It’s Wednesday, April 26th, 2017…but before we begin, it’s come to our attention a…

Federal Judge in San Francisco Calls Trump’s Order on Sanctuary Cities Unconstitutional

Though the judge went on to acknowledge…

“…granting the preliminary injunction doesn’t block the Trump administration from enforcing existing conditions of federal grants, or developing regulations around or defining what makes a sanctuary jurisdiction.“

…James Williams, the county counsel for Santa Clara, noted the decision as…

“…an affirmation of the basic principles of federalism and the separation of powers that our founders put in place, and it makes absolutely clear that the president cannot use Congress’s spending power to threaten and coerce states and local government to adapt his agenda.”

You know,…unlike the fiscal threats and coercion The Obamao used to (i) force public schools to enact his wife’s half-baked dietary theories; (ii) bully state and local jurisdictions into permitting perverts access to women’s bathrooms; or, (iii) intimidate colleges and universities into reducing their costs for tuition.

It’s as we’ve often said: if it weren’t for double-standards, The Left would have no standards t’all!

Now, here’s The Gouge!

At the top of today’s order, following up on an earlier posting in which we described Liberals as crazy as a…

…Townhall.com‘s Katie Pavlich identifies yet another example of Progressives’ politically-correct total detachment from reality:

New York Times Health Editor: Don’t Use The Term Genital Mutilation Because It’s Culturally Insensitive

“…Health and Science editor Celia Dugger said she came to the conclusion to refer to the act of removing the female genitalia of young girls as “genital cutting” during a trip to Africa in the 1990s. She spoke about her decision in a Times mailbag article in response to a reader’s question.

“I never minced words in describing exactly what form of cutting was involved, and there are many gradations of severity, and the terrible damage it did, and stayed away from the euphemistic circumcision, but chose to use the less culturally loaded term, genital cutting,” Dugger wrote. “There’s a gulf between the Western (and some African) advocates who campaign against the practice and the people who follow the rite, and I felt the language used widened that chasm.”

…Activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who was subjected to the procedure as a young girl in Somalia, explained how women like Dugger regularly sacrifice girls at the altar of political correctness by refusing to acknowledge FGM is a barbaric cultural practice…”

One more example of political correctness overriding reason and morality, as well as the exemplification of Progressive’s surrender to the forces of cultural equivalence.  After all, who are we to judge the inhumanity of Islam’s version of the chastity belt?!?

And further proof, as if any were really needed, why…

Again…and again…and again!

So why would anyone, least of all a woman, waffle on an issue as barbaric as female genital mutilation?  Grandpa Joe has the answer:

Perhaps were Ms. Dugger…or more appropriately, her daughters…involuntarily subjected to the procedure which she so assiduously seeks to find faultless, she’d voice a very different opinion. 

Speaking of nitwits, writing at The Federalist, John Daniel Davidson offers this 411 to the tender flowers pissing away money matriculating at America’s institutions of lower learning:

Sorry, College Kids, There’s No Such Thing As Hate Speech

Progressive college students seem to think violence is okay as long as it’s silencing ‘hate speech.’ Someone should tell them there’s no such thing.

“For the sake of campus protestors and their professors across the country, it’s time to make something clear: there’s no such thing as hate speech.

That should go without saying, since freedom of speech and free inquiry is supposed to be what college is all about. But the recent spate of violent student protests, from the University of California at Berkeley to Middlebury College in Vermont, have been met with a collective shrug from an alarming number of college students, professors, and administrators who seem to be under the impression that violence is okay so long as its purpose is to silence “hate speech.”

But in fact, there is no “hate speech” exception to the First Amendment. The answer to the question, “Where does free speech stop and hate speech begin?” is this: nowhere. For the purposes of the First Amendment, there is no difference between free speech and hate speech. Ideas and opinions that progressive students and professors find offensive or “hateful” are just as protected by the Bill of Rights as anti-Trump slogans chanted at a campus protest.

…Shutting down free speech with violence is becoming commonplace on college campuses across the country. Instead of cracking down on violent protests, college administrators are simply canceling controversial events, giving in to the heckler’s—or rioter’s—veto.

On Wednesday, UC-Berkeley announced it had canceled an event with Ann Coulter scheduled for next week, citing recent violent clashes downtown and, back in February, on campus, ahead of a planned appearance by Milo Yiannopoulos. After that protest, at which masked individuals set fires, threw fireworks and Molotov cocktails, attacked members of the crowd, and threw rocks at police, the student newspaper ran an editorial boasting, “Protests show presence of free speech on campus.”

But the student editors at UC-Berkeley, like the Wellesley College editors who recently warned that politically incorrect speech should be met with “hostility” have no idea what free speech is. They believe free speech is only for certain people with certain ideas. Everything else is “hate speech,” and anyone engaging in it should be muzzled—by force if necessary.

Our college students have come to this impasse in large part because their parents, high school teachers, college professors, and school officials have all failed them. They have not only refused to instill in them a reverence for the First Amendment, they have taught them to despise the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, the very things that protect their right to protest. In so doing, they have turned them into the thing they claim to despise most: fascists.“

And surrendered their powers of reason and critical thought…

…in the process.

In a related item, NRO‘s Jim Geraghty details the utter unconstitutionality and inanity of…

Howard Dean’s First Amendment

The former DNC chair’s argument for banning Ann Coulter’s speech relies on a dubious reading of the Constitution.

“On MSNBC yesterday, former Vermont Governor and DNC Chair Howard Dean elaborated on his argument that Ann Coulter’s upcoming speech at Berkeley does not have to occur because “hate speech” is not protected by the First Amendment:

Okay, several things to think about. One, the United States has the most far-reaching protections on speech of any country in the world. Two, it’s not absolute. Three, there are three Supreme Court cases you need to know about. One, the most recent, a John Roberts opinion, the Phelps people, that church out in Kansas, had a right to picket horrible offensive signs at military funerals. Well, two, in 2002, the Supreme Court said cross burning was illegal because it could incite violence. And three, Chaplinsky, the Chaplinsky case in 1942 said that speech was not permitted if it included fighting words that were likely to incite violence.

This is not a clear-cut carrying on the way the Right does. The Right loves to be able to say anything they like, no matter how offensive it is. Well, Ann Coulter has used words that you cannot use on television to describe Jews, blacks, gays, Muslims immigrants, and Hispanics. I think that there’s a case to be made that that invokes the Chaplinsky decision, which is “fighting words,” likely to cause violence. I think Berkeley is within its rights to make the decision that it puts their campus in danger if they have her there. I’ll be the first to admit it’s a close call.

Actually, it’s not a close call; Dean is making the wrong call under the Constitution. (Not to mention completely misstating the SCOTUS opinions in each case!) Dean’s entire answer piles wrong argument atop wrong argument until he completes a Dagwood sandwich of wrong.

Dean cites three court cases, and he mischaracterizes the decisions in all of them. The first case he references, Snyder v. Phelps, was an 8 to 1 decision in favor of the Westboro Baptist Church’s freedom to chant the horrible slogans and hold up the horrible banners it favors at a military funeral. If the church is free to protest at a military funeral, it makes no sense to argue that Ann Coulter is not free to give a speech at Berkeley. Dean is perhaps unknowingly citing a case that argues the reverse of his position.

The second case Dean cites, Virginia v. Black, struck down a state law that deemed cross-burning a prima facie attempt at intimidation. The decision was complicated, with multiple justices concurring in part and dissenting in part, but its upshot was that if prosecutors wanted to charge someone with a crime for burning a cross, they had to prove that the cross-burner intended his action as a threat.

“Criminal threats”, “intimidation” and criminal harassment are already crimes on the books in many states. If Ann Coulter explicitly threatens an individual in her speech, she can be charged with a crime for that. But whatever her flaws, Coulter is unlikely to make an explicit incitement to violence in a speech at Berkeley.

The third case Dean cites, Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire, has come up a bit more frequently as of late. Eugene Volokh points out that while the Chaplinsky precedent hasn’t yet been struck down, subsequent decisions have drastically narrowed its definition of “fighting words.” In 1971, the court ruled that a vulgar phrase on a jacket didn’t fall within said definition because it was unlikely that any “individual actually or likely to be present could reasonably have regarded the words” to be “a direct personal insult.” In R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul, the Court struck down a hate-crime statute, decreeing that the state can restrict speech to a certain “time, place, or manner,” but only if those restrictions were “justified without reference to the content of the regulated speech.” (I.e., the government can ban flag-burning by, say, banning all outdoor fires in certain areas, but not explicitly because it dishonors the U.S. flag.)

Without knowing what Coulter would say in her speech, Dean suggests that it would contain “fighting words,” given her history of using “words you can’t say on television” to describe minorities. Given the “words you can’t say on television” have no bearing on the constitutionality of an (as-yet-undelivered) speech at Berkeley, the one-time front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination seems to be insisting that just by being offensive, Coulter’s words incite violence and must be restricted and banned. It is fair to ask Dean and his ilk why they are so focused on restricting and punishing speech that supposedly “incites” violence and much less focused on punishing those who actually commit violent acts.

If Dean’s real desire is to ban speech that he doesn’t like, he should just say so.“

Frankly, we believe that’s exactly what he said.  And the powers-that-be at UC-Berkeley only serve to reinforce…

…the egregiousness of his error.  Think about it: “we do not have a “protectable venue“; the inmates are truly running the asylum.  The planet hasn’t witnessed so abject a surrender since Munich…or when Barry Obama gave Iran the green light to become a nuclear power.

Since we’re on the subject of overeducated idiots, one’s the subject of this Vanity Fair article by T.A. Frank, who requests divine intervention to save the Dimocratic Party:

Please, God, Stop Chelsea Clinton from Whatever She Is Doing

The last thing the left needs is the third iteration of a failed political dynasty.

“…Perhaps the best way to start is by revisiting some of Chelsea’s major post-2008 forays into the public eye. Starting in 2012, she began to allow glossy magazines to profile her, and she picked up speed in the years that followed. The results were all friendly in aim, and yet the picture that kept emerging from the growing pile of Chelsea quotations was that of a person accustomed to courtiers nodding their heads raptly.

Here are Chelsea’s thoughts on returning to red meat in her diet: “I’m a big believer in listening to my body’s cravings.” On her time in the “fiercely meritocratic” workplace of Wall Street: “I was curious if I could care about [money] on some fundamental level, and I couldn’t.” On her precocity: “They told me that my father had learned to read when he was three. So, of course, I thought I had to too. The first thing I learned to read was the newspaper.” Take that, Click, Clack, Moo.

Chelsea, people were quietly starting to observe, had a tendency to talk a lot, and at length, not least about Chelsea. But you couldn’t interrupt, not even if you’re on TV at NBC, where she was earning $600,000 a year at the time. “When you are with Chelsea, you really need to allow her to finish,” Jay Kernis, one of Clinton’s segment producers at NBC, told Vogue. “She’s not used to being interrupted that way.”

Sounds perfect for a dating profile: I speak at length, and you really need to let me finish. I’m not used to interruptions.

What comes across with Chelsea, for lack of a gentler word, is self-regard of an unusual intensity. And the effect is stronger on paper. Unkind as it is to say, reading anything by Chelsea Clinton—tweets, interviews, books—is best compared to taking in spoonfuls of plain oatmeal that, periodically, conceal a toenail clipping.

Take the introduction to It’s Your World (Get Informed! Get Inspired! Get Going!). It’s harmless, you think. “My mom wouldn’t let me have sugary cereal growing up (more on that later),” writes Chelsea, “so I improvised, adding far more honey than likely would have been in any honeyed cereals.” That’s the oatmeal—and then comes the toenail:

I wrote a letter to President Reagan when I was five to voice my opposition to his visit to the Bitburg cemetery in Germany, because Nazis were buried there. I didn’t think an American president should honor a group of soldiers that included Nazis. President Reagan still went, but at least I had tried in my own small way.

Ah, yes, that reminds me of when I was four and I wrote to Senator John Warner about grain tariffs, arguing that trade barriers unfairly decreased consumer choice.

At first glance, of course, Chelsea seems to be boasting that at age five she was interpreting the news with the maturity of an adult. But we should consider whether it’s instead a confession that as an adult she still interprets the news with the maturity of—well, let’s just submit that perhaps she thinks what other people tell her to think.

…The crude conventional wisdom is that Bill Clinton craved adoration and Hillary Clinton craved power. But Chelsea Clinton seems to have a more crippling want: fashionability—of the sort embraced by philanthropic high society. So you tell The New York Times that your dream dinner party would include James Baldwin, Shakespeare, Franz Kafka, Albert Camus, Jane Jacobs, and Jane Austen, and discussion would be about how “people and communities can evolve to be more inclusive, more kind, have a greater and broader sense of solidarity, while still respecting individual liberties; what provokes or blocks those changes; and what stories might resonate today to encourage us toward kindness, respect, and mutual dignity.” You almost have to bow down before someone who could host Shakespeare for dinner and make the agenda wind up sounding like a brochure for the Altria Group. At least Kafka would be on hand to capture the joy of the evening.

To find fault with the former First Daughter is to invite the wrath of thousands. Love of Chelsea correlates closely with love of Hillary, toward whom her fans have long felt an odd protectiveness, as if she were a stroke survivor regaining the power of speech rather than one of the (formerly…and then only in exchange for cold, hard cash!) most influential people in the world. That goes even more for Chelsea, who is often treated less like an independent 37-year-old multi-millionaire and more like the 12-year-old who still deserves to be left alone.

But let’s have a reality check. No one bothers George W. Bush’s daughter, Barbara Bush, who quietly works on her nonprofit, Global Health Corps. On the other hand, if you’re posing for magazine covers, granting interviews, doing book tours, placing your name on your parents’ multi-million-dollar foundation, and tweeting out daily to 1.6 million people, then—guess what—you’re a public figure. And if you’ve openly entertained the possibility of running for office if “it was something I felt called to do,” then assurances to the contrary aren’t quite good enough. You’re a public hazard.

God has decreed that American political dynasties decline sharply in suitability for office with each iteration. Call it the George H.W.-George W.-Jeb rule. Quit after the first iteration. Don’t trot out the second one. And, for the love of God, don’t trot out the third. Forgetting that rule harmed the Democratic Party in 2016 and blew up the Republican Party entirely. The Democratic Party is surprisingly cohesive these days, thanks to anti-Trump sentiment, so a Jeb-style destruction is unlikely. But never say never. If anyone could make it happen, Chelsea could.“

And it couldn’t happen to a more-deserving bunch of buffoons.

Which brings us to today’s walk on The Lighter Side…

Then there’s Michael Ramirez’s homage to the departure of Bill O’Reilly:

Sorry Bill, but we hope the door hit you hard in your pompous harASS on the way out!

Finally, we’ll call it a day with yet another titillating tale torn from the pages of The Crime Blotter, and this latest bit of willful blindness from The Great White North:

Canadian man who beheaded bus passenger granted total freedom

“A Canadian man who was found not criminally responsible for beheading and cannibalizing a fellow passenger on a Greyhound bus has been granted his freedom. Manitoba’s Criminal Code Review Board announced Friday it has given Will Baker, formerly known as Vince Li, an absolute discharge, meaning he is longer subject to monitoring.

Baker, a diagnosed schizophrenic, killed Tim McLean, a young carnival worker who was a complete stranger to Baker, in 2008. Baker sat next to the 22-year-old McLean on the bus after the man smiled at him and asked how he was doing. Baker said he heard the voice of God telling him to kill the man or “die immediately.” He repeatedly stabbed McLean while he fought for his life. As passengers fled the bus, Baker continued stabbing and mutilating the body before he was arrested. He severed McLean’s head, displaying it to some of the passengers outside the bus, witnesses said. A year later he was found not criminally responsible due to mental illness.

Baker was initially kept in a secure wing of a psychiatric hospital but was given more freedom every year. He has been living on his own in a Winnipeg apartment since November, but was still subject to monitoring to ensure he took his medication.

Baker’s doctor, Jeffrey Waldman, told the board earlier this week that he is confident Baker will remain on his medication and will continue to work with his treatment team if released. Waldman testified that Baker knows it’s the medication that keeps his illness at bay.

…The Supreme Court of Canada ruled in 1999 that a review board must order an absolute discharge if a person doesn’t pose a significant threat to public safety. The ruling added there must be clear evidence of a significant risk to the public for the review board to continue imposing conditions after a person is found not criminally responsible.

…Baker’s defenders include Chris Summerville, executive director of the Manitoba Schizophrenia Society, who has met and worked with him over the years. “He is no longer a violent person,” Summerville said. “I will say, yes, he absolutely understands that he has to (take his medication) and has a desire to live a responsible, moral life and never succumb to psychotic episodes and not to hurt anybody ever again.”“

Yeah,…

We’re willing to be the farm neither Dr. Waldman nor Mr. Summerville have volunteered to let Mr. Baker, nee Li bunk with them…let alone occupy the seat next to him on his next bus ride. 

Magoo