As you can tell by the phony rhetoric about defending the middle class, the Democratic Party is an alliance against the middle class. It consists of the liberal elite and the underclass that it farms for votes. Never has this been more obvious than in Michael Bloomberg’s attempt to buy Florida for his fellow liberal elitist Joe Biden.

Via Fox News:

$16 million is pouring into Florida from billionaire Mike Bloomberg, who pledges to pay the court fines and fees of nearly 32,000 Black and Hispanic convicted felons who have been hindered from voting.

Bloomberg hopes the initiative will remove the red tape for the approximately 1 million felons in Florida, who, if allowed, would likely vote Democrat in the upcoming election.

That they can count on felons to vote overwhelming in their favor tells you all you need to know about Democrats.

The state’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, previously signed a bill which stipulates that felons must pay all fines, restitution, and other legal financial obligations before their sentences could be considered fully served, and allow them to participate in voting.

So Bloomberg steps up with his wallet, to make the world more like the way felons would want it to be. Democrats have already accomplished this at the local level in places like New York, Seattle, and Portland, where criminals largely have the run of the streets thanks to liberal hegemony.

Florida is a key swing state that could decide the election.

Bloomberg previously announced he’d be investing $100 million to Florida alone in an effort to get Biden elected. The money allocated to the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition to pay off debts by the state’s felons is a separate sum from Bloomberg’s original pledge.

Yet we have to listen to these people screech about how they are standing up to big money in politics.

Biden’s campaign had been dramatically outspending the Trump team to run ads in Florida and other key battlegrounds.

There’s no shortage of money among socialists. Consider how well Nicolas Maduro lives as Venezuela starves and you will see the appeal socialism has for the rich.

Bloomberg, who recently spent nearly $1 billion trying to buy the Democrat nomination, is not the only pernicious moonbat with deep pockets. Another is the allegedly racially put-upon LeBron James, who has amassed $480 million in the land of his oppression by playing a game.

From elsewhere on Fox News:

LeBron James and the Florida Rights Restoration are reportedly sending text messages to residents for the purpose of forwarding them to convicted felons, according to Outkick the Coverage.

Outkick reported that James and the group are offering to pay for fines and fees so felons can vote for Joe Biden in the upcoming presidential election.

If wishing really hard works, Trump will be reelected despite all their money and will make a trade deal with China that forces the commies to take their friend LeBron James.

On tips from Chuck A, Zachary B, Adam, Bluto, and Varla.

Gavin Newsom smirks that the debate is over; everyone agrees with him that the fires ravaging the West Coast were caused by climate change, which has always existed but can be arrested if we turn over enough money and power to Big Government. The liberal media establishment backs him up. However, those without a power-grabbing agenda don’t — including environmentalist Michael Shellenberger. The actual culprits are bad policy and poor forest management:

On a tip from KirklesWorth.

Remember pregnant Australian mom Zoe Buhler, who was arrested for urging people on Facebook to come to a Freedom Day protest? Looks like she will have plenty of company in custody, now that Australia is following the lead of the dystopian science fiction movie Minority Report by punishing COVID-19 precrime.

The Age reports:

The COVID-19 Omnibus (Emergency Measures) and Other Acts Amendment Bill 2020 was announced on Minister for Health Jenny Mikakos’ website and is now before Parliament. …

The explanatory memorandum to the bill provides for an authorised officer, who reasonably believes that a high risk person (someone either diagnosed with COVID-19 or a close contact) who is required to comply with a self-isolation direction and is likely to refuse or fail to comply with the direction, to detain that person. So the first concern is the speculative or predictive nature of the assessment that the authorised officer is to make before depriving a person of their liberty.

If the Precogs prophesize that someone might not self-quarantine to the fullest extent demanded, out come the handcuffs.

As noted at Summit News, Australia is becoming a COVID-19 police state:

Numerous people have been violently arrested for not wearing a face mask on the street, while journalists have also been arrested merely for covering anti-lockdown protests. Street markets have also been raided and shut down by riot police.

Even Black Lives Matter protests are somewhat frowned upon by authorities, in stark contrast to the USA, where liberal pols go out of their way to encourage them. They must not have gotten the word Down Under that left-wing mobs don’t spread the virus.

On a tip from Lyle.

Remember when Joe Biden was laughed out of the primaries back in 1987 in part for telling lies about his academic accomplishments? A reminder:

A New Hampshire voter named Frank Fahey asked Biden, “What law school did you attend and where did you place in that class?”

After characteristically insulting the intelligence of the person who asked him the uncomfortable question, Biden went into full Jon Lovitz mode:

“I was the only one in my class to have a full academic scholarship. … The first year in law school I decided I didn’t want to be in law school and ended up in the bottom two-thirds of my class and then decided I wanted to stay and went back to law school and in fact ended up in the top half of my class,” he continued.

“I was the outstanding student in the political science department at the end of my year. I graduated with three degrees from undergraduate school and 165 credits, you only needed 125 credits.”

Eventually the truth leaked out:

Several months later Biden released his academic records revealing that many of the credentials that he cited in the rant in Claremont were not true.

In fact, Biden attended Syracuse law school on a half-scholarship and graduated near the bottom on his class. Despite claiming that he improved his academic performance over time, the records did not indicate that he did. And finally, he graduated with a dual major in history and political science — not “three degrees” as he stated.

Instead of learning not to tell easily disprovable lies, Biden continues to fabricate new academic accomplishments. At the beginning of this video below, he proclaims preposterously that he taught constitutional law for 20 years. (Don’t bother watching the whole thing unless you want to hear him blathering hypocritically about not replacing Ruth Bader Ginsburg until after the election.)

He also continues to claim that he was the first member of his family to attend college, despite having been caught in this lie decades ago.

Then again, maybe he isn’t lying at all; maybe he is so far gone into dementia that he believes his own stories.

On a tip from BPatMann.

Democrats have gone into meltdown mode over the idea that the president might do his job by appointing a new justice to the Supreme Court. Replacing a leftist ideologue like Ruth Bader Ginsburg with someone with a higher regard for the Constitution could be an impediment to their radical plans.

This is understandable enough, considering that they are the party of total government, and the Constitution stands in their way, as it was designed to do. But they ought to spare us the sanctimonious rhetoric. We all remember when they were in favor of appointing justices, even in an election year — in their case, even when the White House and Senate were controlled by different parties:

Biden elaborates:

Fill that seat. It could be crucial to helping America survive as America if radical Democrats take power.

On tips from Dragon’s Lair and Rapinhoe.

Regular Americans have had enough of the often obscene leftist graffiti that covers monuments, walls, and windows thanks to sociopathic Black Lives Matter/Antifa hooligans. In some cities, the graffiti is even painted on the streets at public expense. Thankfully, there has been some pushback.

From New York City, where the crime-facilitating, police-defunding hard left mayor personally took part in painting a giant “BLACK LIVES MATTER” mural on Fifth Avenue:

New Yorkers painted a massive stretch of Brooklyn blacktop with the yellow message “F–k Cuomo and de Blasio” over the weekend in the vein of Hizzoner’s “Black Lives Matter” art…

Bucking widely held notions about municipal inefficiency, workers from the city Department of Transportation descended on the display less than 24 hours later — around 10 p.m. Saturday — to cover up the message with black…

The incident is under investigation. Police will not be highly motivated to find the culprits. Reportedly, they stood around laughing while the mural was created.

Meanwhile, up the coast in Massachusetts:

As in NYC, all-cap yellow letters were used to mimic the Black Lives Matter murals that municipal moonbats like de Blasio and DC’s Muriel Bowser have painted on streets to highlight their support for rioters versus the police and property owners.

It’s nice to see that there is resistance to “the Resistance.”

On tips from Rapinhoe and Jack Bauer.

Attempting to hispander, Biden promises that if leftists can use him to seize power, there will be no deportations for 100 days. Or maybe there will be no deportations except for illegal aliens who commit felonies in the USA. It depends on which lines Biden catches as they scroll past on his teleprompter.

That’s the problem with running a candidate in such a state of cognitive decline that not only can he not get through staged softball interviews without a teleprompter, he can’t even competently read the teleprompter.

Watch him botch the Pledge of Allegiance in Wisconsin:

Looks like he lost a line again. Never mind; you know the thing.

Kamala, Bernie, AOC, and the rest of the radical left will not have to worry about pushback from Biden on even the most demented and anti-American initiatives. By next January, he won’t recognize himself in the mirror.

On tips from Rapinhoe, Henry B, Anonymous, Chuck A, and Mr. Freemarket.

As Mark Twain might have said, history doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes. An article at Moonbattery.com sponsor Ammo.com suggests that unfolding American history could rhyme with the Spanish Civil War.

Spain had been a monarchy for almost its entire existence as a nation until 1931, when the Second Spanish Republic was established, based on a radical left constitution that was hostile to Christianity and property rights. Fascists, monarchists, and various conservatives joined forces to push back. The situation became increasingly unstable.

The igniting event was the election of 1936. This saw a very, very slim (less than 1 percent of the vote) victory of the Spanish left (socialists, Communists and anarchists) over the Spanish right.

The right revolted. In response, the leftists running the government got ugly…

…mobilizing the far left in Spain as shock troops to terrorize the population into submission. Communists in particular were unleashed to execute and torture anyone even suspected of being a nationalist sympathizer. It didn’t help that the clergy bore the brunt of this, with nuns gang raped before being summarily executed. The republicans went so far as to exhume the bodies of dead religious figures and desecrate their corpses.

Hostility toward tradition and specifically toward Christianity has been echoed by Black Lives Matter and Antifa shock troops. However, in Spain, the Church was more closely associated with the society leftists wanted to destroy. In the USA, people have been trained to think more along racial lines.

The comparison between the Church in Spain 1936 and white Americans in 2020 isn’t much of a stretch. Much of the violence directed against the Church was predicated on the basis that they “deserved” this as payback for historical crimes. All told, 3,400 priests, monks and nuns were murdered during the first two months of the Spanish Civil War.

Genocide directed against clergy was also a feature of the French Revolution — which BLM/Antifa moonbats refer to reverently, even setting up symbolic guillotines.

Factors 2020 America has in common with Spain before it broke down into civil war include extreme political polarization, street fighting, anarcho-communist ideology, and potentially, an election that sets off the tinderbox:

As we prepare for the 2020 Presidential election, it is clear that whoever loses will not only be unhappy with the results, but will probably consider them to be illegitimate. …

An article from the Washington Post states that any outcome but a Biden landslide will result in massive violence and civil unrest.

Was that a threat from the lefties at WaPo, a call to arms, or an accurate prediction? Possibly all three.

Read the rest at Ammo.com, and as always, stock up on discount ammo while you are there.

There is follow-up on the case of Greg Patton, the USC Marshall School of Business professor who was placed in purgatory after using the Chinese term “nèi ge,” which militant crybullies say sounds like the forbidden n-word. Patton used the word in order to be inclusive of international students.

At last word, educrats have admitted to no error for their treatment of Patton. The dean denounced him; he remains under suspension, and it is unclear whether he will ever be reinstated. Even the Atlantic is appalled at the injustice, and his fellow faculty are scared that they might be next to get frog-marched to the guillotine through no fault of their own.

Recent grads are also alarmed:

Ninety-four recent graduates of the MBA program, purporting to represent “more than a dozen nationalities and ethnicities,” wrote that “a few of us, but many of our parents, lived through mainland China’s Cultural Revolution. This current incident, and Marshall’s response so far, seem disturbingly similar to prevalent behavior in China at that time—spurious accusations against innocent people, which escalated into institutional insanity.”

The insanity began when Patton promptly apologized to the crybullies for accidently providing them with a pretext to be offended. Saying “I’m sorry” to the belligerently oppressed puts the smell of blood in the water.

The offended students went into lynch mob mode, shrieking that their “mental health has been affected” by the “unwelcome environment” created by Patton having said a Chinese word that has nothing to do with race. They wrote,

“In light of the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and the recent and continued collective protests and social awakening across the nation, we cannot let this stand.”

That is, they demanded Patton be offered up to them as a sacrifice or else. After hundreds upon hundreds of Black Lives Matter riots, everyone knows what “or else” means.

The climate of terror that these thugs have been allowed to create has had a predictable effect on the erstwhile open marketplace of ideas:

Last Monday, the faculty council at the business school discussed the results of an anonymous survey on the Patton incident that 105 faculty members answered. According to a transcript I obtained, a member of the council described “an overwhelming sense of vulnerability, worry, insecurity, fear and anxiety” among faculty who worry that they could be “cancelled” anytime due to a misunderstanding. The faculty feel “anger, disappointment, betrayal, and outrage” at Patton’s treatment. … [F]aculty members mentioned that “given the atmosphere of fear and perceived lack of support, they think it is too risky for them to continue discussing certain topics with students. This includes topics related to diversity and inclusion, but it also includes such topics as politics and international relations.”

The crisis is hardly limited to USC:

[A]dministrators all over the country are bending over backward to appease umbrage-taking students in the name of inclusion, and more than a few academics have found themselves under serious investigation for flimsy reasons. “Academics write to me with great frequency to share their anxieties,” my colleague John McWhorter, a Columbia professor, wrote earlier this month. “In a three-week period early this summer, I counted some 150 of these messages. And what they reveal is a very rational culture of fear among those who dissent, even slightly, with the tenets of the woke left.”

A mob of bullies not bright enough to belong in college now dictates what can and cannot be said in academia. What happens in the Ivory Tower today will happen to the rest of us soon absent pushback.

On a tip from Adam.

As Tony Heller observes in the video below, “Civilization is being driven into fear, madness, and tyranny because of junk science.” This pertains not only to the global warming hoax, but to the crisis authoritarians have exploited COVID-19 to create. Only madness can explain how former ballplayer David Ortiz is reported to be “recovering” from a sickness that has no symptoms:

On a tip from KirklesWorth.

To preserve lives, they should have kept Biden yapping for as long as possible, because he said by the time he finished his talk in Philadelphia yesterday, 200 million would be dead of COVID-19. Barked Biden:

“It’s estimated that 200 million people have died, probably by the time I finish this talk.”

Looks like Trump is once again to blame:

The estimation was probably formulated by Biden himself, considering his recent history with numbers:

Biden has fumbled his figures before, claiming earlier this summer that more than 120 million Americans had died of Covid-19, overstating the true death toll by a factor of 1,000. Back in February, he claimed during a primary debate that “150 million” Americans had died of gun violence since 2007 – nearly half the country’s population.

Maybe it would help if his teleprompter programmers write out numbers instead of using digits, which Biden appears to find confusing.

On tips from Adam and Varla.

Bureaucrats continue to find ways to make COVID-19 lockdowns more repressive — for the sake of our health, of course.

The Hammersmith and Fulham Council in West London has banned employees from smoking at working desks even when working online from home. …

The Hammersmith and Fulham council, run by The left-wing Labor Party, announced that “any part of a private dwelling used solely for work purposes will be required to be smoke-free.”

Similarly, online learning has effectively prohibited toy guns in the house, as a 12-year-old recently learned in Colorado Springs:

Isaiah Elliott attends Grand Mountain, a K-8 grade school in the Widefield District #3, just south of Colorado Springs.

On Thursday, Aug. 27, the seventh grader was attending on online art class when a teacher saw Isaiah flash a toy gun across his computer screen. The toy in question is a neon green and black handgun with an orange tip with the words “Zombie Hunter” printed on the side.

The teacher notified the school principal who suspended Isaiah for five days and called the El Paso County Sheriff’s Office to conduct a welfare check on the boy without calling his parents first.

It remains to be seen whether the Hammersmith and Fulham Council will dispatch police if a Zoom meeting reveals that someone has been smoking in their own home.

Private homes are becoming public areas, to be monitored and regulated as such, just as dystopian novels about totalitarianism like We and 1984 predicted.

On a tip from Zachary B.