Giving the minority leader his due
Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., had had it with Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., last week and told him off in terms other Republican senators should have used during the shameful years when he was majority leader and routinely held up bipartisan legislation from reaching the Senate floor.
The freshman senator rose to speak against Reid's decision to stall a vote on a defense bill that ultimately passed the body 98-0. The Nevada senator, who is retiring, accused Republicans of drafting the bill in the "dead of night," leaving lawmakers no time to read it.
Cotton no doubt found the irony rich.
"As a junior senator, I preside over the Senate," he said. "I usually do in the morning, which means I'm forced to listen to the bitter, vulgar, incoherent ramblings of the minority leader. Normally, like other Americans, I ignore them. I can't ignore them today, however."
Noting the bill had been public for weeks, he wondered when was the last time Reid read a bill. "It was probably an electricity bill," he said.
"This coming from a man who drafted Obamacare in his office and rammed it through this Senate at midnight on Christmas Eve on a straight party-line vote," Cotton said.
He also mocked Reid for his faux military concern.
"To say that he's delaying this because he cares for the troops," Cotton said, "a man who never served himself, a man who in April 2007 came to this very floor before the surge had even reached its peak and said the war was lost, when over 100 Americans were being killed in Iraq every month, when I was carrying their dead bodies off an airplane at Dover Air Force Base." The Nevada senator's claim, he said, was an "outrage."
How it's done
Raw video of an interview between documentary host Katie Couric and a group of gun rights activists shows how far the level the left-wing media will go to distort the truth.
In a scene from "Under the Gun," a documentary executive produced and narrated by the former "Today" anchor and CBS news reader, she asks the members of the Virginia Citizens Defense League, a gun rights organization, "If there are no background checks for gun purchases, how do you prevent felons or terrorists from purchasing a gun."
In the documentary, the activists are shown sitting silently, apparently unable to come up with an answer. Then the scene changes.
In the raw video, which was provided to the Washington Free Beacon, Couric's question is immediately answered, and a back-and-forth exchange continues between her and the activists for four minutes.
The Virginia Citizens Defense League, not surprisingly, did a little burn, labeling the ruse "unbelievable and extremely unprofessional."
"Katie Couric asked a key question during an interview of some members of our organization," organization President Philip Van Cleave said. "She then intentionally removed their answers and spliced in nine seconds of some prior video of our members sitting quietly and not responding. Viewers are left with the misunderstanding that the members had no answer to her question."
Not surprisingly, calls to Couric and the documentary's director were not returned.
Tolerance
Breitbart senior editor Milo Yiannopoulos found out how little support conservative speakers could expect on college campuses recently when his scheduled event at DePaul University was disrupted by protesters, who stormed the stage, blew whistles, grabbed the microphone and threatened to punch him in the face.
The security forces, which the speaker and Brietbart paid for, remained at the back of the venue and refused to intervene, even with the 550-person crowd chanting at them to "Do your job."
Eventually, Yiannopoulos, who had tried to continue the event despite chants of "Black lives matter" and "Feel the Bern" and epithets against Donald Trump, invited the crowd to follow him to the college president's office. En route, a scuffle ensued between protesters and fans of the Breitbart editor. One attendee was grabbed by protesters as he attempted to film the scuffle.
The university president had no immediate comment. Neither did the president of the United States on the outrage in his hometown of Chicago.
All-male women's team coming?
Campus Reform recently sent out a male correspondent to the University of Maryland to see what reaction he'd get if he told students he was a transgender female trying out for the school's women's Division I basketball team.
Of the 50 gullible millennials he interviewed, 49 signed his petition. Only one wouldn't, explaining, "Just because you identify [as a woman] doesn't change the physiological differences."
As sound as that may be, it's not likely good enough to outstrip the left favoring the mere desire to identify as a woman.
"I believe in you," one signer said. "I'm with you 100 percent." The hardest thing, another signer told him, will be "having the team accept that you're actually a woman and not a dude perving."
Don't look now, but Supreme Court battles are dead ahead.