It’s Friday, October 12th, 2018…but before we begin, Brendan Clark provides us a sneak preview of Brett Kavanaugh’s SCOTUS portrait:

Now, here’s The Gouge!

First up, as Tucker Carlson details at our Video of the Day, accessible through Link #2 immediately below our Quote of the Day at the top of the page, the WaPo‘s concluded Progressive violence is a figment of your imagination, this undeniable evidence to the contrary notwithstanding:

Portland: Angry Leftists Took Over an Intersection and Attacked an Elderly Gentleman’s Car as He Tried to Escape the Crowd of Protesters

“Portland, Oregon was the scene of another leftist protest that resulted in violence and property damage as a man slowly drove through the crowd, trying to escape as they clubbed his car.  The protest was against the police department that reportedly shot a black man, Patrick Kimmons, who had allegedly been involved in a shootout involving at least two other men.

And Just when you thought such insanity couldn’t become any crazier…

Portland police are calling for the protesters who blocked a man driving the silver Lexus to come forward and press charges against him despite the fact that the demonstrators were illegally occupying the intersection and jumped in front of his car, later attacking the vehicle.  The entire incident took place literally one block away from police central precinct headquarters, and not a single uniformed officer was dispatched to quell the unruly mob…”

By the way, we for one require proof of the author’s closing statement:

“Portland residents are furious that the protesters took over an intersection and abused drivers while directing traffic and they are blaming Mayor Ted Wheeler for allowing anarchy on the streets.“

From what we’ve seen, heard and know of Portland, the majority of the city’s residents likely side with the mob.

Speaking of the insane, we’ve one piece of good news to report: Samantha Ness, the special ed instructor…

…who looks and acts as if she should be a student in her own class, has resigned. 

Next up, writing at Townhall.com, Ben Shapiro wonders…

What Do We Have In Common?

“America stands at a precipice.

It’s a moral precipice of our own making: We’re not facing any external existential threat, or any serious economic crisis. Nonetheless, we’re at each other’s throats in a shocking and unique way. At least in the 1960s, serious issues divided us: the national attempt to grapple with legally enshrined racism, the sexual revolution, the Vietnam War. We have no such excuse now. Yet to view the sheer chaos surrounding the confirmation of Justice Brett Kavanaugh is to realize that we may simply have nothing in common anymore, other than our sheer blind luck at having been born into the most prosperous, free, productive country in world history.

But a nation is more than a country. A nation is a people united by history, ideals, culture, institutions. But we’ve been steadily chipping away at each element of that nationhood.

Our history now divides us. This week, retired astronaut Scott Kelly was forced to apologize on Twitter for the grave sin of quoting Winston Churchill; he tweeted, “I will go and educate myself further on his atrocities, racist views which I do not support.” Meanwhile, across America, left-leaning city councils celebrated Indigenous Peoples Day in place of Columbus Day, signaling their belief that Christopher Columbus’ discovery of the New World was a tragedy rather than a cause for celebration. We Americans are in the midst of a serious division regarding our own character: Was America and the West founded on fundamentally good and eternal principles, principles we’ve sometimes failed to live up to, of course, but principles worth fighting for? Or is America and the West the font of evil, the source of suffering, and is all our prosperity merely the fruit of the poisonous tree?

Our ideals divide us, too. On the one hand are “red state” Americans, steeped in traditional Judeo-Christian principles and mores — Americans who believe that our rights are God-given, and that liberty must be balanced by traditional moral virtue. On the other hand are “blue state” Americans, steeped in egalitarian principles and mores — Americans who believe that rights spring from government, and that inequality is a more pressing concern than individual liberty, and that systems of traditional virtue merely mask hierarchical power structures.

Without a shared history or shared ideals, culture and institutions crumble. Our culture has fragmented – can we celebrate July Fourth and stand for the national anthem together, or even watch a football game without arguing about our divisions? Can we attend a movie together without feeling sandbagged by the questions that divide us outside the theater? We certainly no longer attend church or even go bowling together.

And as for institutions, Democrats have now discussed packing the Supreme Court, destroying the Senate and ending the Electoral College thanks to their recent spate of political defeats. All of that follows hard on former President Barack Obama simply arrogating power to himself when he couldn’t get Congress to go along with him. Our institutions won’t restrain us if we decide to tear ourselves apart.

So, what can hold us together? We can start with gratitude, gratitude for this unique moment in human history, for our unique country, for our unique ideals, for our unique institutions. If we’re ungrateful, spite will win the day. And that means that we could be setting the charges for a spectacular implosion.“

In a related item courtesy of the WSJ, Dan Henninger questions how much CAN one have in common with a group who takes the position…

‘You Cannot Be Civil’

Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton agree on the current state of the Democratic party.

“At a time when it’s said that anything is possible in American politics, the impossible just happened. Hillary Clinton has aligned herself with Donald Trump’s view of the Democratic Party.

Mr. Trump has been using his political rallies to denounce “the radical Democrats” as “an angry mob.” On Tuesday, Mrs. Clinton told CNN: “You cannot be civil with a political party that wants to destroy what you stand for, what you care about.” You cannot be civil. Behold the Trump sun and the Clinton moon in a moment of political eclipse.

…During Ronald Reagan’s presidency, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations was Jeane Kirkpatrick, who in some ways was a template for Nikki Haley’s U.N. tenure as an unapologetic defender of America’s interests. At the Republicans’ 1984 national convention, Kirkpatrick delivered a speech memorable for one phrase—“the San Francisco Democrats.” The idea behind “the San Francisco Democrats” has never died. It stands for a party of the unelectable left. That year, Reagan defeated Walter Mondale by 525 to 13 electoral votes.

…In conversations I’ve had recently with Democrats, once past the Kavanaugh arguments, most express a desire for more political civility. This is wishful thinking. The party has a problem: The San Francisco Democrats are back.

There are policy types on the left who would rather contest campaigns over health care and income disparities. But the Kavanaugh episode shows that the party is being taken over by what I would call the Code Pink Left.

The professional network of the Code Pink Left, typified by the George-Soros-funded woman who trapped Sen. Jeff Flake in an elevator, has virtually no interest in substantive policy goals. The Code Pink Left specializes in creating political story lines or “frames”—such as that conservatives are weak on sexual abuse—which it promotes with theatrical protests, distributes on social media, and depends on mainstream media for constant repetition. This is something familiar. It is called agitprop.

The goal is to make the broader electorate nervous and doubtful. It worked. Many voters are now nervous about the Democrats’ street-fighting men and women. Every Republican from Donald Trump down to dogcatcher is running against the Democrats’ “angry mob” of Senate screamers and restaurant marauders.

…A valid criticism of Donald Trump is that he hasn’t expanded his base into a broader coalition. But his luck in attracting self-destructive opponents is astonishing.

…Maybe it’s historical determinism. The constant-protest left captured the Democratic Party in the late 1960s and frightened the country into Richard Nixon’s overwhelming win against George McGovern in 1972. Four-and-a-half decades later, another generation of Democratic politicians is answering the same old radical siren song, “You can’t be civil.”

For a time, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, governors from the American South, taught them that won’t win. One thing never changes with the American left: It always goes too far.“

As Stilton Jarlsberg relates in his latest offering:

All of this brings three thoughts come to mind: first, while we concur with most of what Shapiro writes, we strongly disagree the “moral precipice” America faces is of “our” making: it is almost wholly the creation of one side…and indeed, largely due to one man:

The country certainly is being torn apart, but it’s The Left doing the tearing; Conservatives are simply clinging doggedly to the Founder’s Republic.

Second, one cannot know history if one is never taught history; hence the deliberate dumbing-down of our public education system continues to be an integral part of Progressive planning and policy. 

If one doesn’t KNOW one has a shared past, it’s easier to divide us.

Third, there is an incredibly serious issue which divides us today, and which was at the heart of the Kavanaugh fiasco: abortion, and the judicial activism which enshrined it as a “right” emanating from penumbras in the Constitution only Liberal jurists can detect.

And which, as Kevin Williamson notes at NRO, is…

Why the Left Won’t Take Up Originalism

Political process can give progressives only some of what they want.

“…The Left and the Right face the same quandary and the same temptation. Where the Constitution is silent, we have two choices: We may address the question through the political process, or we may rely upon the Supreme Court to invent a constitutional pretext facilitating our desired policy outcome. Progressives have long relied on the latter approach; given the likely direction of the Court in coming years, one might think that they would be rethinking their commitment to judicial activism. But they are not. Instead, their big ideas at the moment are court-packing and legislature-packing, or else impeaching a few of the justices they do not like if and when they should again control enough Senate seats to achieve that.

Why not rely on the political process? Why insist on inventing constitutional mandates that do not exist — especially when sticking to that approach is more likely for the moment to produce conservative outcomes rather than progressive ones?

To understand why that is requires understanding the basis of the progressive commitment to judicial activism. That commitment is not only (or even chiefly) about achieving policy outcomes that would be more difficult to secure through ordinary political means. Judicial activism is about social domination, which progressives seek and covet as an end in itself independent of the particular policy outcomes associated with it. In a society as prosperous as ours, the most desirable goods are metaphysical ones: status, power, privileges, rank, approval, and other fringe benefits of the soul. (Airlines, bless them, may be the worst-run businesses in the world, but they are bracingly honest about the fact that some customers have status and some do not. Status is from the Latin word meaning standing, and if you want to know your status at the check-in counter, your standing determines physically where you stand, the metaphorical and the literal united at last.) A great part of the Left’s social politics are not about policy questions at all — they are about the enjoyment that one derives from the act of humiliating those one hates. Hence the Left’s mandatory-participation model of politics: Abortion will not only be legal, but those of you who object to it will pay for it and thus participate in it; you nuns, elderly and celibate though you may be, will purchase and subsidize contraception to which you object; you critics of global-warming policies will be investigated as criminals and legally punished for your dissent; etc. Social domination is a consumption good, the psychological equivalent of getting a massage. And that is why it is not enough for the Left to join forces with like-minded conservatives such as John Yoo when an opportunity presents itself, as it did in the matter of homosexual marriage.

To win an election is not sufficient — it is much more satisfying to be revealed as one of the chosen by capital-H History, which progressives always are declaring themselves to be on the right side of. (One of the funny consequences of that is that important progressives such as President Wilson and Senator Russell are read out of the progressives’ historical account of their own movement because of the horrible racial views they held.) To win a political victory is one thing — a relatively petty thing — but to have one’s political will and sense of personal identity revealed as a constituent of the foundational bedrock of the nation, blessed by History itself, is a different kind of thing altogether. And that is what the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court threatened to take away from the Left, which is why their campaign against him was conducted with such hysteria. Some conservatives noted that it resembled religious fervor, but it did not resemble that: It was not something like religious fervor but actual religious fervor, the thing itself.

Which is to say, the Left will not take up originalism because the political process can give progressives only some of what they want. Democracy may provide the policy outcomes they desire, but progressives desire much more than that. They desire domination for its own sake, as a source of pleasure, and that domination grows more desirable the more closely the instrument of domination resembles a religious body: e.g., wise men in black robes interpreting an occult text inscrutable to the uninitiated, who, being profane and outside the clerisy, cannot read between its lines. Sicut erat in principio, et nunc, et semper, et in sæcula sæculorum.“

Hence when someone of note strays from the orthodoxy Progressives have ordained for them…

Their laughter only highlights their hypocrisy.

Since we’re on the subject of The Left and religion, consider this item from The Sacramento Bee via Drudge:

Ban on same-sex couples roils small Christian college: ‘This isn’t something sinful, God’

“On a recent fall day, a group of protesters gathered in a university courtyard, many holding rainbow flags. About 100 students and faculty members were fighting for LGBTQ rights on campus. The scene was unusual, though – in some ways radical – given that the location was Azusa Pacific University, a Christian college, and that the debate was over how God would view the issue of same-sex couples.

“This isn’t something sinful, God,” one student said, leading the emotional gathering. “This is something beautiful. I pray that we continue to live out the mission of being difference-makers, God, that this world be a place of equality, God.”

The public display of support for LGBTQ students was a response to the evangelical Christian university’s recent decision to reinstate its ban on same-sex relationships…”

Sorry, Charlie; but The Bible, which Paul reminds us in 2 Timothy 3:16 is, “is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness”, repeatedly states homosexual activity, along with adultery, fornication and other forms of heterosexual misbehavior, is a sin.  So until God specifically states otherwise, we’re going with what’s written in His Word.  

This “prayer” reminds us of the dinner blessing Gay Focker offered in Meet the Parents:

They both make the same amount of sense…which would be nonsense.

Then there’s this rather interesting article forwarded by George Lawlor from Investor’s Business Daily:

What Do The Worst-Run States Have In Common? They’re Run By Tax-And-Spend Democrats

“Which political party is better at managing taxpayer dollars? The latest ranking of states’ fiscal condition offers an unequivocal answer. For several years, the Mercatus Center at George Mason University has ranked states based on five measures of their financial condition: cash solvency, budget solvency, the ability to meet long-term spending commitments, state spending and taxes as a share of personal income, and unfunded pension liabilities and debt.

And lest anything think that Mercatus — a free-market-oriented group — is fudging the numbers, note that the data used to compile these rankings all come from official state annual financial reports and from state actuarial reports…”

Nothing worth reporting here, folks…the MSM’s just gonna move along.

Finally, we’ll call it a week with The Lighter Side:

Magoo