SHE WHO MUST NOT BE NAMED…

Guess who was on the Wal-Mart board for many years while it sold such merch? #SheWhoMustNotBeNamed https://t.co/3QFMQTdLsq

— Just Karl (@justkarl) June 23, 2015

.@Walmart​ will remove all Confederate flag merchandise from its stores, the company says. http://t.co/O3H6XV2ppK pic.twitter.com/rSToCBKwWs

— CNN (@CNN) June 22, 2015

…And never will be, by the MSM, Democratic operatives with bylines, as the vacationing InstaProfessor likes to say.

SCHLICHTER THESIS CONFIRMED:

Shot:

● Sexy Conservatives Will Out-Breed Barren Liberals

—Kurt Schlichter, Townhall, April 20, 2015.

Chaser:

● HuffPo Writer Refusing To Have Children So She Doesn’t Spread Her White Privilege “Biologically”…

—Weasel Zippers, yesterday.

THAT WAS FAST — THE ERA OF BIG PROGRESSIVISM IS OVER: In July of 2007 during a CNN/YouTube-sponsored Democrat presidential debate, Hillary Clinton was asked, “how would you define the word ‘liberal’? And would you use this word to describe yourself?” She responded, “I prefer the word ‘progressive,’ which has a real American meaning, going back to the progressive era at the beginning of the 20th century.”

Flash-forward eight years, and Dana Milbank of the Washington Post now claims, “Liberal is no longer a dirty word:”

Since the 1988 presidential campaign, when George H.W. Bush and Lee Atwater turned “Massachusetts liberal” into an epithet, the label has been tainted — so much so that many liberals abandoned it for “progressive.”

But new polling shows a significant increase in the number of Americans who describe themselves as liberal and the number of Americans taking liberal positions on issues. Gallup has found the percentage of Americans calling themselves social liberals has equaled the percentage of social conservatives for the first time since pollsters began asking the question in 1999 (when 39 percent identified as conservative and 21 percent as liberal). Democrats are more likely to call themselves liberal and Republicans are less likely to embrace the “conservative” description, opting instead for moderate.

As Jazz Shaw writes in response at Hot Air:

To see what a mixed bag this is in terms of definitions you need to wind the calendar back quite a ways. The emergence of a widely accepted definition of classical liberalism is found back in the 19th century and it was highlighted in the works of authors such as John Locke and Adam Smith and Thomas Hobbes. There was certainly a flavor of hey, do your own thing, baby to the movement, but it was grounded in the idea that your thing should be taking place in a well defined and suitably defended country. Beyond that, the classical liberal actually wanted government to stay out of your way as long as you weren’t hurting anyone else. (Sound familiar?) Hobbes wrote at length about the idea that one of the key functions of government was to protect us from each other. His fellow classical liberal authors believed strongly in the free market and the idea that the individual should be free to work for the highest paying employer and that competition was good. Most of these ideas are foreign concepts to modern liberals and would quickly send them to the fainting couch.

Of course “Progressivism” prior to World War II did have “a real American meaning” as Hillary said, though it’s probably one she’d much prefer forgotten: it stood for big government statism, racialism, and eugenics. As Fred Siegel of the Manhattan Institute wrote in The Revolt Against the Masses, his history of 20th century leftism, it became such a reviled word during World War I as a result of the Wilson administration’s crackdown on free speech (and to a lesser extent due to his rampant racism), self-described progressives resorted in the early 1920s to stealing the L-word away from classical liberals and appropriating for themselves. It seems a similar reaction to “Progressivism” as a result of the two terms of the Obama administration is forcing Milbank and other “Progressives” to revert back yet again to calling themselves liberals.

Rinse and repeat, apparently endlessly.

TERRY TEACHOUT: Twitter, in four sentences.

COMING SOON, A ROBOT TO MOW YOUR LAWN: The WaPo’s Andrea Peterson reports on how John Deere, not Google, is the real leader in self-driving vehicles.

Some farmers aren’t shy about their enthusiasm for the tech – even uploading videos showing it off online. One appears to show a tractor hauling a planter making a tightly choreographed turn without a driver in the cab. In another, the driver takes pictures, throws paper airplanes and balances a water bottle on his nose before appearing to nod off while the tractor keeps working his field.

The systems come with their own risks, including concerns that they could be hacked. But because farm-equipment makers operate almost exclusively on private land, they’ve been able to bring products to market much quicker than consumer automakers – and without the same level of regulatory scrutiny.

[youtube Qg4Ju1l75mc]

ONE OF THE ADVANTAGES OF BEING UP LATE: is that I can post some seriously weird stuff with the excuse I’m slap happy.  Right? Velociprincess.

WELL, IT’S BOULDER: Moose on the loose in downtown Boulder, not fazed by police.  It’s actually stranger that no one offered the moose a joint.

WILL GREECE TILT TOWARD MOSCOW? Probably not. But it wouldn’t be out of character.

OF COURSE THEY DO:  Reports downplay key Hillary aide’s role in suppressing State Dept. investigations.

JORGE LUIS BORGES THOUGHT IT WAS THE MOST DISPENSABLE BOOK EVER WRITTEN: Terry Gilliam Makes Seventh Attempt at “Don Quixote” Movie. Nobody expects the Don Quixote movie, I guess?

PREPARE FOR LIFE AFTER THE NATIONAL RAISIN RESERVE: How can we hope to survive?

NEXT THEY’LL WANT YOU TO SURRENDER YOUR TEETH AND YOUR FISTS:  British Police Call On Nation To ‘Save a Life, Surrender Your Knife’ As ‘Knife Violence’ Continues. You can never be safe enough. Also, reality seems determined to put the Onion out of business.

JAMES HORNER, COMPOSER FOR STAR TREK II & III, TITANIC,  BRAVEHEART, AND AVATAR DIES IN SINGLE-ENGINE PLANE CRASH.

JURASSIC WORLD CALLED “RACIST” OVER DINOSAUR NAME:

A British comedian originally brought attention to the line, offering a tongue-in-cheek rant against the dinosaur’s name. However, people did not get the joke, and are actually calling the film racist.

During the course of the film, the Pachycephalosaurus escape from their enclosures, leading one character to shout, “The Pachys are out of containment!” This has led news outlets and Twitter users to call the film “racist.”

The Independent called the line “very racist.” The Huffington Post called it “accidental racism.” Yahoo News called it “unintentional, but very racist.” The Irish Examiner called it “unintentional racism.”

If everything is racist, that is, if everything can be weaponized by its enemies as being racist, than nothing is racist. Of course, a very different group of animatronic monsters had the very best response to this topic years ago.

FIRE INTERN MAX BLOOM ON “SAFE SPEECH“:

I’m a student at the University of Chicago, and my experience has been that dialogue works well on a small scale. Get the Marxist and the laissez-faire economics student (both of whom who are in full force at the university) in a small room and you’ll get a hell of a debate. But on a larger scale, there’s relatively little interest in debating something like the matter of global Islam or whether slurs should be reclaimed, particularly in public forums. While there are probably many reasons for this, I have heard from a number of students that they feel wary commenting on divisive issues because they worry that other individuals will label their speech personally objectionable or harmful, at which point the speaker knows that she will either have to back down or be ostracized and condemned for harming other students.

WHAT HAS SHE DONE FOR ANYONE? What did Hillary do for oppressed gays while Secretary of State?

AT AMAZON, New Releases on Blu-Ray and DVD.

CHINA’S DOG MEAT FESTIVAL is raising hackles inside and outside of China.

“There are all sorts of cultural norms about what you can eat, you eat turkey, so why are you trying to force us to not eat dog meat?” shouted one dog meat supporter.

“It’s healthy, just like raising pigs or chickens, it’s fine,” said Teng Jianyi, as he tucked into a dog dish with some friends.

These things really are relative. Some in India are appalled that the rest of us eat cows. So how about a compromise? We won’t tell you to stop eating dogs if you won’t tell us to stop being horrified that you eat dogs.

IS THIS SUPPOSED TO BE SOME KIND OF A JOKE? Beijing insists that its controversial expansion into the South China Sea is simply to acquire better weather forecasts.

LAYERS AND LAYERS OF FACT-CHECKERS AND EDITORS: How a 16-year-old tricked the New York Times into reporting that Dylann Roof blogged about “My Little Pony.”

(Via ‏@DefendWallSt.)

TURKEY’S CREEPJOB OF A PRIME MINISTER is furious about Kurdish gains against ISIS in Syria.

He’s not on board with ISIS ideologically, but he’s more freaked out by Kurdish indepenence right now than anything else since roughly 25 percent of Turkey’s population is Kurdish. From his point of view, ISIS is the lesser of evils. President Obama says he expects “deeper cooperation” from Turkey, but even he must know at this late date that we are not going to get it.

REASON DIDN’T “STAND ALONE,” but some people were very, very quiet. Contrary to the impression co-guest blogger Randy Barnett got, numerous media outlets and individual journalists, from across the political spectrum, supported Reason against the overreaching subpoena for its commenters’ identities. Some wrote articles and others supportively tweeted links to Popehat’s posts and my Bloomberg View column. On the radio, Reason‘s cause garnered sympathetic coverage from both NPR and Rush Limbaugh, thanks to guest host Mark Steyn. It was covered well on major tech sites. Patrick of Popehat compiled a partial list of coverage here; see the comments for additions. But the issue definitely received more attention in the online media than in the traditional print press, and notably silent voices included the editorial pages of the New York Times, the Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal, which surely wasn’t reserving its concerns for a Republican administration. Some of the indifference surely reflects political tribalism, some reflects insider-outsider status, and some I’m sure comes from the the fundamental difficulty of covering a story when the people involved are forbidden to talk to the press.

WALMART IS REMOVING ALL CONFEDERATE FLAG MERCHANDISE FROM ITS STORES. “We never want to offend anyone with the products that we offer.”

AT AMAZON, Coupons Galore in Pet Supplies.

Plus, Outlet Deals in GPS and Navigation.

DALEK AND THE DOMINOES: “Im-per-son-ate! Angry dwarf is jailed after sticking a sucker dart on his head and pretending to be a Dalek in row which led to him being Tasered twice by police:”

An angry dwarf has been jailed after sticking a sucker dart on his head and threatening to kill two carers while impersonating a Doctor Who Dalek.

Ian Salter-Bromley, 55, filled his mouth with dominoes before shouting ‘Exterminate! Exterminate!’ in a row which led to him being Tasered twice by police.

Oh, to be in England when the angry dwarf Daleks in wheelchairs duel with the authorities…