"Speaking of bovine flatulence . . .

"Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was supposed to be the Democratic party's fresh new face -- so why is the honorable lady from the Bronx trafficking in ideas from the 1930s?

"The Left really has only one idea: control. At the end of the Cold War, when socialism stood discredited and the memory of its atrocities and repression were fresh in the minds of people who had just watched the dismantling of the Berlin Wall and much of what it stood for, the partisans of central planning found themselves in need of a new host, and what they found was the environmental movement -- another vehicle for supplanting liberalism and free markets with five-year plans and political discipline. Hence the joke about 'watermelons,' the new lefty activists who were green on the outside but red on the inside. The metaphor may occasion some eye-rolling and is prone to abuse, but it speaks to an undeniable truth: Environmentalism has been since the fall of the Soviet Union the world's most important vessel for anti-liberal and anti-market forces.

"Representative Ocasio-Cortez's brief public career offers testimony to a mind that never has been at risk of being violated by a coherent thought, much less an original one, and so she has settled upon the 'Green New Deal,' a concept and a marketing campaign that already was hackneyed and shopworn back when Barack Obama was pushing it years ago, and when Thomas Friedman was pushing it before him, and when the Communist Party USA was pushing it before him."

Read entire article here.

"A number of Democratic Party presidential hopefuls -- including Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, Kirsten Gillibrand, Julian Castro, and Beto O'Rourke, for starters -- have already endorsed or expressed support for the 'Green New Deal' (GND). Today, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Edward J. Markey dropped details about her plan.

"It is not hyperbole to contend that GND is likely the most ridiculous and un-American plan that's ever been presented by an elected official to voters. Not merely because it would necessitate a communist strongman to institute, but also because the societal cost are unfathomable. The risible historic analogies Markey and Ocasio-Cortez rely on, the building of the interstate highway system or moon landing, are nothing but trifling projects compared to a plan that overhauls modernity by voluntarily destroying massive amounts of wealth and technology. That is the GND."

Read entire article here.

"Today, House Democrats are holding hearings on a monstrous, 571-page election- and campaign-finance-reform bill called the 'For the People Act of 2019.' I can think of other, more accurate, names -- like the 'First Amendment Demolition Act,' or perhaps the 'Federalism Repeal Act,' or maybe, most accurate of all, the 'Constitutional Lawyers Enrichment Act,' because the passage of the law would trigger a full decade (at least) of litigation on numerous constitutional fronts.

"At its essence, the bill federalizes control over elections to an unprecedented scale, expands government power over political speech, mandates increased disclosures of private citizens' personal information (down to name and address), places conditions on citizen contact with legislators that inhibits citizens' freedom of expression, and then places enforcement of most of these measures in the hands of a revamped Federal Election Commission that is far more responsive to presidential influence. ...

"As Bradley Smith argues in a comprehensive Institute for Free Speech analysis of the legislation, 'The goal seems to be to limit discussion of candidates to the candidates and parties themselves, at the expense of the public at large.'"

Read entire article here.

"There were laughter, tears, raucous cheers and awkward silences. But more than anything else, it was a punch in the gut that President Trump delivered Tuesday night.

"Time after time, on issue after issue, he laid down a marker about the remaining two years of his term -- and the outlines of his re-election campaign. ...

"True to White House billing, the president was conciliatory at times and urged national unity in the face of domestic and international threats. Perhaps he was even sincere in those wishes, but on virtually all the big issues dividing America, Trump took bold and resolute stances that left little room to the imagination and even less wiggle room.

"'I will get it built,' he said about a wall after a lengthy discourse on the problems of the southern border in which he urged Democrats to join him in ending the scourge of sex trafficking, drugs, gangs and illegal immigration.

"He derided the rising calls on the far left for a socialist approach to economics, declaring, 'America will never be a socialist country.'"

Read entire article here.

"Both the Supreme Court and Congress -- or both -- should act to rein in district court judges who issue 'nationwide' or 'universal' injunctions.

"Such injunctions purport to apply those judges' decisions to the whole country, rather than just to the litigants before them or to the specific geographical jurisdictions the judges serve. The use of such injunctions has exploded in recent years, and it has proven particularly popular among liberal district judges who aim to block initiatives of the Trump administration. ...

"As Justice Samuel Alito explained ... if a single lower court judge can in effect bind the entire country, it encourages litigants to race to the courts to find a friendly judge. This, he wrote, 'invites the losers to seek to obtain in court what they could not achieve in the political arena.'

"One way or another, judges should show restraint. But if they won't, Congress or the Supreme Court should restrain them."

"Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam's political career is about to be aborted, although presumably the cracker Democrat is being 'kept comfortable' in his final moments as the party elders hold 'discussions' about the 'tragic and difficult circumstances' in which he finds himself.

"Oh wait, those were the very terms the erstwhile Social Justice Warrior had used only hours earlier to describe the infanticide that his party was enthusiastically proposing to legalize in the Old Dominion.

"As Northam himself noted as recently as Thursday, in the case of 'severe deformities,' sometimes a decision must be made, for the good of all parties, in this case the Democrat party.

"Talk about severe deformities -- politically, in the blink of an eye, Northam had gone from toast of the town (well, Georgetown anyway) to just plain toast."

"Florida governor Ron DeSantis said Thursday that he plans to issue an executive order setting new curriculum standards and eliminating 'the vestiges of Common Core' from the state's public schools.

"'We stuck with Common Core. Then we re-branded it. . . . It's all the same. It all needs to be looked at, it all needs to be scrutinized,' DeSantis said at an event at Ida S. Baker High School in Cape Coral.

"Fulfilling one of his campaign promises, the Republican governor announced that he will ask Education Commissioner Richard Corcoran, who also attended Thursday's event, to 'come up with a roadmap' for new curriculum standards over the next year, working alongside the state Board of Education.

"Common Core, which sets required proficiency levels for students from kindergarten to twelfth grade in language-arts and math classes, has been adopted by 45 states. It is controversial among conservatives, some of whom call it an uncalled for and illegal encroachment into classrooms that mandates high-stakes tests and lessons that don't work for some students. Florida first adopted its standards in 2010, and modified them slightly in 2014."

"WASHINGTON -- Nearly four times as many veterans could be eligible for private health care paid for by the Department of Veterans Affairs under sweeping rules the agency proposed Wednesday.

"The rules, which will be open to public comment, would permit veterans to get private care if they had to wait more than 20 days or drive more than 30 minutes for a VA appointment.

"That would be a considerable expansion of eligibility standards, in which private options kick in for vets who have to wait 30 days or live 40 miles from a VA facility. The new rules would allow veterans who need urgent care to go to a private doctor without pre-authorization.

"If they go into effect, the rules would deliver on a presidential campaign promise made by Donald Trump to expand choices for veterans seeking health care outside the VA.

"VA officials estimated the plan could increase the number of veterans eligible for private care to as many as 2.1 million -- up from roughly 560,000."

Read entire article here.

"The left-wing approach to billionaires has radically changed. Aside from the rhetorical boilerplate about robber barons and the need for an income-tax rate of 70 percent, in reality the hard Left has partnered with the nation's richest. The new big fortunes of America are now mostly in high-tech, media, and finance, not in the old conservative and muscular corporations centered in farming, manufacturing, or oil and minerals. And the new zillionaires are left-wing, and they are activist: Bezos, Bloomberg, Buffett, Gates, Zuckerberg, the Google and Apple teams, Soros, Steyer, and a host of others. Through grants, foundations, purchased media, and super PACs, astronomical amounts of money flow into federal, state, and even local midterm election campaigns, and into voter harvesting and issues from global warming and late-term abortion to open borders, gun control, and identity politics. The 2018 midterms were a mere precursor of things to come. ...

"The bad news is that conservatives will likely increasingly be outnumbered, outspent, and out-organized unless they are shocked out of their somnolence. The quasi-good news is that the hard Left is unapologetic that it is the hard Left, not just bankrupt in its ideology in a world where socialism has demonstrably wrecked entire countries, but also predictably hypocritical and cynical, given that leftists are now really the party of the rich -- and without much empathy for the deplorable and irredeemable middle classes."

"Special counsel Robert Mueller's indictment of Roger Stone elucidates what has been apparent to the public for a year, and therefore must have been known to prosecutors and the FBI for much longer: There was no criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russian government. That is, the Kremlin's cyber-espionage efforts to undermine the 2016 election by hacking Democratic email accounts were not coordinated with the Trump campaign.

"In the Stone indictment, Mueller offers up 20 pages of heavy-breathing narrative about the Russian theft of tens of thousands of emails from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, the transmission of the purloined materials to WikiLeaks (portrayed as a witting arm of the Putin regime), and their subsequent media publication in the final weeks of the campaign. But the big wind produces no rain. At the end, we get a couple of pages of process crimes.

"Stone is charged with such comparative trifles as concealing from Congress that his communications with an associate were in writing. The seven counts are offenses generated not by an espionage conspiracy but by the investigation of an espionage conspiracy that did not exist.

"Not one that 'may not have existed.' The Trump-Russia conspiracy did not exist."