On a tip from Jester.

Conservative Supreme Court justices do their job by upholding the Constitution. Liberals don’t hate them so much as the Constitution itself. Nicholas Goldberg of the Los Angeles Times is up-front about it:

The problem isn’t just with the justices. The problem, or at least a substantial portion of it, lies with the U.S. Constitution itself.

He finds an Expert to quote:

“It was written by a small group of white male landowners clustered along the Eastern Seaboard in a largely agrarian society in the late 1700s,” said David S. Law, a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law who studies courts and constitutions around the world. “How could it possibly fit the needs of a highly diverse country of 300-plus-million people in the 21st century, a military and economic superpower in a globalized world, a highly developed, post-industrial nation that stretches from sea to shining sea?”

Because it is based on the timeless, universal principles of individual liberty, natural rights, and limited government is how.

According to Goldberg and Law, a constitution that upholds freedom rather than guaranteeing goodies is not keeping up with the times:

[C]onstitutional thinking has evolved since 1787. Today, most new constitutions include far more enumerated rights than ours, notes David Law. The right to education, for instance, and to privacy, food, healthcare and housing.

Goldberg also wants constitutional rights to abortion, to unionization, and to force the world to cater to each person’s disabilities. He calls for the environment and favored identity groups including homosexuals and transsexuals to be granted explicit rights (i.e., superior status).

The “right” to force other people to provide you with food, housing, and special privileges could only be found under an authoritarian regime. If you have a “right” to other people’s labor and property, you have no rights, because you live under socialism.

Leftists want to take away our rights and replace them with privileges bestowed by Big Government at other people’s expense. The purpose of the Constitution is to defend America from people like Nicholas Goldberg and David Law.

On a tip from Lyle.

Biden’s maniacal War on Energy and commitment to massive wasteful spending are not the only reasons inflation won’t be easy to get under control. There is also the rising price of housing. As always, liberal policies are making matters worse.

The Wall Street Journal reports:

Climbing housing costs are set to keep inflation elevated this year, creating another challenge for Federal Reserve officials who want to see signs that price pressures are easing before slowing their interest-rate increases.

These interest rate increases are likely to trigger a recession — assuming we aren’t already in one. But even that would be better than runaway inflation.

If you want housing to be prohibitively expensive, a tried and true tactic is rent control. St Paul demonstrates. As of May, it caps rent increases at 3% per year, about one third of the current inflation rate:

This strict new rent control is hitting while building costs have soared. Between the first quarter of 2021 and the first quarter of 2022, construction costs rose 18.2% in nearby Minneapolis…

The effect this will have on the construction of new housing should be obvious. Who is going to build if they cannot turn a profit?

Citing rent control, investors recently paused development on the 3,800-unit Highland Bridge project. Its builders would have set aside 20% of units for affordable housing, with 10% going to those earning 30% or less of area median income.

Democrats squawk that they want affordable housing. What they actually want is Americans living in tents, dependent on handouts. This was proven after Democrats took total control of California.

The best way cities can make housing affordable is to have policies that increase the housing supply. Rent control restricts supply and is economic madness, as St. Paul is proving.

Many voters appear to be so cognitively dysfunctional that they honestly cannot see the inevitable outcome of policies like rent control. Those running the Democratic Party don’t have that excuse. They know they are putting people out on the streets by preventing the construction of new housing, whether through rent control or through excessive regulation as in California.

Misery is not a bug of liberal policy; it is a feature. As Founding Father of progressivism Vladimir Lenin put it, “Worse is better.” The more desperate people there are, the easier it is to impose communism. That’s why the Democratic Party is waging a war of extermination against the middle class.

On a tip from Varla.

The Biden Regime is defying the Supreme Court in its campaign to force us into expensive, unreliable, combustion-prone, inefficient electric cars. Whatever its motives, this is not about the environment, despite the pious rhetoric. Electric moonbatmobiles are more harmful to Mother Nature than proper cars:

[A] new study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that electric vehicles are worse for the environment than gas-powered ones. By quantifying the externalities (both greenhouse gases and local air pollution) generated by driving these vehicles, the government subsidies on the purchase of EVs, and taxes on electric and/or gasoline miles, researchers found that “electric vehicles generate a negative environmental benefit of about -0.5 cents per mile relative to comparable gasoline vehicles (-1.5 cents per mile for vehicles driven outside metropolitan areas).”

Liberal readers should brace for a big surprise. The electricity to power their virtue-signaling Teslas does not come from pixie dust or slightly more viable renewable sources. It comes from the fossil fuels the Biden Regime is making so expensive.

“The comparison between a gasoline vehicle and an electric one is really a comparison between burning gasoline or a mix of coal and natural gas to move the vehicle,” according to The American Economic Review.

Good thing CO2 is only harmful in the alternate reality of moonbat ideology. However, making lithium-ion batteries really is bad for the planet. The batteries require lots of graphite from China…

Pollution can come “from graphite dust in the air, which is damaging whether inhaled or brought down to the earth in the rain,” a Bloomberg report found. More pollution results from the hydrochloric acid used to process mined graphite into a usable form. Hydrochloric acid is highly corrosive and can cause great environmental damage if leaked into groundwater or streams.

China’s communist rulers are no more worried about the environment than they are about human rights.

[T]he U.S. government’s EV subsidies end up subsidizing China’s highly polluted production. … We also know from past experiences that pollution in China ends up harming the rest of the world.

It seems our rulers don’t care about the environment any more than the ChiComs do. As if he were a dictator rather than a president, Biden has decreed by executive order that half of all new cars in truck sold in the USA by 2030 must be electric — on the preposterous grounds that this will improve the weather.

On a tip from Blackjack.

On a tip from Anonymous.

They used to talk about the proletariat. Now it’s the climate. However, the objective is the same: global totalitarian rule. In Holland, they have declared war on agriculture to consolidate power. Farmers pushed back; authorities responded by firing on a kid driving a tractor. The daughter of a Dutch farmer has good reason to advise Americans to hold tight to the Second Amendment:

She mentions Sri Lanka, another country where the food supply has been constricted in the name of leftist climate ideology. Pushback has now brought down that government:

Both the president and the prime minister of Sri Lanka are resigning in the wake of massive mobs storming and occupying their residences, burning the PM’s private house and refusing to leave the presidential palace until both men are out of office.

Here’s why the mob acted appropriately:

Sri Lanka foolishly signed on to the green initiative in farming, going organic and limiting the importation and use of chemical fertilizers. Food production, including tea, a vital export earner of foreign exchange, collapsed, and now the government is broke, people are hungry.

Similar tyrants are imposing the same agenda in America, ignoring the Supreme Court in the process. If Sri Lankans will rise up against green tyranny, maybe Americans will too.

As Leonardo da Vinci observed, it is easier to resist at the beginning than it is at the end. We are now at the end of the beginning in the war between humanity and the Liberal World Order.

Sky News Australia puts the Dutch rebellion in the context of the global ruling class’s attempted Great Reset:

On tips from seaoh and Mr. Freemarket.

The good news is that the Supreme Court has ruled that unelected federal bureauweenies like Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg cannot regulate us into abject poverty in the name of their climate ideology without legislation. The bad news is that Democrats don’t care:

In West Virginia v. EPA, the Court ruled that regulatory agencies can’t impose costly new regulations without a clear direction from Congress.

And yet:

Now the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) wants to take this abuse of authority on the road. It cites an obscure provision in federal law that authorizes it to set national “performance” goals for the national highway system. The law defines these goals as safety, infrastructure condition, congestion reduction, system reliability, freight movement and economic vitality, environmental sustainability and reduced project delivery delays.

FHWA says this “environmental sustainability” language allows it to regulate CO2 emissions.

Everything we do, including breathing, produces the harmless CO2 emissions that according to liberal dogma control the global temperature. The FHWA is claiming the authority to dictate all human behavior.

They want to start by abolishing affordable transportation. A familiar tactic is employed; states that do not sufficiently suppress CO2-emitting traffic on highways will be denied federal funding. They confiscate your money, then dole some of it back to you on the condition that you do as you are told.

The proposed rule also says states will be required “to establish declining targets for reductions in tailpipe CO2 emissions” on the national highway system. This sounds like DOT conscripting states into regulating vehicle greenhouse gas emissions, which states are expressly barred from doing under federal law.

Law is a tool that Democrats use only when it suits their purposes. Their purpose here is to suppress transportation. What else would you expect of the Department of Transportation, considering that the Biden Regime is straight out of George Orwell?

On a tip from Varla.

If all workers cannot be directly employed by Big Government, they must at least be controlled by Big Unions, which are a lucrative extension of the Democratic Party. Otherwise, workers would be independent — and independence is obscene from the point of view of our leftist ruling class. That’s why the Democrats have conspired to throw tens of millions of Americans out of work by making it illegal to work on a freelance basis.

Biden et al. has intended from the beginning to inflict a federal version of California’s AB5, which demonstrates the Democrat belief in the American dream by criminalizing working for yourself. AB5 is about to cause economic havoc.

The law decrees that

“a person providing labor or services for remuneration shall be considered an employee rather than an independent contractor unless the hiring entity demonstrates that the person is free from the control and direction of the hiring entity in connection with the performance of the work, the person performs work that is outside the usual course of the hiring entity’s business, and the person is customarily engaged in an independently established trade, occupation, or business.”

Those who find favor with California’s moonbat overlords get exceptions. Truckers are not among them.

A January 2020 injunction saved trucking from the insane and tyrannical law. However:

California Attorney General Xavier Becerra [currently head of Biden’s HHS] called on U.S. District Judge Roger T. Benitez to reverse the injunction. …

On June 28, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review the case of the California truckers battling against AB5. …

Now, the truckers must be employees of trucking companies and not independent contractors in order to be able to work in California. …

If the law is enforced, California faces a possible mass exodus of the state’s estimated 70,000 independent truckers.

Imagine the chaos this will cause at the Port of Oakland alone:

“There’s 9,000 trucks that serve the port on a daily basis, and 90% of them are independent contractors. So, this is a big, big impact,” said Bill Aboudi owner of AB Trucking in Oakland.

You think we have a supply chain crisis now? You think prices are already high? Just wait. Democrats are not through inflicting their agenda.

The California Trucking Association delivered a warning, “Gasoline has been poured on the fire that is our ongoing supply chain crisis. In addition to the direct impact on California’s 70,000 owner-operators who have seven days to cease long-standing independent businesses, the impact of taking tens of thousands of truck drivers off the road will have devastating repercussions on an already fragile supply chain, increasing costs and worsening runaway inflation.”

If they were merely fools, they might show contrition. But Democrats are pressing full steam ahead toward economic devastation.

Sneers Lorena Gonzalez, currently head of the California Labor Federation, who was the author of AB5:

“The fact that trucking companies will have to abide by basic labor laws in CA takes us one step closer to rebuilding the middle class that was almost deregulated out of existence.”

If there are two things Democrats love, they are regulation and unions. They are more than willing to make us suffer for them.

If you think the economy has been bad since Biden took power, think how awful it would be if he were able to get his favored legislation passed. His Build Back Better lurch deeper into socialism would push inflation into Venezuela territory. The Pro Act — a federal version of AB5 — would do to the whole country what malevolent leftists like Gavin Newsom and Lorena Gonzalez are doing to California.

On tips from Blackjack and Mr. Freemarket.

Radical abortion advocate Joe Biden will say anything to advance the killing of unborn children — to the best of his limited ability to speak. Here he wails sanctimoniously about a pregnant 10-year-old girl who was forced to cross state lines to “terminate the presidency”:

The story he is trying to tell is probably fictional, concocted by his fellow abortion advocate Caitlin Bernard, who refuses to provide any details. The liberal media was so eager to believe her that it printed the story anyway:

Bernard, an Indianapolis obstetrician-gynecologist, claimed a child abuse doctor referred to her a 10-year-old patient who was pregnant and seeking an abortion a few days past Ohio’s six week limit. The story was originally published in the Cincinnati Enquirer then quickly picked up by national outlets including Politico, The Washington Post, CNN, Teen Vogue, The Hill and numerous other outlets…

Where did the 10-year-old come from? Who was her doctor? Who made her pregnant? Were charges filed? Bernard refuses to say, presumably lest less gullible news sources prove her story to be a fabrication. She won’t even talk to her fellow moonbats at Snopes.

Bernard has worked with the media actively in the past and advocated against legal abortion limits previously in Politico, The Republic, PBS, 13WTHR and WRTV Indianapolis. The June 29 Politico article, which ran two days after Bernard claims to have received the call about a pregnant 10-year-old, makes no mention of the event.

Then again, if her improbable story isn’t true, why does Biden stumblingly attempt repeat it, placing upon it the imprimatur of his administration? Could it really be that the White House under Democrat control has no credibility?

On a tip from Wiggins.

To destroy a nation, you have to turn it against its own heritage. You have to tear down its greatest heroes. This is why the Black Lives Matter riots prominently featured the destruction of statues of the Founding Fathers. It is why Monticello — long preserved as a shrine to the greatness of the author of the Declaration of Independence — is now being used by America’s enemies to propagandize against its creator Thomas Jefferson:

The new emphasis is the culmination of a 10-year effort to balance the historical record, officials of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, the nonprofit that owns the estate, have said.

But visitors complain that employees go out of their way to belittle Jefferson and his life.

Jefferson has been targeted for erasure on the grounds that he took part in a society that did not comply with 21st standards of political correctness. Like the rest of the landowners in 18th century Virginia, he had slaves.

Already his statue has been expelled from New York City Council by Bill de Blasio after nearly 2 centuries. Now they have transformed Monticello into a soapbox from which to denounce him, rendering the monument pointless.

The propaganda is executed with the subtlety we have come to expect of progressives. The ticket booth in the visitor’s center is “decorated with a contemporary painting of Jefferson’s weeping slaves.” Exhibits focus on Sally Hemings, a mixed race slave with whom Jefferson allegedly had children. If liberals prevail, this possibly fictional relationship is all that will be remembered about him.

Upon entering the mansion, visitors are confronted by a gigantic modern painting of a faceless black man. It was commissioned in honor of “Juneteenth.” Smirks Monticello guide Susan Woodward,

“It’s quite provocative, I do believe.”

The book shop features the excretions of proponents of critical race theory Ibram X. Kendi and Ta-Nehisi Coates. How provocative.

The message that Jefferson owned slaves and was therefore a bad man is ubiquitous. Visitors are also belligerently reminded that Monticello was built on land where sacred savages once roamed happy and free, before evil white people like Jefferson came to oppress them.

This will surprise no one:

The Thomas Jefferson Foundation is run by a roster of big-money Dem donors and former Democratic officials…

The foundation is chaired by Melody Barnes, former assistant to Barack Obama and director of the White House Domestic Policy Council, who has griped in WaPo about all the nice things people say about that scoundrel Thomas Jefferson.

Allowing leftists to take over Monticello is like putting satanists in charge of the Vatican.

On tips from Bluto and Franco.

A basic tenet of law in civilized countries is “double jeopardy,” whereby you cannot be tried multiple times for the same crime. This goes all the way back to the ancient Roman principle of “non bis in idem.” However, as civilization recedes in the face of moonbattery, so does justice. Double jeopardy protection no longer applies in crimes of political incorrectness. Derek Chauvin is a case in point:

Former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was sentenced in a federal court Thursday to 21 years in prison for violating George Floyd’s civil rights.

Chauvin had already been sentenced to 22½ years for restraining liberal demigod George Floyd as he died of a fentanyl overdose while resisting arrest. But that was by the state. Now the federal government gets a whack at the piñata.

The sentences will run concurrently.

If his crime were killing the career criminal Floyd, Chauvin might enjoy double jeopardy protection. But his actual crime is that he personifies white police officers in the hive mind of the mob. He has a part to play in the theatrical production entitled The Martyrdom of Saint George of Fentanyl. To suggest that Chauvin deserves justice like any other citizen of a civilized country would be racist.

On a tip from Wiggins.

Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh can tell you all about what kind of people we are up against.

When he was nominated to the Supreme Court, Democrats outrageously lied that he is a serial rapist, producing witnesses that no adult would regard as credible. When it was leaked that he might help restore the integrity of the judicial system by overruling Roe v. Wade, mobs of thugs assailed his home; the White House pointedly refused to condemn this.

In the midst of the siege, an armed moonbat showed up at his house with the admitted intent to kill Kavanaugh. The Democrat-controlled media barely mentioned this. Rather than tone down his rhetoric in the aftermath, Joe Biden egged on the liberal mob to be “viscerally angry.”

Leftist thugs reacted to Roe’s repeal by following orders from prominent Democrat Maxine Waters to harass their opponents in public. Kavanaugh was driven out of a DC restaurant, being forced to escape through a back door rather than eat in peace like a citizen of a civilized country.

The response from an increasingly arrogant White House: “This is what democracy is.”

Seeing is believing:

Now we know what they mean when they repeatedly bark the phrase “our democracy.” They are referring to a system under which anyone who puts up resistance is relentlessly intimidated by goons.

The Biden Regime is encouraging people to violate federal law. But if laws could be used against powerful Democrats, Biden would be in Leavenworth facing a firing squad for treason.

Morton’s Steakhouse now faces the wrath of the mob for daring to serve food to someone leftists don’t like. Moonbats are bombarding it with bad reviews to wreck its reputation.

Other members of the tolerant Democrat base are offering bounties for information on opportunities for the mob to set upon Supreme Court justices who do not vote as they are told:

A liberal protest group is offering cash to anyone who sees the conservative justices of the Supreme Court and provides their location.

The justices targeted by the group ShutDownDC are John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh, Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, and Amy Coney Barrett. The group tweeted that it is willing to give “$50 to anyone who gives a confirmed sighting and $200 if the Justice or Justices are in the same area 30 minutes after their location is given.”

Twitter apparently has no problem with this. It clearly violates the guidelines…

Twitter, the platform on which ShutDownDC announced its “bounty,” does not allow users to “engage in the targeted harassment of someone, or incite other people to do so.”

…but with leftists, all ethics are situational. Jordan Peterson has been banned from Twitter for refusing to pretend that Ellen Page is a man. Meanwhile, this is still up on Twitter, despite the attention it has drawn:

Hold on, it gets even more disgusting. Chasten Buttigieg, the homosexual paramour of our supposed Secretary of Transportation, with whom Pete Buttigieg canoodled for months on end instead of showing up for work at the height of the supply chain crisis, approves of the mob’s behavior — and taunts Kavanaugh:

“Sounds like he just wanted some privacy to make his own dining decisions,” [Chasten] Buttigieg tweeted.

Responds Jon Gabriel of Ricochet:

“What happens if MAGA types start showing up where ever you and Pete go? This continued escalation is a dangerous game, especially since Kavanaugh just had an assassination attempt on him. You don’t want the world you’re advocating for.”

Oh yes he does want it, if he is anything like his “husband” Pete and the rest of today’s Democrats. As for what would happen if MAGA types were to stoop to similar thuggery, the ongoing January 6 inquisitions make that clear.

On tips from Wiggins, TCS III, Bluto, Blackjack, KirklesWorth, MrRightWingDave, and Varla.