"Self-described 'liberal, feminist lawyer' Lisa Blatt, who voted for Hillary Clinton and is an advocate of Roe v. Wade, sat before the Senate Judiciary Tuesday and gave a more powerful and full-throated endorsement of Brett Kavanaugh than anyone else the entire day.

"Lisa Blatt -- an attorney and Supreme Court veteran who has argued cases before the court more than any other woman, winning 32 of 35 cases -- fully endorsed the Trump nominee, even though she has filed cases against the Trump administration.

"In her surprising remarks, Blatt introduced herself as 'a liberal Democrat and an unapologetic defender of a woman's right to choose' and called liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg her 'hero,' and said she voted for Hillary and Obama.

"'I'm here today to introduce Judge Kavanaugh and urge the Senate to confirm him as a next associate justice of the Supreme Court,' Blatt said after the previewing of her liberal credentials, saying she received hate from her own party for supporting Trump's pick. 'Judge Kavanaugh is clearly qualified to serve on the Supreme Court.'"

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"A definition of totalitarianism might be the saturation of every facet of daily life by political agendas and social-justice messaging.

"At the present rate, America will soon resemble the dystopias of novels such as 1984 and Brave New World in which all aspects of life are warped by an all-encompassing ideology of coerced sameness. Or rather, the prevailing orthodoxy in America is the omnipresent attempt of an elite -- exempt from the consequences of its own ideology thanks to its supposed superior virtue and intelligence -- to mandate an equality of result. ...

"This new politicized borg ferrets out every aspect of our lives. Nothing is safe, nothing sacred. Dead or alive, the relentless social-justice messaging continues. Like some sort of time machine, we go back in time to alter history as if a few corrections and adjustments will change and thus improve the entire present.

"Progressive politics seeks to connect and energize us as millions of shared malignant cells inside a metastasizing tumor -- or to destroy us in the attempt."

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"Test your knowledge of current events by answering this question: Which organization remains stuck in deep cover-up mode?

A) The FBI
B) The Roman Catholic Church
C) Both of the above
D) Neither of the above

"If you get your news only from The New York Times, you believe the correct answer is D, neither of the above. Other people know the correct answer is C because they see the leaders of both organizations acting as if the public can't handle the truth.

"It is not my intent to suggest the FBI and the Vatican are in all ways comparable. Far from it.

"Yet they are in similar straits because each faces a crisis of public confidence. Those crises are severe because of internal decisions to parse, obscure and withhold important facts.

"While a desire to protect historically valuable institutions from external harm is understandable, the goal cannot come at the expense of honesty and truth. When it does, the damage grows."

"A hundred times every day, I remind myself that my inner and outer life depend on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving."

"With their busy schedules and tight state budgets, Democratic attorneys general have little in the way of time and resources to advance climate-change policies, which is where billionaire Michael Bloomberg comes in.

"The former New York City mayor's fortune has bankrolled a year-long effort to place privately funded lawyers as 'special assistant attorneys general' in at least six states with specific instructions to work on 'clean energy, climate change, and environmental interests.'

"The program, run through the New York University School of Law, comes as the most disturbing example of the 'billion-dollar per year climate industry' gaining access to law-enforcement authority in pursuit of a political agenda, according to a report released Wednesday by the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

"'The scheme raises serious questions about special interests setting states' policy and law enforcement agendas, without accountability to the taxpayers and voters whom these law enforcement officials supposedly serve,' said CEI senior fellow Chris Horner, who authored the report, 'Law Enforcement for Rent: How Special Interests Fund Climate Policy Through State Attorneys General.'"

"Playing God, even online, is not as easy as it looks. Facebook, Twitter and the other technology firms in control of the social-media universe are learning that with nearly limitless power comes the responsibility to administer it fairly. So far social media has failed. Bias, mostly but not all left-leaning, has obstructed the free flow of dialogue. Unless the tech giants figure out how to remedy their tendency to mediate political discourse by leaning left, the bloom will fade from the unmatched flower of human connectivity, and bad things will follow.

"In his 2003 fantasy film 'Bruce Almighty,' funny man Jim Carrey plays a TV reporter who, following several personal misfortunes, has the gall to loudly second-guess God. Annoyed, the Creator lets his critic try his hand at directing the affairs of men. The newly omnipotent reporter discovers the dilemma of adjudicating humanity's billions of competing petitions, and with rue and remorse begs the Almighty to take it all back.

"The tech giants that unleashed the cacophony of global communications are similarly overwhelmed. As the number of social-media enthusiasts has exploded across our orb, so has a list of complaints from users who say their messages are electronically folded, bent, spindled or mutilated simply because of an offending turn of phrase. ...

"Social media is regarded as electronic bulletin boards where everyone is free to post his thoughts. Such thoughts are exempt -- for now -- from the requirements of the Communications Decency Act that apply to paper-and-ink publishers who are liable for the content of third-party users. If the gatekeepers of conversation continue to tilt left as arbiters of acceptable speech, they, too, are likely to be subject on one sad day to the government's rules, and learn the perils of playing God online."

"Is Google manipulating its algorithm to prioritize left-leaning news outlets in their coverage of President Trump? It sure looks that way based on recent search results for news on the president.

"Conservatives and Trump supporters have for the last several years questioned whether Google was deprioritizing conservative news sites, hiding them from users who utilize their search engine. Google has maintained that all outlets are treated fairly, but nevertheless, conservative sites have reported reduced search traffic and, in the case of Google-owned YouTube, content creators have been banned and demonetized. Google's high-profile firing of conservative James Damore, purportedly over his conservative political views, only reinforces the idea that Google is picking winners and losers.

"To test the premise, I performed a Google search for 'Trump' using the search engine's 'News' tab and analyzed the results using Sharyl Attkisson's media bias chart.

"I expected to see some skewing of the results based on my extensive experience with Google, but I was not prepared for the blatant prioritization of left-leaning and anti-Trump media outlets. Looking at the first page of search results, I discovered that CNN was the big winner, scoring two of the first ten results. Other left-leaning sites that appeared on the first page were CBS, The Atlantic, CNBC, The New Yorker, Politico, Reuters, and USA Today (the last two outlets on this list could arguably be considered more centrist than the others).

"Not a single right-leaning site appeared on the first page of search results.

"But it got much, much worse when I analyzed the first 100 items that Google returned in a search for news on 'Trump.'"

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"PHOENIX (AP) -- Sen. John McCain's death in office has handed Arizona's governor an empty Senate seat to give out -- and a difficult political puzzle to solve before he does.

"Arizona law requires only that Gov. Doug Ducey name a replacement who is a member of McCain's Republican Party and who will fill the seat until the next general election in 2020. But in a state with a deeply divided Republican Party, where McCain was a towering but divisive figure, the choice is far more complicated.

"Ducey is balancing the demands of the many conservative Arizona Republicans who have soured on McCain due to his dovish immigration stance, criticism of President Donald Trump and vote against a rollback of President Barack Obama's health care law. They are wary of Ducey appointing a moderate. But naming someone with dramatically different views from McCain could be viewed as disrespectful to McCain's legacy, carrying its own risks. In either case, Ducey wants to set the party up to hold the seat two years from now, no easy task given the turmoil in his party."

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"There's an old cliche that the Federal Reserve likes to take away the punch bowl just when the party is getting going. That's what President Trump suspects that Fed Chairman Jerome Powell is doing now by raising interest rates at a time of a booming economy.

"Last week Mr. Trump took a shot at the Fed when he complained to Reuters that 'I'm not thrilled with them raising interest rates.' When asked if he believed that the Fed should be 'independent,' Mr. Trump said, 'I believe in the Fed doing what's good for the country.'

"In response to these comments, many in the media and on Wall Street have been suffering heart palpitations. The president is trying to bully the Fed into keeping interest rates low, they protested. Others claim that Mr. Trump is trying to politicize the Fed. Of course, we don't want the Fed's monetary decisions to be based on politics or the election cycle.

"But why should it be taboo for this or any president, who effectively serves as the nation's CEO, to weigh in on financial and monetary decisions that fundamentally affect the economic success of the nation? The Fed independently makes its own decisions on the direction of monetary policy, but seemingly every pundit in America has an opinion on what it should do. Why not the president -- especially a man who has already proven he knows more than a thing or two about business and the economy? ...

"The Fed's job is not to stall growth or to prevent economic 'overheating,' whatever that means. It is to keep prices stable and the dollar a strong and reliable currency. Rapid GDP growth and rising wages are not the enemy -- they are the goal. This is what Trumponomics is all about, and if the Fed isn't with that program then Mr. Trump is right to attack them for trying to block America's grand economic comeback."

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"Special Counsel Robert Mueller's proxy prosecutor in New York City has obtained a plea agreement with Michael Cohen on some pretty slimy personal-business issues, and in the process, obtained pleas to two federal campaign-finance-law violations ... that, from my experience as an attorney in the field, do not appear to violate federal campaign-finance law. That aside, maybe this means that Mueller might step out of his snipe hunt of an investigation of Russian 'collusion' in 2016 to take an actual interest in whether there was compliance with federal campaign-finance law by both 2016 presidential campaigns, not just President Trump's. If Mueller is actually concerned, as his designated prosecutor in the Cohen case apparently is, about compliance with the federal statutes setting limits on contributions and reporting of expenditures by campaigns, parties, and candidates, his interest is long overdue. There are several serious enforcement and prosecutorial undertakings awaiting his attention -- none involving President Trump or his campaign.

"Let's start with the payments from the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) to Fusion GPS for the infamous dossier that triggered the entire Mueller investigation of 'Russian collusion.' It is still not known how much the Democrats paid to Fusion GPS because that information has not been released, even though it was revealed almost a year ago that the source of payment was the Democrats. We should know the exact amount paid to Fusion GPS by the DNC and the Clinton campaign because all expenditures over $200 by parties and campaigns are required to be reported to the Federal Election Commission (FEC). However, the Democrats' payments for the discredited dossier were falsely reported as 'legal fees' paid to Perkins Coie, and not disclosed as to the actual vendor, amount, or purpose -- as required by federal law. It is a federal offense to falsify an FEC report, which was obviously done in this case. Perhaps there is a conflict of interest for Mueller to investigate this matter, since it involves several of his own agents as potential witnesses, thus suggesting that the investigation of the Fusion GPS payments from Perkins Coie should be referred to the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, in the same manner that Mueller transferred the Cohen case to the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. ...

"These co-conspirators collectively engaged in the greatest campaign-finance scandal in history. Mueller has the opportunity to prove that his investigation is not a partisan witch hunt, as millions of Americans now believe. It will be interesting to see if he applies the same fervor to the Democrats' 2016 campaign-finance violations and activities that he has applied to those of President Trump and his associates."

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