Among the most likely Democratic (Socialist) Party nominees for the 2020 presidential election, are Senators Kamala Harris and Cory Booker.

What sort of people they are was revealed under bright lights during the recent, days-long, televised interrogation of Brett Kavanaugh to confirm his appointment by President Trump to the Supreme Court.

So what sort of people are they? Well, they’re both black. That’s a chief qualification in the eyes of the racist Left. And one of them is a woman. Double points.

But what of their ideas, their competence, their characters?

Ken Blackwell writes at Townhall:

Despite the Senate Judiciary Committee’s being the most politically polarized committee in Congress, there’s still usually a sense of seriousness during a Supreme Court confirmation hearing. Not this time.

Over the four days of hearings – two of which Judge Kavanaugh went well into the night answering Senators’ questions – there were well over a hundred interruptions by protesters.

And when Democratic Senators did ask questions, they did their image no good whatsoever.

For his part, Kavanaugh was masterful in fielding every question, befitting a confident 12-year veteran of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals bench, the second most important court in the country. The American people saw a judge’s judge – he will fairly apply the law, he will honor the Constitution, he won’t make up law … or impose any kind of agenda from the bench. It’s clear, as with Neil Gorsuch, President Trump had hit another home run with a man who’ll be another great justice. …

Leading the [Democratic] parade were two committee members who’ve made it no secret they’re running for president in 2020. 

For Senators Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), the hearings were their own little “Kavanaugh Primary” within the primary contest for the Democratic nomination. They were expected to try and outdo each other in appealing to their party’s base, but what happened instead was a literal comedy of errors. 

During his first opportunity to question Kavanaugh, Booker tried to ambush the judge with emails from the time he served in the George W. Bush White House as an associate counsel and later as staff secretary. Kavanaugh calmly kept asking Booker if he could please see a copy of the emails to which the Senator was referring – so he could accurately answer his question. But they were not provided. 

Early the next morning Booker pronounced he was releasing documents, including the emails to which he had referred the day before, in what he believed to be a brazen display of flouting Senate rules for the public good. He said he was releasing confidential documents that were being withheld by the committee so the public could see them, and he would accept the consequences. He even proclaimed: “This is the closest I’ll ever get in my life to an “I am Spartacus” moment.”

A brave leader of an uprising of the oppressed against a tyranny. Easy heroism. Booker was, figuratively speaking, banging his chest as he boasted that he was taking an enormous risk, but would accept any consequences fearlessly.

In harsh reality he was making a fool of himself.

But it turned out Senate Democrats had gotten clearance to release them [the emails] several hours prior.

Spartacus had lied to us.

A presidential candidate?

Let’s look at the other one.

Not to be outdone, Harris tried to ambush Judge Kavanaugh as well.

It was late Wednesday night, she was one of the last Senators to question Kavanaugh during what had been a long, grueling day. She glared at him, knowing the cameras were capturing every moment, and sprang her gotcha question: “Have you discussed [Special Counsel] Mueller or his investigation with anyone at Kasowitz Benson and Torres, the law firm founded by Marc Kasowitz, President Trump’s personal lawyer. … Be sure about your answer, sir.”

Kavanaugh couldn’t recall any such conversation but, as he told Harris, he was happy to have his memory refreshed if she was aware of anything. She played coy. Her staff told reporters throughout the night and into the next day of the hearings that she had it on good information such discussions had taken place.

“Good information”. How good?

Surely she had him, she had damning information about Kavanaugh inappropriately discussing the Mueller investigation with the president’s personal law firm, and he was the president’s pick for the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court could well hear arguments in the Mueller investigation. Game over, right?

Wrong.

When she asked him the same question directly the next night he flatly said, “no.”

And then she … moved on. It was all made up, nothing to see here. Fishing expedition comes up empty.

It’s a sobering thought that there are millions of people who might vote for Booker or Harris to be president.

Acting on the inflammatory rhetoric of the Left, a comedian, Kathy Griffin,

suggested beheading the President of the United States in the manner favored by ISIS.

When she was criticized for her idea, she cried.

Yesterday (June 14, 2017) the Republican Representative Steve Scalise was shot by a far left Bernie Sanders supporter at a congressional baseball practice on the baseball diamond in Alexandria, Virginia. At the time of this writing, Mr. Scalise is said to be in critical condition. Four others were also wounded. Two were Capitol Police officers Crystal Griner and David Bailey before they shot the gunman dead. (“Had they not been there, it would have been a massacre,” a witness – Senator Rand Paul – said.) The other two were Matt Mika, a lobbyist, and Zack Barth, a staffer for Republican Representative Roger Williams.

There is obviously no dialogue possible between Left and Right in America now (or anywhere else in the world). So the battle has to be fought in other ways.

Victor Davis Hanson writes at Townhall:

The two Americas watch different news. They read very different books, listen to different music and watch different television shows. Increasingly, they now live lives according to two widely different traditions.

The Left is inconsolably bitter over losing the presidency, the House, the Senate, the Supreme Court, and most of the states. Having no arguments, no case to make, but being moved by intense childish emotion, Leftists strike out with fists, clubs, guns.

John Hawkins lists 20 quotations from the Left that urged the use of extreme violence. the beating, raping, torturing, and murdering of conservatives, Republicans, and Donald Trump. An accumulation of such declarations (there have been a great many) is more than likely to eventuate in attempts at murder.

You have plays, rap videos and prominent liberals glorifying the murder of the President …  while cops at left-wing universities stand back and allow violent students to riot, threaten and disrupt conservative speakers. 

1) “Michele (Bachmann), slit your wrist. Go ahead… or, do us all a better thing [sic]. Move that knife up about two feet. Start right at the collarbone.” – Montel Williams

The inciters become incoherent with rage. They choke on their fury. Their repetitious cussing is a sign that they have no reasonable case to make.

2) “F*ck that dude. I’ll smack that f*cker’s comb-over right off his f*cking scalp. Like, for real, if I met Donald Trump, I’d punch him in his f*cking face. And that’s not a joke. Even if he did become president — watch out, Donald Trump, because I will punch you in your f*cking face if I ever meet you. Secret Service had better just f*cking be on it. Don’t let me anywhere within a block.”– Rapper Everlast on Donald Trump

3) “I have zero doubt that if Dick Cheney was not in power, people wouldn’t be dying needlessly tomorrow … I’m just saying if he did die, other people, more people would live. That’s a fact.” — Bill Maher

4) “I know how the ‘tea party’ people feel, the anger, venom and bile that many of them showed during the recent House vote on health-care reform. I know because I want to spit on them, take one of their “Obama Plan White Slavery” signs and knock every racist and homophobic tooth out of their Cro-Magnon heads.” — The Washington Post’s Courtland Milloy

The Tea Party! If those peaceful polite mainly middle-aged people who got together to ask for fiscal responsibility, and who meticulously cleared up every scrap of debris on the ground after they held a public meeting, were  full of anger, venom and bile, they certainly never showed it. But no doubt the lying left-biased media reported that they were.

5) “F*** God D*mned Joe the God D*mned Motherf*cking plumber! I want Motherf*cking Joe the plumber dead.” — Liberal talk show host Charles Karel Bouley on the air.

It was to “Joe the Plumber” that Obama explained how he wanted to redistribute the wealth of the country. His administration, he planned, would take money forcibly from those who had earned it and give it to those who had not. “Joe the Plumber”, like a lot of other Joes, did not like the idea. So, says the Left, kill him.

6) “Are you angry? [Yeah!] Are you angry? [Yeah!] Are you angry? [Yeah!] Well, we’ve been watching intifada in Palestine, we’ve been watching an uprising in Iraq, and the question is that what are we doing? How come we don’t have an intifada in this country? Because it seem[s] to me, that we are comfortable in where we are, watching CNN, ABC, NBC, Fox, and all these mainstream… giving us a window to the world while the world is being managed from Washington, from New York, from every other place in here in San Francisco: Chevron, Bechtel, [Carlyle?] Group, Halliburton; every one of those lying, cheating, stealing, deceiving individuals are in our country and we’re sitting here and watching the world pass by, people being bombed, and it’s about time that we have an intifada in this country that change[s] fundamentally the political dynamics in here. And we know every – They’re gonna say some Palestinian being too radical — well, you haven’t seen radicalism yet.” U.C. Berkeley Lecturer Hatem Bazian fires up the crowd at an anti-war rally by calling for an American intifada

That was clear and plain incitement to terrorist action on a massive scale.

7) “That Scott down there that’s running for governor of Florida. Instead of running for governor of Florida, they ought to have him and shoot him. Put him against the wall and shoot him. He stole billions of dollars from the United States government and he’s running for governor of Florida. He’s a millionaire and a billionaire. He’s no hero. He’s a damn crook. It’s just we don’t prosecute big crooks.” — Rep. Paul Kanjorski, D-Pa

8) “..And then there’s Rumsfeld who said of Iraq ‘We have our good days and our bad days.’ We should put this S.O.B. up against a wall and say ‘This is one of our bad days’ and pull the trigger. Do you want to salvage our country? Be a savior of our country? Then vote for John Kerry and get rid of the whole Bush Bunch.” — From a fund raising ad put out by the St. Petersburg Democratic Club

9) “Republicans don’t believe in the imagination, partly because so few of them have one, but mostly because it gets in the way of their chosen work, which is to destroy the human race and the planet. Human beings, who have imaginations, can see a recipe for disaster in the making; Republicans, whose goal in life is to profit from disaster and who don’t give a hoot about human beings, either can’t or won’t. Which is why I personally think they should be exterminated before they cause any more harm.” — The Village Voice’s Michael Feingold, in a theater review of all places.

10) “But the victim is also inaccurately being eulogized as a kind and loving religious man. Make no mistake, as disgusting and deservedly dead as the hate-filled fanatical Muslim killers were, Thalasinos was also a hate-filled bigot. Death can’t change that. But in the U.S., we don’t die for speaking our minds. Or we’re not supposed to anyway. Thalasinos was an anti-government, anti-Islam, pro-NRA, rabidly anti-Planned Parenthood kinda guy, who posted that it would be “Freaking Awesome” if hateful Ann Coulter was named head of Homeland Security.” — Linda Stasi, New York Daily News,on a victim murdered in the San Bernadino terrorist attack

11) “Cheney deserves same final end he gave Saddam. Hope there are cell cams.” — Rep. Chuck Kruger (D-Thomaston)

12) “If I had my way, I would see Katherine Harris and Ken Blackwell strapped down to electric chairs and lit up like Christmas trees. The better to light the way for American Democracy and American Freedom!” — Democratic Talk Radio’s Stephen Crockett

13) “May your children all die from debilitating, painful and incurable diseases.” — Allan Brauer, the communications chair of the Democratic Party of Sacramento County to Ted Cruz staffer Amanda Carpenter.

Can anyone get lower than that? Yup. For Leftists there is no bottom.

14) “Violence solves nothing. I want a rhino to f*ck @SpeakerRyan to death with its horn because it’s FUNNY, not because he’s a #GOPmurderbro.” – Jos Whedon

15) “I hope Roger Ailes dies slow, painful, and soon. The evil that man has done to the American tapestry is unprecedented for an individual.” — Think Progress editor Alan Pyke

16) “But, you know, the NRA members are the current incarnation of the brownshirts from Germany back in the early ’30s, late ’20s, early ’30s. Now, of course, there came the Night of the Long Knives when the brownshirts were slaughtered and dumped in the nearest ditches when the power structure finally got tired of them. So I look forward to that day.” — Mike Malloy

“Antifa” is a Leftist brownshirt organization, fascist if ever any organization deserved to be called fascist. It claims to be “fighting fascism”. They and other Leftist rioters who are attacking people at pro-Trump rallies (and the populist equivalents in Europe) are doing exactly what the fascist mobs, both Nazi and Communist, did in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s. It is a joke – a very ugly one –  that they are doing their brutal violent murderous work against peaceful crowds in the name of “anti-fascism”.

17) “Or pick up a baseball bat and take out every f*cking republican and independent I see. #f*cktrump, #f*cktheGOP, #f*ckstraightwhiteamerica, #f*ckyourprivilege.” – Orange is the New Black star Lea DeLaria

18) “I wish they (Republicans) were all f*cking dead!” — Dan Savage

19) “Sarah Palin needs to have her hair shaved off to a buzz cut, get headf*cked by a big veiny, ashy, black d*ck then be locked in a cupboard.” — Azealia Banks advocates raping Sarah Palin over a fake news story.

They claim to have”imagination” while, they say, the Right does not. So there we see what it is they imagine: Jos Whedon’s hilarious dream of the rhino raping and killing Paul Ryan, and Azealia Banks’s wish for Sarah Palin. Behold the Vision!

20)” Yes, I’m angry. Yes, I’m outraged. Yes, I have thought an awful lot about blowing up the White House, but I know that this won’t change anything.” – Madonna

How many others, like yesterday’s would-be killer, take such outbursts to be declarations of war? There are surely more violent attacks to come.

The Left has become a terrorist organization.

Have you heard of the “Secretary of State Project“?  It was an evil conspiracy of the Left (we ask seriously – what plan of the Left is not an evil conspiracy?) to get lefties into the position of Secretary of State in as many states as possible, because where that official runs elections he or she could swing it leftwards – in other words, could cheat.

The good news is that it has to be abandoned.

This is from Front Page, by Matthew Vadum:

A George Soros-backed scheme that paved the way for Al Franken’s 2008 theft of a U.S. Senate seat has collapsed months ahead of the critical November elections.

Rumors of the death of the Secretary of State Project had been circulating for months. Michael Kieschnick, co-founder of the Secretary of State Project, confirmed that his group has shut down in an interview at the recent “Take Back the American Dream” conference in Washington, D.C. …

The idea behind the Secretary of State Project was that in most states the secretary of state runs elections and that a relative pittance can help swing these little-watched state contests, allowing even small donors to play a big role in installing a powerful state official who can tilt the playing field in favor of Democrats. …

The Secretary of State Project’s signature achievement was helping to elect the unethical Saul Alinsky-inspired community organizer Mark Ritchie. Ritchie is the radical, ACORN-loving Minnesota secretary of state who orchestrated Al Franken’s theft of incumbent Republican Norm Coleman’s U.S. Senate seat in the 2008 election cycle. …

The SoS Project endorsed secretary of state candidates who took the position that voter fraud is a myth; that voter suppression is widely and solely used by Republicans; that it’s a waste of time to remove obviously fraudulent names from voter rolls; and that legal requirements that voters show photo identification somehow discriminate against racial minorities.

So the Left accepts that there are fraudulent names on the voter rolls which, it argues, would be “a waste of time to remove”  – and yet it maintains that “voter fraud is a myth“.

Until two years ago the SoS Project was doing well. Before the 2010 cycle it took credit for electing 11 of the 18 left-wingers it endorsed since it began funding candidates in 2006.

But then the cheats found that their scam didn’t work well or often enough.

Then in 2010 disaster struck for Democrats at both the national and state levels. Five out of the SoS Project’s seven official candidates went down to defeat. Only Ritchie and another progressive incumbent, California’s Debra Bowen, stayed afloat in the Republican electoral tsunami. The Secretary of State Project lost its luster and its funding dried up.

Cash for the plot hadn’t been a problem. The great promoter and benefactor of hell on earth, George Soros, had organizations in place which were willing and eager to cough up the lolly.

SoS Project co-founder Kieschnick is a member of the Soros-led Democracy Alliance, a donors’ collaborative established to help Democrats and build left-wing political infrastructure such as pressure groups, media outlets, leadership academies, and think tanks. Democracy Alliance members frequently opened their wallets to help secretary of state candidates endorsed by the Secretary of State Project. …

Another SoS Project co-founder is James Rucker. The former MoveOn organizer also co-founded (with self-described communist Van Jones) Color of Change, a radical Afro-centrist group that organizes boycotts of conservative groups … and smears conservatives and anyone who opposes President Obama’s socialist juggernaut as racist.

Meanwhile, the SoS Project’s friends in leftist groups such as the ACORN-affiliated Project Vote are engaged in a massive assault on electoral integrity through the courts. Project Vote, which used to employ Barack Obama, and other radical organizations are pressuring state officials across America to drop voter fraud investigations.

The SoS Project can be abandoned without a tear dropping from a leftie’s eye, because the mighty and unscrupulous power of the Obama administration is now promoting electoral fraud in the interest of the Democratic Party. And we are all paying for it.

Attorney General Eric Holder is doing everything in his power to ignore wrongdoing on the Left. Holder’s failure to pursue truncheon-wielding New Black Panther Party members who tried to intimidate Philadelphia voters in 2008 is just one example. Holder’s underlings are also opening elections to massive voter fraud. Even after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Indiana’s voter ID law the Department of Justice has blocked voter ID laws in Texas and South Carolina. 

Perhaps the Left no longer needs the Secretary of State Project. After all, you and I as taxpayers are already subsidizing the Left’s crusade against honest elections.

“We are living in a time of Christian persecution unparalleled since the days of Hitler and the Soviet Gulag,” Ken Blackwell writes at Townhall.

It is true that Christians are being persecuted with a persistence and viciousness that may in fact be wholly unparalleled in the history of Christendom. The persecutors are Muslims, chiefly in the Islamic states.

Yet the few Christian leaders who can bring themselves to speak out against the discrimination, threats, violence, forced conversions and murders, blame the Jews. (See here and here and here.)

Are any Muslims being persecuted, tortured, murdered? Yes – not by Christians or Jews, but by other Muslims.

The European once-Christian nations grovel before Islam. Muslims carry out terrorist attacks against the indigenous people, rape insult assault and murder them – and cowardly European governments protect them, even from justified criticism. [See our posts:  The West on trial (December 16, 2009); Freedom versus Islam (January 20, 2010); Civilization on trial (October 11, 2010); An honest confession of hypocrisy (October 23, 2010); The new heresy (January 11, 2011); Darkness descending – again (February 7, 2011);  Protecting Islam from criticism (December 18, 2011); Sharia is the law in Austria (December 25, 2011); Only the gagged may speak freely (December 26, 2011); Darkness imminent (January 8, 2012); The most important struggle of our time (April16, 2012); Marked for death (May 10, 2012); The last days of Europe, (June 9, 2012)]

But the Jews … They may be unjustly criticized, condemned, and reviled. For what? The Jews may have given more (see here and here) to the world proportionate to their numbers than any other nation, but in Europe they are not to be endured. Why? For no other reason (though many more are concocted) than that they have continued maddeningly to exist ever since and despite the advent of Christianity.* Christian belief may fade, but its savage hatred of the Jews lives on. The once-Christian states of Europe, keeping up the venerable tradition even though they have largely given up the faith, continue to persecute them.

This is from Front Page by Giulio Meotti:

While the U.S. is home to many Christian supporters of Israel, the Christian groups more closely linked to global public opinion, bureaucracy, media and legal forums are all violently anti-Israel and anti-Jewish. This month, for example, the Church of England voted to support the boycott movement against Israel.

A special report by the Israeli watchdog NGO Monitor, revealed the huge flux of money that is being provided by European governments for the Church-based efforts to destroy Israel. This development is paving the way for a new Jewish bloodbath through the vehicle of excluding Israel’s Jews from the family of nations.

The Dutch government, for example, grants millions of euros to organizations such as Kerk in Aktie and the Interchurch Organization for Development Cooperation, which support a “general boycott” of Israeli products as per the policy of the Protestant Church of the Netherlands. The Interchurch Organization also received money from the European Union (€5.3 million).

Diakonia, Sweden’s largest humanitarian NGO founded by five Swedish churches (the Alliance Mission, the Baptist Union, InterAct, the Methodist Church and Mission Covenant Church), financed programs “to commemorate the Nakba,” the Palestinian term for “catastrophe” which indicates Israel’s foundation in 1948.

The UK’s Christian Aid and Finland’s FinnChurchAid received millions from the EU to propagate the worst anti-Israel blood libels, including starving, torture, dispossession and siege.

The World Council of Churches, which plays a pivotal role in mobilizing churches in the boycott against Israel, gets annually millions from European taxpayers.

European taxes are used in several ways to fund anti-Semitism of an intensity unseen since Nazi Germany. …

The Palestinian Authority has reported that the EU (41.4 million euros), France (19 million euros) Ireland (5 million euros), Norway (53 million dollars) and the World Bank (40 million dollars) have all given funds to the Palestinian budget, used to pay the families of the “martyrs” (read: suicide bombers) and the 5.500 Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails.

Europe is financing Israel’s destruction also by channeling millions of euros to secular and leftist NGOs. These are just some: Addameer (207.000 $ from Sweden), Al Haq (426.000 $ from Holland, 88.000 $ from bailout-needing Ireland and 156.000 $ from Norway), Al Mezan (105.000 $ from Sweden), Applied Research Institute (374.000 $ from the European Union and 98.000$ from bankrupt Spain), Coalition of Women for Peace (247.000 $ from the European Union) and Troicare (2.000.000 $ from Brussels and 640.000 $ from UK).

There is a fourth way Europe funds Palestinian terrorism and anti-Semitism: books, school textbooks, documentaries, tv channels. This is a kind of “software” of the holy war against the Jews.

According to a report by the Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education, the Palestinian textbooks funded by the European Union incite hatred against Israel: “Palestine” is shown to encompass all the Jewish State, Judaism’s most holy sites (such as the Temple Mount and Rachel’s Tomb) have been erased, the Jews are demonized and Arab “martyrdom” is praised. In these texts, Jews are described as “cunning,” “locusts” and “wild animals.”

Thanks to Arab satellite channels, Hizbullah’s al-Manar and Hamas’s al-Aqsa TV stations can beam their hatred into European living rooms, radicalizing Muslim immigrants throughout the continent. Brussels has never tried to stop this European Jihad TV, ignoring even the massacre of four Jews in southern France last spring by a French Muslim. …

Seventy years ago the Europeans had to round up the Jews and take them to the nearest railway station. Now they just need to finance a textbook, fund a television show and draw a check at a distance of 3.299 km (that between Brussels and Jerusalem). It’s a cleaner and more comfortable anti-Jewish policy that resists any rational exorcism.

We will not be surprised if one day, under the Eurabian banner, the new Europeans will try to expel the descendants of the Holocaust from the land of Israel. This second Shoah will be called “Peace and Love for Palestine.”

*There are Christians who are fully aware that Christianity itself is the root cause of the persistent irrational hatred which came eventually, in the late 19th century, to be called “anti-Semitism”. For example, Professor William Nicholls, an Anglican minister and founder of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of British Columbia, wrote in his book Christian Antisemitism: A History of Hate:

No amount of tolerance and goodwill can obscure the fundamental threat to the Jewish people contained in the heart of traditional Christian belief … [Because] the very presence of the Jewish people in the world… puts a great question mark against Christian belief in a new covenant …

A reviewer of the book, Dave Turner, writes that Nicholls could see no remedy:

Even were all branches of Christianity to agree to somehow moderate the anti-Judaism of the gospels and Paul, is this even possible? These documents … are, after all, considered the inerrant word of God. Unanimity over violating God’s inspired words just for the sake of saving the Jews yet another Holocaust? And assuming a wave of remorse, a universal need to express penance, what then would remain of Christianity if indeed it did agree to do so? According to Nicholls, “Once all the anti-Jewish elements have been removed from Christianity, what is left turns out to be Judaism.”

Which strangely adds up to mean that Christianity is Judaism plus hatred of the Jews!

Dave Turner concludes:

Dr. Nicholls’ book is unrelentingly honest and powerful, a carefully constructed and well-written indictment of a religion that sees itself as embodying the high ideals of “Love, Charity and Forgiveness.” … These ideals … as Dr. Nicholls describes in this volume, clearly … do not apply to the Jews.

Obama is energetically pursuing his policy of making as many Americans as he can dependent on the government.

This is from the Heritage Foundation:

The imperial Presidency has overturned Congress and the law again. Not content to stop at rewriting immigration policy, education policy and energy policy, yesterday, President Obama’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) released an official policy directive rewriting the welfare reform law of 1996. The new policy guts the federal work requirements that were the foundation of the Clinton-era reform. …

Welfare reform replaced the old Aid to Families with Dependent Children with a new program, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). … The whole point was that able-bodied adults should be required to work or prepare for work as a condition of receiving welfare aid.

This reform was very successful. TANF became the only welfare program (out of more than 70) that promoted greater self-reliance. It moved 2.8 million families off the welfare rolls and into jobs so that they were providing for themselves. Child poverty fell, and single-parent employment rose. Recipients were required to perform at least 20–30 hours per week of work or job preparation activities in exchange for the cash benefit.

Now, Obama’s HHS is claiming that it can waive those work requirements that are at the heart of the law, and without Congress’s consent.

When it established TANF, Congress deliberately exempted or shielded nearly all of the TANF program from waiver authority. They explicitly did not want the law to be rewritten at the whim of HHS bureaucrats. In a December 2001, the non-partisan Congressional Research Service clarified that there was no authority to override work and other major requirements…

But that did not stop the Obama Administration, which has been increasing welfare spending at an alarming rate already. President Obama has added millions to the welfare rolls, and his Administration has come under fire lately for its efforts to expand and add more Americans to the food stamp program. …

Over the past two decades, welfare spending has grown more rapidly than Social Security and Medicare, education, and defense. The TANF reform was one small step in the direction of reducing Americans’ dependence on government programs and getting them back on their feet. Cutting its work component is likely to unnecessarily swell the ranks of welfare recipients and with no way to pay for it.

Heritage experts Robert Rector and Kiki Bradley explained further …:

In the past, state bureaucrats have attempted to define activities such as hula dancing, attending Weight Watchers, and bed rest as “work.” These dodges were blocked by the federal work standards. Now that the Obama Administration has abolished those standards, we can expect “work” in the TANF program to mean anything but work. The new welfare dictate issued by the Obama Administration clearly guts the law.

What can be done about a president who breaks the law, whose administration executes his orders in defiance of the legislature?

Will the Supreme Court stop him? Probably not.

This is from Townhall, by Ken Blackwell:

Chief Justice Roberts shows extraordinary deference to the federal government when the actions of the president or Congress are challenged for exceeding federal powers under the authority clauses. …

Part of the consternation from the Obamacare decision was seeing Chief Justice Roberts engage in linguistic gymnastics to ignore Congress’ word choice in writing the statute and the president’s televised vows, upholding the individual mandate as a tax despite 200 years of precedent that penalties are not taxes. …

This reluctance to unapologetically apply judicial review when authority clauses are implicated bodes ill for many current court challenges. There might not be five votes to succeed in challenges to Dodd-Frank, EPA’s cap-and-trade rules, the FCC’s internet-control rules, the recess-appointment challenges, and other power grabs.

Mr. Obama announced on July 6 in Ohio that this election is about a “clash of visions” about the role of government in our lives, arguing for massive entitlements and regulatory controls. If he wins, he will claim a mandate and take federal power to heights we’ve never seen. We can no longer be confident that the Supreme Court will stop him.

Liberty endures only when each branch fully and fearlessly checks and balances the other two branches. Abdicating judicial review empowers President Obama to subvert the Constitution with an imperial presidency, and fundamentally transform the United States to the detriment of future generations.

One remedy of course is to vote Obama out of office.

But if he is not voted out in November, how will the Republic be saved from becoming a full-blown dictatorship?

In an article that makes good sense until the very last sentence, Ken Blackwell writes at Townhall:

The recent high-level comings and goings between Jerusalem and Washington remind us of nothing so much as all those “consultations” between top-level officials of two other democratic allies seventy-six years ago. In 1936, everyone wanted to stop the German army coming into the de-militarized Rhineland, but no one was willing to use force to prevent it. Hitler sensed this weak resolve in the Americans and the British. The Americans were still in the throes of isolationism in 1936. Britain wanted to talk about Hitler’s move into the Rhineland, but it did not want to use force, or even allow the threat of force.  Hitler could smell fear.  …

As the leaders of Russia, China, North Korea, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Iran can sense weak resolve and fear in the US leadership now.

Consider this: Iran has been at war with the U.S. for more than thirty years. When they seized our U.S. Embassy in Tehran in 1979, that was an act of war. When they recruited terrorists to kill 241 U.S. Marines and Navy corpsmen in Beirut in 1983, that, too, was an act of war. 

The Iranians are also at war with Israel. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has publicly said he can foresee a world without the U.S. and Israel. He says Israel should be “wiped off the map,” that the Jewish state is but a “two-bomb country.” What kind of bombs would those be?

U.S. policy makers are desperate, it seems, to dissuade Israel from striking Iran. Gen. Martin Dempsey has been to Israel carrying that warning. Sec. Leon Panetta publicly worries that Israel may be planning a “surprise attack.” In Britain, Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg frets that an Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear weapons installation would be “potentially destabilizing.” 

What, one wonders, does Mr Clegg understand by the word “stable”, if what is happening in the Islamic world seems to him to be stability? And Iran’s threat must be seen as part – the most dangerous part – of the jihad that Islam is waging with ever greater ferocity and determination against the West.

Looking at the chaos, violence, oppression, and tumult throughout the region today, where exactly does the Right Honorable Mr. Clegg see the stability that might become “destabilized”?

As worrisome as an Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities might be, Iran with a nuclear weapon is infinitely more dangerous. …

Israel reminds us that when a nation’s very survival is on the line, that nation will do whatever it must do to meet its sworn enemy. Israel followed the advice of American and British administrations. They urged [Israel] to evacuate Southern Lebanon. Now Hezbollah, supplied by Iran, rules there. Israel withdrew from Gaza. Now, Hamas, another Iranian cat’s paw, holds sway there. The Israelis — prodded by Bill Clinton and the illusory Oslo accords — let Yasser Arafat’s unreformed Palestinian terrorists have “authority” in the West Bank.

Today, surrounded by mortal enemies, with their backs to the wall, Israelis are told to take more “risks for peace” by a US. administration that is outraged by the sight of too many Jews in Jerusalem.

If we wait until the Iranians have sunk their nuclear weapons deep into hardened bunkers it will be too late. The Obama administration will not act in time. Later will be too late.

Israel: Don’t wait; hit the Iranian nuclear facilities now. The world will thank you for it.

The world will thank Israel?

If so, the sun will be blotted out by trillions of flying pigs.

In our post immediately below, The cables show…, we said we were waiting to hear of a single person who has been harmed by the WikiLeaks cables.

Our wait is over.

Ken Blackwell reports in his Townhall column that Hillary Clinton had a very bad week as a direct result of the documents leak.

Even the Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza noticed. He designated Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as having “the worst week in Washington”, a week ago. This is something of a comedown among liberals, who have been fawning over Hillary. …

He notes the damage done to Hillary’s image by the WikiLeaks revelations. Those leaked cables—those undiplomatic diplomatic documents—show what he calls “a chatty and at times petty State Department offering strikingly candid assessments of the relative strengths and weaknesses of various world leaders.”

That is putting it most diplomatically. These leaks are devastating.

As former Speaker Newt Gingrich says, they show an administration wholly incapable of protecting classified documents. Why, Newt asks, does a low-level Army private have access to a quarter million classified documents? Who gave this grunt a security clearance? Former UN Ambassador John Bolton chimes in: This WikiLeaks scandal shows an administration so weak, so disorganized, that it does not understand the first thing about national security.

We’re trying to look sad about Hillary’s distress.

It cannot be said that the mess Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has made of foreign relations amounts to a failure, because it is highly possible that the mess is what Obama wanted her to achieve, in which case it’s a success.

Her latest betrayal of an old ally is in connection with the Falkland Islands, for the retention of which Prime Minister Thatcher fought and won a fierce war with Argentina.

Ken Blackwell writes this about it at Townhall:

During an official visit to Argentina, Mrs. Clinton referred to the Britain’s Falkland Islands as “Las Malvinas–the Argentine name for them. She said the U.S. was willing to mediate the conflicting claims of Argentina and Britain to the collection of rocky crags that have been British since 1833. The Falklands have been British a decade longer than Texas has been American. Argentina still claims these crags–and is even keener to have them back now that oil is rumored to be bubbling beneath the stormy seas of the South Atlantic.

Every one of 3,000 living souls on the Falklands is British–and defiantly so. …

Is the Obama administration determined to undo everything Ronald Reagan accomplished? In 1982, Argentina’s rogue government got into trouble because of its insane economic policies. The military junta then in charge in Buenos Aires in 1982 started yelling “Remember the Malvinas!” They hoped to distract their tormented people from their hardships at home by naked aggression abroad. The Argentine military invaded the sparsely populated Falkland Islands–there are almost 800 of them, most of them uninhabited.

The Argentine junta reckoned without the Iron Lady, Britain’s Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. There was never a doubt that Mrs. Thatcher would respond to this brazen aggression with force.

She quickly assembled and sent to sea a Royal Navy battle fleet. She personally went to the fleet’s embarkation point to see off the young warriors. Not since World War II had Britain’s people been so united about anything. …

The Falklands War was short, sharp, and bloody. …

Thousands of young Argentine draftees, poorly trained, poorly supplied, and even more poorly led, were quickly rounded up on the islands. Britain lost 255 dead in this war while 649 Argentines were needlessly sacrificed to the Buenos Aires dictators’ vainglory. As a result of this humiliating defeat, Gen. Leopoldo Galtieri and his fellow thugs were soon sent packing.

Back then, the Reagan administration quietly but firmly backed Britain with critical intelligence and re-fueling stations. But now, we face another possible crisis over the Falklands. And all because of Hillary Clinton’s clumsy attempt at “even-handedness”–which is in fact ham-handedness.

Britain loyally supported us in Iraq. She is our strongest ally in Afghanistan. Tied down fighting at our side, Britain would be hard-pressed to eject the Argentines should the left-wing government of President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner decide once again to invade the homes of those staunchly British Falklanders. …

The Argentines are crowing over the Clinton Coup. He’s never seen “such substantial support” from the U.S., says Argentina’s Ambassador in Washington Hector Timerman. Buenos Aires’ official mouthpiece, Ruperto Godoy called Mrs. Clintons’ comments “very significant, very important.”

Blackwell recalls some other notable failures/successes:

Hillary’s comments are indeed significant. She is buying trouble for us around the globe. From a failed “Re-Set” button with the Russians, to a dangerous appeasement of Iran and China, from bribing the PLO on the West Bank with $900 million to shutting down missile defense for Eastern European democracies, from siding with the dictator in Honduras, to opening the door to a second Falklands War, this administration’s foreign policy is in shambles. And we’re only 14 months into it.