Grassroots

The Progressive-Democratic Party has them.

Violent clashes erupted in Washington, DC, between protesters and police after the conclusion of the Republican National Convention (RNC) on Thursday night.

And

Protesters yelled and threw water bottles at police at the historic St John’s Church….

And

US Senator Rand Paul (R, KY) said he was attacked by a “crazed mob” of more than 100 people after leaving the White House following President Trump’s acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention.

And

An elderly couple was confronted as they crossed the street by at least one protester who screamed at them while making an obscene gesture, according to a video.

And the ongoing rioting and looting in Progressive-Democrat-run cities, like Portland, Seattle, Minneapolis, Chicago, New York City, ….

These are the Progressive-Democratic Party’s grass roots.

This is why no one in Party talked about those rioters and looters Party’s poll numbers started to fall, why Progressive-Democrats were deafeningly silent all through their convention and in the weeks before that.

It’s why, even now, they’re commenting only in empty platitudes, with no concrete intention, much less an actual plan, to act against the violence.

Governance

Holman Jenkins, using the current state of energy deliverance in California as his backdrop, is concerned about the governance of the State.

Which introduces our larger theme. The only hope for the many, many things ailing the Golden State is better governance.

Which introduces the encompassing theme. The citizens of the Golden State keep electing the politicians that deliver the present quality of governance.

It’s not the politicians who are failing the citizens; they’re only doing what they’ve been hired to do.

It’s the California citizens who are failing California’s citizens.

The Roaring of the Silence

First Lady Melania Trump speaks with an accent. Which isn’t surprising to most of us, she’s an immigrant from Slovenia, only come to the US as an adult. Never mind, either, that her English is much better than any of our Slovenian.

Bette Midler, though, objected to her accent and her citizenship (gained in 2006) while FLOTUS Trump was making her Republican convention speech on Tuesday evening.

Oh, God. She still can’t speak English.

And

Get that illegal alien off the stage!

Midler has since pretended to apologize for the first—pretended because in the heat of the moment, she tweeted from her heart, but her…apology…came only later after much hoo-raw—although she seems to have done nothing about the second.

More importantly, though, it’s three days later, and the Republican convention is over. It’s three days later, and while lots of folks have decried Midler’s slurs, not a single Progressive-Democrat has objected to, much less repudiated, either of them.

This is a silent bigotry we do not need in the White House or anywhere in Congress.

“All of this has never happened before”

The NLMSM, of which Chris Wallace is a prominent example, is whining over President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump speaking at the RNC Convention from White House property and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo addressing the convention from Jerusalem.

All of this has never happened before….

Chris Wallace bleated Tuesday night. He went on:

I don’t know what personal capacity a secretary of state has[.]

Because in his petty self-importance, if he doesn’t know the capacity, it perforce must not exist.

More important than Wallace’s or the NLMSM’s oblivious self-importance, though is this concept of “never happened before.” Precedence matters in law. Tradition can be—can be—a useful guide.

However, everything humanity, or any individual, has ever done at one point had never happened before, and subsequent to that—since traditions must have a first instance—everything new that’s ever been done has been a deviation from tradition.

If we never did anything for the first time, we’d still be knocking around the savannah competing with more powerful scavengers for predators’ left-overs. We wouldn’t even have any traditions from which to deviate.

It would be amusing, if it weren’t so sad, this pressman’s and these pressmen’s obsession with precedence.

Alphabet’s Political Bias

made manifest once again, this time via YouTube, which is wholly owned by Google, which in turn is wholly owned by Alphabet.

During Joe Biden’s presidential nomination acceptance speech Thursday night, both his personal YouTube page and the Democratic Party’s YouTube page saw strong, negative reactions from live audiences. In fact, “Dislikes” outnumbered “Likes,” in real time.
Yet both pages’ “Dislikes” mysteriously dropped in the hours after the Democratic National Convention (DNC) had concluded.

Just The News cited carefully unnamed “experts” positing that

[t]he removed Dislikes could be a signal that YouTube is concerned about fake accounts or bots trying to influence the election or indicative of something else[.]

Of course. But with Alphabet’s history of political bias and censorship, the anonymous claim is hard to take seriously. It’s especially hard to take this claim seriously with Alphabet, through its Google, refusing to answer questions about the disappearances.