Mark “Black Hawk Down” Bowden writes a retrospective some time he spent with Donald Trump almost 20 years ago:

He was like one of those characters in an 18th-century comedy meant to embody a particular flavor of human folly. Trump struck me as adolescent, hilariously ostentatious, arbitrary, unkind, profane, dishonest, loudly opinionated, and consistently wrong. He remains the most vain man I have ever met. And he was trying to make a good impression. Who could have predicted that those very traits, now on prominent daily display, would turn him into the leading G.O.P. candidate for president of the United States?

His latest outrageous edict on banning all Muslims from entering the country comes as no surprise to me based on the man I met nearly 20 years ago. He has no coherent political philosophy, so comparisons with Fascist leaders miss the mark. He just reacts. Trump lives in a fantasy of perfection, with himself as its animating force.

The whole thing is worth a read.

For roughly the everyeth year in my life in a row, I skipped the Oscars last night.  But I did catch a little bit of Chris Rock’s opening monologue.  And he had a couple good ones:

• For most of Oscar history, black people had much bigger things to worry about than Oscars.
• “Jada Pinkett-Smith boycotting the Oscars is like me boycotting Rihanna’s panties. Neither of us were invited!”

But Alan West notes another inconvenient truth; while this year was a slow one for black nominees, African Americans over the past 20 years have actually won “Actor/Actress” and “Supporting Actor/Actress” statues exactly in proportion to their share of the population:

The problem isn’t that black people are underrepresented at the Oscars.  The problem is that the narrative needed a chanting point for February.

The TV sitcom “Friends” was…unPC (PunC?)

…“Friends’” has been the main lightning rod for such perceived shortcomings, especially since it became available on Netflix in January 2015. Right after that, Slate ran a piece that called Chandler Bing “agonizingly obsolete. . . . Once he may have seemed coolly sarcastic, the gang’s designated ‘funny one.’ But through the eyes of a 2015 viewer even vaguely cognizant of modern gender politics, he’s also the cringe-worthy one.” The piece referenced a YouTube video called “Homophobic Friends,” a montage of the show’s male characters engaging in “gay panic” — where the implication that one of them might be gay is the joke. The concern has cropped up in other online think pieces, listicles and forums, including one Reddit thread that asks: “Was ‘Friends’ really as homophobic as the Internet seems to think it was?”

I’ve seen a grand total of maybe 20 minutes of “Friends” – it came out at a time when I wasn’t watching a lot of TV, and for a while didn’t own one.

But the article does include one quote that needs to be pasted into just about every discussion about revisionist PC; Ray Bradford of the gay activist group GLAAD, noted:

“Images don’t exist in a vacuum — you look at where they were at that time of progression of TV and our country, and also where we are now and the standard,” Bradford said. “When I looked at Kathleen Turner’s character [apparently, Turner played Chandler’s trans-gendered father], there was nothing tragic about it. It was not a story line depicting her as a killer or a psychopath or a sex worker 0r anything like that.”

Whenever I hear people retroactively picking over the political incorrectnesses of the past, I say to myself – and, not infrequently, to others – “God save us, meaning mainly you, from the opinions of our descendents; we have no idea what’s going to set them off”.

And this article is proof…

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Every week, the Court of Appeals releases opinions on criminal cases.  Every week, there’s an ineligible person in possession of a pistol.  And these aren’t all of the ineligible persons in possession – these are only the ones that had a good enough legal argument to appeal.  There’s no telling how many other felons had guns but didn’t appeal, or plea-bargained the charge away.  It’s a genuine epidemic and nobody is going anything about it.

So here’s the question for every one of those cases: Where’d this particular felon get this particular pistol?  Did he pass a background check?  Order it off the Internet?  Buy it at a gun show?  Which Obama gun-control proposal would have prevented him from acquiring the pistol?  We don’t know because the court doesn’t report that fact and if the cops asked at all, the felon undoubtedly lied to protect his source.

Maybe we need an incentive program?  Maybe the cop says “Look, man, you’re going away.  Nothing can change that.  But if you give up the name – and the name checks out – we hand you $1,000 cash, tax free.   Plus you get a carton of Marlboros and one extra hour of yard time each week.”

Maybe it wouldn’t work.  But maybe it would.  We know from the War on Drugs that cracking down on suppliers is far more likely to dry up the supply than piling more restrictions on innocent, law-abiding citizens.  Why not use a proven technique in the War on Crime?

Joe Doakes

That presumes that the Minnesota left – who control law enforcment in the state – are interested in addressing crime.

Mark “Black Hawk Down” Bowden’s piece on Donald Trump.

John Hinderaker on the Ventura/Trump comparison.

Today, the Northern Alliance Radio Network – America’s first grass-roots talk radio show – is on the air! I will be on live from 2-3PM today!

Today on the show,

• I’ll be talking with former MN Governor Tim Pawlenty and US Senator Deb Fischer.

Don’t forget – King Banaian is on from 9-11AM on AM1440, and Brad Carlson has “The Closer” edition of the NARN Sundays from 2-3PM.

So tune in the Northern Alliance! You have so many options:

• AM1280 in the Metro
• Streaming at AM1280’s Website
• Streaming on IHeartRadio
• On Twitter (the Volume 2 show will use hashtag #narn2)
• Via my UStream video and chat channel.
• Send us an SMS text message – 651-243-0390
• Good ol’ telephone – 651-289-4488
• Podcasts are now available; for my show and for Brad’s
• And make sure you fan us on our new Facebook page!

Join us!

Brad Carlson and I are switching days, this weekend.

Brad will be hosting the Northern Alliance Radio Network today from 1 to 3 PM.

I will be in tomorrow from 2 to 3.

Tune in both days!

I had too many jalapenos on my burrito last night, and dreamed that I’d read a letter to the editor in a 1942 edition of the Strib that read something like “Aren’t Americans racist for going to war against Germany, when the Deutsche-Amerikanische Bund is preaching rapprochement with Germany?”

I wanted to yell “But one country declared war on us, while the Bund, ill-advised as their ethnic sympathies turned out to be, were exercising their First Amendment rights!”…

…but I couldn’t.  Because blogs didn’t exist in 1942.  And either did I.

But I woke up – both extant, and with my blog humming right along – and, given the nightmare I’d just awoken from, was almost overjoyed to read this bit of intensely flawed reasoning in an op-ed by Jesse Zettel.

In the past week, there has been much talk of whether Apple should help the FBI gain access to a smartphone of one of the San Bernardino, Calif., shooters. At stake is whether we are willing to sacrifice some of our freedom for some security.

The correct answer – someone tell all seven Presidential candidates – is no, we should not be.  But that’s not really the subject, here.

In the past when the question was about guns, our answer has been a resounding no. Now that the question is about our privacy, there seem to be a lot of people saying yes.

Ah, yes – the group of people that I’ll call the “omnisicent ‘a lot'”; that group of People Not Like Me that we’re assured exist and confirm your thesis, notwithstanding their being your personal anecdote.

How many people do this?  A lot of people… – oh, snap.  Now I’m doing it!

Carry on.

On “The McLaughlin Group” last weekend, Pat Buchanan cited a Latin phrase “salus populi suprema lex,” meaning “the safety of the people is the highest law.” He doesn’t say that when it comes to guns.

He’s leading up to something, here.  I can almost taste it.

We’ll come back to that.

In other words: We will not give up our freedom to easily access weapons of war for the sake of safety, but we might be open to giving up our privacy.

We’re dealing with two different “omniscient a lots” here:

• “A lot of people” erroneously believe that you can “hack” just one iPhone to get at information.  Some – Trump – echo Buchanan’s statist beliefs.  Others – Marco Rubio among them – don’t know how software architecture works (and, admit it, most likely either do you).   They’re not malicious, stupid, or closeted fascists – they’re uninformed.
• Another “lot of people” think that by controlling the access of law-abiding citizens to gun, you make society “safer”.  They are equally ill-informed, although since the truth is out there and doesn’t require any technical background to understand, they are more likely to be willfully ignorant, stupid or malicious.  Not all of them.  Just a lot of them…oh, there I go again.

Back to Mr. Zettel:

If part of what the FBI wants to find in that phone is how the shooters got the guns, it need look no further than a Wal-Mart or a gun show.

The Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant knows that this is where to get guns, and it tells its followers as much.

Easy access to guns is the Trojan horse of our time. ISIL didn’t have to send a shooter. It didn’t even have to provide the guns: Our own laws did that.

Shall we continue that train of thought?

If the FBI wants to know where terrorists get bomb fixins, they need look no further than any farm supply store.

If they want to know where they get the material to incinerate people, they need look no further than a gas station or a propane vendor.

If they want to bring down three skyscrapers, they need to look no further than the nearest airport.

If they want to create a ghastly wave of up-close-and-personal terror, they need only visit the cutlery section at Target.  It’s happened.  (note to Mr. Zettel – guess how that particular wave of terror got stopped?  You’re not gonna like it)

And the next victim of these misguided laws may well be our privacy.

Why is it that the ability of gun manufacturers to sell weapons of war is held sacred, while our own privacy is considered negotiable?

Let’s put that strawman out of our misery; the smart people support all freedom – the right to privacy and the government’s obligation to observe due process, as well as the constitutional, civil, human right to keep and bear arms.

Mr. Zettel – to invert his thesis – is clamoring to give up our right to defend ourselves from criminals and terrorists and our government, while exalting the right to privacy.

I wonder if the next time there is a mass shooting in this country (and there will be more), we will be willing to look at the easy access to guns that makes these shootings so commonplace, rather than searching for other freedoms we might be willing to give up instead. Something has to give. After all: “salus populi suprema lex.”

Here’s another Latin phrase.  It’s more applicable to this “debate”: Ne contumeliam mea intelligentia; argumentum est puerile et infans.
.  

Rubio, this morning.

As Leon Wolf notes in Redstate:

This isn’t the menacing, scowling attacks that have been leveled at Trump before, it’s treating Trump like he deserves to be treated: like a joke. Like an object of particularly funny scorn and ridicule.

Watch and enjoy:

To:  Etan Cohen and Mike Judge, co-writers of Idiocracy
From:  Mitch Berg, uppity peasant
Re:  Your Blinding Flash of Epiphany

Etan and Mike,

This is just occurring to you?

I’m a conservative in Saint Paul.  Looking at my city government, I thought it was a documentary when I first saw it.

That is all.

…must be tempered by the knowledge that the only reason this happened – University of Missouri professor Melissa “Poster Child for Moral Constipation” Click, was fired earlier this week – was that her little meltdown was caught on video:

(Looking at the “Students” in this video may be the most deeply depressing thing I’ve done lately.  Fascism is alive and well and drinking latte on a thousand university campuses)

How many professors out there commit the same, and worse, crimes against free expression and critical inquiry every day, unrecorded and, thanks to the outdated practice of academic tenure, utterly untouchable?

In a just world, every one of those “students” will have this video hounding them throughout their “lives”.

Additional Question:  Any bets on whether Click gets hired at one of the Twin Cities’ surplus crop of mediocre colleges?

Tonight’s the last debate before the Minnesota Caucuses…:

No – the last debate before the caucuses.

…and that means its’ our final debate party!

Join Brad Carlson and me at B-52’s Bombers Burgers and Brew in Inver Grove Heights at 6PM tonight!  (Website | Map)

Hope to see you all there!

There’s a new sheriff in town at “ProtectMN”.

She’s got size two shoes to fill.

And they’ll be having a party to talk about it tonight:

Dear Heinrich,
Come meet the new Executive Director of Protect Minnesota and learn how YOU can help prevent gun violence in our state. The Rev. Nancy Nord Bence is excited to meet you, share important information prior to caucusing on March 1, and hear your ideas for the growth of our coalition. Wine and appetizers will be provided.

After “Protect” MN’s last decade in the legislature, one might think the appetizer would be “crow”.

But I imagine they’ll be knocking back the vino, all right.

DATE: Thursday, February 25, 2016
TIME: Open House from 6:30-8:30pm

I’m pretty sure you need to be on the guest list to show up.

It’s right in the middle of the AM1280 Debate Party, so I won’t be able to attend.

Coincidence?  I think not.

LOCATION: Protect Minnesota Offices, 2395 University Ave W, Suite 204, St. Paul MN 55114. (That’s in the Security Building on the corner of Raymond and University.) Street parking is free after 5pm. Come to the entrance on Raymond Avenue and our doorman will let you in.
Hope you’ll join us!
The Rev. Nancy Nord Bence

www.protectmn.org

Welcome to the battle, Reverend Nord Bence.  I’ll extend you the same invitation I’ve been extending to your predecessor, Heather Martens, for the past decade; you can come on my show any Saturday afternoon and talk “gun safety”.  Hopefully you’ll be less pusillanimous than your predecessor.

And just to show you I’m all about the same goals you are, I’ll do this for you:

Audience Participation:  What advice do you, the smartest comment section in town‡, want to give Rev. Nord Bence?

Go!

‡  Well, most of you, anyway.

The conclusion to Brendan O’Neil’s latest at National Review, on the “Ivy League Lynch Mob” that gathers, makes vaguely “feminist” noises about sexual assault, and demands the repeal of our entire system of criminal justice:

Assuming a defendant’s innocence is what distinguishes progressive societies from backward ones. It’s the idea that infuses To Kill a Mockingbird. Atticus Finch insists that the black man, Tom, who is accused of rape must receive a fair trial. We learn later that Tom is innocent and that his accuser, Mayella, made up the whole thing. Could that be the case with Kesha, too — that she’s making it up and Dr. Luke is innocent? We don’t know. But entertaining that possibility is what makes us more like Atticus Finch than the Tom-hunting mob, which today’s feminists seem to have modeled themselves on.

The journey to this conclusion – via a splashy, show-biz non-trial and PR lynching of a music producer on the word of a pop star unhappy with her contract – is worth a read.

Venezuela’s slow-motion collapse is switching to fast motion.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Most recent report from Centers for Disease Control concerning death by gun violence not helpful . . . to Liberals.

A buddy mentioned:

“I took note of the drownings.  The Boy Scouts have always considered water as the most dangerous place for scouts.  The Director of the Waterfront is always the most responsible position in camp.  Not the Director of the Shooting Range, or the Archery Range.  Not the Director of the High Climbing Tower, or the Food Service, or even the Medical Oversight person.  Waterfront is the place where most kids die in summer camps.  But not in Boy Scout camps.”

Water doesn’t drown people.  People drown in water.  Teach the people to be safe and the water is safe.  What an amazing concept.  Too bad it doesn’t apply to other activities like driving or hiking or . . . firearms.

Joe Doakes

Accidental shootings are almost 100% preventable – just like accidental drownings.  You just have to extend the effort.

Note to “The Other McCain” readers:  Welcome!

Note that the title of this post is misleading; I have no (new) evidence of voter fraud or payoffs to Planned Parenthood.

The title was bait for a regular comment section, er, “visitor”.  

Inside jokes are the best, aren’t they  

Hope you enjoy the stay here!

To:  Semi-regular commenter who makes big claims but never, ever responds when the claims are debunked
From:  Mitch Berg, blog owner
Re:  Questions

Dear regular commenter,

I thought that title would get your attention.  Great.  I have asked you a few questions in recent months.  I figured I’d direct your attention back to them.

1.  A while ago, you said that gender-reassignment surgery would result in the subject having different DNA.  Please elaborate.
2. Last week, you said that  you “observed” that Heather Martens – president and one of vanishingly few members of “ProtectMN” – had accomplished a lot during her decade-plus at the helm of the group.  I’d very much like to hear specifically what you think she’s accomplished, politically, in policy terms, or or socially.   Please be specific.

It’s one of dozens of questions you’ve left unanswered over the years, but why quibble over a few hundred issues, right?

Those two will be a great start.

Thanks!

Minnesota – the state where everything that isn’t mandatory is banned – jumped down hard on “vaping”, the “smoking” of electronic cigarettes (or “e-cigs”).  E-cigs, which create a vapor out of water with flavoring and nicotene, are a vastly lower-risk alternative to smoking cigarettes, without the tar and most of the known carcinogens.

Summary:  people enjoying something that looked like, and bore a superficial relationship (there’s something that looks like smoke!) to something the ruling class abhors (but for the tax money) but the declassé enjoy?  Ban it!

And so the state’s behavior police, sensing illicit enjoyment, leapt into action, grunting out a series of laws that, while scientifically vacant, made vaping the equivalent of smoking.

But with a little luck, the push for conformity may have taken a hit in, of all places, New York, with a judge noting the radical notion that, with vaping, nothing is burning:

“An electronic cigarette neither burns nor contains tobacco,” said the court. “Instead, the use of such a device, which is commonly referred to as ‘vaping,’ involves the inhalation of vaporized e-cigarette liquid consisting of water, nicotine, a base of propylene glycol or vegetable glycerin and occasionally, flavoring.”

And also, the subversive idea (at least in the age of Obama( that the law means what it says it means:

The issue was brought to the court in the case of People v. Thomas, after vaper Shawn Thomas was issued a citation on the subway and subsequently challenged the citation in court. New York law defines smoking as “the burning of a lighted, cigarette, pipe or any other matter or substance which contains tobacco.”

Let’s hope this sparks (heh) a continued legal rebellion.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

There has been recent discussion about requiring women to register for the draft.  Failure to register carries threat of prosecution, but nobody has been prosecuted in decades.  Despite lack of enforcement, compliance is 99% in Idaho but only 34% in Washington, DC.  We must address the factors causing voluntary non-compliance.  If threat of prosecution carries no weight, how can we give young people a meaningful incentive to obey the law?

Joe Doakes

It’s time to end selective service registration.  It will never be used, the military doesn’t want it (ever), and it’s major problem isn’t that we don’t draft women; the problem is that the draft puts the onus of defending the nation (especially in the enlisted ranks) entirely on those who don’t have the means to avoid the lottery.

“Selective” service is an abomination to a free society.

A law-abiding citizen with a carry permit killed a would-be robber in Brooklyn Park Monday evening.  The Brooklyn Park PD just confirmed that the shooter was a citizen with a carry permit, and the decedent was attempting to rob the citizen.

The person targeted for robbery has “a valid permit to carry a handgun” and was not arrested, said Deputy Police Chief Mark Bruley.

Officers recovered both guns at the scene as they continue to investigate the shooting.

Police have yet to disclose the identities of those involved in the confrontation.

And I’m going to speculate that the law-abiding citizen who did the shooting won’t get his name released, because of the danger he’d face from the rest of the community.  It’s been true with several of the justifiable homicides we’ve seen – the Evanovich shooting and the Broadbent incident last summer among them.

Bruley said the man who died “goes back and forth between Brooklyn Park and Minneapolis. He’s an individual we’ve known from previous contact. He certainly hangs out around here.” Bruley declined to say more about that contact entailed.

I’m going to guess it involved the fact that he was just in the middle of getting his life turned around.   It’s a theme in this sorts of episodes.

State Rep. Pat Garofalo, R-Farmington, said the outcome of this shooting validates a 2003 law in Minnesota that allows people to carry a firearm in public.

“A loss of life is a tragedy,” Garofalo wrote. “But when a criminal pulls a gun, they risk ending their life. Concealed carry works.”

As of early this year, there were more than 221,000 active permit holders in Minnesota, according to the latest data report from the state’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.

The total has grown by more than 20,000 in the past six months. Now, about one in 19 eligible Minnesota adults has a permit to carry, according to Gun Owners Civil Rights Alliance.

The number is up over 5% of eligible adults – which, in some parts of the state, likely means there’s a better than one in ten chance that someone you might want to try to rob can end you.

The odds are better in the Metro, if you’re a robber; most don’t grow up in a (law-abiding) gun culture; there are fewer ambient, social chances to get into shooting, much less self-defense.  Less than 2% of eligible adults have carry permits in the Metro, where the crime rate shows they are the most needed (and, I’d argue, also shows their lack).

Condolences to the victim’s family; he may have run off the rails, but he was someone’s kid, brother or parent.

And best of luck to the shooter, whoever you are.  And thanks.

 UPDATE:  Is this predictable or what – the Strib always shuts down story comments when a good guy uses a gun against a bad actor.

Wonder why that is?

UPDATE 2:  By my count, since 2005, that makes five human lives saved via the ability to resist violence with a legally-carried handgun:

1. A bouncer shot a knife-wielding drunk outside a Minneapolis bar.
2. Another bouncer shot another knife-wielding drunk outside Grumpy’s in Northeast Minneapolis
3. An unidentified man shot Darren Evanovich behind the Cub Foods on East Lake street in 2011, after Evanovich and his sister pistolwhipped a fifty-something Latina cleaning lady and stole her just-cashed paycheck.
4. Another unidentified man shot Lauventai Broadbent last August, one of a small gang of teenagers who tried to rob the citizen using guns they’d stolen earlier that day on the East Side.
5. Yesterday’s episode.

The final GOP debate before the MN Caucuses is happening Thursday evening – the Northern Alliance, Brad Carlson and I, will be there!

We’ll be at B-52’s Burgers and Brew, in Inver Grove Heights.

The bar looks nothing like this.

The burgers are fantastic, by the way.

Less brawn – better flavor.

We always get capacity crowds, and it’s always a lot of fun!

Come out and join us!

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

After border-crossers have lost their court cases and been denied asylum, federal law considers them “illegal aliens” and they are ordered to be deported.  While they’re awaiting deportation, Liberals claim they’re entitled to the same level of humane treatment as we give to American children in the foster care system, which our detention centers don’t provide.

Liberals hope by getting detention centers shut down, the government won’t be able to hold people for deportation and therefore, nobody will get deported.  Seems to me the solution is build a wall to keep them out in the first place.  Trump is right, again.

Meanwhile, providing what Liberals consider “humane” treatment is actually cruel.  The illegals come from places with housing standards substantially lower than expected in this nation.  So why are we obligated to improve their lot even as they are deported?  Making detention facilities nicer only highlights their loss when illegals eventually are returned to the squalor from whence they came.

Instead of that, illegal aliens awaiting deportation should be housed in comparable conditions to those they face when they are returned.  Giving them the taste of the land of milk and honey knowing they will have it ripped from them when they return to the land where nobody cares if they live or die . . . that’s heartless cruelty.

America is better than that.
Joe Doakes

The only greater cruelty?  Reminding them how very unlucky they were to be deported, much less caught at all.

… I can’t imagine why people, finding mainstream Christianity spineless and spiritually vacant, are hitting the doors faster than if they were at a Nickelback/Creed surprise gig.

Twitter stock is dropping like Johnny Manziel’s career bell curve.

Part of it is the complete lack of a business model that includes a road to real profit.

But the other part?  Twitter’s efforts to actively antagonize half of the population – including yours truly:

The company recently put in a place a “Trust and Safety Council” that they staffed with hard-left social justice nuts.  And I do mean real nuts — one of them includes an Islamic “research center” that makes CAIR look like choir boys.

Of course, being a private company, they can ‘censor’ anyone they want, for any reason they want.  They can have a “Trust and Safety Council” with Rachel Maddow, Jane Fonda and the board of NOW, for all it matters.

But…

But Twitter might want to think about the fact that about half of the population in this country is conservative, and the other half liberal.  It’s not quite that simple of a division, but it’s close enough.

And unlike a little privately-run place like this, where my first and foremost goal is not to maximize my advertising revenue, that is precisely Twitter’s first and foremost goal.

It’s only a matter of time before a public company that does this sort of thing winds up like MySpace.

And while Twitter, being an ultra-ultra-liberal operation that swims in the liberal pond that is San Francisco, may not actually know, or really believe that, one need only look at the successive flops of efforts that need general acceptance but actively antagonize half the populations (see also; every anti-war movie of the past decade, Truth, MSNBC, and on and on).

And good riddance.  As I wrote about the other day, Twitter is a vast wasteland of stupid punctuated by the rare little points of misplaced brilliance; like someone doing an impromptu Mozart violin concerto at Wrestlemania.

Let it burn.

…it always makes for low-brow entertainment.

Krauthammer:

Republicans, say the Democrats, owe the President deference. Elections have consequences and Obama won re-election in 2012.

Yes. And the Republicans won the Senate in 2014 — if anything, a more proximal assertion of popular will. And both have equal standing in appointing a Supreme Court justice.

I keep pointing this out to DFLers who jabber about the President’s election.  I never, ever get a response beyond name-calling.

I’ll be adding emphasis to this next stretch:

It’s hard to swallow demands for deference from a party that for seven years has cheered Obama’s serial constitutional depredations: his rewriting the immigration laws by executive order (stayed by the courts); his reordering the energy economy by regulation (stayed by the courts); his enacting the nuclear deal with Iran, the most important treaty of this generation, without the required two-thirds of the Senate (by declaring it an executive agreement).

(Side note:  there are actually Democrats who think Obama is “the most disrespected president in history.  As if the George W Bush’s administration never happened).

Minority Leader Harry Reid complains about the Senate violating precedent if it refuses a lame-duck nominee. This is rich. It is Reid who just two years ago overthrew all precedent by abolishing the filibuster for most judicial and high executive appointments. In the name of what grand constitutional principle did Reid resort to a parliamentary maneuver so precedent-shattering that it was called the nuclear option? None. He did it in order to pack the U.S. Circuit Court for the District of Columbia with liberals who would reliably deflect challenges to Obamacare.

Power is all that matters to the left.  And they can do it, knowing the media gave up checking and balancing about the time man landed on the moon.