It’s Wednesday, August 16th, 2017…but before we begin, a brief rant explaining why we no longer frequent the FOX Sports web page.  The Monday morning after The British Open, we went online to check the final results.  Imagine our surprise when neither the FOX home page NOR its GOLF page had an article or video detailing the results of the tournament.

Fast forward to this past Monday, the day after the PGA at Quail Hollow.  What follows is a screenshot of the FOX Sports home page, both at the top…

…and further down:  

Even at the golf page, the only reference to 2017’s final major was a banner across the top listing the order of finish.  No article…no video.

We can only assume, Tiger Woods no longer constituting a threat to win anything but the Waffle House Sugar Daddy Award, FOX Sports no longer deems men’s professional golf as important as LSU occupying the #14 position in a pre-season NCAA football ranking, or Sophia Schubert (whoever she is!) advancing to the finals of the U.S. Women’s Amateur.

Oh,…and going through our old files, we happened upon a photo featuring two of the principle authors of our current preoccupation with political correctness, one we felt accurately summarized their thoughts towards America:

Now, here’s The Gouge!

First up, NRO‘s Rich Lowry opines…

In Defense of So-Called Both-Sidism

Over the last 24 hours, it’s become unacceptable in some quarters to point out that there was violence on both sides in Charlottesville, even though it’s unassailably true. Here is a New York Times reporter from yesterday:

An observation which resulted in Ms. Stolberg’s skewering on Twitter.

Here is another reporter who was filing for the New York Times, Hawes Spencer, via Mike Allen’s e-newsletter:

The entirety of Downtown Charlottesville looked like a war zone. Protesters maced each other, threw water bottles and urine balloons — some of which hit reporters — and generally beat the crap out of each other with flagpoles.

This doesn’t make the neo-Nazis any better; they are obviously evil, and their idiot march was the proximate cause of the violence, and one of them committed an act of murder and domestic terrorism. But anti-fa is also hate-filled and violent and was spoiling for a fight. Any person of good will committed to liberal values should be perfectly happy to denounce them both.

Though we must point out, while we largely agree with Lowry’s commentary, like them or not, the neo-Nazis’ march, though ideologically bankrupt and utterly idiotic, was perfectly legal.

Consider, for a moment, what the problem is NOT:

Now, contemplate John Hawkins’ contention the MSM, along with their Dear Misleader, helped create the current climate of hate.

Then, just as a tree falling in the forest with no one around to hear it is, for all tense and purposes, silent, assess the likelihood theses ass-clowns would continue to protest…

…if no one showed up to counter-demonstrate…or the MSM refused to report or cover them when they did!

For more on the subject, we recommend, Guy Benson’s  even-handed assessment of both the Charlottesville violence and the reaction to it.

And we’re forced to recount one particularly poignant incident of supposed police indifference as reported by The Los Angeles Times:

Just so we’re all on the same page: De’Andre Harris, who is BLACK, decided to attend a White-Supremacist rally shouting racially-based, anti-White obscenities while wearing a towel covered with anti-police epithets…then got his ass kicked while the police stood by.  Whooda thunk it?!?

While we’ll let Mr. Harris, undoubtedly another sterling product of America’s public education establishment, and his ignorance speak for themselves, we’ll leave the last words on the gross overreaction to Trump’s Charlottesville response to Jesse Watters…

…and the great Stilton Jarlsberg…

…who is stuck in Texas suffering the slings and arrows of an outrageous home remodel.

As for us, we’re frankly fatigued with the hype and hypocrisy inherent in any pronouncement from Progressives.

Since we’re on the subject of the idiotic emanations of the Progressive penumbra, as Truth Revolt reports, the…

NYT Jumps the Shark Again: ‘Women Had Better Sex Under Socialism‘

“Just when you think the New York Times can’t discredit itself any further, it continues its rehabilitation of socialism/communism with an article over the weekend titled — are you sitting down for this? — “Why Women Had Better Sex Under Socialism.”

“When Americans think of Communism in Eastern Europe,” begins Kristen R. Ghodsee, a professor of Russian and East European studies at the University of Pennsylvania, “they imagine travel restrictions, bleak landscapes of gray concrete, miserable men and women languishing in long lines to shop in empty markets and security services snooping on the private lives of citizens. While much of this was true” — [much of this? All of this!!!] — “our collective stereotype of Communist life does not tell the whole story.”

Right, our stereotyping left out all the good parts of life under Communism. For example, Ghodsee, the author of numerous books on European Communism and its aftermath, claims that “Eastern bloc women enjoyed many rights and privileges unknown in liberal democracies at the time, including major state investments in their education and training, their full incorporation into the labor force, generous maternity leave allowances and guaranteed free child care.”

Sounds great! A liberal utopia! But that’s not the best part. “[T]here’s one advantage that has received little attention: Women under Communism enjoyed more sexual pleasure.” Ghodsee states that “women had more fulfilling lives during the Communist era. And they owed this quality of life, in part, to the fact that these regimes saw women’s emancipation as central to advanced ‘scientific socialist’ societies, as they saw themselves.”

“Sure, some things were bad during that time, but my life was full of romance,” the Bulgarian Ana Durcheva told the professor. “After my divorce, I had my job and my salary, and I didn’t need a man to support me. I could do as I pleased.” By contrast, her daughter, born in the late 1970s, and the daughter’s husband work so hard that they’re too tired to do anything but watch TV “like zombies. When I was her age, we had much more fun.”

Who knew that life under brutal state oppression could be so wild and sexy?…”

For more on this latest Leftist lunacy, we present James Freeman’s take on the subject.

In all seriousness, you couldn’t fabricate such fables if you tried!!!

Next up, courtesy of NRO in a forward from Jeff Foutch, Deroy Murdock shines the cold, hard light of truth on The Left’s continuing contention there’s no such thing as voter fraud:

Ghost Voters

At least 3.5 million more people are on U.S. election rolls than are eligible to vote.

“Some 3.5 million more people are registered to vote in the U.S. than are alive among America’s adult citizens. Such staggering inaccuracy is an engraved invitation to voter fraud.

The Election Integrity Project of Judicial Watch — a Washington-based legal-watchdog group — analyzed data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2011–2015 American Community Survey and last month’s statistics from the federal Election Assistance Commission. The latter included figures provided by 38 states. According to Judicial Watch, eleven states gave the EAC insufficient or questionable information. Pennsylvania’s legitimate numbers place it just below the over-registration threshold.

My tabulation of Judicial Watch’s state-by-state results yielded 462 counties where the registration rate exceeded 100 percent. There were 3,551,760 more people registered to vote than adult U.S. citizens who inhabit these counties.

“That’s enough over-registered voters to populate a ghost-state about the size of Connecticut,” Judicial Watch attorney Robert Popper told me…”

As frequent contributor Foutch so insightfully observed, the casting of 3.5M illegal ballots would equal precisely Hillary’s margin of “victory” in the popular vote, meaningless as that tally actually is.

Speaking of the scourge which is the impact of modern Liberalism upon those its purported to profit, the WSJ details…

Philadelphia’s Soda Tax Bust

Fewer jobs, lower revenues, but a boost for beer sales.

“…This is no surprise to anyone who knows the iron economic law that when you tax something you get less of it. In this case that means fewer soda sales. Daniel Grace, secretary-treasurer of Teamsters Local 830, estimates that soft-drink sales within the city are down by as much as 45%. His truck drivers earn money based in part on how many cases of soda they deliver, and he says the tax has halved their income. As bodegas, supermarkets and gas stations struggle to make up the lost sales of a core item, 165 of his members are out of work. Several ShopRite stores slashed employee hours this spring, and in March Pepsi announced it was laying off about 20% of its local workforce. Both blamed the soda tax…”

For some odd reason, we like the GOP’s chances of winning Pennsylvania again in the next national election.

And in another forward from Jeff Foutch, Legal Insurrection relates how, among other things, the…

USDA puts a chill on “climate change” policies

“As I have noted in previous posts, Trump’s EPA chief has refocused the agency back to its core mission of protecting the environment from actual pollutants.

Legal Insurrection readers may recall that President Donald Trump picked Georgia’s former governor, Sonny Perdue, to head the United States Department of Agriculture. Like Scott Pruitt, Perdue is scaling back positions and making significant changes in his agency’s policies. For example, there have already been alterations in the Michelle Obama’s signature school lunch program.

…With a new administration in Washington, lots of changes are upon us, including some announcements from Sonny Perdue, the new head of the USDA, which governs the School Lunch program which will go into effect on July 1, 2017.

With the first change they have lessened the restriction on whole grains from the 100% whole grains. This is helpful in reducing the amount of food waste as students did not care for the whole grain product.

The second change will allow 1% fat back in the flavored milks, such as chocolate and strawberry, while maintaining fat free in regular milk. Again, this 1% increase has been found to be more palatable for students.

The third change is placing a halt on further reducing sodium limits from their current standards as previously stated by the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act.

Also, like Pruitt, Perdue is refocusing his agency back to its core mission that consists of food safety and rural community support. This new approach has led to a request by the USDA to its employees, instructing them to avoid using language that directly references climate change.

… Instead of “climate change,” workers are told to refer to “weather extremes;” instead of talking about how the country can “reduce greenhouse gases,” they’re asked to talk about “build[ing] soil organic matter.”

The director issuing these statements, Bianca Moebius-Clune, stressed that this wouldn’t alter the scientific modeling, just how it’s discussed. Still, some in the organization aren’t happy. One staffer was worried that altering the language would jeopardize the “scientific integrity of the work.”

I think I can put that staffer’s heart at ease: There really isn’t any “scientific integrity” about this politicized science to worry about. To put it in terms related to USDA activities…that horse has already left the barn.

Shockingly, Moebius-Clune dares make a novel suggestion: Employees should promote American agriculture…”

Which brings us to The Lighter Side…

Finally, in a follow-up to an earlier item detailing the abysmal failure of Seattle’s misguided increase to the minimum wage, Best of the Web offers… 

A Brief History of Minimum-Wage Disasters

New research finds that job losses are concentrated among older workers, women and blacks.

“LBJ was right!”

“…According to the Democrats’ new “Better Deal” economic agenda, “increasing the minimum wage will provide economic security for all working Americans.”

But it’s hard for Americans to have economic security if they’re not working.“

Especially if they’re old, female or Black.  Here’s the juice: the only people Dimocratic policies benefit are Dimocratic politicians.

Magoo