California on Thursday added Texas, Alabama, Kentucky and South Dakota to its growing list of states that public employees cannot travel to on official business. Celebrations immediately broke out in Texas, Alabama, Kentucky and South Dakota. (Just kidding.) Kansas, Mississippi, North Carolina and Tennessee are already being boycotted by California bureaucrats.

What is this boycott about?

In a variety of ways, these states are safeguarding the rights of religious individuals and organizations to follow their deeply held beliefs. And the intolerant progressives who run California just can’t tolerate it.

For example, in these states a Catholic charity could not be forced to provide abortion coverage to its employees. In contrast, California is forcing pregnancy resource centers to promote abortion. California also objects to states requiring girls to use the girls’ bathroom and requiring boys to use the boys’ bathroom. California thinks this is a violation of human rights.

Just a few weeks ago, California Gov. Jerry Brown (affectionately known as Gov. Moonbeam) strengthened his progressive credentials by hopping on a jet and traveling to Beijing to make a separate climate deal with China, the world’s biggest polluter.

China is a country that does not recognize religious freedom under any circumstance that conflicts with communist rule. It imprisons dissidents. It monitors and raids Christian churches. It is threatening its smaller and weaker neighbors. For decades, China forcibly aborted women who dared to have a second child. It suppresses free speech. And China isn’t exactly “gay friendly” either.

How insane is the progressive Left in America? It looks at China and Texas and declares Texas to be the human rights violator.

McConnell vs. Obamacare

Senate Republicans unveiled their version of an Obamacare reform bill Thursday. Four conservatives — Sens. Cruz, Johnson, Lee and Paul — immediately voiced misgivings, while some moderates also expressed concerns.

Since one Senate Democrat won’t help save the country from this failing disaster, Majority Leader McConnell cannot afford to lose more than two GOP senators. So the GOP’s challenge is to work very hard in the days ahead to come up with something that can pass.

It also needs to advance tax reform. If the party fails on both issues, it will suffer terrible consequences in 2018 — and it won’t be Donald Trump’s fault.

I urge our friends on the Hill: Do not go on an August recess until you get something done on either Obamacare or tax reform.

In most of America, a boss will say to his employees, “I know you have a vacation coming, but you’re not leaving until your work is finished.” Well, your boss is the American people. And from what I can tell, their mood is, “Don’t go on vacation until your job in DC is done!”

That Didn’t Take Long

I suspect all of us felt a little tinge of hope when we saw the picture of Republican and Democrat congressmen kneeling in prayer on the baseball field the day after a deranged leftist nearly killed House Majority Whip Steve Scalise.

While I think most of those kneeling were genuine in demonstrating some shared humanity, it is painfully clear that the ascendant progressive left-wing of the Democrat Party will not pause for a second in its vicious attacks on anything conservative.

For example, the Nebraska Democrat Party recently experienced a hostile progressive takeover. This week, a party official was fired after audio emerged in which he said of Rep. Scalise’s shooting, “I’m glad he got shot… I wish he was f—ing dead.” Another Nebraska Democrat official came under fire last week for her comments about the shooting.

Back in Washington, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, whom millions of progressives see as their hope for the future, used this rhetoric to describe Sen. McConnell’s Obamacare bill: “I’ve read the Republican ‘health care’ bill. This is blood money. They’re paying for tax cuts with American lives.”

When progressives constantly suggest that conservatives are going to push grandmothers off of cliffs, that they are Nazis and they are causing people to die, it shouldn’t come as a surprise when deranged leftists conclude that they are doing something noble by killing Republicans. And there are a lot of deranged leftists out there.

Of course, the media and the Hollywood Left did not even go through the charade of kneeling in prayer. Thursday, Elise Jordan, a former Bush aide and current MSNBC commentator, compared President Trump to a “suicide bomber.”

Actor Johnny Depp seemed to be high on something when he asked, “When was the last time an actor assassinated a president?” Depp’s reference, by the way, was to the assassination of the country’s first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln. John Wilkes Booth was an actor.

If the Left continues this rhetorical violence while groups like Antifa continue their actual violence, there will be dark days ahead for our beloved country.

Other Headlines

• Kudos to the Trump administration for rejecting pro-abortion extremism at the United Nations.

• President Trump on Friday signed legislation making it easier for the VA to fire underperforming bureaucrats at the underperforming agency.

• Fourteen of the 15 charges against pro-life activists David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt were dismissed by a California court this week. Daleiden and Merritt produced the undercover videos that exposed Planned Parenthood’s trafficking in aborted baby body parts. Rather than investigate Planned Parenthood, California’s progressive politicians are persecuting journalists, hoping to hide the ugly truth about the abortion industry.

• A recent Gallup poll finds that 68% of Americans believe there should be significant restrictions on abortion, including 52% of Democrats.



• Tennessee has joined a growing number of states that have banned late-term abortions.



• Kudos to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley for holding hearings about the Left’s assault on free speech on college campuses. Several states are taking steps to hold the violent thugs accountable.

• Many Hispanic immigrants — even those here many years — are failing to learn English and failing to assimilate.

• 30% of the children Obama allowed to walk across the border have ties to gangs.

• 64% of voters believe that the Democrats’ obsession with the Russia investigations is hurting the country and distracting from more important issues. Time to move on!

• The Washington Post conceded this week that the Left’s single-payer health care scheme “would have an astonishingly high price tag” of more than $3 trillion a year!