It’s Monday, September 4th, Labor Day 2017…but before we begin, as detailed in this forward from Bill Meisen and Townhall.com‘s Matt Vespa, ya think the abortion movement’s a little…

Out of Touch? Pro-Choice Group Tells Houston Victims They’ll Have Funds To Cover Abortions

“Dear Houston residents, if you don’t have water, towels, food, or shelter, the Lilith Fund doesn’t have any of that—but they will provide resources to procure an abortion if that’s what’s on your mind in the wake of a horrific storm. Hurricane Harvey slammed the Houston area, dumping 11 trillion gallons of water, flooding whole sections of the city. First responders and good Samaritans, using their private watercraft, have rescued thousands. Tragically, almost 50 people have been killed by the storm, and that figure is expected to rise. Yet, in the wake of property loss, loss of life, and just overall devastation, it’s great to know that some groups are raising money to kill babies provide abortions. Let’s chalk this up as unseemly…”

We’re chalking it up to depraved indifference…with the emphasis on “depraved”!

Oh, and contrast this warning from Fort Bend County Sheriff Troy Nehls…

…(that last phrase was “body bag”)…to the unconstitutional pronouncements and actions of Louisiana authorities in the wake of Katrina:

For those of you betting line police officers and soldiers won’t act against the Constitution…

…think again.  Remember, this was in Louisiana!  Any question what those further north, say in Pittsburgh…

…will do?!?

Now, here’s The Gouge!

We lead off the Monday edition with a follow-up to Friday’s item on the perfidy of James Comey, as James Freeman, writing at Best of the Web, echoes our previously expressed sentiments:

How’s He Going to Explain This?

More evidence that Comey deserved to be fired. *

* And may deserve to be shot!

“Forgotten in all the media drama and confused White House communications of recent months was the fact that the President had several very good reasons for firing FBI Director James Comey in May. Now comes evidence of another one.

On Wednesday Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina wrote to current FBI Director Christopher Wray asking for additional documents related to Mr. Comey’s decision to exonerate Hillary Clinton in 2016. FBI agents had been investigating Mrs. Clinton for her use of a private server and mishandling of classified information while serving as secretary of State. The lawmakers want more documents because they’ve found evidence in interview transcripts of Mr. Comey’s former senior FBI staff suggesting another gross violation of investigative standards. The letter was made public by the committee on Thursday.

…This week’s letter is a helpful reminder that there were many legitimate reasons for sacking Mr. Comey. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein wrote about them in May, and in particular about Mr. Comey’s decision to make a public statement of his opinions about Mrs. Clinton’s conduct:

In response to skeptical questions at a congressional hearing, the Director defended his remarks by saying that his “goal was to say what is true. What did we do, what did we find, what do we think about it.” But the goal of a federal criminal investigation is not to announce our thoughts at a press conference. The goal is to determine whether there is sufficient evidence to justify a federal criminal prosecution, then allow a federal prosecutor who exercises authority delegated by the Attorney General to make a prosecutorial decision, and then – if prosecution is warranted – let the judge and jury determine the facts.

In his memo, Mr. Rosenstein quoted former Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick, who served in the Clinton Administration, and former Deputy AG Larry Thompson, who served under George W. Bush. They described the Comey method in the Clinton case as “real-time, raw-take transparency taken to its illogical limit, a kind of reality TV of federal criminal investigation” that is “antithetical to the interests of justice.”

Perhaps we finally have an appropriate time for Mr. Comey to publicly announce his thoughts and offer real transparency. If he can make the case that early drafting of conclusions—before witnesses have been interviewed—serves the interests of justice, no doubt many Americans are eager to hear it.“

In the meantime, Mr. Comey and any remaining supporters can go…well,…like Aunt Em told Miss Gulch…

And we’ve had the displeasure of knowing James Comey for barely 23 months.

Since we’re on the subject of Progressive prevarication, obfuscation and purposeful misrepresentation, the WSJ‘s Jason Riley notes…

Modern Liberalism’s False Obsession With Civil War Monuments

Black accomplishments in the ’40s and ’50s prove that today’s setbacks are not due to slavery.

“…One problem with these assumptions about slavery’s effects on black outcomes today is that they are undermined by what blacks were able to accomplish in the first hundred years after their emancipation, when white racism was rampant and legal and blacks had bigger concerns than Robert E. Lee’s likeness in a public park. Today, slavery is still being blamed for everything from black broken families to high crime rates in black neighborhoods to racial gaps in education, employment and income. Yet outcomes in all of those areas improved markedly in the immediate aftermath of slavery and continued to improve for decades.

Between 1890 and 1940, for example, black marriage rates in the U.S. were higher than white marriage rates. In the 1940s and ’50s, black labor-participation rates exceeded those of whites; black incomes grew much faster than white incomes; and the black poverty rate fell by 40 percentage points. Between 1940 and 1970—that is, during Jim Crow and prior to the era of affirmative action—the number of blacks in middle-class professions quadrupled. In other words, racial gaps were narrowing. Steady progress was being made. Blacks today hear plenty about what they can’t achieve due to the legacy of slavery and not enough about what they did in fact achieve notwithstanding hundreds of years in bondage followed by decades of legal segregation.

In the post-’60s era, these positive trends would slow, stall, or in some cases even reverse course. The homicide rate for black men fell by 18% in the 1940s and by another 22% in the 1950s. But in the 1960s all of those gains would vanish as the homicide rate for black males rose by nearly 90%. Are today’s black violent-crime rates a legacy of slavery and Jim Crow or of something else? Unfortunately, that’s a question few people on the left will even entertain.

Just ask Amy Wax and Lawrence Alexander, law professors at the University of Pennsylvania and University of San Diego, respectively, who were taken to task for co-authoring an op-ed this month in the Philadelphia Inquirer that lamented the breakdown of “bourgeois” cultural values that prevailed in mid-20th-century America. “That culture laid out the script we all were supposed to follow,” they wrote. “Get married before you have children and strive to stay married for their sake. Get the education you need for gainful employment, work hard, and avoid idleness. . . . Be respectful of authority. Eschew substance abuse and crime.”

The professors noted that disadvantaged groups have been hit hardest by the disintegration of these middle-class mores and that the expansion of the welfare state, which reduced the financial need for two-parent families, hastened social retrogression. “A strong pro-marriage norm might have blunted this effect,” they wrote. “Instead, the number of single parents grew astronomically, producing children more prone to academic failure, addiction, idleness, crime, and poverty.”

For the suggestion that something other than continuing racial bigotry and the legacy of slavery has contributed to racial inequality, a coalition of faculty and students at the University of Pennsylvania promptly accused the professors of advancing a “racist and white supremacist discourse.” The reality is that there was a time when blacks and whites alike shared conventional attitudes toward marriage, parenting, school and work, and those attitudes abetted unprecedented social and economic black advancement.“

Problem is, one party was primarily responsible for slavery, Jim Crow, and the Great Society which decimated the Black family structure.  And it weren’t the Party of Lincoln!

And here’s a twist courtesy of Jeff Foutch:

Oops!  Maybe they can use the “we were only following orders” defense…though it didn’t work out for Eichmann.

Meanwhile, as these next two items detail, one of Liberalism’s poster children is straying WAY off the reservatio….er,…sorry,…WAY out of bounds.  First, in a forward from Jeff Foutch, The Washington Free Beacon highlights how the…

Southern Poverty Law Center Transfers Millions in Cash to Offshore Entities

Left-wing nonprofit pays lucrative six-figure salaries to top management

Second, PJ Media reports on the true endgame of same:

Southern Poverty Law Center: ‘Our Aim in Life Is to Destroy These Groups, Completely’

Seriously, if these race baiters were really in the business of fighting Southern poverty, they’d be focused on providing no-cost banjos…

…or at the very least…

…free dental implants!

But as this next item from the WSJ relates, Liberals are nothing if not accommodating, as evidenced by…

L.A.’s Gift to Trump

The city council bans Columbus Day, echoing the Ku Klux Klan.

To paraphrase Marx, all great historical events occur twice: first as tragedy, second as some action by the Los Angeles City Council. The latest demonstration came Wednesday when the council banished Columbus Day from the city calendar. Henceforth in L.A., the second Monday in October will be Indigenous Peoples Day.

We have no dispute with any group or city that wishes to celebrate the culture and achievements of indigenous peoples. Such celebrations are a staple of American life and contribute in their way to e pluribus unum.

But L.A.’s move isn’t about celebrating. It’s about indicting anything that represents Western civilization, as Christopher Columbus most certainly does. So how ironic that in deposing the Italian explorer, Los Angeles council members find themselves taking the side of the Ku Klux Klan of the early 20th century—whose nativism led it to oppose statues, memorials and days devoted to Columbus because he was Catholic, Southern European and called to mind the new waves of non-English immigrants at the time.

That’s precisely the danger of applying modern sensibilities to judge people from the past. Columbus had his faults, and honest histories address them. But if we honored only saints, few would make it onto pedestals.

If Columbus has to go, does FDR’s wartime internment of Japanese-Americans mean we tear down his memorial on the national mall? Most Americans sensibly would say no, but today it’s the vandals who are ascendant, here attacking a bust of Lincoln in Chicago, there beheading a Columbus statue in New York, there desecrating a Joan of Arc statue in New Orleans.

So perhaps it’s fitting that an L.A. City Council that thinks it is leading a politically correct charge is really completing the work urged by an earlier generation of haters and nativists. We wonder if the council knows it has given President Trump a political gift by demonstrating that what so many on the left really oppose is the larger triumph of Western civilization.

We say again: what about…

…this?!?

Which brings us, appropriately enough, to The Lighter Side…

Finally, we’ll call it a wrap with the Faith Section, and this provocative piece of prose from David French, also courtesy of NRO:

Can a Progressive’s ‘Inclusive Values’ Include Christianity?

A mayor’s backlash against a basic statement of Evangelical Christian belief signals an ominous turn in the culture wars.

“…Every now and again, progressive politicians tip their hand. Every now and again, the message of “inclusion” becomes, “We don’t want your kind here.” When Chick-fil-A was in the eye of the culture-war storm, progressive city leaders from coast to coast indicated they wanted no Chick-fil-A chicken sold within their city limits. Consider for a moment that degree of malignant intolerance. No one is indoctrinated in a fast-food restaurant. But the mere idea that faithful Christians would be enriched by liberal dollars was too much for some progressives. “Inclusive values” apparently demand punitive reprisals.

We now live in a world where a subset of progressive politicians is enthusiastically and vindictively intolerant in the name of tolerance. They will re-educate or ruin small-business owners who won’t lend their creative talents to celebrate gay weddings. If the Constitution allowed, they would ban from their cities any businesses run by faithful Christians who refuse to be silent on matters of sexual morality. They will publicly reject basic statements of Christian theology, and they will do it in the name of comprehensive social engineering.

These politicians are the twin brothers and sisters of their repressive campus and corporate cousins, but they wield the power of the state. They will name, shame, and push their power beyond its constitutional limits to build their brave new world. There’s nothing “inclusive” about any of this. It’s secular social justice, the new progressive faith, and heaven help those who dissent.“

We can’t say whether the loss of Mayor Barry’s son to a drug overdose clouded her judgement; but we do know is her interpretation of Scripture is about as accurate as Bill Clinton’s initial denial of having engaged in sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky.

Magoo