"Both the Supreme Court and Congress -- or both -- should act to rein in district court judges who issue 'nationwide' or 'universal' injunctions.

"Such injunctions purport to apply those judges' decisions to the whole country, rather than just to the litigants before them or to the specific geographical jurisdictions the judges serve. The use of such injunctions has exploded in recent years, and it has proven particularly popular among liberal district judges who aim to block initiatives of the Trump administration. ...

"As Justice Samuel Alito explained ... if a single lower court judge can in effect bind the entire country, it encourages litigants to race to the courts to find a friendly judge. This, he wrote, 'invites the losers to seek to obtain in court what they could not achieve in the political arena.'

"One way or another, judges should show restraint. But if they won't, Congress or the Supreme Court should restrain them."

"Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam's political career is about to be aborted, although presumably the cracker Democrat is being 'kept comfortable' in his final moments as the party elders hold 'discussions' about the 'tragic and difficult circumstances' in which he finds himself.

"Oh wait, those were the very terms the erstwhile Social Justice Warrior had used only hours earlier to describe the infanticide that his party was enthusiastically proposing to legalize in the Old Dominion.

"As Northam himself noted as recently as Thursday, in the case of 'severe deformities,' sometimes a decision must be made, for the good of all parties, in this case the Democrat party.

"Talk about severe deformities -- politically, in the blink of an eye, Northam had gone from toast of the town (well, Georgetown anyway) to just plain toast."

"Florida governor Ron DeSantis said Thursday that he plans to issue an executive order setting new curriculum standards and eliminating 'the vestiges of Common Core' from the state's public schools.

"'We stuck with Common Core. Then we re-branded it. . . . It's all the same. It all needs to be looked at, it all needs to be scrutinized,' DeSantis said at an event at Ida S. Baker High School in Cape Coral.

"Fulfilling one of his campaign promises, the Republican governor announced that he will ask Education Commissioner Richard Corcoran, who also attended Thursday's event, to 'come up with a roadmap' for new curriculum standards over the next year, working alongside the state Board of Education.

"Common Core, which sets required proficiency levels for students from kindergarten to twelfth grade in language-arts and math classes, has been adopted by 45 states. It is controversial among conservatives, some of whom call it an uncalled for and illegal encroachment into classrooms that mandates high-stakes tests and lessons that don't work for some students. Florida first adopted its standards in 2010, and modified them slightly in 2014."

"WASHINGTON -- Nearly four times as many veterans could be eligible for private health care paid for by the Department of Veterans Affairs under sweeping rules the agency proposed Wednesday.

"The rules, which will be open to public comment, would permit veterans to get private care if they had to wait more than 20 days or drive more than 30 minutes for a VA appointment.

"That would be a considerable expansion of eligibility standards, in which private options kick in for vets who have to wait 30 days or live 40 miles from a VA facility. The new rules would allow veterans who need urgent care to go to a private doctor without pre-authorization.

"If they go into effect, the rules would deliver on a presidential campaign promise made by Donald Trump to expand choices for veterans seeking health care outside the VA.

"VA officials estimated the plan could increase the number of veterans eligible for private care to as many as 2.1 million -- up from roughly 560,000."

Read entire article here.

"The left-wing approach to billionaires has radically changed. Aside from the rhetorical boilerplate about robber barons and the need for an income-tax rate of 70 percent, in reality the hard Left has partnered with the nation's richest. The new big fortunes of America are now mostly in high-tech, media, and finance, not in the old conservative and muscular corporations centered in farming, manufacturing, or oil and minerals. And the new zillionaires are left-wing, and they are activist: Bezos, Bloomberg, Buffett, Gates, Zuckerberg, the Google and Apple teams, Soros, Steyer, and a host of others. Through grants, foundations, purchased media, and super PACs, astronomical amounts of money flow into federal, state, and even local midterm election campaigns, and into voter harvesting and issues from global warming and late-term abortion to open borders, gun control, and identity politics. The 2018 midterms were a mere precursor of things to come. ...

"The bad news is that conservatives will likely increasingly be outnumbered, outspent, and out-organized unless they are shocked out of their somnolence. The quasi-good news is that the hard Left is unapologetic that it is the hard Left, not just bankrupt in its ideology in a world where socialism has demonstrably wrecked entire countries, but also predictably hypocritical and cynical, given that leftists are now really the party of the rich -- and without much empathy for the deplorable and irredeemable middle classes."

"Special counsel Robert Mueller's indictment of Roger Stone elucidates what has been apparent to the public for a year, and therefore must have been known to prosecutors and the FBI for much longer: There was no criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russian government. That is, the Kremlin's cyber-espionage efforts to undermine the 2016 election by hacking Democratic email accounts were not coordinated with the Trump campaign.

"In the Stone indictment, Mueller offers up 20 pages of heavy-breathing narrative about the Russian theft of tens of thousands of emails from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, the transmission of the purloined materials to WikiLeaks (portrayed as a witting arm of the Putin regime), and their subsequent media publication in the final weeks of the campaign. But the big wind produces no rain. At the end, we get a couple of pages of process crimes.

"Stone is charged with such comparative trifles as concealing from Congress that his communications with an associate were in writing. The seven counts are offenses generated not by an espionage conspiracy but by the investigation of an espionage conspiracy that did not exist.

"Not one that 'may not have existed.' The Trump-Russia conspiracy did not exist."

"It was as predictable as the sunrise -- the second the 'deal' was announced Friday to reopen the government, smug liberals took to social media to declare victory. And why not? They won. But what exactly did they win? And is the fight really over?

"What Democrats won is a continued unsecured border. Americans will continue to be victims of crimes, up to and including being murdered at the hands of people who shouldn't be in the country in the first place, congratulations. Those criminals will continue to enjoy the protections of Democratic Party officials until they manage to cross the ever-moving line leftists draw to protect illegal aliens (basically a violent crime) and allow authorities to call ICE. Way to go! Opioid overdoses will continue to skyrocket, claiming more American lives every year than died in the entirety of the Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq Wars combined. Congratulations, Democrats.

"I don't really see how any of that is worth celebrating, but I'm not a 'progressive Democrat.' I'm more interested in protecting American citizens than I am with illegal aliens or scoring political points with a race-obsessed base."

"Venezuela's resistance to the tyrannical rule of Nicolas Maduro has hit a new peak, with hundreds of thousands taking to the streets to demand his exit. He can hold on if the military doesn't turn - and if he's willing to rule over a wasteland. ...

"Juan Guaido, the new head of the National Assembly, has rallied the latest uprising by invoking constitutional provisions that make him the legitimate interim president. Brazil, Colombia, Argentina, Chile, Peru and other Latin nations have recognized his claim, as have Canada and the United States. ...

"The regime is holding on with the help of secret police imported from Cuba, and by mortgaging the nation's future to China and Russia. Guaido became leader of the opposition because the government has jailed, killed or otherwise sidelined a long string of challengers - and he's now been forced into hiding.

"Washington has no magic answers here, certainly not an invasion. For now, Team Trump is rightly doing what it can to support Venezuela's best hope for freedom."

"The Supreme Court has taken its first gun-rights case in almost a decade, and it's a strange case indeed. At issue is what appears to be a draconian, one-of-a-kind New York City law that prohibits any person who possesses a license to own a gun in their home from transporting that gun (even in a locked container, separate from its ammunition) anywhere except for one of the seven shooting ranges within the city.

"Under this law, if you want to transport your gun to a shooting competition outside the city, you can't. If you're fortunate enough to own a second home, you can't even take your own weapon to your own home. You can't take it to any other shooting range. If you leave your house for an extended period, your gun has to stay in your vacant home. If you're going to another location - where you have the right to possess or even carry the gun - the weapon can't travel with you.

"It's an astonishing law, but it's also (given its single-city applicability and the fact that very few New Yorkers are able to get gun permits to begin with) one of the most limited gun-rights cases in the country. In the years since the Supreme Court recognized that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms and then ruled that the Second Amendment was applicable to state and local governments, it has time and again declined to rule on consequential cases."

Read entire article here.

"Good citizens with proper respect for themselves, their neighbors, and their country do not seek to destroy the lives of a couple of teenagers in the pursuit of a transient and petty political advantage.

"Errors can be forgiven, and the occasional tendency to get carried away with rhetorical excess can be received with charity - especially by those of us who suffer from the same temptation from time to time. But political psychosis and deceit are something else. They can be forgiven only contingently - and never forgotten."