At last! A judge objects to the media’s left bias and getting away with untruthfully smearing individuals.

The Western Journal reports:

Circuit Court Judge Laurence Silberman, appointed by President Reagan, objected to the vast protection the media have from being sued for libel. He wrote: “After observing my colleagues’ efforts to stretch the ‘actual malice’ rule like a rubber band, I am prompted to urge the overruling of New York Times v. Sullivan. Justice Thomas has already persuasively demonstrated that New York Times was a policy-driven decision masquerading as constitutional law.” New considerations have arisen over the last 50 years that make the New York Times decision a threat to American Democracy. It must go. That case increased the power of the media. It could be argued that the press needed protection to cover the civil rights movement, but that protection is now abused. “I doubt the Court would invent the same rule now. As the case has subsequently been interpreted, it allows the press to cast false aspersions on public figures with near impunity.” If that power was applied in an even-handed manner, there would be no crisis, but that is not the case. Two of the three most influential papers, The New York Times and The Washington Post, are virtually Democratic Party broadsheets, and the news section of The Wall Street Journal leans in the same direction. The orientation of these three papers is followed by The Associated Press and most large papers across the country, such as the Los Angeles Times, Miami Herald, and Boston Globe. Nearly all television — network and cable — is a Democratic Party trumpet. Even the government-supported National Public Radio follows along. Silicon Valley also has an enormous influence over the distribution of news, and it too filters news delivery in ways favorable to the Democratic Party. As an example, the  judge referred to Twitter’s efforts in the weeks before the 2020 election to block the distribution of the story of Hunter Biden’s laptop computer.  America’s democracy suffers from the bias of the media. “It should be borne in mind that the first step taken by any potential authoritarian or dictatorial regime is to gain control of communications, particularly the delivery of news.” It is fair to conclude, therefore, that one-party control of the press and media is a threat to a viable democracy, even giving rise to extremism. The First Amendment guarantees a free press to foster a vibrant trade in ideas, but a biased press can distort the marketplace. “And when the media has proven its willingness — if not eagerness — to so distort, it is a profound mistake to stand by unjustified legal rules that serve only to enhance the press’s power,” he wrote. He added that the reasons for press bias surely relate to bias at academic institutions.

The tyrants now in power do not want America to be prosperous and strong and happy. They want to humble it. They want it to be a country where they themselves thrive, and the majority of the people are oppressed and unhappy.

And they want to stay in power to keep things that way all their lives long, and to be followed by fellow ideological legionaries. (The collective noun for demons is legion – a legion of demons. For devils? A bombast of devils. Bombast commonly means empty speechifying, and yes, they do that too. They are demons, devils and blowhards. A collective noun for blowhards? It still needs to be invented. How about a castro or a schiff or a comey of blowhards? And while we’re at the game, how about a pelosi of haters? A brennan of liars? Suggestions are invited.)

The urge that some people have to tyrannize is as old as mankind, but hard for those who aren’t possessed of it to understand. Stalin felt it ruling over Russia. Primates of the Catholic Church felt it for hundreds of years. Protestant despots felt it too. Luther the German monster and Calvin the Swiss monster were gripped by it. As were many kings and tsars and emperors.

The present tyrants of America command the citizens to believe that a majority voted them into power. It is not true. They faked an electoral win, and now they intend to hold on to power forever.

Andrea Widburg writes at American Thinker:

The Democrats who now control Washington, D.C. are determined to change America’s election laws to ensure that they never lose another election.  The first salvo in this battle was the House’s vote passing H.R. 1, which opens federal elections to all types of fraud and manipulation.  On Sunday [March 14, 2021], Joe Biden added his bit to the effort by signing yet another executive order, this one ostensibly to enhance “voting rights” on the anniversary of the Selma protests in 1965.  However, the order is drafted to allow the federal government to control political speech.

As with most of Biden’s initiatives, it frames the power-grab in terms of race:

The right to vote is the foundation of American democracy.  Free and fair elections that reflect the will of the American people must be protected and defended. But many Americans, especially people of color, confront significant obstacles to exercising that fundamental right. These obstacles include difficulties with voter registration, lack of election information, and barriers to access at polling places.  For generations, Black voters and other voters of color have faced discriminatory policies and other obstacles that disproportionally affect their communities.

Once again, the leftist premise for increasing opportunities for election fraud is the theory that Blacks lack the mental capacity to navigate the American system without the Democrat party at their side, supporting them.  It’s an amazingly offensive position, but, sadly, Democrats have conditioned Blacks for decades to believe in their own helplessness. …

It is the responsibility of the Federal Government to expand access to, and education about, voter registration and election information, and to combat misinformation, in order to enable all eligible Americans to participate in our democracy.

There’s the magic phrase that says what all this emphasis on information is really about: the federal government will use its reach and power “to combat misinformation”.

And what is “misinformation” in the Democrats’ new political lexicon?  It’s anything with which the Democrats disagree.  The federal government, through Biden, has just announced that it will put its thumb on the scale in all future elections, combatting “misinformation” by presenting its version of “information”.

What Biden is proposing is unconstitutional, as is the case with many of his executive orders.  They are often straightforward announcements that he will no longer abide by American law, especially regarding our southern border.  Biden and his handlers are confident that the Supreme Court is so cowed by the court-packing threat that it will do nothing to stop the Democrats as they slowly, but surely, run the Constitution through a shredder.

Had the Supreme justices declared the November 2020 election the unconstitutional fraud that it was, they wouldn’t need now to fear that the fraudulent winners will pack the court. Yet we are told that very fear kept them from hearing appeals. If that is true, they missed their opportunity.

Can anything now stop the shredding of the Constitution?

Opinions we agree with from American Greatness

Theodore Roosevelt Malloch writes: Kamala Harris personifies identity politics gone wild. The records show as California attorney general, Harris put more than 1,500, mostly poor, black and brown men in jail for smoking or possessing pot. But then she laughed about smoking weed in college while listening to Tupac Shakur, who, strangely, would not release his debut album for another five years. Oh, well, caught again in deceit. Kamala Harris has built a monumental career out of hypocrisy and dishonesty. The soon-to-be president sets new low standards even for a politician. One thing she does consistently is to oppose the constitutional rights of individuals, on speech, on assembly, on bearing arms, on fair trials, on just about everything. Kamala—and please pronounce her first name correctly or you will be in really big trouble—the now future president of the United States, a chief cackler well beyond the novice abilities of a Hillary Clinton or Nancy Pelosi, is—make no mistake—a woke authoritarian.  Her phoniness is fraudulence in spades. But her cackle? Pure evil.

Debra Heine writes about Joe Biden’s choice to lead the Department of Justice’s enormously powerful Civil Rights Division: a nasty woman named Kristen Clarke. She has a history of pushing a radical, anti-white, anti-Semitic, anti-police agenda; defending Jussie Smollett’s vicious lie about being attacked by Trump supporters (when he actually paid two Nigerians to pretend to do it); and claiming Blacks are superior to Whites because the more melanin you have in your body the smarter you are. She fervently insists on the innocence of Mumia Abu-Jamal, the convicted murderer of police officer Danny Faulkner.

What hope do normal Americans have of justice when people like this are given power over them?

The Western Journal reports:

When Columbia University in New York City holds its virtual graduation ceremonies for the Class of 2021, it wants to be sure that there are separate ones for certain identity groups.

“Complementing our school- and University-wide ceremonies, these events provide a more intimate setting for students and guests [not] to gather, incorporate meaningful cultural traditions and celebrate the specific contributions and achievements of their communities,” the Ivy League university said in announcing a series of graduation ceremonies designed for those groups Columbia has deemed special.

The ceremonies begin with one for Native Americans on April 25.

Next comes what is called “Lavender Graduation” to spotlight the “LGBTQIA+ community” on April 26.

So not only races are to be segregated – each from every other and especially from “whites” – for celebration, but there is to be similar apartheid between the sexually abnormal and the normal. But in what – except sexual practices – can the sexually abnormal claim as “meaningful cultural traditions” or “specific contributions and achievements” different from the cultural traditions, contributions, and achievements of normal students?

On April 27, the university will hold a ceremony for Asian students, followed by one for low-income students … 

So class difference is to be observed too…

and [one for] those who are the first generation in their family to graduate from college.

The series of racially profiled ceremonies continues April 29 with one for Hispanic students — billed as “Latinx Graduation” to reflect current liberal language — and concludes April 30 with a ceremony for black graduates.

Say, what happened to “diversity and inclusion”?

John Solomon reports at Just the News:

Long after former President Donald Trump dropped his legal challenges to the 2020 election, some courts in battleground states are beginning to declare the way widespread absentee ballots were implemented or counted violated state laws.

The latest ruling came this month in Michigan, where the State Court of Claims concluded that Democratic Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson’s instructions on signature verification for absentee ballots violated state law.

Benson had instructed local election clerks a month before the Nov. 3 election to start with a “presumption” that all signatures on absentee ballots were valid and only reject those that had “multiple significant and obvious” inconsistencies. Republicans and one election clerk challenged her instructions in court.

Chief Court of Claims Judge Christopher M. Murray ruled March 9 that the state Legislature did not provide such guidance in its election laws, and therefore Benson needed to promulgate a formal rule – a timely process – before imposing such a requirement. Murray told election clerks they should disregard Benson’s instructions in future elections.

“An agency must utilize formal rule-making procedures when establishing policies that ‘do not merely interpret or explain the statute or rules from which the agency derives its authority,’ but rather ‘establish the substantive standards implementing the program,'” Murray ruled.

“The guidance issued by the Secretary of State on October 6, 2020, with respect to signature-matching standards was issued in violation of the Administrative Procedures Act,” he concluded. …

In neighboring Wisconsin, the state Supreme Court handed down a significant ruling in December when the justices concluded that state and local election officials erred when they gave blanket permission allowing voters to declare themselves homebound and skip voter ID requirements in the 2020 elections.

In a case challenging the practice in Dane County, one of Wisconsin’s large urban centers around the city of Madison, the state’s highest court ruled that only those voters whose “own age, physical illness or infirmity” makes them homebound could declare themselves “indefinitely confined” and avoid complying with a requirement for photo ID.

The mere existence of a COVID-19 pandemic and shutdown orders was not sufficient under Wisconsin law for all persons to skip the voter ID requirements to seek to vote absentee, the justices ruled. …

In so doing, the court ruled that local officials like Dane County and Gov. Tony Evers did not have legal authority to exempt all voters to get an absentee ballot without an ID. Evers had issued an executive order earlier this year.

“We conclude that [Evers’] Emergency Order #12 did not render all Wisconsin electors ‘indefinitely confined’, thereby obviating the requirement of a valid photo identification to obtain an absentee ballot,” the majority ruling concluded.

The court filings indicated nearly 200,000 voters declared themselves permanently confined in the state’s spring primary, a marked rise over prior years, and even more did so in the general election. Biden won Wisconsin by just 20,000 votes.

Meanwhile in Virginia, a judge in January approved a consent decree permanently banning the acceptance of ballots without postmarks after Election Day, concluding that instructions from the Virginia Department of Elections to the contrary in 2020 had violated state law. An electoral board member in Frederick County challenged the legality of the state’s instruction and won though the ruling came after the election.

“If the return envelope has a missing postmark, the ballot shall be rendered invalid,” Frederick County Circuit Judge William W. Eldridge IV ruled in the consent decree.

The Public Interest Legal Foundation, which represented electoral board member Thomas Reed called the ruling “a big win for the Rule of Law.”

“This consent decree gives Mr. Reed everything he requested – a permanent ban on accepting ballots without postmarks after Election Day and is a loss for the Virginia bureaucrats who said ballots could come in without these protections,” PILF President and General Counsel J. Christian Adams said.

Several more legal challenges remain in states, as well as two audits/investigations of voting machine logs that are pending in Georgia and Arizona.

Then comes this peculiar sentence (our italics):

And while there has been no proof the elections were impacted by widespread fraud, there are still significant disputes over whether rule changes and absentee ballot procedures in key swing states may have been unlawful.

How much proof is needed of fraud in how many states and counties before it is considered “widespread” enough to have a decisive impact? There seem to be mountains of proof. What manner of proof, in how many places, would clinch the case?

In addition, the Thomas More Society’s Amistad Project on election integrity is pursuing litigation over whether hundreds of millions of dollars donated by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and routed to local election officials in several battleground states may have unlawfully influenced the election, according to the project’s director, Phill Kline.

“We’re expanding our litigation,” Kline told the John Solomon Reports podcast on Wednesday. “I still have suits that are active in Michigan and Georgia on this, and you’ll see us take new action in Wisconsin. And we will renew action in Pennsylvania. And, and our involvement in Arizona will take a little bit of a different tack, but will involve this. The Arizona legislature is going to do an audit and we want this within the scope.”

In other words, the election [contest] between Joe Biden and Donald Trump may be settled, but the battle over how elections will be governed – especially as it relates to absentee ballots and private funding of election clerks – has only just begun.

What is the difference between “private funding of election clerks” and bribery?

Two quotations today from Townhall about the corruption of all our institutions:

By Chris Stigall:

Critical race theory has infected the curriculum of our public schools, teaching young children they’re racist before they learn to tie their shoes. Our intelligence institutions have been so politically charged and compromised the bulk of their time is now targeting citizens of one political party instead of real threats at home and abroad. Our nation’s law enforcement have gone from heroes keeping the peace in our most violent communities to “minority hunting killers” mythologized as more dangerous than a common street thug. Our entertainment and sports institutions have been completely taken over by leftist politics to such a degree – athletes and entertainers working in the industry are excommunicated for not staying on the approved message of the left. Media institutions waved bye-bye to truth telling and objective journalism long ago. There’s sad bipartisan agreement on that.  Even our once most trusted institution – the United States military now finds its senior leadership lobbing editorial comments at a television show host simply for questioning their priorities in defending our nation from truly alarming threats like China. That leaves only one institution for us all to rally around. Our vote. Election Day. Sadly, after watching the unconstitutional manipulation of our last election and Democrats’ current attempt to federalize that trickery permanently overriding our states, our last standing institution is hanging on by a thread. [But if H.R. 1 becomes law …]

By Kurt Schlichter:

Americans have been serially betrayed by our institutions for the last couple decades, most painfully by those institutions that were supposed to look out for us. Academia, which we subsidize, teaches our kids that we are moral monsters. The media hew to the establishment narrative instead of jumping in to expose its depredations against us normal folks. Even the FBI tossed out Inspector Erskine in favor of that looming doofus Jim Comey and tried to frame the president we picked to fix the establishment’s mess. While the military leadership’s betrayal was still shocking, we normal people immediately saw exactly what was happening again with this latest institution to fall. It too was betraying us in the name of wokeness.  Thirty years ago right now, I was in Saudi Arabia in the wake of the Gulf War, the high point of American power. The military was rebuilt by visionaries who embraced high standards,  focused on warfighting, and annihilated a nation’s entire force in six weeks of air war and 100 hours of ground war. We were not woke. We were not politically correct. We were just unbeatable. Fast forward to 2021:  our military is still chasing bandits around the Hindu Kush, our forces still in Iraq are still getting rocketed, and we are still pouring troops into Syria for some damn reason. The Chinese are eating our lunch in the Western Pacific, but our military leadership pretend that the U.S. is still dominant. It thinks we’re unbeatable, but the Chinese are deadly serious, even as our leadership pretends boys can become girls and that paying for their snip surgery will make us more combat-ready.

The Leftists in power are like termites living in a wooden house, devouring their habitat.

This is good news from Breitbart:

A shift in the corporate world with big American companies embracing so-called “woke” leftist policies along with increased retirements among the old guard of the GOP is fueling a populist surge inside the Republican Party, a new memo from GOP insiders reveals. In the memo, which has no named author, CGCN warns the “business community” that their previous allies in the Republican Party are moving on from protecting business interests to instead focusing on populist priorities of protecting American workers. As the GOP shifts downward away from the elites and towards the everyman, the memo notes, the Democrats in Washington continue their efforts to punish companies with tax hikes and regulatory burdens. In other words, companies may be left with nobody to defend them or their interests—all because they decided to abandon neutrality in favor of woke leftism, fighting culture wars that have driven Republicans away from them back toward the refreshed GOP base while Democrats will never reward them for being woke enough.

(Of course a “shift” can’t “fuel” anything, but we know what is meant.)

What’s lacking in the report is an acknowledgment that what the GOP is now becoming is more and more TRUMP’S PARTY. 

Even Californian Democrats – or at least a fair number of them – cannot stomach the abuse of power committed in their state by Governor Gavin Newsom, San Franciso’s district attorney Chese Boudin, and George Gascon the district attorney of Los Angeles. All three are likely to be recalled.

Lloyd Billingsley writes at Front Page:

The campaign to recall California governor Gavin Newsom has now gathered, 2,060,000 signatures, the California Globe reports, exceeding its goal of 2 million by March 10 and far outpacing the 1.495 million needed to authorize a recall election. Even with a rejection rate of 25 percent, the recall will have enough signatures to be on the ballot this year. …

Also last week, the San Francisco department of elections authorized a recall campaign against district attorney Chesa Boudin, who prior to election in 2019 had never prosecuted a case. Boudin has eliminated entire categories of crime, now surging across the city. …

His mother, Weather Underground alum Kathy Boudin, served 22 years in prison for her role in an armored car assault in Nyack, N.Y. that claimed the lives of police officers Waverly Brown and Edward O’Grady along with security guard Peter Paige. Chesa was only 14 months old when the $1.6 million Nyack robbery went down. Radical father David Gilbert drove the getaway car and Chesa was duly adopted by Weather Underground royalty Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn.

Kathy Boudin named her son after Joanne Chesimard of the Black Liberation Army, which assassinated at least six police officers in the early 1970s. Kathy Boudin assisted in the armed robbery that funded Chesimard’s jail break in 1979. Chesimard changed her name to Assata Shakur and fled to Cuba, which refuses to extradite the cop-killer. True to form, Chesa touts “restorative justice” and “decarceration”. …

Since taking office, Boudin has tried zero homicides, and essentially shut down the justice system in San Francisco. Boudin released a previously jailed criminal who killed two people and on his watch crime is up 46 percent.

It is serious crime too – “brazen robberies” and “daytime shootings”.

George Gascon, district attorney of Los Angeles, has removed all crime enhancements in trials, ordered prosecutors not to attend parole hearings, and supported the re-sentencing [revisions of sentences?] of those with murder convictions after serving only 15 years. …

These measures sparked a recall effort that will soon be authorized to gather signatures.

Like Gascon and Boudin, Gavin Newsom has a soft spot for violent criminals. In March of 2019, Newsom reprieved all 737 murderers on California’s death row, the worst of the worst, serial killers, cop killers and the like.

A year later, Newsom invoked the “leadership” of his one-time aunt Nancy Pelosi as he locked down the state, with notable exceptions. Newsom released thousands of imprisoned criminals …

During an unemployment scandal that has now surpassed $30 billion, California paid out $421,370 to death row inmates alone …

Nancy Pelosi herself. presiding as Speaker of the House over the passing of H.R.1 which “legalizes” all the methods of cheating in elections that the Democrats tested and found good in November 2020, is another believer in the rule of lawlessness.

There is no bottom.

John Hinderaker of  PowerLine reports:

U.K. sources say that Meghan Markle wants to run for President of the United States. Markle’s political ambitions seem to be in tune with the times. She is playing the victim card as a “black” woman, although she is paler than many “whites”. Common sense suggests that it is hard to be a victim when you are a multimillionaire Duchess and your child is the great-grandson of the Queen of England. But then, Michelle Obama absurdly claimed to be a victim, as have countless college professors, intellectuals, students, and even business people. So why not Meghan? Joe Biden obviously won’t be the Democratic Party candidate for president in 2024. So a skeptic might ask: why is Kamala Harris any better suited to be president than the Duchess of Sussex, and is there any reason to think that Harris would do better in the general election than the Duchess? Further, the dominant quality of our age is whininess, and the Duchess of Sussex is perhaps the whiniest person in the world. So maybe the woman and the hour have met. In the degraded state to which our politics have sunk, it is hard to rule anything out.

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Today we select a passage from an article on the bewildering experience of living in a country which has a senile president put there to seem responsible for executing an anti-American agenda .

Drew Allen writes at Townhall:

It is no secret that Joe Biden is not in charge of the executive branch. Nor does it come as a surprise. … What is surprising, however, is how effective and advantageous his non-presidency has been for the Democratic Party. His mental incapacitation has not hindered the left’s agenda to transform the United States from a Constitutional republic to a totalitarian state, but has helped facilitate it.  … Joe Biden is unfit for the office he nominally holds. But so long as Joe remains the “president,” even if this is understood as merely a figurative role, the Democrats will continue to have wild success in their diabolical and unconstitutional efforts to destroy America. … We are living in a nightmare scenario. … The American people and our country have been plunged into darkness. We have largely no idea what is going on. While we can speculate as to who is actually running the country — Obama? Susan Rice? — we have no access to the one individual “responsible” for the destruction of our economy, our safety, and our freedom. America is being run by a shadow government. … So long as [Biden]  remains in office, those Americans who religiously watch CNN and get their propaganda from the Washington Post will never be exposed to anything remotely resembling reality. Joe Biden is a strategy for the Democratic Party at this point, not a hindrance or frustration. As the rag known as the Washington Post declares, “Democracy dies in darkness”. We are living in darkness. I regret to say that we would be better off with [Vice President] Kamala Harris. At least if she was president, there would be no unspoken excuse either understood or accepted for this un-American and totalitarian regime. But if the Democrats are smart, they’ll keep Joe around as long as they can.

We cannot agree that “we would be better off with Kamala Harris”. We think it would be unimaginably worse if she were president. But otherwise we concur with Drew Allen’s description of the current US administration.

It is a nightmare. And a farce and a horror.