Latest from Coffee House

The First Lady of Virginia, Pam Northam, wife of Ralph, got herself in hot water this week for handing out cotton to black students while they were on a tour. But the Northams have form when it comes to messy race relations. There’s the whole blackface or KKK costume school photograph business. Then there’s the blacking up as Michael Jackson thing, which Ralph admitted to. Oh, and Ralph Northam’s family owned at least 84 slaves. Northam maintains that he learned about his family’s slave ownership in 2017. That story is harder to believe once you see that three out of the four grandparental lines of his family owned slaves. Two branches owned at least two dozen. Let’s take a tour of the family genealogy.

The most fascinating thing about the Michael Cohen hearing may not be what Michael Cohen said, but what Republicans didn’t. They made no attempt to defend Donald Trump other than to disparage Cohen’s character with metronomic regularity. Cohen was a liar. A bad man. He enriched himself. But how do you derogate someone who has already confessed to swimming happily in Trump’s swampy waters? The other tack they pursued was to declare the hearing a circus or a charade. Protestations were profuse. O tempora o mores! Washington, we were told, is a ‘hellhole.’ (At least Republican lawmakers forbore from deeming it a shithole.

Later this week, the Conservative Political Action Conference will convene for its annual gathering. Spectator USA has obtained a final copy of its official schedule. We are reprinting it here for the first time, in its entirety, and without comment.

The New Jersey State Senate voted overwhelmingly in favor of a bill Thursday to require presidential candidates to release five years’ worth of tax returns in exchange for a place on the state’s ballot. The measure passed along party lines 23-11. Sitting President Donald Trump famously bucked modern tradition when refusing to release his tax returns, so the NJ measure could effectively keep Donald Trump off the ballot. The Democrat-dominated New Jersey legislature passed the same requirement in 2017, but Republican Gov. Chris Christie refused to sign it.

Andrew McCabe, second-in-command at James Comey’s FBI, is at it again. First, he and his boss shredded the Bureau’s reputation as the world’s leading law enforcement agency. Now, McCabe is compounding the damage by making wild, self-serving charges to sell his new book. In one TV interview, he said it is ‘possible’ that Donald Trump is a Russian agent. Serious charges need serious proof. Simple fairness demands it. But McCabe presents none. That’s par for the course. Simple fairness was not the hallmark of the Comey-McCabe era. No disinterested observers think the Bureau’s investigation of Hillary Clinton’s email server was treated the same way as the amorphous charges against the Trump campaign. That bias wasn’t the fault of FBI field agents.

In the past six months, Democrats have accused Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh of gang rape, gone apoplectic over an awkwardly smiling 17-year-old boy, flirted with infanticide, embraced late-term abortion, and fallen all over themselves to endorse an absurd so-called ‘Green New Deal’ that calls for eliminating air travel, remodeling of every building in the United States, and, at long last, confronting the scourge of ‘farting cows.’ Where, in this great, big, moralizing, self-righteous, progressive mess that has become the Democratic party are the non-radical voters? Where are the moderates? The ‘blue dogs?’ Are there even any left? The answer seems to be no and obvious the conclusion is that the Democrats have gone off the rails.

It’s Friday evening and the sun set over three hours ago, which can only mean one thing: the time has arrived for another development in the Robert Mueller probe. This time around, the revelation is the Special Counsel’s recommendation of up to 24-and-a-half years in prison for former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort. Manafort is going down for the crimes of tax fraud, bank fraud and failing to file a foreign bank account report. The filing says that Manafort ‘acted for more than a decade as if he were above the law, and deprived the federal government of millions of dollars.’ The sentencing recommendation comes after Judge Amy Berman Jackson ruled that Manafort had lied to prosecutors on three different topics, breaching his plea deal.

The great-grandfather of Virginia governor Ralph Northam was a leader of the Red Shirts, a quasi-Klan militant group known for terrorizing black Republicans during Reconstruction. Captain John Brownlee, who died in 1912, has his membership of the group mentioned in two obituaries. One obituary refers to ‘his valiant company of “Red Shirts,”’ and that ‘he did as much to redeem his country from Radical rule and tyranny as any other man in upper Carolina.’ The other obituary states that he ‘took a very active part in the red shirt times of ’76, being captain of one of the Abbeville companies.’ [caption id="attachment_10406766" align="alignnone" width="416"] An obituary to Capt. John E.