VA Chief Says Senate Must Act So He Can Fire ‘Terrible Managers’

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Department of Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin said Wednesday the civil service appeals process prevents the agency from firing “terrible managers,” and that the Senate must act to reduce the impact of the Merit Systems Protection Board and excessive government employee union-backed due process requirements.

“Just last week we were forced to take back an employee after they were convicted no more than three times for DWI and had served a 60-day jail sentence … Our accountability processes are clearly broken,” Shulkin said at the White House.

Shulkin was promoted to the VA’s top job by President Donald Trump after being appointed by former President Barack Obama as undersecretary. Those positions have given Shulkin direct experience with the extent to which union-backed rules block the firings of poor performing employees.

“We had to wait more than a month to fire a psychiatrist who was caught on camera watching pornography on his iPad while seeing a patient,” he said. “Because of the way judges review these cases, they can force us to take terrible managers back who were fired for poor performance, we recently saw that with one of our executives in San Juan.”

Shulkin was referring to DeWayne Hamlin, a hospital director who was fired Jan. 20 for corruption but was then quietly returned to work. (Read more from “VA Chief Says Senate Must Act So He Can Fire ‘Terrible Managers'” HERE)

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Trump Administration Considering Rule That Would Help Little Sisters of the Poor

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For employers that don’t want to provide birth control and abortifacient coverage in health insurance plans, relief may be on the way.

President Donald Trump’s administration “is poised to make changes to Obamacare’s birth control coverage mandate by granting broad exemptions to employers that object on religious or moral grounds,” The Hill reported.

The proposed move is being cheered by some conservatives.

“Better late than never,” Mark Rienzi, senior counsel with the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, a nonprofit legal organization, said in a statement.

“At long last the United States government acknowledges that people can get contraceptives without forcing nuns to provide them,” Rienzi added. “That is sensible, fair, and in keeping with the Supreme Court’s order and the president’s promise to the Little Sisters and other religious groups serving the poor.”

The Becket Fund represents the Little Sisters of the Poor, an order of Catholic nuns who fought the Obamacare contraception and abortifacient mandate all the way to the Supreme Court.

Last year, the Supreme Court “‘vacated,’ meaning erased, all of the lower court cases and required them to reconsider the claims brought by the Little Sisters of the Poor and others that the regulations promulgated pursuant to Obamacare violate their religious exercise in light of the government’s admission that it could indeed provide contraceptive coverage without the Little Sisters’ collaboration,” wrote The Heritage Foundation’s Elizabeth Slattery and Roger Severino, a former Heritage employee, at the time.

Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, an organization that promotes pro-life and family values, said the proposed rule change is good progress.

“While this apparent leaked document is a draft, it is a very positive sign to see the federal government work to cease its hostility toward Christians and those who object to the Obama-era health care mandates,” Perkins said in a statement. “This draft regulation shows that [Health and Human Services] Secretary Tom Price and President Trump intend to make good on their pledge to vigorously protect and promote [America’s] First Freedom.”

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., decried the proposed rule change.

Birth control advocates, such as Keep Birth Control Copay Free, an organization that promotes birth control access, are not supportive of the potential rule change.

“President Trump has been clear that religious liberty is important and that religious orders, such as the Little Sisters of the Poor, are deserving of that freedom as well,” a White House spokesperson told The Daily Signal in an email.

The leaked rule “would leave in place the religious ‘accommodation’ created by the Obama administration, making that route available to groups that choose to continue using it,” according to the Becket Fund.

The Becket Fund also noted in its press release that many Americans remain on health insurance plans that do not have to provide abortifacients or birth control:

One hundred million Americans—nearly one in three—don’t have insurance plans that must comply with this mandate. The government was already exempting large corporations like Exxon and Visa, and even its own government-run plans for the disabled and military families.

Eric Rassbach, deputy general counsel at Becket, told The Daily Signal in an email that the proposed rule could be published in the next week or in the next several weeks. (For more from the author of “Trump Administration Considering Rule That Would Help Little Sisters of the Poor” please click HERE)

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What Happens When We Don’t Raise Kids to Become Adults

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When I was little, mom would leave detailed lists of chores on the kitchen counter each summer morning for my siblings and me to complete before we could play baseball, ride bikes, or go swimming.

And when I arrived at college, basically everyone with whom I became friends, a group from a wide range of socioeconomic backgrounds, had also done real work growing up.

Not everyone had worked in the field like I had—most had spent summers in retail or taking orders at a fast-food place or sorting the mail or doing some other kind of grunt work at a local office—but it was at least a job with certain expectations and set hours.

I didn’t presume everyone was as gritty as Elda Sasse, but I knew that my siblings and I hoped we would one day prove as perseverant as she was—and I honestly believed that this was a universal aspiration.

Without deliberate reflection, I assumed that basically all young people everywhere had similar placeholder role models in their minds, and thus that the transmission of a work ethic to each next generation was more or less inevitable.

My passive assumption that all kids have some meaningful work experiences as teens was shattered in late 2009 when I arrived as president of Midland University.

The university’s board of directors had hired me, as a 37-year-old, not because I had any special insight into shaping 18- to 22-year-olds, but because I was a “turnaround” guy who specialized in helping troubled companies become solvent.

This liberal arts institution was in big trouble, in terms of both finances and enrollment, the latter at its lowest point in a century.

My job was to tackle the college’s unsustainable deficits, skyrocketing debt, enrollment shortfalls, and flagging morale among faculty and staff. None of my initial charter had anything to do with current students and their emotional health.

Immediately upon arrival, however, it became apparent that in addition to dealing with other so-called “big picture” concerns of a university in crisis, I would also have to reshape the student affairs leadership and structure.

When my team and I arrived at Midland, the school had been on the verge of missing payroll four months in a row, which would mean that families would miss mortgage payments. That’s a pretty urgent crisis.

Yet finances might not have been the biggest problem at the school.

More stunning to me was that it was an atypical experience for an incoming freshman to have done really hard work, not even the sorts of elementary farm tasks common to Nebraska kids from the homesteaders of the 1860s until just a few years ago.

Teenage life, I soon learned, had been stunningly remade in the two decades since I’d gone off to college. Elda’s and Elmer’s childhoods were far removed from these kids’ experiences and understanding.

Let’s be clear that there were many wonderful human beings and delightful students at Midland, but many of the teens I met upon arriving on campus also had an outsized sense of entitlement without any corresponding notion of accountability.

For example, a student staged a sit-in in my office one day, announcing that he would not leave until I resolved a scheduling problem for him. He was upset that the registrar wouldn’t be offering a particular course he needed the following semester.

Obviously, college presidents don’t usually solve the Rubik’s Cube of course scheduling.

The student was emphatic that he wasn’t leaving, and while I was clear that the course registrar had a job to do and that she did it well, I realized it might be a teachable moment, a chance for the student and me to have a conversation.

At one point he proclaimed, “You need to figure this out. I pay tuition to go to this school, which means I pay your salary. So you work for me.”

Well, ummm… no. That isn’t how it works at all. My job did include serving him, but in a defined way. It was not my job, for instance, to wash his car or fetch him pizza on Friday night.

I patiently explained that Midland exists for many people and many purposes; the board of directors hired me; and I serve at their pleasure—but that my leadership of the institution as a whole relies on my empowering a team of people to fulfill their specialized vocations.

I then gently pointed out to the student that he was attending the university on scholarship. In truth then, he worked for—or had a debt to—the generous donors who made his scholarship possible.

But even if he’d been paying for his education himself, the college is a living institution of partners, with thought-out, intentional divisions of labor.

He was approaching the situation and this whole living-learning-working community only as a consumer. He was not thinking or talking or acting like a maturing young man aware of the dignity of the work of the many other people in the equation.

During the five years I was president, we conducted surveys annually about the highs and lows of students’ university experience.

The survey takeaway that repeatedly woke me in the middle of the night was the aching sense not just that the students lacked a work ethic, but more fundamentally that they lacked an experiential understanding of the difference between production and consumption.

Dispiritingly, students overwhelmingly highlighted their desire for freedom from responsibilities. The activities they most enjoyed, they reported, were sleeping in, skipping class, and partying. A few mentioned canceled classes as the best part of their four years.

I too love a good Midwestern blizzard, but I loved them in college so that we could explore the beauty, or ski, or snowmobile—rather than merely be free from class.

Almost nowhere did the student surveys reveal that they had the eyes to see freedom to categories—to read, to learn, to be coached, to be mentored in an internship.

If you have done any real work, you begin to see a broad range of work differently. And if you’ve been reflective about your and other people’s work, you start to ask questions about where goods and services come from.

Who did the work that got these non-Nebraska items to this store in this Nebraska small town?

As hard work is baked into your bones, you begin to feel great gratitude for the other workers who built the stuff and plotted the distribution system that got these toasters and sneakers and books to this place.

On the other hand, if you’ve never worked, you are more likely blind to the fundamental distinction between production and consumption. And these students, I learned from interviewing many of them, had mostly not done any hard work prior to arriving in college.

Although it is not universally fair, millennials have acquired a collective reputation as needy, undisciplined, coddled, presumptuous, and lacking much of a filter between their public personas and their inner lives.

As one New York Times story about millennials in the workplace put it, managers struggle with their young employees’ “sense of entitlement, a tendency to overshare on social media, and frankness verging on insubordination.”

“Well, what’s the alternative? Are you asking us to be fake?” one young woman asked me after a speech in which I’d made a passing comment about the virtues of “deferred gratification.”

No, of course not. Of course we all struggle with selfishness, and of course there are times to simply have fun, avoid responsibility, and seek escape—or perhaps, as noted in the last chapter, to pause the daily churn to reflect.

But growing up involves coming to recognize the distinction between who we still are today and who we seek to become. Our hope is that our young people will begin to own the Augustinian awareness that not everything we long or lust for is something we should really want.

Healthy people can admit that there are unhealthy yearnings. It is not “fake” to aim to mature. And it is not fake to begin modeling the desired behavior even before it is a full and fair representation of who you are in the moment.

I remain selfish and impatient today, but it is surely not fake or wrong to seek to sublimate these traits. I want to grow beyond who I am today, and I aim to begin better modeling that idealized future right now. (For more from the author of “What Happens When We Don’t Raise Kids to Become Adults” please click HERE)

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This Farmer Won’t Host Same-Sex Weddings at His Orchard. Now a City Has Banned Him From Its Farmers Market.

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A farmers market and Facebook posts have opened a new front in courtroom battles over religious freedom.

It started when Steve Tennes, who owns a 120-acre farm in Charlotte, Michigan, expressed his traditional view about marriage on the farm’s Facebook page.

This drew a warning from an official more than 20 miles away in East Lansing, Michigan, that if Tennes tried to sell his fruit at the city’s farmers market, it could incite protests.

No one showed up to protest that August day last summer, though, and Tennes continued selling organic apples, peaches, cherries, and pumpkins at the seasonal market until October, as he had done the six previous years.

Nevertheless, East Lansing moved earlier this year to ban Tennes’ farm, the Country Mill, from participating in the farmers market when it resumes June 4. The city cited its human relations ordinance, an anti-discrimination law that includes sexual orientation.

So Tennes and his wife sued the city for religious discrimination.

As a Marine veteran who is married to an Army veteran, Tennes told The Daily Signal, this was consistent with his philosophy of defending freedom:

My wife Bridget and I volunteered to serve our country in the military to protect freedom, and that is why we feel we have to fight for freedom now, whether it’s Muslims’, Jews’, or Christians’ right to believe and live out those beliefs.

The government shouldn’t be treating some people worse than others because they have different thoughts and ideas.

Alliance Defending Freedom, a Christian legal aid organization, is representing the Tenneses.

Neither East Lansing’s public information office nor the city manager’s office responded Wednesday to phone calls about the case from The Daily Signal.

East Lansing Mayor Mark Meadows told the Lansing State Journal that the city’s decision to exclude Country Mill—also known as Country Mill Orchard—from the farmers market had nothing to do with religious beliefs, but with the farm’s “business decision” not to host same-sex weddings.

“This is about them operating a business that discriminates against LGBT individuals, and that’s a whole different issue,” Meadows said.

The lawsuit, filed Wednesday with the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Michigan, says of Steve and Bridget Tennes’ perspective, in part:

Plaintiffs support the rights of citizens and other businesses to express their views about marriage. Plaintiffs simply seek to enjoy the same freedom.

Yet, East Lansing’s policy strips plaintiffs of their constitutional freedoms, including free speech and the free exercise of religion, by punishing plaintiffs’ viewpoint on marriage, going so far as to prohibit Country Mill from continuing its long history of participating in the farmers market because plaintiffs publicly stated their sincerely held religious view that marriage is a union between one man and one woman.

The suit also says the farm “has employed people from a wide variety of racial, cultural, and religious backgrounds, including members of the LGBT community.

Country Mill hosts a corn maze, birthday parties, weddings, and other events.

In 2014, two lesbians sought to be married in a wedding ceremony at Country Mill, but Tennes turned them down.

This occurred before the 2015 Supreme Court ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges, which legalized same-sex marriage across the country.

According to his legal complaint, Tennes had a “civil” discussion with the women, and said his venue didn’t host same-sex weddings because of his religious beliefs. But he referred the women to an orchard that held same-sex weddings.

In 2015, the two women were married at another orchard. On Aug. 22, 2016, one of them wrote a Facebook post discouraging consumers from doing business with Country Mill.

In response, Tennes initially said the farm would cease holding any weddings, writing on Facebook:

After this post, the East Lansing official asked Tennes not to sell produce at the market, saying he feared protests.

Tennes did anyway, and no protest occurred, according to the lawsuit.

In December, Tennes announced on Facebook that Country Mill would resume holding weddings:

This past fall our family farm stopped booking future wedding ceremonies at our orchard until we could devote the appropriate time to review our policies and how we respectfully communicate and express our beliefs. The Country Mill engages in expressing its purpose and beliefs through the operation of its business and it intentionally communicates messages that promote its owners’ beliefs and declines to communicate messages that violate those beliefs.

The Country Mill family and its staff have and will continue to participate in hosting the ceremonies held at our orchard. It remains our deeply held religious belief that marriage is the union of one man and one woman and Country Mill has the First Amendment right to express and act upon its beliefs. For this reason, Country Mill reserves the right to deny a request for services that would require it to communicate, engage in, or host expression that violates the owners’ sincerely held religious beliefs and conscience.

Furthermore, it remains our religious belief that all people should be treated with respect and dignity regardless of their beliefs or background. We appreciate the tolerance offered to us specifically regarding our participation in hosting wedding ceremonies at our family farm.

East Lansing city officials determined that these public statements violated the city’s 1972 human relations ordinance prohibiting discrimination. That law was the first in the state to recognize sexual orientation as a protected class from discrimination.

But this brought up a jurisdictional issue on top of First Amendment concerns, the farmer’s lawsuit says.

East Lansing, the complaint says, “has no authority to enforce its ordinance based on Tennes’ religious beliefs and their impact on how he operates Country Mill.” The farm, it says, is 22 miles outside the city.

The lawsuit also notes that the city has not taken action against a vendor that promoted same-sex marriage.

In March, East Lansing sent Tennes a letter denying Country Mill’s application to be a vendor at the 2017 farmers market:

It was brought to our attention that the Country Mill’s general business practices do not comply with East Lansing’s civil rights ordinances and public policy against discrimination as set forth in Chapter 22 of the City Code and outlined in the 2017 market vendor guidelines.

“As such,” the letter reads, “Country Mill’s presence as a vendor is prohibited.” (For more from the author of “This Farmer Won’t Host Same-Sex Weddings at His Orchard. Now a City Has Banned Him From Its Farmers Market.” please click HERE)

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Successful US Missile Defense Test Shows How Essential This Missile Program Is

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The United States Missile Defense Agency has accomplished a historic feat.

On Tuesday, the agency successfully intercepted an intercontinental ballistic missile in an important test utilizing its ground-based midcourse defense system.

The ICMB—mocked up to resemble a missile capable of carrying a nuclear payload similar to the ones that North Korea is feverishly pursuing—was launched over the Pacific Ocean some 4,000 miles away from the intercepting missile’s launch site at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

The successful test was an important step in reaffirming our nation’s missile defense program’s ability to protect the American homeland from long-range ballistic missile threats.

This is particularly relevant given the increased bellicosity with which North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un has been attempting to flex his nation’s military might. Since the beginning of the year, North Korea has launched a total of 12 missiles in nine separate tests.

The missiles launched by North Korea have ranged from short- to medium- to intermediate-range ballistic missiles.

The increase in provocative missile tests by the rogue North Korean regime should be seen as both a warning and an opportunity.

It is a warning that, despite past rhetoric to the contrary, North Korea is firmly determined to achieve the capability to strike the American homeland with offensive, nuclear-armed ballistic missiles.

It is also an opportunity because as recognition of North Korea’s intentions and capabilities becomes clear to even the blindest skeptic, Congress and the Trump administration can feel confident in their investment in a robust, comprehensive missile defense program.

A multilayered, robust missile defense system has been, and will remain, an integral element of America’s broader national security apparatus.

Missile Defense Agency Director Vice Admiral Jim Syring hailed the defense system as “vitally important” and said that Tuesday’s successful test “demonstrates that we have a capable, credible deterrent against a very real threat.”

Syring added, “The intercept of a complex, threat-representative ICBM target is an incredible accomplishment for the [ground-based midcourse defense] system and a critical milestone for this program.”

Tuesday’s successful missile defense test against an ICMB-class threat was indeed an important milestone, but it’s also a reminder that missile defense is not a one-time investment.

Missile defense requires a sustained commitment to building upon the successes of today while also investing in the technology of the future.

Investment in and commitment to missile defense technologies wavered under the Obama administration.

As Michaela Dodge of The Heritage Foundation wrote last year, “President Obama’s missile defense policy shifts cost the nation precious time and capabilities at a time when adversaries are succeeding in advancing their own ballistic missile programs.”

Unfortunately, the United States can no longer afford to waste precious time in developing and enhancing the capabilities necessary to defend the American homeland. The threats from rogue nations such as North Korea and Iran, as well as from regional adversaries throughout the world, is only increasing.

Tuesday’s successful test against an ICBM-class missile was an important moment in the history of America’s missile defense program development. Yet it must be understood as only the next step in an evolving and essential program. (For more from the author of “Successful US Missile Defense Test Shows How Essential This Missile Program Is” please click HERE)

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Ethics Prof. Charged in Deadly-Weapons Assault of Trump Backers

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Eric Clanton, an adjunct professor at Diablo Valley College (DVC) in Northern California, has been arrested on charges of assaulting numerous individuals with a bike lock at an April political rally-turned-riot spearheaded by the radical-left Antifa organization.

The East Bay Times reports Clanton was arrested Wednesday in Oakland, Calif., “on three counts of suspicion of assault with a deadly weapon that isn’t a firearm and assault causing great bodily injury.”

Clanton remains in a Berkeley jail on a $200,000 bond. He was arraigned Friday at an Oakland courthouse.

On April 15, a conglomerate of Trump supporters gathered in Berkeley for a “Patriots Day” event. Their event was crashed by far-left Antifa protesters, and soon thereafter, the two sides clashed. Twenty-one individuals were arrested, according to police, and six hospitalized for injury.

Clanton, 28, is thought to be the masked individual in the video below who smashed a Trump supporter in the head with a U-lock at the Patriots Day event, giving his victim a large gash.

CONTENT WARNING:

The Berkeley Police Department started investigating the allegations against Clanton in April, according to Golden Gate Xpress, the student paper for San Francisco State.

According to his Diablo Valley College faculty profile (which has since been taken down), Clanton began teaching at the school in 2015 and holds a master’s degree in philosophy. However, the community college district spokesman said that Clanton had not been working this spring semester.

The DVC course schedule shows that Clanton is slated to teach a “Logic and Critical Thinking” class as well as an “Introduction to Philosophy” course at DVC in summer. In the fall, he is slated to teach two “Introduction to Philosophy” classes.

Eric Clanton’s master’s thesis focused on the “intersection of virtue ethics and affective/emotional perception in the context of environmental philosophy,” according to Clanton’s website.

“I am also interested in feminist theory as well as critical and philosophical approaches to prisons and police enforcement,” he adds.

Clanton’s (former) bio at DVC read in part: “His primary research interests are ethics and politics. His work in political philosophy also centers on mass incarceration and the prison system. He is currently exploring restorative justice from an anti-authoritarian perspective.”

Before DVC, Clanton was a lecturer at Cal State, Sacramento, where he taught two classes on ethics. He was also a graduate teaching assistant in the philosophy department at San Francisco State for multiple semesters.

Clanton was allegedly identified as the bike-lock suspect thanks to the work of several dedicated 4chan users, a popular politics message board. Users there say they identified Clanton through a crowdsourced effort that focused on his clothing, skin markings, facial alignments, and other identifying markers. They then compared those criteria with the profile of the masked Antifa rioter.

In a comment to the Diablo Valley College student newspaper on April 20l, DVC spokeswoman Chrisanne Knox said the claims against Clanton were “based on an unsubstantiated allegation from unknown sources.”

Requests for information from various officials at Diablo Valley College were not returned. (For more from the author of “Ethics Prof. Charged in Deadly-Weapons Assault of Trump Backers” please click HERE)

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Does Kathy Griffin Want to Join ISIS?

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These are confusing times. If there’s a memo which explains what it’s safe to think and say nowadays, I didn’t get it. Neither may have many of you. So I decided to write one, which lays out the basic, unquestionable facts of life in 2017:

Islam is a religion of peace, and if you say otherwise, Muslims will kill you.

Muslims have nothing to do with terrorism. Don’t deny that, you’ll just provoke them!

Feminism is for female empowerment. Except when it runs interference for polygamous sheiks who favor female genital mutilation and the torture of rape victims. But, on everything else, it’s solid.

The left supports equality and opposes all exclusion. Except when they want all-female movie screenings and all-black dorms. But your Christian college had better have a gay activist group on campus, or else.

Liberals favor freedom. Except when you offend them, they’ll try to wreck your career and maybe put you in prison.

Progressives want democracy. But if you elect someone they disapprove of, they will fantasize about overthrowing the government, removing the president over fake scandals, or just outright murdering the guy.

We learned the last item on this list first from Rosie O’Donnell, who greeted the inauguration of Donald Trump by calling for a military coup, as we reported here at The Stream.

Kathy Griffin Auditions for ISIS

But we didn’t really know what it meant until today, when comedienne Kathy Griffin released an ISIS-style beheading selfie. She was holding the blood-soaked head of the president of the United States by the hair.

What can we really say to this? It’s probably illegal, but it’s doubtful that the feds will prosecute her. That’s exactly what she’s hoping will happen, to make her a martyr for free speech or something. Because it’s okay to urge violence against the president. That’s completely covered by the First Amendment. What isn’t covered is teaching divergent political opinions in college courses. Because that could “trigger” students and make them feel unsafe.

You know who should be most offended by Griffin’s stunt? Not Donald Trump. Not even his voters, though Griffin is proving her scorn for half of America. The half that has never heard of her, by the way. Those who should be most upset, I’d say were the survivors of ISIS’s actual victims. You know, the Christians who were in fact beheaded by the group whom Obama dismissed as the “JV team” of terror. And the families of anyone else who was beheaded by terrorists. John Podhoretz pointed this out on Twitter:

To the survivors of those who died in this particularly gruesome way, this stunt is just as funny as those sick Alt-Right cartoons picturing American Jews in ovens. Both were equally squalid and stupid.

That Moment in the Exorcism

Is there something deep and dark in the soul of the cultural left that is finally crawling out to see the light of day?

When Katy Perry isn’t mindlessly calling for peace love and brotherhood as the answer to Muslim slaughter bombings of schoolgirls, she’s releasing cannibalistic fetish videos [WARNING: Vile, graphic content].

When Planned Parenthood isn’t telling pregnant women who want pre-natal care to go look for it on Google, its representatives are joking about the butchered parts of babies. It doesn’t seem too far-fetched to say of our culture that this is the moment in the exorcism when the head starts to spin around. How ironic is it that “baby-Christian” Donald Trump was the man who has provoked all this! God works in funny ways.

The Left’s Campaign of Terror

Or maybe it’s not demonic. Wielding Occam’s Razor, we don’t absolutely need a preternatural explanation for the devilish ways of the left. There’s political theory here that could go some way toward explaining what we see. The left was savagely disappointed in the defeat of Hillary Clinton. They saw her chance to pack the courts and spur the federal Leviathan as a golden opportunity to silence Christians forever — while flooding the country with new natural Democratic voters. They came so achingly close to sealing the deal that they can taste it. So they flail around for scapegoats:

James Comey sandbagged us.

Half of Americans are racists.

The Russians hacked Vermont’s voting machines.

The Russians hacked our brains using Wikileaks.

Unable to contain their impotent rage, many leftists have decided on a course of “resistance.” That means pulling out every stop, breaking every rule, abandoning every previous standard of decency. The goal? To create or simulate a national crisis, and call into question the legitimacy of our government. Political scientist Thomas Molnar called such a strategy “cultural terrorism.” See my January column explaining this theory in detail.

The power of this strategy is that it feeds on our very outrage. The more people who thunder about Kathy Griffin’s vile stunt, the better she likes it (though of course she’ll officially apologize). She and her allies want to produce division, rage, and extremist counter-stunts. That helps bring on the crisis in which they believe they will be the winners.

Much better, I think, to meet this desperate cry for Botox on the part of a D-list celebrity with the emotion it truly deserves. Good, healthy scorn. Along those lines, my favorite reaction to Griffin was that of provocateur Gavin Macinnes:

The devil can bear many things. He can’t abide being mocked. So said St. Thomas More. (For more from the author of “Does Kathy Griffin Want to Join ISIS?” please click HERE)

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Hannity Promises ‘Insane, Vicious’ Scoop on Media Matters

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Conservative Review Editor-in-Chief Mark Levin brought Fox News’ Sean Hannity on his radio show Tuesday evening, giving his conservative-media colleague the opportunity to provide his side and perspective on the Left’s efforts to pressure advertisers from deserting his Fox News program.

A suspected coordinated left-wing campaign has been initiated by the likes of Media Matters and BuzzFeed to target Hannity’s advertisers, ostensibly to take him off the air. Hannity said the conservative response to the boycott campaign was “overwhelming,” as advertisers like USAA and others have been convinced to reverse their initial decision to pull advertisements from Hannity’s cable news program.

“I’m so appreciative, humbled, thankful … If we don’t fight back, they’re going to pick all of us off,” the Fox News and talk radio host told Levin. “This is about silencing conservatives.”

Hannity encouraged listeners to go to MediaEqualizer.com to fight back against the leftist campaign to silence conservative voices. Further, he promised an equally devastating scoop and damning evidence with regard to Media Matters President Angelo Carusone, the organization’s finances, and “things said and done” by members of the left-wing organization.

“While we prefer not to be involved in this type of effort, we need to be on equal footing. We will continue to announce the advertisers that finance these efforts and support these hosts who allow lies and conspiracy theories to permeate the airwaves.

“If Media Matters ceases these type of assaults, we will do the same. Until then, we will list every advertiser that supports hosts like Rachel Maddow, an outright liar, and someone who deceives the public and defames conservatives on a daily basis,” the Media Equalizer website states.

“Fight fire with fire,” Hannity said. “This liberal fascism has to stop.”

(For more from the author of “Hannity Promises ‘Insane, Vicious’ Scoop on Media Matters” please click HERE)

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DIPLOMATIC DISTRICT ROCKED: at Least 64 Dead, More Than 300 Hurt in Kabul Suicide Car Bombing

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A massive explosion rocked a highly secure diplomatic area of Kabul during rush hour on Wednesday morning, killing at least 64 and injuring 320.

Authorities said the blast was so heavy that more than 30 vehicles were either destroyed or damaged at the site of the attack. “We don’t know at this moment what was the target of the attack, but most of the casualties are civilians,” said Danish.

Windows were shattered in shops, restaurants and other buildings up to a half mile from the blast site.

“There are a large number of casualties, but I don’t know, how many people are killed or wounded,” said an eyewitness at the site, Gul Rahim.

No group immediately claimed responsibility for the blast but both the Taliban and the Islamic State group have staged large-scale attacks in the Afghan capital in the past. (Read more from “DIPLOMATIC DISTRICT ROCKED: at Least 64 Dead, More Than 300 Hurt in Kabul Suicide Car Bombing” HERE)

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US Conducts Successful ICBM Intercept Test With Eye on North Korea

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The U.S. tested its defenses against a simulated intercontinental ballistic missile at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California Tuesday.

The U.S. fired off an interceptor at an ICBM target, Reuters reports. The Missile Defense Agency reports that the test was successful, meaning that the U.S. ground-based midcourse defense (GMD) system was able to shoot down a mock warhead fired from the Reagan Test Site on Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands in the Pacific.

“This was the first live-fire test event against an ICBM-class target for GMD and the U.S. ballistic missile defense system,” MDA reported in a statement announcing the successful intercept.

WATCH:

The intercept of a complex, threat-representative ICBM target is an incredible accomplishment for the GMD system and a critical milestone for this program,” MDA Director Vice Adm. Jim Syring said in a statement. “This system is vitally important to the defense of our homeland, and this test demonstrates that we have a capable, credible deterrent against a very real threat.”

The missile defense shield has a spotty record, as only nine of the 17 tests have been successful, reports USA Today. (Read more from “US Conducts Successful ICBM Intercept Test With Eye on North Korea” HERE)

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