Europe
LAS VENTAS, MADRID — I am supposedly on holiday in Madrid. I take a break from politics, from public policy, from culture, and take in life in the country. In Spain that means the bullfight. Las Ventas is the major league in Spanish bullfighting, and I am not disappointed in what I see. These are fine bullfighters and ferocious bulls, though I wish Spaniards would give more consideration to the safety of the bulls. This evening, I saw six bulls slain and two bulls pull up lame. At least those lame bulls did not taste the sword.
French rapper Nick Conrad’s new song is the textbook definition of hatred and discrimination against a country and its people. The most outrageous thing about it is not in the lyrics, which include disgusting lines about “burning” and “fucking” France, but the fact that such hateful and explicit trash has been deemed worthy of staying on Facebook and Instagram while internet personalities like Laura Loomer and Paul Joseph Watson have been removed for “far less violent content.”
Presidential contenders are in a battle to out give one another. Senator Elizabeth Warren proposes a whopping $50,000 per student college loan forgiveness. Senator Bernie Sanders proposes free health care for all Americans plus illegal aliens. Most Democratic presidential candidates promise free stuff that includes free college, universal income, "Medicare for All" and debt forgiveness.
Did you hear about the new study out of Berlin which found that 92 percent of left-wing activists still live with their parents? This will come as no surprise to nearly every conservative learning about it. What the study didn't look at though was what percent of left-wing activists never leave adolescence. Chances are, that answer would have been on the high end. Latest example from liberal media -- Bill Press yesterday on his radio show/podcast discussing the latest "milkshaking" incident in Great Britain, this one targeting Nigel Farage, a leader of the Brexit movement.
Perhaps wary of Donald Trump’s 2016 victory, international reporters at the New York Times are seeing the “far right” everywhere, in unlikely guises, such as supporting being allowed to eat and drink whatever one likes without government interference. The paper filed an odd story: “Finland’s Right Appeals to Voters With a Nihilistic View on Climate.” In Italy, it found "a far-right attempt to eschew civility and make meanness cool.” In Norway, freedom to eat and smoke were likened to the far right.
On Saturday's PoliticsNation show, MSNBC host Al Sharpton devoted a segment to fretting that the rebuilding of three black churches struck by arson in Louisiana have not received as much attention as the destruction of Notre Dame Cathedral in France. Sharpton went along with his guest's blatantly incorrect claim that the national media ignored the black churches even though nearly every network covered the story even before MSNBC or Sharpton himself got around to it.
Shortly after the tragic sight of Notre Dame Cathedral going up in flames in Paris, as crowds watched and sang “Ave Maria,” historian Victor Davis Hanson put our modern times in perspective. “It’s going to be very hard in our society to ever build a cathedral again, much less to repair them, because we don't believe in what they represented. And it's ironic, because we don't like the past. We are at war with the past. We tear down monuments. We don't build cathedrals. We erase names.”
Although the progressives at Rolling Stone offered their condolences to the French in the wake of Notre Dame’s Monday fire, they pondered whether the devastation of the 900-year-old Cathedral opens up the possibility of reincarnating the structure as a monument to the secular “modern France;” because heaven forbid a progressive society rebuild a symbol to “non-secular, white European France.”
There's a push to change laws to permit both criminals serving time and ex-criminals the right to vote. Guess which party is pushing the most for these legal changes. If you guessed that it was the Democrats, go to the head of the class. Bernie Sanders says states should allow felons to vote from behind bars. Elizabeth Warren doesn't go that far but believes felons should have the right to vote. Democrats want the criminal class to have voting rights restored because they could become a significant part of the Democratic base.
On Monday as the world watched in horror as the famous Notre Dame Cathedral burned, a deeply concerned President Trump put out a tweet urging for water-tanker helicopters to be used to put out the blaze. We later learned that French authorities didn’t use them because the weight of the water could cause further destruction. Despite many other people thinking the same thing, members of liberal media used it as an opportunity to score cheap points against Trump. But not all did.
One more indictment that came as a result of the Trump-Russia probe came tumbling down the pike on Thursday, when a former White House counsel for President Obama was charged with lying to investigators about his foreign lobbying work for Ukraine. If that sounds familiar, it’s because that’s similar to what former Trump campaign head Paul Manafort was convicted of. But despite the similarities, the airtime dedicated to the indictment by the broadcast networks was grossly lopsided.
If one needed evidence of the gross ignorance of millennials, and their teachers and college professors, it's their solid support for socialism and socialist presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders. Socialism has produced tragedy wherever it has been implemented. Last year marked the 40th anniversary of nearly 1,000 Americans perishing in a mass suicide/murder in the jungles of Guyana. Just as Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez see socialism as mankind's salvation, so, too, did Rev. Jim Jones, who told his followers, “God is Socialism, and I am Principle Socialism, and that's what makes me God.”