It’s Friday, July 17th, 2020…but before we begin, consider these three items which highlight the literal Liberal insanity which has infected the country.  Exhibit A: the Hodge Twins detail how the police shooting of a parolee who pulled a weapon and fired on police during the arrest of a confederate charged with the killing of three other Black men still merits protests: 

Next, just in from the Hard Left Coast courtesy of Breeze Gould and George Lawlor, we present Exhibit B, as Reason.com reports…

Museum Curator Resigns After He Is Accused of Racism for Saying He Would Still Collect Art From White Men

Irate employees of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art said the removal of Gary Garrels was “non-negotiable.”

 

“…“Considering his lengthy tenure at this institution, we ask just how long have his toxic white supremacist beliefs regarding race and equity directed his position curating the content of the museum?”

This accusation—that Garrels’ choices as an art curator are guided by white supremacist beliefs—is a very serious one. Unsurprisingly, it does not stand up to even minimal scrutiny.

The petitioners cite few examples of anything even approaching bad behavior from Garrels. Their sole complaint is that he allegedly concluded a presentation on how to diversify the museum’s holdings by saying, “don’t worry, we will definitely still continue to collect white artists.”

Garrels has apparently articulated this sentiment on more than one occasion. According to artnet.com, he said that it would be impossible to completely shun white artists, because this would constitute “reverse discrimination.” That’s the sum total of his alleged crimes. He made a perfectly benign, wholly inoffensive, obviously true statement that at least some of the museum’s featured artists would continue to be white. The petition lists no other specific grievances.

You might think that one of the most prominent art curators in the country—with 20 years of experience at SFMOMA—would be able to weather such a pathetically weak accusation of racism. But in the current cultural moment, it appears not. Garrels promptly resigned...”

Which, honestly, says as much about Garrels’s character as that of his hypersensitive false accusers.

Then there’s Exhibit C, courtesy of Chuck Sachs and the WSJ‘s Dan Henninger, who agrees…

Oh Yes, Ban the Redskins

I give up. It’s time to ban a lot of really terrible sports-team names. I have a long list.

 

“…Clevelanders will object that even if most people under 20-years-old think the Cleveland Browns offends the race gods, the Browns are named after team founder Paul Brown, who, as luck would have it, was a white guy. The easiest solution would be to abolish the Browns once and for all. Who would notice?

…Names associated with religious belief are also a problem. The New Jersey Devils imply God exists. Ditto the New Orleans Saints, and the Boston Celtics evoke Irish Catholics. Get rid of them.

The Portland Trail Blazers celebrate genocidal pioneers. The San Francisco 49ers are named after 19th-century California gold-diggers who raped the environment. The Houston Rockets have an impossibly male-sounding name and should compensate by becoming the Houston Rockettes.

The Colorado Avalanche evokes death. The New York Rangers sound like the police. The Texas Rangers are the police. What were the San Diego Padres thinking?…”

It follows the Carolina NFL franchise must be renamed the…

…BLACK Panthers…and given a 14-point lead at the start of each contest.

P.S. Hat tip to Brenda Berry for the Possum meme at the top of the page.

P.S.S. Though the universally-despised Dan Snyder may be offered up as a sacrificial lamb in hopes of nipping this scandal in the bud, if you think the Deadskins will be the only pro sports franchise subject to charges of sexual harrassment, you got another think comin’!  So long, NFL…

Now, here’s The Gouge!

First up, as Jerry Hendrix reports at NRO, the…

Burning USS Bonhomme Richard Signals More Trouble for Navy

The latest incident in a long line of recent trouble suggests continued internal weakness

 

“...The bottom line is that the fire creates one more negative story about the Navy in a series of negative stories.

…How did this fire happen? The answer will emerge from the investigation that will surely follow, but the events onboard the Bonhomme Richard will raise questions in the minds of our Navy’s sailors, our allies, and our competitors as to whether the U.S. Navy is still fit to fight a war if a major capital vessel can catch fire and gut itself while tied to a pier at a major naval base in one of the nation’s largest modern cities. The Navy appears broken in ways that the nation’s leaders are only now beginning to understand.“

Though her sailors may be incapable of effectively fighting fires, and her officers unable to navigate and prone to surrendering to the enemy without even beginning to fight, at least today’s Navy is fully woke and completely up to speed on their on their LGBQRSTUVWXYZ training, led by a SecNav committed to eliminating a non-existent “something that has plagued our nation since its birth“.  Mike Mullen must be so proud…and John Paul Jones rolling over in his crypt.

Since we’re on the subject of things which have long plagued our nation, courtesy of Jeff Foutch, The American Spectator asks and answers…

Why Has Biden Hired 600 Lawyers?

 

“During a recent fundraiser, former Vice President Joe Biden announced that his campaign had recruited an army of 600 attorneys to prepare for expected legal battles pursuant to the upcoming election. Biden says he needs all these lawyers to fend off “voter suppression,” which he defines as any opposition by the Trump campaign to Democratic calls for a dramatic expansion of mail-in voting. The president believes that such a precipitous change in our electoral process will create chaos and encourage election fraud. He’s right. “Experts” insist that fraud is rare. In fact, it is quite common, and mail-in voting exacerbates the problem.

…Even if all politicians and poll workers were as pure as the driven snow, there’s a huge elephant in the room that the advocates of mail-in voting refuse to acknowledge — the efficiency of the U.S. Postal Service. Rick Moran writes at PJ Media, “Voting is not a group activity… forcing people to vote by mail unnecessarily involves postal workers, clerks, registrars, and election officials — any one of which can screw it up.” Moran points to a study by the postal service inspector that revealed various mail-in ballot problems, which effectively disfranchised numerous Wisconsin voters in April. Nor is it just Wisconsin. As Mark Hemingway recently pointed out at RealClearPolitics:

Between 2012 and 2018, 28.3 million mail-in ballots remain unaccounted for, according to data from the federal Election Assistance Commission. The missing ballots amount to nearly one in five of all absentee ballots and ballots mailed to voters residing in states that do elections exclusively by mail. States and local authorities simply have no idea what happened to these ballots.

So much for the electoral efficiency of those much vaunted vote-by-mail states. If a mere five states can “misplace” 28.3 million mail-in ballots, an average of about seven million per election, try to imagine the chaos that will ensue if the 24 states controlled by Democratic governors attempt to implement all mail-in voting during the next 90 days or so.

Enter Biden’s army of lawyers. In 2016, at least six states were decided by less than 1.5 percent of the vote. Any state that goes to Trump by a narrow margin will be pounced upon by Democratic pettifoggers screaming about “voter suppression” and proposing bizarre recount schemes. It will make Bush v. Gore seem like a cakewalk.

The good news is that the increasing anger of ordinary Americans over the past four years of Democratic skullduggery — the Russia collusion hoax, the asinine impeachment, the pandemic of fear-mongering, the astroturfed attacks on our heritage — will almost certainly result in an electoral backlash resembling Reagan’s 1984 rout of Walter Mondale. Indeed, like Mondale, our erstwhile VP has promised to raise taxes. Trump will trounce Biden so badly that 6,000 lawyers won’t be able to save him.“

Speaking of those we’d like to see on a bus driving off a cliff, NRO‘s David Harsanyi highlights… 

The Shameless Gaslighting by Andrew Cuomo’s Defenders

There is no measurement at our disposal and no level of gaslighting that will change the fact that Cuomo-led New York was an utter failure.

 

OUCH! Sorry Sonny, but when even Jake Tapper and Sanjay Gupta ain’t buyin’ what you’re sellin’, it’s time to close up shop.

Speaking of COVID-19-related fables, this forward from The Boss offers further confirmation the statistics surrounding the Wuhan virus are as trustworthy as Susan Rice’s recollections of the causes behind Benghazi:

Coronavirus update: Florida labs not reporting negative test results, report says

 

Meanwhile, the CDC is saying the outbreaks in Florida and Texas are NOT the result of those states opening too fast, but rather were likely caused by Memorial Day vacationers from up North.

This graphic forwarded by Jeff Foutch puts the Wuhan “pandemic” in proper perspective:

Here’s the juice: if only 10% of the stories we’ve read and first-hand accounts we’ve heard are true, everything about this virus has been manifestly misrepresented and/or grossly blown out of proportion.  Our niece in North Lake, TX, having experienced a lengthy wait in line with her husband, finally tired of the delay and went home without being tested.  They subsequently received notice their results were positive for the Wuhan virus.

An ophthalmologist friend of The Boss had a similar experience in Tulsa: lengthy wait, went home without being tested, received positive results.

People injured in car wrecks, OD’d on drugs or suffering from any one of a hundred other ailments requiring hospitalization are tested for the Wuhan virus, and if the results are positive, they’re classified as being admitted for COVID-19…’cause that makes the hospital eligible for more federal funds.

Wake and smell the scam, America: never before in its history has our nation combatted a pandemic by quarantining the healthy rather than the sick and highly vulnerable, let alone literally shutting down the economy.  Not until The Donald occupied the Oval Office.

Here’s the juice: It remains ALL about November 3rd.

In a related item, as Speed Mach informs us, courtesy of your tax dollars, the Smithsonian‘s National Museum of African American History & Culture offers the following classic piece of racist propaganda to miseducate you on the concept of…

Whiteness

Since white people in America hold most of the political, institutional, and economic power, they receive advantages that nonwhite groups do not.

 

“Whiteness and white racialized identity refer to the way that white people, their customs, culture, and beliefs operate as the standard by which all other groups of are compared. Whiteness is also at the core of understanding race in America. Whiteness and the normalization of white racial identity throughout America’s history have created a culture where nonwhite persons are seen as inferior or abnormal.

This white-dominant culture also operates as a social mechanism that grants advantages to white people, (You know, like Usain Bolt and Michael Jordon!) since they can navigate society both by feeling normal and being viewed as normal. Persons who identify as white rarely have to think about their racial identity because they live within a culture where whiteness has been normalized. (Unlike, for example, Sweden, Iceland or Norway!)

Thinking about race is very different for nonwhite persons living in America. People of color must always consider their racial identity, whatever the situation, due to the systemic and interpersonal racism that still exists.

Whiteness (and its accepted normality) also exist as everyday microaggressions toward people of color. Acts of microaggressions include (But are certainly not limited to!) verbal, nonverbal, and environmental slights, snubs or insults toward nonwhites. Whether intentional or not, these attitudes communicate hostile, derogatory, or harmful messages…”

The NMAAHC goes on to offer a helpful primer highlighting examples of systemic Whiteness, including, but not limited to:

In other words, any trait or characteristic which can generally be considered as leading to success are tools of the oppression inherent in Whiteness.  Not to rain on the NMAAHC‘s parade of revisionist history, but we’d suggest they consider Michael Jordan, Ben Carson, Jackie Robinson, Clarence Thomas, Willie Mays, George Washington Carver, MLK, Herschel Walker, Robert Johnson, Booker T. Washington, Hank Aaron and millions of other less-famous but equally determined and successful Americans of dark-skinned ancestry.  Not to mention Stevie Wonder and Ray Charles, who didn’t even know what “Black” was or looked like.

They were all polite, self-reliant, spoke the King’s English, delayed gratification, suffered in silence, held hard work to be the key to success and were extremely competitive.  Did all of them suffer from Whiteness?!?

Now explain to us how Helen Keller suffered from Whiteness…let alone the over 360,000 Union troops who, in the words of Julia Ward Howe, died to set men free.

The commentary also features this quote from Toni Morrison:

“In this country, American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.“

An utter misrepresentation of reality we counter with this meme courtesy of Balls Cotton:

Sorry, Toni, but your Affirmative Action-based Nobel Prizes notwithstanding, hyphenation is by choice, not compulsion. 

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

Then there’s this from Speed Mach…

…five from Mark Foster…

…along with four from Ed Hickey…

…a couple courtesy of Balls Cotton…

…one from Fielding Cocke…

…and lastly, this t-shirt-themed series we found rather amusing:

Rumors that last shirt was designed by a serial sex offender holed-up in a basement in Delaware remain unsubstantiated.

Finally, we’ll call it a week with another sordid story straight from the pages of The Crime Blotter, and this from FOX News suggesting…

Colombian cartels killing anyone who doesn’t obey coronavirus lockdown orders

Cartels distributed pamphlets about coronavirus restrictions, warning that they are ‘forced to kill people in order to preserve lives.’

 

“Colombian cartels warned residents in nearly half the country’s states that armed fighters would kill anyone who disobeyed coronavirus lockdown restrictions, a new report claimed.

Despite government-mandated lockdown rules that began in March and have yet to be lifted, which include curfew hours but allow people to leave their houses for necessities and in a medical emergency, the cartel reportedly implemented more stringent and sometimes lethal measures across 11 of the country’s 32 states…”

Magoo