It’s Monday, April 9th, 2018…but before we begin, TLJ forwarded the following video we had to headline:

You go, Mark Robinson, you go!!!

Contrast Mr. Robinson’s dramatic defense of the rule of law with the incredibly flippant performance of our next guest, and you tell us…

…who young Black men should seek to emulate?!?

Now, despite having devoted the better part of Sunday afternoon and evening to an incredibly exciting Masters, here’s The Gouge!

First up, if anyone at FOX Sports is interested in knowing why we no longer frequent your website, this screen shot in the wake of Patrick Reed’s nail-biting finish at Augusta…

…should tell you all need to know: i.e., anyone not focused on NASCAR, European football or UFC need not tune in. 

Getting serious, courtesy of NRO, David French recounts how…

“Yesterday, the New York Times’ Nick Kristof posted a column that purported to tell his largely progressive readership “how to win an argument about guns.” I’m interested to read good arguments from the other side, so I clicked eager to find how Kristof would best an informed gun-rights advocate in debate.

The short answer, it turns out, is that he wouldn’t.

The column’s pattern is simple: Kristof posits a primitive caricature of a gun-rights argument, delivers a thoroughly inadequate response designed to settle the issue, and then repeats the cycle. In other words, he erects one straw man after another and fails to best any of them.

…To his credit, Kristof does at least note that other nations have large numbers of firearms without American levels of violence, but here’s the entirety of his response:

Yes, there’s something to that. America has underlying social problems, and we need to address them with smarter economic and social policies. But we magnify the toll when we make it easy for troubled people to explode with AR-15s rather than with pocketknives.

Putting aside the fact that it’s far easier for a troubled person to obtain a knife than a gun, he hardly begins to grapple with the cultural question. There’s more than “something” to the argument. For example, “41 percent of white households own guns, compared to just 19 percent of black households.” Yet the gun-death rate among black Americans is almost twice the rate among white Americans. Gun-control advocates would love to lower the gun-ownership rate nationwide to 19 percent, but clearly cultural factors — what Kristof calls “underlying social problems” — can and do swamp other considerations.

…Finally, if Kristof wanted to “win an argument” with a gun owner, why did he completely ignore the benefits of gun ownership?  He never once addresses the effects of his so-called sensible gun restrictions on the right of self-defense. An informed gun owner is always going to respond to a gun-control proposal with at least two follow-up questions: First, will it make a material impact on the gun problem you seek to solve? Second, will it materially impact my ability to defend myself from known and foreseeable threats?

All too often, the answer to those questions is “no” and “yes.” All too often gun-control proposals operate as a form of collective punishment on the law-abiding while serving as barely a speed bump in the path of the criminal. There is a cost in the “let’s just try” approach, and that cost is borne by the men and women who comply with the law.

Kristof won’t “win” his argument because he can’t. We’ve proven that we can decrease crime while we protect the Second Amendment and expand access to guns. We know we can reduce suicides without restricting any person’s right to self-defense. We know we have fewer suicides than many other developed countries even as we have more guns. Moreover, we know that various so-called commonsense gun-control measures wouldn’t have prevented a single recent mass shooting.

The law-abiding gun owner is a tremendous asset to American society. He’s a protector of his family and of American liberty. It will take more than the arguments that Kristof can muster to persuade him (and/or her!) to further limit his freedom in the vain hope that criminals might finally obey the law.“

Moving from Progressivism’s assault on the 2nd Amendment to its war on the 1st, also courtesy of NRO, as Jim Geraghty so accurately observes…

Apparently, Kevin’s conservative views have no place in Goldberg’s vision of a wide-ranging, diverse, provocative debate.

“Jeffrey Goldberg’s announcement that The Atlantic had “parted ways” with our old friend Kevin Williamson — what a gutless way to announce you’ve fired someone, a week or so into the job — represents a successful effort to redefine “beyond the pale” in the political debates of 2018, or to close the Overton Window, if you prefer that metaphor.

A week ago, Goldberg told his staff this in a memo:

I don’t think that taking a person’s worst tweets, or assertions, in isolation is the best journalistic practice…He’s an excellent reporter who covers parts of the country, and aspects of American life, that we don’t yet cover comprehensively…Diversity in all its forms makes us better journalists; it also opens us up to new audiences. I would love to have an Ideas section filled with libertarians, socialists, anarcho-pacifists and theocons, in addition to mainstream liberals and conservatives, all arguing with each other. If we are going to host debates, we have to host people who actually disagree with, and sometimes offend, the other side. Kevin will help this cause.

Yesterday, allegedly because of Kevin’s comments in a podcast — “the language used in the podcast was callous and violent,” Goldberg decreed — Kevin was suddenly unacceptable, and he had no place in Goldberg’s vision of a wide-ranging, diverse, provocative debate.

This explanation that some long-forgotten podcast comment suddenly made Kevin persona non grata doesn’t make much sense. (In keeping with every other manifestation of Progressive tyranny!) What does make sense is the theory that Goldberg completely underestimated the level of liberal rage about the presence of an outspoken conservative in its pages — both outside and inside the building. (For those saying, “what about current Atlantic columnists David Frum, Caitlin Flanagan, and Conor Friedersdorf?” I’d respond, “I said an outspoken conservative.”) It didn’t take a master detective to figure out that if Goldberg continued to defend the hiring of Williamson, he would be the next figure in the crosshairs of the angry leftist mob.

Congratulations, Jeffrey Goldberg.

And a gutless douchebag at that!

You’ve worked your way up to a position of management and leadership at a major media publication, and now you’ve agreed to give the Woke Twitter crowd veto power over your personnel decisions. Who runs The Atlantic? The loudest complainer on staff who makes Goldberg nervous.

Look, dear reader, if Kevin Williamson is “beyond the pale,” beyond the realm of socially and politically acceptable thought and discourse, then you and I are either beyond the pale as well or bumped right up against it, as social justice warriors strain to pull it ever leftward. Our speech doesn’t merely challenge or provoke them, it is decreed threatening and dangerous, a social crime if not a literal legal one…”

It’s just as Kurt Schlichter wrote: Progressives are targeting the 2nd Amendment first so they can go after the 1st Amendment second.

Meanwhile, as FOX News reports (and take it from us, on many levels, FOX News is hardly better than FOX Sports!), the Deep State continues to dig deeper and The Swamp remains largely undrained…Trump’s ineffective tweets notwithstanding:

Trump slams DOJ, FBI over missed document deadline: ‘What is going on?’

“President Trump on Saturday slammed the Justice Department for failing to meet a deadline to turn over documents related to the FBI’s decisions in the Hillary Clinton email probe, alleged abuses of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and the recommendation to fire former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe.

“Slow walking – what is going on? BAD!” Trump tweeted. “What does the Department of Justice and FBI have to hide? Why aren’t they giving the strongly requested documents (unredacted) to the HOUSE JUDICIARY COMMITTEE? Stalling, but for what reason?” he added in a second tweet. “Not looking good!”…”

No sh*t!  But…don’t all these people work for him?!?  Seems to us we need far less “President” Trump and a lot more General George S. Patton:

Next up, again writing at NRO, Mike Fredenburg offers an analysis of what he claims is the NoKO equivalent of Saddam Hussein’s reconstituted WMD program:

As even this video supposedly detailing why the Koksan is stopping U.S. military action against Pyongyang admits, the conjecturable casualties from the employment of the 1950’s weapon would be de minimis:

Sorry, but considering the greater Seoul metropolitan area is home to 25 million people, 29,000 casualties is hardly a drop in the bucket, particularly when compared to the millions Kim has enslaved, let alone starved to death.

The spirit of Neville Chamberlain is alive and well, and living at Defense Updates…as well as other bastions of peace-at-any-priceology. 

Then there’s this intriguing bit of imagined racism forwarded from Miltary.com by Breeze Gould:

Naval Aviators Say They Were Kicked Out of Training Due to Racial Bias

This is one to which we can personally relate: wake up and smell the lack of ability, Bro!

And in the Environmental Moment, the editors at the WSJ report on…

The New Science of Smog

Other things pollute the air more than gasoline exhaust does.

Liberals are claiming that the Trump Administration’s plans to roll back the Obama fuel-mileage rules will increase pollution. Perhaps they should read up on the latest scientific evidence about the sources of air pollution.

When Ronald Reagan quipped that trees cause more pollution than automobiles do, he had a point.

Another big source of pollution: Dirt. According to a recent study in the journal Science Advances, cropland and natural sources contribute up to 40% of California’s NOx emissions—about 10 times as much as the California Air Resources Board has estimated. Motor vehicles make up about 30%.

The real target of the green regulators of course are automobile carbon emissions, but those don’t contribute to dirty air. More rational mileage standards won’t mean more smog.

Holy “Inconvenient Truth”, Batman!

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

Finally, our sister-in-law Amy sent us this helpful hint…

…regarding what not to do when your boss asks for proof you’re in the hospital!

Magoo