WES VERNON — Public commentary on John McCain's death cries out for balance. The senator whose departure from this planet left behind six or seven days of unremitting and un-contradicted public praise that -- on TV seemingly deemed him as worthy of the highest level of sainthood. Granted caution, decent respect for the plus side of his legacy cannot be ignored. And it wasn't.... (more)

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON — Using funerals for political purposes has a long, but not distinguished, tradition. In 44 B.C. eulogist Mark Antony claimed to Roman mourners that he came to bury Caesar. But his speech created a frenzy and ended up ensuring a death warrant for the once "honorable" Brutus. In contrast, aside from the commemoration of the dead, Americans mostly have seen funerals as solemn reminders of how frail and transitory life is for all of us, and how our shared fates should unite even the bitterest of enemies.... (more)

PATRICK J. BUCHANAN — The campaign to overturn the 2016 election and bring down President Trump shifted into high gear this week. Inspiration came Saturday morning from the altar of the National Cathedral where our establishment came to pay homage to John McCain.... (more)

NEWSMAX — Senate Democrats embarrassed their party with their actions during Judge Brett Kavanaugh's first day of confirmation hearings, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said Wednesday, but she did not find that surprising.... (more)

NATIONAL REVIEW — Judge Brett Kavanaugh faced his first full day of questioning from members of Congress on many controversial issues as his confirmation hearings continued on Wednesday. Senator Dianne Feinstein (D., Calif.) peppered the Supreme Court nominee with questions about his stance on the 1973 landmark abortion-rights case Roe vs. Wade, which Kavanaugh has described as "settled law."... (more)

WASHINGTON TIMES — President Trump's Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh voted 93 percent of the time with his colleague Judge Merrick Garland, who President Obama unsuccessfully nominated to the Supreme Court in 2016, when they both heard cases together on a federal appeals court in D.C.... (more)

NEWSMAX — Jerome Corsi, author and investigative writer, has been served papers to appear before the Mueller grand jury in Washington this Friday to answer questions about his longtime Trump confidante Roger Stone, according to a report in The New York Times.... (more)

ART MOORE — Shortly after executives from Facebook and Twitter testified Wednesday before the Senate Intelligence Committee, the Justice Department announced a meeting with state attorneys general to discuss "growing concern" about censorship by social-media platforms, suggesting they are violating antitrust laws.... (more)

NEW YORK POST — On a day when its chief operating officer was on Capitol Hill this morning getting a grilling from DC lawmakers, Facebook is also the focus of a newly released Pew Research Center study that's chock-a-block with negative trends for the beleaguered social giant.... (more)

JOSEPH FARAH — If Dinesh D'Souza went to jail for a trivial campaign finance violation that might have warranted a small fine, what should the Federal Elections Commission do about Google and Facebook? According to research led by Robert Epstein, a Harvard Ph.D. in psychology, in conjunction with the apolitical, nonpartisan American Institute of Behavioral Research and Technology, Google and Facebook are in a position to swing 12 million votes in the 2018 midterm elections due to their overwhelming pro-Democrat bias demonstrated in their virtual monopoly dominance of search and social media platforms. Does that scare you like it scares me?... (more)

BOB UNRUH — The former dean of Harvard's Medical School is warning that Brown University's failed handling of a controversial study on gender dysphoria poses a threat to academic freedom. Jeffrey S. Flier contended in a commentary in the Quillette that social pressure on the university is influencing its conclusions about the research.... (more)

NEWSMAX — The Mexican man charged with abducting and killing an Iowa college student was known for years on the dairy farm where he worked by another name: John Budd. The alias has emerged as Cristhian Bahena Rivera's employer, a cattle operation owned by a prominent Republican family, faces questions over whether its managers were aware of any warning signs that he was in the country illegally.... (more)

NEWSMAX — Parkland shooter Nikolas Cruz's birth mother was a violent criminal and his half-sister is behind bars for attempted murder of a police officer, The Miami Herald reported Wednesday. Up until recently, the history of Cruz's birth family was sealed by statute, but now it could be used to keep him off Florida's Death Row for allegedly killing 17 students and teachers when he opened fire at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in February.... (more)

WASHINGTON TIMES — Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh sat through seven hours of shrill protests and Democratic warnings that he represented a legal apocalypse if confirmed to the Supreme Court -- then tried to defuse those complaints, promising Tuesday to be a careful judge and "team player" with the other justices.... (more)

NATIONAL REVIEW — Americans are divided on Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh as the first day of his confirmation hearing begins on Tuesday. A slight plurality, 40 percent, say the Senate should confirm President Trump's nominee to replace former Justice Anthony Kennedy, while 36 percent think he should be denied a seat on the court, according to a Gallup poll that was released on Tuesday and that was taken from August 20 to 26.... (more)

NEWSMAX — Republican ex-Sen. Jon Kyl has been picked to fill the late Sen. John McCain's seat in the upper chamber. Kyl, 76, was the second highest ranking Republican in the Senate when he retired in 2013 after serving three terms.... (more)

NEWSMAX — Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel says he won't seek a third term in 2019. Emanuel said Tuesday that being mayor "has been the job of a lifetime but it's not a job for a lifetime." The Chicago Tribune says he had already raised more than $10 million for another run for a four-year term.... (more)

WASHINGTON TIMES — President Trump's former campaign adviser Roger Stone spent Labor Day vilifying John McCain in a pair of social media posts, denouncing the recently deceased Arizona senator as treasonous and corrupt. Mr. Stone lashed out at McCain in separate Instagram posts Monday, a day after the Vietnam War veteran and lawmaker was laid to rest at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland.... (more)

ALAN KEYES — Judge Denise Casper has ruled against a Christian's access to a program that routinely hoists privately owned flags over a city building, concluding that other flags are acceptable because they're not religious. "The city's policy of excluding non-secular flags is viewpoint neutral because it excludes religion as a subject matter of speech on the flagpole....... (more)

CLIFF KINCAID — The Catholic Church would not be able to function as a criminal enterprise without the financial contributions of its members. Unless Catholic parishioners restricted their contributions to the local poor, their largesse was at least partly going toward underwriting the activities of pedophile priests and cover-ups through the Catholic bureaucracies in Washington, D.C. and Rome. Judge Brett Kavanaugh, a Catholic, should be asked about this growing scandal during his Supreme Court confirmation hearings. Has he been implicated in the scandal through his donations to the church?... (more)

JOHN FUND — The past week has featured so much extravagant praise of John McCain that Jill Abramson, the former editor of the New York Times, had to admit "McCain would cringe over some of the glowing tributes pouring in."... (more)

PJ MEDIA — As the fall elections approach, it's clear that the Left side of the aisle is getting nuttier by the day. The public spectacles of the two funerals, Aretha Franklin's and John McCain's, brought forth the usual characters from our long-running American sitcom-cum-political soap opera, including a lecherous Bill Clinton, Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, and Louis Farrakhan in Detroit; and the leading lights of the Permanent Bipartisan Fusion Party, including George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Joe Lieberman, in Washington, almost all of whom seemed not to have the dearly departed on their minds, but their bete noire in the White House, Donald Trump.... (more)

WASHINGTON EXAMINER — Huma Abedin, a longtime aide to Hillary Clinton, tweeted for the first time in more than two years to honor the late Sen. John McCain on Sunday. In the tweet, Abedin hearkened back to how the Arizona Republican defended her years ago against unsubstantiated allegations by House Republicans that she was part of a Muslim Brotherhood conspiracy to infiltrate the U.S. government.... (more)

NATIONAL REVIEW — The litany has been repeated so often that it's easy to recite: The walls are closing in on Donald Trump, person x or y or z is going to bring him down, it's only a matter of time before he is caught or exposed or loses his base of support and driven from public life. The phrases sound out from our cable channels. We see them in newspaper headlines and in our Twitter timelines. This time Trump has gone too far. The end is near. Take that, Drumpf!... (more)

ROBERT KNIGHT — The "progressives"' game plan to re-acquire power in Washington and make it permanent has been shockingly obvious for some time: Import millions of illegal immigrants, hook them on government aid and turn them into voters -- legally or illegally. Two Democrats running for Congress in Texas have come out for decriminalizing illegal immigration, along with Beto O'Rourke, who is running for Ted Cruz's U.S. Senate seat. Virtually all Democratic office holders oppose voter ID laws.... (more)