People who want to ‘tweak’ the First Amendment don’t want free speech

Now and then it’s good to have a brief check-in on premises, as in the basic assumptions of our thinking.

The topic was brought home to me Tuesday by an article at Breitbart, by Pam Key, recounting Joy Behar’s dictum during a discussion of free speech at The View that the First and Second Amendments need “tweaking.”

Key quotes Behar:  “When the Founding Fathers were busy with the amendments — the 1st and 2nd Amendments — they did not have AR-15s in there, weapons of war, and they didn’t have Twitter. So both amendments, I think, need to be tweaked a little bit.”

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German schools rename ‘St. Martin’s Day’ fest – but look who opposes doing that

St. Martin’s Day – too Christian for the European left. (Image: Mitteldeutsche Zeitung)

You just know this latest in the thousand cuts of “multi-kulti” cultural suicide has to do with fear of offending Muslim immigrants.  And it does.

But I urge readers to look past the surface and keep in mind who’s doing the slice-and-dice job.

The story at hand involves a school in Oberkassel, Dusseldorf, which has redesignated the traditional St. Martin’s Day festival, held on 11 November, as an absurdly generic “Festival of Light.”  German media reported this late last week, and it was picked up quickly by English-language outlets.  (It’s worth making the point, as an aside, that we not only have to give up the richness of our own Western culture to supposedly avoid offending those from other cultures; we have to dumb everything down as well, turning ourselves into primitive animists and nature-worshipers.  Having a festival about “light” is so 10,000 years ago.)

Fake, P.C. #NativeHistory ‘map porn’ storms Facebook

Imaginary map scratches bias itch. (Map: ScientiaOmniaVincit via Reddit and Facebook)

If you weren’t sure America’s schools are turning out a whole lot of people of, shall we say, uneducated potential – well, dither no more.  Certainty can be yours.

A fantasy map of North America, posted in a Reddit forum on 6 August, has taken Facebook by storm – and with it, the impressionable minds of hundreds of thousands of Facebook members.

The original map was an exercise in projecting what North America might look like in 2015 if there had been no colonization by Europeans.  As the comments at Reddit indicate, the original map made quite a number of, um, uneducated errors.  But the important point for now is that the map never purported to reflect any kind of historical reality (and it didn’t).  It was an essay in alternative-history imagination.

That didn’t stop Facebook peeps from seizing on the map and sending it viral, with comments like these:

Trump jumps shark with insane comment about McCain’s military service

(Image via outsidethebeltway.com)

Gaahhhh.  Feh.  OMG.  No he didn’t.

But…yes, unfortunately — inevitably? — he did.

Trump managed to implode faster than, well, something that implodes really fast.  Come up with your own analogies.  (Post them in the comments section and we’ll have a contest.)

After riding the crest of a wave for three weeks, speaking for Mr. and Mrs. Joe America on the subject of out-of-hand illegal immigration, Trump crashed and burned in Iowa, lobbing a few seconds’ worth of campaign-ending trash talk at John McCain.

Memphis and the inconvenient dead: We’re all snarling jihadis now

Graves of WWII soldiers in Libya, desecrated by jihadis. (Image via euronews)

Congratulations to the Memphis City Council.  As Howard Portnoy reported, Memphis’s finest voted this week to dig up the remains of Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest – and his wife – from their resting place beneath Forrest’s statue in a Memphis park.

It’s politically incorrect, according to the council, for the Forrests’ bones to repose there any longer.

“It is no longer politically correct to glorify someone who was a slave trader, someone who was a racist on public property,” said City Council member Myron Lowery.

So now our own, all-American Memphis, Tennessee is just like the jihadi animals who’ve been attacking graves around the Middle East, as they slash and burn their way through the post-Arab Spring landscape.