You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose. Mario Cuomo's adage has been updated and adapted by his successors in the modern Democratic Party. The duality they present to voters either side of an election is a deception that has defined American politics and culture for the past 20 years. As they campaign for office, they present a kind of idealized version of themselves to the electorate as mainstream Americans, seeking merely to bring a little unity and compassion to a fundamentally great country in need of reform. Once in office they act as if they have a mandate to remake a benighted country, to reorder an unjust system, to replace American exceptionalism with European social democracy, and to rewrite the nation's values with the precepts of their cultural Marxism.
Sadly, many of our leading law schools have lost their bearings. Law school leaders and faculties have steadily disavowed teaching the constitutional text and structure to instead promote the latest fads in diversity, equity and inclusion. Faculty hostility toward true academic freedom, a content-neutral approach to free speech and study of the Constitution's text has gone so far that law schools are now rejecting donors who wish to support research in separation of powers, federalism and constitutional interpretation
The powers that be have sent President Joe Biden on vacation to California for the remaining days of the Democratic National Convention (DNC). He is currently tucked away on a five-day vacation at the estate of a billionaire Democrat donor. His schedule over the past two days has been entirely empty. Last week, President Biden was on vacation to Camp David. The week before, he was on vacation in Delaware. Ever since he was effectively forced to surrender the Democratic nomination to Vice President Kamala Harris, Biden has been missing in action. Sure, before that, he was barely functional, but Biden's schedule has now reached new levels of absurdity. Yet it looks like this is the game plan for his handlers for the next 151 days until Inauguration Day 2025 arrives. So who exactly is running the country? Nobody outside of the upper echelons of the Washington D.C. political elite seems to know.
Tim Walz, Minnesota governor and Vice President Kamala Harris' running mate, has received a lot of criticism for fudging details of his military service. That's definitely worthy of scrutiny, but something else that Walz said in an interview in late 2022 deserves attention, too. "There's no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech and especially around our democracy," he told MSNBC. Walz is wrong. We do have a broad guarantee of free speech under the U.S. Constitution, and that includes misinformation and hate speech. Walz probably missed the irony, but his misinformation on free expression is protected speech.
The interest rate needs to reflect what the market can bear. Artificially low rates for far too long contributed to the recent excessive inflation.