included
Scalia.’ Those are razor-thin margins on issues of major significance to most
Americans. Just this week, the justices decided three cases on
free speech by a single vote. As liberals increasingly turn to the courts to
accomplish what they can’t legislatively, it’s more important than ever to have
men and women on the bench who understand and respect the Constitution.”
-Tony Perkins
“All last week Democrats were crying with outrage over
inhumane treatment of migrant children. Today they’re crying with outrage at
the idea they might not be able to kill unborn children. And here I thought
Democrats cared about the children!”
-Liz
Wheeler
___________________________________________________________________
LEFTIST WATCH
Socialist
wins primary over 4th ranking Democrat in the House of
Representatives, the Left cheers. The Left
says she is a “Socialist With a
21st-Century Vision”. Oxymoron?
Portland Occupiers Shut Down ICE Office, Replace American
Flag with 'Refugees Welcome' Flag
This will endear her to her liberal constituents: Rep. Pramila
Jayapal, D-Seattle, was arrested during an immigration protest at the nation’s
capital.
Tom Steyer: To Win Midterms, Democrats Must Promise to
Impeach Trump
Homeland Security Official Warned With Decapitated Animal On
His Porch. The official said roughly two
dozen threats have been made in the last few days.
__________________________________________________________________
ARTICLES
“The Democrat base won’t tolerate a retreat from extremism.
They must push forward, get more extreme, pump up the volume, with each MSNBC
chatterclown striving to top the previous doofus’s Hitler hyperbole. These
Democrat idiots are going to talk themselves into a Second Civil War and
then act surprised when it works out poorly again.”
7 Recent Lies From Media On Emotion-Driven Immigration
Debate
Marijuana addiction is real, and rising
________________________________________________________________
GOOD WEBSITES
MUST WATCH: NBC “Reporter” Admits To Working With Democrat
Party To “Inflict” Damage On President Trump
______________________________________________________________________
WISE
WORDS
“It has long..been my opinion, and I have never shrunk from
its expression … that the germ of dissolution of our federal government is in
the constitution of the federal Judiciary; working like gravity by night and by
day, gaining a little today and a little tomorrow, and advancing its noiseless
step like a thief, over the field of jurisdiction, until all shall be usurped.”
-Thomas
Jefferson
posted by gary at
7:59 AM
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