“Which leads me to the political principle a friend summed up in a pithy observation: “To be a liberal is to be unable to learn from the past.” Sometimes experience is a great teacher. Sometimes it is hardly more than a distraction. My friend’s point is that Democrats seem to derive no sustenance from their experience. The failure of their policies does not lead them to adjust their expectations or their actions. It causes them to double down on their mistakes. The history of America’s welfare apparatus since the time of FDR and, especially, since the time of LBJ and the so-called Great Society programs, is a case in point.”  ~~ Roger Kimball

“The big problem is — and this has never happened in the history of humankind — if this was happening at any other time, you could say: ‘We’re going to win in the end.’ But because of the climate crisis, we don’t have that much time. You know, there’s a point where if it gets too hot, then there’s no going back.” ~~ Jane Fonda

 “It’s funny because they don’t seem to realize that each outraged tweet is met with an equal and opposite reaction of MAGA memes. The more flipped out and angry they get, the funnier it is. Trump always manages to make them look like the stuffy, unfunny, miserable scolds, throwing one temper tantrum after another. They’re like Ted Knight (only not as funny) in Caddyshack, even if they will never know it. Trump is forever Rodney Dangerfield, Bill Murray and Chevy Chase all rolled in one.” ~~ Sasha Stone

“Canadian leftists have been giving us glimpses into our future if we let the Democrats get too much power again. All leftists have tyrant blood coursing through their veins, but the COVID pandemic really gave them a taste of the kind of totalitarian power that they fetishize. They’re not interested in slowly implementing their retro-Soviet agendas; they want to severely punish what they label wrongthink right now. Old Stasi and NKVD stories are porn to these wannabe dictators.” ~~ Stephen Kruiser

“Hannah Arendt had it right, She said one of the great advantages of the totalitarian elites of the twenties and thirties was to turn any statement of fact into a question of motive.” ~~ Patrick Moynihan

“The real scandal is the press’s role. No one is surprised to see elected officials or political partisans engaged in partisan tactics, which now includes lawfare. But this particular ruse doesn’t work without the media’s cooperation—its willingness to suspend disbelief, omit key facts, and pretend higher courts are acting out of bounds. It’s doing terrible damage. Where are the professional media critics when you need them?” ~~ Kim Strassel

“Because the United States is living in the feminist future that these witless, self-indulgent, agnostic, supposedly well-educated, and miserable women promoted, there is an ongoing calamitous erosion of a unique American civilization.”  ~~ Ned Ryun

“After the midterms occurred and we won the midterms, and how you know the Democrats were doing so well, and everybody was coming to Joe and to me and saying, ‘He’s got to keep going,’” she said. “His advisors were saying that. People were saying that everywhere, out on the road. He has to run.” ~~ Jill Biden

“This is a lazy, intellectually dishonest dodge. Race is not the point; assimilation is. The people in that 1950s footage were, in many cases, themselves first- or second-generation Americans—Irish, Italian, Polish, Jewish, among others. They were people whose parents or grandparents had arrived here through Ellis Island. They did not come to recreate the old country on American soil, transforming it. They came to become American—to transform themselves. They learned the language, embraced the civic norms, cheered on the same teams as their neighbors, and played by the same unwritten rules that made public spaces safe and orderly. Baseball was not merely entertainment. It was a sacrament of a shared American identity.” ~~ Brian Lonergan

What’s really driving them bonkers is less about providing voter lists for eligibility determination (though they are certainly worried about that) and much more about MATCHING BARCODES of the outer and inner envelopes in a mail ballot package.

Here is why that’s the problem for them. If surplus mail ballots collected from people who aren’t voting by mail are somehow voted on behalf of OTHER PEOPLE, it becomes readily detectable that a ballot was repurposed from its originally intended voter to someone else on the voter rolls. The “no-match” condition means that ballot was taken from the originally intended voter or it was given away. Either way that’s how fraud can be easily detected.

Keep in mind, the barcode matching requirement does not require any personal information that isn’t on the outside of an envelope, and it doesn’t prevent states from using mail to conduct elections, so the hysterical reactions are confirmation they know the gig is up.  ~~ Mark Mendlovitz

“If 2 Arab boys need to be taken care of, I’m not sending two girls in. As soon as certain surnames come up, we bring in the police.

“It usually doesn’t take long for 20, 30, 40 family members to show up in front of the hospital. They have special Telegram groups where they alert each other, and they want to make their presence felt in a way that’s often aggressive: ‘We’re here; we stand by our people—and you can expect trouble if anything happens to them.’

“In these circles, it’s common for the mothers and women to scream loudly and in high drama. This high noise level is a stress factor for the staff and also for the patients.” ~~ German ER Nurse

“‘We control matter because we control the mind. Reality is inside the skull. You will learn by degrees, Winston. There is nothing that we could not do. Invisibility, levitation — anything. I could float off this floor like a soap bubble if I wish to. I do not wish to, because the Party does not wish it. You must get rid of those nineteenth-century ideas about the laws of Nature. We make the laws of Nature.’” ~~ George Orwell

“I believe it is vital – to civilization, to liberty, to everything we wish for our species, especially for our young. Reading shapes the way we think. Not the content (that too, but it is near irrelevant). It shapes the way we CAN think, which opens our capacity to think. It requires translating and assembling symbols into words, words into concepts, images -things in themselves far bigger than the little word. It’s a process the brain uses to process and store information, but more importantly, to create from. Reading is training this, the younger a child starts, the easier it becomes and more building blocks they have. It is also compound interest for there on in.

It is a genie repressed in illiterate societies. It is a genie that, once freed, cannot ever be put back. Those who champion freedom, must champion reading, and particularly reading fiction, because that trains the mind in taking symbolic logic into creating what is not. Into building something far beyond the mere literal meaning of words, transforming them. That is what drives us, makes us human, gives us dreams. That will give us the stars.

Without that we’re little more than sheep.

With it, we have a key to being far more.” ~~ Dave Freer

“How do you know when you’ve made it in America? When your grown-up kid declares he’s a socialist. It means you’ve given your family a level of material comfort and security so unquestionable that your child has never even thought about how it happened. The very life you’ve provided him is like a seamless work of art in which all the grueling spadework has been successfully hidden. Good for you. Bad for everyone else.” ~~ Abe Greenwall