SHOT: Democrats Target Suburban Voters In Key Battlegrounds.

CHASER:

“Vote for me, you planet-killing racist, so I can take away your stuff” doesn’t seem like a winning message to me.

SPENCER MORRISON ON Jobs vs. Chinese Imports.

HEINLEIN’S CRAZY YEARS (CONT’D): Penis ring toss, lubricant taste tests featured at public university’s sex ed carnival. “Genitalia is not an indicator of gender and it can be harmful to assume so.”

Oy.

DIVINE RIGHT AND THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY:

The American polity, like a magnet, is polarized because it has two poles, for which the Republican and Democratic parties are rough proxies. Why does the United States have two political poles? Because it has two major political tendencies. Goldberg and Greenberg write of polarization, but they do not believe in it. They do not understand the United States as having two legitimate competing political camps but as suffering from a kind of infection in the form of the Republican party, which inhibits the normal and healthy — meaning Democrat-dominated — political life of the United States. They believe that something they call the “New America” has an unquestionable natural moral right to rule and that the Republican party is not a competing pole but a blockage. To write as Greenberg does that the Democratic party is to be liberated by the practical elimination of the Republican party, and hence able to operate unencumbered, is to embrace not only the end of the GOP but the end of ordinary political opposition.

Well, that’s their goal.

HOW ELSE WILL THEY PROVE THEY’RE ELIGIBLE FOR THE FREE HEALTH CARE? Buttigieg: Illegal Immigrants Should Be Able to Obtain National ID Cards.

JOEL KOTKIN: American Renewal: The Real Conflict Is Not Racial Or Sexual, It’s Between The Ascendant Rich Elites And The Rest Of Us.

Despite the media’s obsession on gender, race and sexual orientation, the real and determining divide in America and other advanced countries lies in the growing conflict between the ascendant upper class and the vast, and increasingly embattled, middle and working classes.

We’ve seen this fight before. The current conflict fundamentally reprises the end of the French feudal era, where the Third Estate, made up of the commoners, challenged the hegemony of the First Estate and Second, made up of the church and aristocracy.

These dynamics are unsettling our politics to the core. Both the gentry left, funded largely by Wall Street and Silicon Valley, and the libertarian right, have been slow to recognize that they are, in de Tocqueville’s term, “sitting on a volcano ready to explode.” The middle class everywhere in the world, notes a recent OECD report, is under assault, and shrinking in most places while prospects for upward mobility for the working class also declines.

The anger of the Third Estate, both the growing property-less Serf class as well as the beleaguered Yeomanry, has produced the growth of populist, parties both right and left in Europe, and the election of Donald Trump in 2016.

Spoiler: The media focuses on those other things to distract people from the real divide.

Related: Trump is a symptom of a new kind of class warfare raging at home and abroad: “But the New Class isn’t limited to communist countries, really. Around the world in the postwar era, power was taken up by unelected professional and managerial elites. To understand what’s going on with President Donald Trump and his opposition, and in other countries as diverse as France, Hungary, Italy and Brazil, it’s important to realize that the post-World War II institutional arrangements of the Western democracies are being renegotiated, and that those democracies’ professional and managerial elites don’t like that very much, because they have done very well under those arrangements. And, like all elites who are doing very well, they don’t want that to change.”

Also: When Rulers Despise The Ruled. “If the rulers feel neither loyalty nor empathy toward the ruled, the ruled can be expected to return the favor.”

THE ONLY THING SCARIER TO THE DEMS WOULD BE IF HE WENT DRESSED AS “CLEANED UP VOTER ROLES” AND “VOTER IDENTITY AND ELIGIBILITY VERIFICATION”:  Trump Truths: Terrify.

AND THIS IS WHY THEY CAN’T HAVE OUR GUNS. ALSO, OUR LEGISLATORS COULD MAKE ANYONE MENTALLY ILL. I DON’T FEEL SO GOOD MYSELF: Link of the Day: Sadly, Not Satire.

“Doctor, is the veil of red that descends over my vision when I read stuff like this normal?”

CAN SOMEONE REMIND THEM WHAT “MENTALLY ILL” MEANT IN THE SOVIET UNION?  White House Considers Plan To Spy On ‘Mentally Ill’ In Effort To Stop Shootings.

DID THEY RUN OUT OF STEAK KNIVES? NO WONDER THEIR “ELITES” THINK THEY CAN COUNTERVENE THE PEOPLE:  British Police Pleased With Seizing BB Guns.

YEAH. AFTER ALL THE WHOLE PURPOSE  OF THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE IS NOT TO LET CALIFORNIA GOVERN US. NEITHER SHOULD THEIR COURT SYSTEM:  Republican Lawmakers Introduce Bill to End Nationwide Legal Injunctions.

BREATHES THERE ONE HUMAN TO WHOM THIS IS A SURPRISE?  How Obama’s Iran Deal Funded Terrorism.

IN MEMORY OF COLONEL CYRIL RICHARD “RICK” RESCORLA AMERICAN HERO: Men of Harlech.

MOSTLY THEY HATE THEMSELVES, BUT THEY AREN’T EVEN AS SELF-AWARE AS HAMLET, SO THEY MUST TURN THEIR SUICIDAL URGES ON THE REST OF US:  The impenetrable, gloomy rage of the Democrat presidential candidates.

GOOD:  Son of 9/11 Victim Takes on Rep. Ilhan Omar for Her “Some people who did something” Comment.

SOME KEYBOARDS THAT ROUTINELY TYPE THAT GUNS KILL PEOPLE ARE AT IT AGAIN:  9/11 and the NY Times: the airplanes were the guilty parties.

LOOK, JUST LOOK HOW SHOCKED MY FACE IS:  Elizabeth Warren Lined Campaign Pockets With Big Donor Cash Prior to Presidential Run.

THIS. AND THE LIES AND COVER-UP AFTERWARDS. I STILL SEE RED WHEN I REMEMBER:  The Other 9/11 Anniversary: Four Killed in Benghazi on Sept. 11, 2012.

GOOD: GOP Gay Club Owner to Challenge Congressman Castro in 2020.

UNDER PRESSURE: With States and the Feds Investigating Google and Facebook, the Legal Pressure Is Ramping Up.

JERRY BOWYER: Flight 93, The Crater, And The Open Book.

AN OLDIE BUT A GOODIE: Hijackers Surprised To Find Selves In Hell.

SOMETHING I WROTE IN 2002: American Dunkirk.

People at Ground Zero, the Manhattan Waterfront, nearby New Jersey, Staten Island and Brooklyn waterfronts, and crews on the numerous vessels repeatedly used the phrases “just amazing,” “everyone cooperated, and “just doing what it took” to describe maritime community responses. Individuals stepped up and took charge of specific functions, and captains and crews from other companies took their direction. . . . Private maritime operators kept their vessels onsite and available until Friday, Day Four, when federal authorities took over.

“Day Four, when federal authorities took over.”

WHAT IF WE DON’T WANT OUR MINDS “REPROGRAMMED” TO SUIT THE NEED OF NEUROTICS TO FEEL IMPORTANT?

OPEN THREAD.