VICTOR DAVIS HANSON:  The First–and a Half–Amendment.

Among those who attack free expression the most loudly are progressives who do not like politically incorrect speech that does not further their own agendas. The term “illegal alien,” an exact description of foreign nationals who entered and reside in the United States without legal sanction, is now nearly taboo. The effort to ban the phrase is not because it is hateful or inaccurate, but because it does not euphemistically advance the supposedly noble cause of amnesties and open borders. Of course, the politically correct restrictionists have no compunction about smearing their critics with slurs such as xenophobe, racist, or nativist.

Yep–totalitarians do that sort of thing.

BECAUSE #DIVERSITY!:  And, you know, #tolerance!  A thought police diversity officer at Goldsmiths, University of London has once again revealed the modern progressive movements’ ugly, racist core.  I wrote about Bahar Mustafa’s nasty “no white males allowed” event at the university before.  In response to the outrage Mustafa’s previous comments triggered, she now defends herself thus:

WISCONSIN SUPREME COURT IN “TURMOIL”:   So says Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice N. Patrick Crooks, in a letter to U.S. District Judge James Peterson, who is overseeing former Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson’s divisive and frivolous lawsuit against her fellow Justices. Crooks’ unusual letter to the presiding judge comes as a response to fellow Justice Ann Walsh Bradley’s recent affidavit filed in the case, in which Bradley (a fellow liberal) supports Abrahamson’s lawsuit and asserts the court is in “upheaval” because of uncertainty over who is Chief Justice of the court.

On April 29, 4 out of 7 Wisconsin Supreme Court Justices voted to oust Abrahamson as Chief Justice and replace her with Justice Patience Roggensack.  The Justices’ power to elect their own Chief Justice is a new power, conferred by the voters of Wisconsin by a 2014 referendum.

It’s unclear what relief Crooks’ was seeking.  He wrote to Judge Peterson,“I know that you are well aware of your authority to act based on your equitable powers. I respectfully request that you exercise such powers to set forth such a transitional plan, in order to address the chaotic situation that exists.”  Just what “equitable” relief Crooks thinks Peterson should exercise is unclear, though presumably it would not include a preliminary injunction against enforcement of the referendum, as Abrahamson has requested.  Judge Peterson has already denied Abrahamson’s request for a temporary restraining order against the new law.

If Judge Peterson is smart, he will grant the State’s motion to dismiss Abrahamson’s lawsuit with prejudice.

Stay tuned.

DEMOCRATS CAN’T GO TO THE DOGS:   The Blue Dogs, that is.  Emma Dumain at Roll Call has an interesting 20-year retrospective on the Blue Dog Coalition of Democrats in the House.   The Blue Dogs formally began in 1994, as a group of 23 conservative-moderate Southern Democrats.  Dumain observes that today’s Blue Dogs are trying to save the Democrat Party from its radical, progressive ideology:

In 2014, when Republicans shrunk Democratic numbers to their lowest since the end of World War II, a similar faction of fiscally conservative House Democrats came to a similar conclusion: The party’s progressives weren’t speaking to moderate voters.

The current political environment, with its ongoing debate over how Democrats can win elections and ugly fights over the “soul” of the party, makes for interesting parallels to what was going on 20 years ago, when the Blue Dog Coalition was born.

“We’ve learned the same lesson — at least some of us have learned the same lesson,” said Blue Dog Chairman Kurt Schrader, D-Ore. “You can’t continue to ignore big chunks of the American voter because you have certain ideological ideas.”

After 20 years, the Blue Dogs insist their mission is the same — they’re just trying to save the Democratic Party from itself.

Yeah, good luck with that.  The current Democrat Party has no soul, other than “win at all costs.”  While I empathize with the Blue Dogs’ alienation in an Obama-worshipping progressive Democrat Party, their effort to “repackage” their party as “moderate” is putting the cart before the horse in today’s political environment. Before they can convince Southern moderates–particularly white males–that the Democrat party “speaks” for them, the Democrat Party needs to actually speak for them–and at the very least stop being openly hostile to them.

I used to work on the Hill for a Southern Democrat from Texas who, while not a Blue Dog, was truly a moderate.  But that was back in the day, when the Democrat Party was a big tent, that welcomed even (gasp!) conservatives and moderates, at least on fiscal issues.  Those days are long gone, and will continue to be until the Democrat Party stops being the party of division and -isms (racism, sexism, genderism, classism, etc.) and starts putting the interest of America first.  I’m not confident they’re capable of doing this anytime soon, given that their 2016 presidential candidates– Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders–are already pledging fidelity to the “divide and conquer” strategy that has worked so effectively for Obama.

For the indefinite future, the Blue Dogs are stuck in the Democrat dog house.

A NATION OF LAWS, NOT MEN:   Except, of course, if you’re a progressive.  If you are a progressive, you write things such as Jim Newell’s Salon hatchet piece on the Supreme Court, Supreme Court’s grand ruse ends: Finally Americans see the justices for the hacks they are.  Because, you know, law is politics, in the eyes of a progressive.

DEAR CLASS OF 2015:  You’re in big trouble.  “The primary reason why today’s graduates face a daunting future: Government is making life more difficult for you.”  Uh-huh.

WHEN IN DOUBT, BLAME FOX NEWS:  At this morning’s Catholic-Evangelical Leadership Summit at Georgetown, President Obama once again blamed Fox News, asserting that if we want to change poverty,“We’re going to have to change how the media reports on these issues.”  Obama’s logic proceeded as follows:

I think there’s been an effort to either make folks mad at folks at the top or be mad at folks at the bottom. And I think the effort to suggest that the poor are sponges, leeches, don’t want to work, are lazy, are undeserving got traction. And look, it’s still being propagated. I mean, I have to say that if you watch Fox News on a regular basis, it is a constant menu — they will find folks who make me mad. I don’t know where they find them. They’re all like, ‘I don’t want to work. I just want a free Obamaphone,’ or whatever.

Well, as my grandma used to say, isn’t that the pot calling the kettle black?  (and no, that’s not racist!).  How very astute of President Obama to observe that making “folks” mad at the “folks on the top,” or vice versa, is incredibly counter-productive and indeed, destructive.  He should know: He (and his progressive henchmen, such as Al Sharpton, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, and the like) are quite adept at this tactic.  Just ask Mitt Romney.  Because, you know, successful people “didn’t build that.”

I don’t recall who said it, but someone once said something along the lines of “he who criticizes others often reveals what he himself lacks.”  Yep.

A CULTURE OF BOYS WITHOUT DADS:  Ken Blackwell and Roy Schwarzwalder have a compelling op-ed in TownHall today, discussing the elephant in the room that progressives don’t want to acknowledge:  the importance of fatherhood.

Fatherhood is in crisis all across the country. . . . Nationwide, only 17 percent of African-American children reach 17 in a family with their married biological parents. . . .Clearly, the solution is healthy marriage and strong families. As Jason L. Riley writes in the Wall Street Journal[wsj.com], “In 2012 the poverty rate for all blacks was more than 28 percent, but for married black couples it was 8.4% and has been in the single digits for two decades. Just 8 percent of children raised by married couples live in poverty, compared with 40% of children raised by single mothers.

As one of us (Blackwell), wrote with Pat Fagan last year in The Washington Times[frc.org], “Marriage is the greatest ‘program’ to end poverty, child abuse, child sexual abuse, school dropout, college failure, health problems, drug problems, depression, out-of-wedlock births to teenagers, reduce abortions, increase homeownership and savings … We know that when you remove marriage as a factor, there is virtually no difference between whites and blacks on graduation, employment and staying out of jail.”

Exactly.  There is nothing as powerful for the welfare of children than an intact family.  But even if the parents do not wish to be (or remain) married, having the constant presence of both a loving mother and father is probably the single most important predictor of the trajectory of a child’s life.

Fathers matter tremendously, and if progressives such as President Obama really “cared” about the black community, they would emphasize this message over and over again.  Instead, when faced with the fact that 73 percent of black children are born out-of-wedlock (versus 29 percent for whites and 17 percent for Asians), we hear crickets, or worse, howls of indignation from progressives, such as a recent piece posted at ThinkProgress, which proclaimed, “there’s compelling evidence that number of black dads living apart from their kids stems from structural systems of inequality and poverty, not the unfounded assumption that African-American men somehow place less value on parenting.”   Or this wisdom from a Washington Post blogger:

If black boys pulled their pants up, then are they more likely to find a job or less likely to be racially profiled? If they just finished school, then could they avoid the cradle to prison pipeline? If African Americans detached from hip-hop culture, stopped having babies out of wedlock and kept their neighborhoods clean, then would racism and social inequality finally end in America?

These questions are beside the point.  Does anyone doubt that a young black man (or white, or any other race) who has a good father/male role model in his life will be more likely to find a job, finish school, and avoid having children out of wedlock or ending up in prison?  The cause of these ills isn’t racism; it’s a cultural divide that causes young black men (or white, or any other race) from the lower socio-economic class  to reject the cultural values of higher socio-economic classes, such as marriage, education and work.  So much of what progressives call “racism” today is, in fact, culturalism.  If we want to have an “honest discussion” about race, we need to start talking about culture.

A PC MILITARY:  Former Army intelligence officer Ray Starmann at Daily Caller has an oped, “Political Correctness has Destroyed the Army’s Readiness and Morale.”  His thesis:

The U.S. Army is facing its greatest danger as an institution since the 1970’s. Stricken with morale and readiness problems, it is also under attack from leftist social engineers who are determined to remake the Army, even if they have to destroy it.

Yikes.

SOME LIBERALS GET IT:   . . . but progressives never will.  Kirsten Powers has a Daily Beast piece, “How Liberals Ruined College” in which she acknowledges (as the subject of her new book) that the academy is a festering pile of progressive intolerance:

On today’s campuses, left-leaning administrators, professors, and students are working overtime in their campaign of silencing dissent, and their unofficial tactics of ostracizing, smearing, and humiliation are highly effective. But what is even more chilling—and more far reaching—is the official power they abuse to ensure the silencing of views they don’t like. They’ve invented a labyrinth of anti-free speech tools that include “speech codes,” “free speech zones,” censorship, investigations by campus “diversity and tolerance offices,” and denial of due process. They craft “anti-harassment policies” and “anti-violence policies” that are speech codes in disguise. 

Indeed.  It’s getting scary.  Just as the Phi Delta Theta fraternity members who were recently suspended from Washburn University’s chapter over text messages that made (gasp!) sexual comments about women and girls.

UPDATE:  Fixed broken link.  :)

CANADIAN “FREE” SPEECH:  Canadian government weighing hate speech charges against those who boycott Israel.  Allahpundit asks, “I wonder how Canadian law would treat a boycott of a Christian-owned business organized by gay-rights activists if the proprietor refused to cater a gay wedding.”  Oh, what a tangled web progressives weave, when they allow proscription of “hate” speech.  Thankfully, the First Amendment to our Constitution doesn’t have a hate speech exception. Yet.

UPDATE:  A website called Honest Reporting Canada claims that the story is a “bizarre conspiracy theory.”

OBAMA-McCONNELL THE NEW ODD COUPLE?:  That’s what Senate Majority Leader McConnell told an audience today in Boston.  Apparently, President Obama is passing sweet little handwritten notes to his new beau, McConnell.  They both strike me as a couple of Felixes, though.

ABORTION SCIENCE DENIERS:  Jonathan Tobin has a piece in Commentary pointing out the obvious anti-science position of defenders of late-term abortions.

[A] new study published in the New England Journal of Medicine illustrates that those decrying the effort to oppose late term abortions as a right-wing “war on women” are not only on questionable moral ground but also disregarding scientific facts about premature babies. According to the Journal, it is now clear that babies born at 22 or 23 weeks into pregnancy have a decent chance to survive if given treatment. Those born at 23 weeks are even more likely to live with half doing so without significant problems. This is good news for families but as even the New York Times tacitly admitted in its story about the report, it is bad news for those on the left who have been fighting efforts in state legislatures to ban late term abortions.

Toobin doesn’t discuss it, but advances in care for very premature babies has pushed back the point of “viability”–survival outside the mother’s womb–that the Supreme Court has designated as its Maginot Line in its abortion jurisprudence since Planned Parenthood v. Casey.  As the point of viability moves backward–now around 22 weeks’ gestation–the States’ ability to ban abortions expands. It has not expanded so far, however, as to sustain laws that ban all abortions after 20 weeks’ gestation, as the Ninth Circuit recently held in Horne v. Isaacson, with the Supreme Court denying review.

HEH:  Antarctic ice so thick scientists have trouble getting there.  You know, because of global warming climate change.

SUPER SIZED:  A new USDA study finds 40% of food stamp recipients are obese.  Another 28% are overweight.  The same basic data holds for children as well as adults.  Republican efforts to block food stamps from being used to buy junk food have all failed.  A 2007 USDA report concluded that trying to restrict food stamp recipients to “healthy” food choices would not work, for various lame-to-semi-lame reasons.

A list of eligible food stamp purchases can be found here.  

So how can American taxpayers stop the train wreck of obesity for this population?  Obamacare has tons of grant money to improve “wellness” in poor communities.  None of it has worked. Why not government subsidized gym memberships, too, because #incomeinequality!

I’d rather pay for gym membership than Ho-Hos, it’s true. But given that we cannot seem to stop subsidizing bad food choices, it would be great to offset those bad choices with increased exercise.  But how?  Clearly, the answer isn’t a gym membership subsidy.  In Canada, they have had a Children’s Fitness Tax Credit (CFTC) since 2007, to promote physical activity and reduce obesity. A recent study concluded, “The estimated costs of the tax-based programs in Canada are substantial; therefore, it is important to consider whether those public funds are better spent on other strategies that could instead provide direct public funding to improve recreational facilities and active transportation networks or to enhance physical activity programs in schools.”

Ya think?  Tax credits, subsidizing gym membership and other government “solutions” will never work.  The only thing that government should spend any money on is P.E./sports in school, and some parks to provide space for sporting venues.  You need to get kids to like exercise, which requires making it part of their daily habit and providing lots of school sports to play. Sadly, kids don’t really have P.E. in schools anymore— yet another failure of modern education.  There is an important mind-body connection, and when the latter is out-of-shape, the former will be as well.

One of the reasons P.E. has been jettisoned is because No Child Left Behind–what I think is better labeled as No Child Gets Ahead–mandates so much time for test preparation that schools have had to cut back on “non-instructional” items such as P.E.   NCLB has been a dismal failure.  It was instituted by Republicans during the George W. Bush Administration, but it’s obsessive emphasis on standardized testing has meant that teachers teach only to “the test,” and have time for nothing more. Under NCLB, poorly performing students don’t “get ahead,” and gifted students are “left behind.”

It would be great to repeal NCLB entirely, as Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has recently supported.  Republicans need to admit failure here as well.  But until we can muster the courage to do so, I say we at least bring back one hour of P.E. per day, and make them actually exercise!

HEH:  Carly Fiorina buys HillaryClinton.net.  She’s also bought SethMeyers.org and ChuckTodd.org, after both men lambasted Fiorina for failing to register CarlyFiorina.org.  They all redirect to CarlyforPresident.com.  I like her.  She fights.

OBERLIN CHOIR SINGS THE TRUTH:  I love these kids.  I laughed.  I cried.  The Oberlin College Choir has a song about “the real world,” in response to the “trigger warnings” and “safe spaces” idiocy of Oberlin feminist snowflakes who became verklempt over Christina Hoff Sommers’ recent lecture there.

If one of these young people applies to your business for a summer job, hire them.

SAUDIS SNUB OBAMA:  Saudi King Salman has pulled out of an Arab summit hosted by King President Obama on Thursday. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Nayif will attend instead.  Obama had planned one-on-one time with King Salman, so his pullout suggests tension with the Obama Administration. Bahrainian King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa also pulled out on Sunday.

The invited nations are members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), which includes Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. According to the White House announcement of the summit issued on April 17, “The gathering will be an opportunity for the leaders to discuss ways to enhance their partnership and deepen security cooperation.” A key item on the agenda was discussion of the nuclear deal with Iran.

Guess the Saudis don’t want to waste their time discussing a nuclear deal they know will ineluctably lead to a nuclear Iran, and they have already signaled an intent to developing their own nuclear arsenal in response.  Way to go, Obama: We are now facing a nuclear arms race in the Middle East.  I’m sure that will work out just fine.

REPORT: OBAMA LIED ABOUT BIN LADEN RAID:  So says Seymour Hersh, writing in the London Review of Books.  Well, he lies about everything else, so what’s one more?

THE OPPRESSION NARRATIVE:  It’s coming to a high school near you, if it hasn’t already.  The new AP US History (APUSH) exam is the product of the same progressive ideologues as Common Core.  According to Stanley Kurtz, a Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, the new exam rewrites U.S. history, deemphasizing American exceptionalism and constitutionalism, and exchanging it for a story of oppression, balkanization based on race, class and gender, and emphasizing “global” citizenship.  Take a look at the “learning objective” themes of the APUSH now:

Theme: Identity  This theme focuses on the formation of both American national identity and group identities in U.S. history. Students should be able to explain how various identities, cultures, and values have been preserved or changed in different contexts of U.S. history, with special attention given to the formation of gender, class, racial, and ethnic identities. Students should be able to explain how these sub-identities have interacted with each other and with larger conceptions of American national identity.

Theme:  Work, Exchange & Technology  This theme focuses on the development of American economies based on agriculture, commerce, and manufacturing. Students should examine ways that different economic and labor systems, technological innovations, and government policies have shaped American society. Students should explore the lives of working people and the relationships among social classes, racial and ethnic groups, and men and women, including the availability of land and labor, national and international economic developments, and the role of government support and regulation.

 Theme: Politics & Power  Students should examine ongoing debates over the role of the state in society and its potential as an active agent for change. This includes mechanisms for creating, implementing, or limiting participation in the political process and the resulting social effects, as well as the changing relationships among the branches of the federal government and among national, state, and local governments. Students should trace efforts to define or gain access to individual rights and citizenship and survey the evolutions of tensions between liberty and authority in different periods of U.S. history

Theme:  Ideas, Belief & Culture  This theme explores the roles that ideas, beliefs, social mores, and creative expression have played in shaping the United States. Students should examine the development of aesthetic, moral, religious, scientific, and philosophical principles and consider how these principles have affected individual and group actions. Students should analyze the interactions between beliefs and communities, economic values, and political movements, including attempts to change American society to align it with specific ideals. 

Um, is that English?  It seems like progressive edu-speak gobbleygook to me.  How about just teaching our children about the founding, the Constitution, and the major historical eras?  It isn’t a cultural anthropology or a race/gender relations class.  As Kurtz observes that the emphasis on oppression and “mini-nationalism” groups will breed hatred and bigotry, rather than unify a diverse country.  And the emphasis on being “global citizens” will undermine democracy:  “Global citizenry is the antithesis of democracy,” Kurtz says. “You can’t be free, if you are not sovereign.”

Yep.

STAY QUIET AND YOU’LL BE OKAY:  Mark Steyn defends free speech by calling out the “I love free speech as much as anyone, but” crowd, which includes all progressives, and some prominent self-proclaimed conservatives like Bill O’Reilly.  Steyn observes:

Free speech is necessary to free society for all the stuff after the “but”, after the “however”. There’s no fine line between “free speech” and “hate speech”: Free speech is hate speech; it’s for the speech you hate – and for all your speech that the other guy hates. . . .

Alas, we have raised a generation of But boys. Ever since those ridiculous Washington Post and AP headlines, I’ve been thinking about the fellows who write and sub-edit and headline and approve such things – and never see the problem with it. Why would they? If you’re under a certain age, you accept instinctively that free speech is subordinate to other considerations: If you’ve been raised in the “safe space” of American universities, you take it as read that on gays and climate change and transgendered bathrooms and all kinds of other issues it’s perfectly normal to eliminate free speech and demand only the party line. So what’s the big deal about letting Muslims cut themselves in on a little of that action?

Why would you expect people who see nothing wrong with destroying a mom’n’pop bakery over its antipathy to gay wedding cakes to have any philosophical commitment to diversity of opinion? And once you no longer have any philosophical commitment to it it’s easy to see it the way Miliband and Cotler do – as a rusty cog in the societal machinery that can be shaved and sliced millimeter by millimeter.

Yep.  As George Orwell said, “So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don’t even know that fire is hot.”  The progressive pursuit of “diversity” is playing with the fire of intolerance.  Free speech is its first victim.

MOTHER’S DAY, PROGRESSIVE STYLE:  Kentucky child protective services has forcibly taken 10 children from their parents, Joe and Nicole Naughler, based on an anonymous tip.  Their “crime”? The parents are Mormons who live off the grid and to “un-school” their children, a type of homeschooling that emphasizes learning through life experiences, play, household management, travel, family and reading books– you know, the way children have been raised for much of history, before “public” schools were invented by statists in the latter half of the 1800s.

The Naughler family may be off-the-grid, but they’ve had a Facebook page called “Blessed Little Homestead” for several years.  On the Facebook page, the Naughler’s have posted recent pictures, including a picture of an “emergency custody order affidavit” issued by child services, in which the affiant (whose name is whited out) “the family is residing on property with only one makeshift shed and two makeshift tents.  Allegations are that there is no running water and no septic and the mother and father refuse to cooperate with the Cabinet and the police. Children are not living in appropriate conditions and are no [sic] enrolled in school.  The parents refuse to cooperate with the investigation.”  They also provide pictures of the sheds in which they live and the children, who all look healthy and happy.

It seems to me the “crime” this family has committed is living unconventionally– off-the-grid, and outside the public school system.  While I wouldn’t want to live this way personally, people must have liberty to do so, if there is to be any liberty at all. Parents must have the right to raise their children as they see fit, short of evidence of child abuse, which in this instance, seems utterly lacking.  The Supreme Court, in Pierce v. Society of Sisters (1925), invalidated an Oregon law that required all children to attend public school, concluding:

[It] unreasonably interferes with the liberty of parents and guardians to direct the upbringing and education of children under their control. The fundamental theory of liberty upon which all governments in this Union repose excluded any general power of the state to standardize its children by forcing them to accept instruction from public teachers only.The child is not the mere creature of the state; those who nurture him and direct his destiny have the right and the high duty, to recognize and prepare him for additional obligations.

A famous progressive brief in the Pierce case, penned by the State of Oregon, argued that the mandatory public school law was necessary to properly educate “the State’s children” and thus overrode any parents’ right to direct the upbringing of their own children.  This notion– of children as belonging to the State, rather than the parents–is a persistent theme in progressivism/communism.  Just ask MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry.  Or Hillary Clinton, who famously proclaimed in 1996 that  “[W]e have learned that to raise a happy, healthy, and hopeful child, it takes a family, it takes teachers, it takes clergy, it takes business people, it takes community leaders it takes those who protect our health and safety, it takes all of us.  Yes, it takes a village.”   And in Komunistka, published in 1920, the communist vision of children was articulated:

Under capitalism children were frequently, too frequently, a heavy and unbearable burden on the proletarian family. Communist society will come to the aid of the parents. In Soviet Russia the Commissariats of Public Education and of Social Welfare are already doing much to assist the family. We already have homes for very small babies, creches, kindergartens, children’s colonies and homes, hospitals and health resorts for sick children. restaurants, free lunches at school and free distribution of text books, warm clothing and shoes to schoolchildren. All this goes to show that the responsibility for the child is passing from the family to the collective. . . .

The playgrounds, gardens, homes and other amenities where the child will spend the greater part of the day under the supervision of qualified educators will, on the other hand, offer an environment in which the child can grow up a conscious communist who recognizes the need for solidarity, comradeship, mutual help and loyalty to the collective. . . . There is no escaping the fact: the old type of family has had its day. The family is withering away not because it is being forcibly destroyed by the state, but because the family is ceasing to be a necessity.

Sound familiar?  It should.  The forcible removal of the Kentucky 10 children reminds me a lot of the Massachusetts girl, Jessica Pellietier, who was removed from her family and spent 16 months in State custody based on ridiculous, unfounded concerns of doctors at Boston Chidren’s Hospital, who second-guessed her existing Tufts University doctors’ diagnosis.  Or how about the removal in January of 7 children from an Arkansas home, after an anonymous caller said the children were running barefoot in the snow.  The parents were religious “preppers” who have homeschooled 9 children (two were grown and lived outside the home at the time the other 7 were taken by the State).  The children are still in State custody.

It is getting far, far too easy for idiotic progressives to impose their views, and take children out of their homes based on their belief that they aren’t getting the “right” care, the “right” education, or the “right” modern amenities.  There is a major difference between “unconventional” parenting and child abuse.

For all of you good, loving parents out there: embrace your children and teach them well.  Happy Mother’s Day.

PUNCH BACK TWICE AS HARD:  Rick Santorum says we should bomb ISIS “back to the 7th century.”  Good for him.  We need more courageous, blunt politicians.

AL JAZEERA BUREAU CHIEF ON TERROR LIST:  Apparently the NSA has determined he’s a al-Qaeda and Muslim Brotherhood member.   I’m not shocked– the whole network seems fishy to me.

SOMETIMES HATEFUL IS GOOD:  Case in point:  David French:  I’m more hateful than Pamela Geller.  A snippet:

I’m far more hateful than Pamela Geller. In fact, I’d argue there’s no way that she could hate jihad more than I do. I’ve seen jihad up-close, in an Iraqi province where jihadists raped women to shame them into becoming suicide bombers, where they put bombs in little boys’ backpacks then remotely detonated them at family gatherings, where they beheaded innocent civilians while cheering wildly like they were at a soccer match, and where they shot babies in the face to “send a message” to their parents.

Exactly– hating jihad/radical Islam is a good thing, because hating evil is always good.