COLORADO CHRISTIAN CENTER BURNED IN MOSTLY PEACEFUL FASHION.
Related: Is This What AOC and Pelosi Wanted? Christian Pregnancy Clinic Torched in Colorado.
Well yes, if only to rebuild the building so as to make it Green New Deal compliant.
Meanwhile, at America’s Newspaper of Record: Authorities Warn Tonight’s Protests May Escalate From ‘Mostly Peaceful’ To ‘Somewhat Peaceful.’
COLOR ME UNSURPRISED: Patients fare better with general anesthesia for hip fracture surgery, study shows.
I had my wisdom teeth out with just a local and it was fine, but there are limits.
Read the whole thing.
(Updated and bumped.)
TOP GUN: MAVERICK CATAPULTS PAST $1B AT WORLDWIDE BOX OFFICE:
Paramount/Skydance’s Top Gun: Maverick has raced past the $1B mark worldwide, becoming only the second movie of the pandemic era to reach such rarefied air — and Tom Cruise’s first time to the milestone in a career that has spanned 40 years. It took just 31 days for the aviators to get to $1B with the total through Sunday at an estimated $1.006B worldwide, including domestic’s estimated $521.7M and $484.7M from the international box office.
Cruise’s flying ace had already raced across $900M last Monday, and a few days prior had topped $800M to become Cruise’s biggest movie ever globally.
The overseas holds on this 36-years-later sequel directed by Joseph Kosinski have been nothing short of stellar. Last weekend was off just 21%, and the current frame, at $44.5M in 65 markets, is down only 26% — simply phenomenal.
DEAL OF THE DAY: Kitchen Mama Electric Can Opener 2.0. #CommissionEarned (bumped)
DON SURBER: Kellogg goes woke, gets broken up. “Elitists want us to live in Bizarro World, which I wrote about yesterday. Grown-ups are starting to say no. And Kellogg’s is spinning off Froot Loops and the rest to keep the company solvent.”
FASTER, PLEASE: Nuclear industry hopes to expand output with new reactors.
If you care about the planet, and about humanity, you have to support nuclear power.
VIRGINIA POSTREL: Stakeholder Capitalism Isn’t Working As Planned.
The great value of the Friedman doctrine is that it establishes a coherent standard for making tradeoffs. Maximizing economic value tells you to “spend an additional dollar on any constituency provided the long-term value added to the firm from such expenditure is a dollar or more,” as Harvard Business School economist Michael Jensen put it in a 2010 article.
Stakeholder theory, by contrast, tells you nothing. It assumes you just make everybody happy. And, as Jensen wrote, “Without the clarity of mission provided by a single-valued objective function, companies embracing stakeholder theory will experience managerial confusion, conflict, inefficiency, and perhaps even competitive failure.” Jensen’s article is the best articulation of why what he calls “enlightened value maximization” is indispensable.
But neither he nor Friedman fully imagined the chaos that could ensue without it.
Look at the backlash when Walt Disney Co. tried to placate vocal employees by opposing Florida legislation to ban discussing sexual orientation with younger children in schools. The political pushback — like the original protests — reflected a sense of betrayal by a beloved company whose fans see their dreams and values reflected in its characters and stories.
Appeasing one group of stakeholders alienated others. It wasn’t hard for conservatives to find opposing voices within the company. Disney has nearly 200,000 employees and countless customers. All are stakeholders, and they represent every conceivable viewpoint.
By focusing on business goals, by contrast, Netflix, despite other challenges, has more successfully weathered its own controversies, from conservative uproar over the French film “Cuties” to more recent protests about Dave Chappelle’s jokes about trans women. To make expectations clear, the company revised its cultural guidelines for employees to explicitly say, “As employees we support the principle that Netflix offers a diversity of stories, even if we find some titles counter to our own personal values.”
Stakeholder capitalism implicitly assumes a cultural consensus identical to whatever its advocates believe. It harks back to the mid-20th century, when big US companies enjoyed little competition, mass media marginalized all but a narrow range of political, religious and social views, and hierarchy and security dominated worker expectations. It pretends social media, Slack channels and “bringing your whole self to work” don’t exist.
It’s really not working out well for Disney: Disney’s Stock Price Has Lost 50% Of Its Value After Year Of Leftwing Political Electioneering And Badly-Received Woke Programming.
GUN CONTROL LAWS TEND TO BE RACIST: Public Defenders Back Bruen Decision’s Elimination of a Racist Gun Control Law.
READER FAVORITE: Super Bright Modern Torchiere LED Floor Lamps. #CommissionEarned
‘I LOST FRIENDS:’ Former Rolling Stone Journalist Talks Reaction To Him Reviewing What Is A Woman.
“[T]he movie shows academic after academic and activist after activist seething at the mere implication that they should have to explain themselves,” he wrote. “Their attitude is positively medieval: ‘We keep the Bible in Latin for a reason!’”
In the same review, Taibbi applauded the humor in “What is a Woman?”, something the journalist told Shapiro had been completely lost on the Left.
“It’s done with a sense of humor and satirical bend that’s taboo on our side of the aisle now, which I find really strange, because that shift happened almost overnight and imperceptibly,” he said.
Well, not quite overnight; we’ve been exploring how the left lost its edge on comedy for almost 20 years now.
SETTING AGGRESSIVE SCHEDULES, BUT TAKING THE NECESSARY TIME TO GET IT RIGHT, IS A MUSK TRADEMARK: Elon Musk wants SpaceX’s biggest rocket ready to launch in July, but experts say he may not get his wish.
LET ME JUST GET OUT AHEAD OF THE STORY AND SAY THAT GHISLAINE MAXWELL DID NOT COMMIT SUICIDE: Ghislaine Maxwell, ex-lover of Jeffrey Epstein, placed on suicide watch ahead of sentencing.
I HOOKED A CATFISH BIGGER THAN THAT ONCE IN LAY LAKE, ALABAMA, BUT IT GOT AWAY. SUCKER WAS THIS BIG. . . This is the largest freshwater fish ever caught.
SUICIDE WATCH. THAT’S WHERE THEY TURN OFF THE CAMERAS AND SEND THE GUARDS ON BREAK, RIGHT? Ghislaine Maxwell has been placed on suicide watch just days before her sentencing, her lawyer says.
“AS SUN TZU SAID IN THE ART OF WAR, ‘DON’T MESS WITH THE REDNECKS.’” LOL! Lefties want to burn down the homes of the “defenseless” country boys now.
READER BOOK PLUG: From Andrew Fox, The Devil’s Toy Box: Exposing and Defusing Promethean Terrorists.
I THINK FOR MOST BUYERS THAT’S NOT A BUG, BUT A FEATURE: Study finds THC in 60% of CBD products tested.
THE HILL IS SUDDENLY COOL WITH NATIONALIZING SOCIALISM: Why we must nationalize Big Oil.
In one scenario, the federal government could buy a controlling interest in the three most dominant oil companies, ExxonMobil, Chevron and Conoco. The cost would be around $350 billion, a trivial amount compared with unmitigated climate change or the $5 trillion the government spent on COVID-19 relief, the nation’s defense budget this year ($778 billion), or fossil fuels’ $630.5 billion annual damages to public health and the environment.
The federal government typically nationalizes companies to save them. In this case, it must nationalize Big Oil to save us all from a future we don’t want.
Why has The Hill started working Salon.com’s side of the far left aisle?
—Salon.com, January 18, 2014.
● Like [the late communist Pete] Seeger and the FDR cargo cult, Salon also harbors turn-the-clock-back fantasies of their own: Last month, the publication called for the nationalization of the news media because it was uncomfortable with the glut of right-leaning news and opinion led by — you guessed it! — Fox News. (Hmmm — I wonder if someone in the FCC read that article?) Now the Website wishes to turn the clock back on the film industry because of a perceived glut of independent films.
—Easy Riders, Raging Stasists, Ed Driscoll.com, February 22, 2014.
—Salon.com, July 8, 2014.
In any case, as Charles Cooke asked in 2016, “Herewith, an under-asked question for our friends on the progressive left: ‘Has Donald Trump’s remarkable rise done anything to change your mind as to the ideal strength of the State?’”
BRUCE BAWER: Wokesters Take On Classic Movies.
And in the end? They got it. They loved it. “What a great film!” cheered Mia Tiffany, the smart, charismatic young black woman at “Movies with Mia.” And they all zeroed in on what mattered: Rick’s moral choice and the message it sends. “He loves her enough to let her go,” said one of the blonde sisters with admiration. “He’s a good guy. He’s selfless.” “Beautiful. What a great man, Rick,” growled the Portuguese guy. “I love this finale. Incredible…. What a great, great movie.” “This guy is pure man!” exulted George. “I’m overwhelmed.… There is no way this kind of movie will ever be made again…. I’ve still got chills.” “What’s not to love here?” asked Shaneel (who’s apparently Indian) of “Shan Watches Movies.” “No jealousy. No pettiness,” pronounced the young Dan Bongino type at “Flix Talk,” who’d never seen a movie from the 1940s. “I loved everything about this film. I fell in love with the passion of it, the message behind it.” “I love the last half hour of this movie,” said the Canadian boy, calling it “a movie with magic in it,” pondering what it must have been like to watch it in 1942, when the war’s outcome was uncertain, and, reacting to Rick’s statement that “the lives of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world,” commented intelligently that the whole point of the movie is that three people can make a very big difference indeed.
Of course, this isn’t a scientific sample. Far from it. These are young people who love film and who founded their YouTube channels precisely because they’re open to checking out a wide variety of movies. If anybody of their generation is going to give something like Casablanca a chance, it’s going to be them. Nonetheless, these YouTubers are children of their time. Like everyone else their age, they’ve been brought up in a society and a culture with values far removed in a number of ways from the values that inform a movie like Casablanca. And yet, watching it, they’re wrapped up in the intrigue, amused by the humor, affected by the music, touched by the love story, and, above all, stirred and deeply impressed by the selfless and noble courage of Victor Laszlo and, in that final scene at the airport, of Rick and Ilsa.
Hard as it is to believe in 2022, but maybe the fundamental things really do apply, as time goes by.
VIA A FRIEND: “We went from men can get pregnant – pride month – to men should have no say in pregnancy, really fast.”
As I mentioned earlier, all the man-hate I’ve seen in response to thie Dobbs opinion seems politically stupid. The issue has gone from the Supreme Court to the political realm. Calling for castration of half the electorate seems like a losing political strategy. And yet.
CHRISTIAN TOTO: Unwoke Beavis and Butt-head’s Universe Shreds White Privilege. ’90s relics roar back by mocking Antifa and soft on crime policies.
NO ENEMIES TO THE LEFT: Corrupt Networks Refuse to Say the Name of Radical Pro-Abortion Terrorists ‘Jane’s Revenge.’
JEFFREY CARTER: Big Week at SCOTUS: The Left Isn’t Civil About It.
To be fair, they go batshit crazy whenever they lose on anything at all. That’s because they’re too mentally unstable to live in a democracy. Which is a problem.
Related: Why a Gun Control Activist Deleted His Tweet About the Supreme Court’s Abortion Ruling.
SCOTT JOHNSON: THE O’KEEFE PROJECT: UNSEAL ME HERE.
I’ve followed the government’s investigation of James O’Keefe and Ashley Biden’s diary since the New York Times broke the story with a little help from its friends in the national security establishment. What did O’Keefe do wrong? What makes it a federal case? This much is clear to me: the Biden Justice Department is out to get James O’Keefe.
Pending before the court that signed off on the search warrants executed on O’Keefe et al. is a motion to unseal the “search warrant materials” (i.e., “the search warrant application, supporting affidavit, return, and any other related judicial documents filed in connection with the Search Warrant” that was “executed at the residence of James E. O’Keefe, III, the founder and Chief Executive Officer of Project Veritas, in connection with an ongoing federal grand jury investigation”).
The motion has been brought by the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. The ACLU supports the motion as an amicus. The RCFP has set up a page devoted to its efforts to unseal the records here. SDNY prosecutors resist it.
It’s not a prosecution, it’s a political persecution.
LOL, AVENATTI. ALSO, LOL, CNN. Ari Fleischer rips CNN bias, Avenatti featured more than Trump COVID-19 team.
CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE: California AG Cancels “Good Cause” for Concealed Carry.
SO WHAT’S NEW WITH THE PARTY OF TOLERANCE FOR DIVERSITY? I Got Thrown Off Etsy and PayPal for Expressing My Belief in Biological Reality. Apparently, selling mugs and shirts that glorify violence against ‘TERFs’ is just fine. But ‘I 💜 J.K. Rowling‘? That‘s hate speech.
YOU’RE GONNA NEED A BIGGER BLOG: ‘Illegitimate’: Read Democrats’ Most Unhinged Reactions to Roe’s Reversal.
I KEEP HEARING THAT THE SUPREME COURT IS ANTI-DEMOCRATIC, THOUGH:
SALENA ZITO: Why Mexican-born Rep. Mayra Flores is the future of the Republican party. “Flores, a 30-something mother of four, told me she was brought up with ‘strong conservative values that focused on faith, family and hard work.’ She won nearly 51% of the vote against her Democratic opponent’s 43% in the special election to replace Democrat Filemon Vela, who retired before his term ended. . . . She said Hispanic voters see themselves as Americans, while Democrats see Hispanic voters as an ethnic voting bloc.”
BARACK OBAMA FLASHBACK: “Throughout my career, I’ve been a consistent and strong supporter of reproductive justice, and have consistently had a 100% pro-choice rating with Planned Parenthood and NARAL Pro-Choice America. … And I will continue to defend this right by passing the Freedom of Choice Act as president.” Nothing to sign; bill has fizzled. “After initially vowing to sign the Freedom of Choice Act, President Barack Obama quickly said it’s not his ‘highest legislative priority.’ That was in March 2009. Since then, it has scarcely been mentioned. A version of the bill was last introduced in Congress in 2007, and no new bill has appeared since.”
A friend writes: “Apparently the Dems’ veto-proof majority from 2009-2011 still didn’t have enough votes to codify Roe. Or they just didn’t want to do it. Methinks the Dem support for abortion isn’t as deep as the media portrays it.”
Or maybe they wanted to keep their voters scared more than they wanted to give their voters what they promised.
Related: Obama Promised To Sign The Freedom Of Choice Act On Day One, Hasn’t Touched The Issue Since.
THAT “STRANGE NEW RESPECT” DIDN’T LAST LONG, DID IT?
OPEN THREAD: I’ve got a lovely way to make it better.
WE CALL IT THE CLINTON/OBAMA EFFECT: Google’s powerful AI spotlights a human cognitive glitch: Mistaking fluent speech for fluent thought.
At least we’re safe from that with Joe and Kamala!
EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: NASA asteroid mission on hold due to late software delivery.
BRIAN WANG: Teslas Are Safer and Here is Proof.
PROGRESSIVISM RETURNING TO ITS ROOTS: Racist White Progressives Love the ‘N-Word’ When It’s Being Used Against Clarence Thomas.
The ghosts of Woodrow Wilson, Margaret Sanger and H.G. Wells approve these messages.
WHERE’S HUNTER, FAT? Hunter Biden met with Putin-Aligned Russian oligarch now wanted for murder.
SEEMS AWFULLY INSURRECTION-Y: Arizona Senate ‘Held Hostage’ By Abortion Protesters.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: How to talk to the press.
ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: ‘Why does it read like a threat?’ Liberals turn on Bette Midler for declaring gays are ‘next.’
K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Marin County Day School Kicks 5 and 8 Year Old Students Out After Their Parents Question Gender-Affirming Care.
On May 25, Paul and Rebeka Sinclair pulled their minivan over to the side of the road, just north of Lake Tahoe, and logged onto a Zoom with Katherine Dinh, the head of the Marin Country Day School.
“Today was the last day of school for your children, Charlotte and Carter,” Dinh informed the couple. The Sinclairs—she’s 37; he’s 51—had been driving home from a vacation to celebrate their anniversary. Dinh appeared to be reading a script. Two MCDS board members joined her on the call but stayed quiet. “Please do not contact any other school employees, particularly Charlotte and Carter’s teachers, as your reaching out to them will cause them further stress,” Dinh continued. “The two of you are not to be on campus again.”
It was the closing act of a year-long drama between the Sinclairs and MCDS, which charges $40,000 per student per year and had been teaching first and second graders about “deconstructing the gender binary”—the idea that there’s no such thing as girls or boys, just a spectrum of relative girlness and boyness.
The Sinclairs weren’t the only parents who had protested the new gender-identity curriculum—most families in their daughter’s class were upset and had been talking about it among themselves. But the Sinclairs had been unwilling to stay quiet. As a result, administrators had suggested that they were homophobic and accused them of tarnishing MCDS’s reputation. (An MCDS attorney had accused the Sinclairs of “defamation” for accusing MCDS of “predatory ‘grooming’ of children.” The Sinclairs never made that accusation.) Friends had stopped replying to their texts. Teachers said they felt unsafe around them. When word got out about why Charlotte, 8, and Carter, 5, had been kicked out, the Sinclairs had to decide whether they could stay in the Bay Area.
“I had no problem being a pariah in Marin,” Beka said. “We were worried about raising our kids long term in an area that was embracing these destructive ideologies.”
Read the whole thing.
WHY IS THE LEFT SUCH A CESSPIT? Self-described Canadian “Pollster, Actor, Sailor” John Corbett was not having a good weekend before his Twitter account was suspended:
I wonder if that last tweet may lead to an inquiry from the FBI?
STAY COOL: Dickies Mens’ Relaxed Fit Multi-Pocket Shorts. #CommissionEarned
PARTY OF YOUTH UPDATE: Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Unexpected Legacy.
Back in 2013, President Barack Obama met with Ginsburg, with hopes that the then-80-year-old, two-time cancer patient could be persuaded to retire:
Mr. Obama had asked his White House counsel, Kathryn Ruemmler, to set up the lunch so he could build a closer rapport with the justice, according to two people briefed on the conversation. Treading cautiously, he did not directly bring up the subject of retirement to Justice Ginsburg, at 80 the Supreme Court’s oldest member and a two-time cancer patient.
He did, however, raise the looming 2014 midterm elections and how Democrats might lose control of the Senate. Implicit in that conversation was the concern motivating his lunch invitation — the possibility that if the Senate flipped, he would lose a chance to appoint a younger, liberal judge who could hold on to the seat for decades.
* * * * * * * *
But Ginsburg just wasn’t interested in retiring. After Ginsburg died in 2020, and President Trump and the GOP-controlled Senate replaced her with Amy Coney Barrett, many liberals realized Ginsburg had made a catastrophic mistake. By remaining on the court for another six or seven years, Ginsburg had denied Democrats their last, best chance to keep a majority on the Court that viewed the law the way she did.
As Christine Rosen wrote last year in her article headlined, “The Democratic Party’s Ice Floe Politics:” “The next time a Democratic politician makes an anonymous observation about the age or vigor of a colleague with whom they disagree, be skeptical. The remarks are made to reporters as if in sorrow, but the message is about as subtle as a shiv in the prison yard.”
SNOW BLITZ EXPLAINED: New study solves long-standing mystery of what may have triggered ice age.
KYLE SMITH: Lightyear flop is a sign audiences are weary of Hollywood wokeness. “It’s amusing that members of the entertainment industry often refer to it as ‘the industry,’ as though they have forgotten the most important word. With the collapse in Netflix’s stock price, Disney’s box-office headache and the revival of ‘Top Gun,’ Hollywood execs must be wondering whether their progressive politics have amounted to a kind of self-imposed woke tax.”
Does Biden remember saying in 2006, “I do not view abortion as a, um, as choice and a right. I think it’s always a tragedy. And I think that it should be rare and safe, and I think we should be focusing on how to limit the number of abortions. And there ought to be able to have a common ground and consensus as to do that.”
Or does Biden remember this moment in 1982? Biden voted to overturn Roe v Wade in 1982 saying women don’t have ‘sole right’ to say what happens to bodies. President had said in 1974 that he thought the Roe v Wade ruling ‘went too far.’
ANA NAVARRO CITES HER DISABLED RELATIVES TO DEFEND ABORTION AND PEOPLE ARE HORRIFIED:
“And I am not anybody to tell you what you need to do with your life or your uterus!” Navarro snapped.
“And because I have a family with a lot of special needs kids. I have a brother who’s 57, and has the mental and the motor skills of a one-year-old. And I know what that means financially, emotionally, physically, for a family, and I know not all families can do it,” she added.
“And I have a step-granddaughter who was born with Downs syndrome, and you know what? It is very difficult in Florida to get services. It is not as easy as it sounds on paper and I’ve got another, another step-grandson who is very autistic, who has autism,” she continued.
“Mothers, and people in that society in that community will tell you that they’ve considered suicide because that’s how difficult it is to get help. Because that’s how lonely they feel. Because they can’t get other jobs, because they have financial issues, because of the care that they are unable to give their other children,” Navarro said.
Navarro went on to claim that she could compartmentalize her Catholic beliefs away from her political support for abortion.
“And so why can I be Catholic and still think it is a wrong decision? Because I’m American. I’m Catholic inside the church, I’m Catholic when it comes to me. But there’s a lot of Americans who are not Catholic and they’re not Christian, and they’re not Baptist,” she said.
“And you have no damn right to tell them what they should do with their bodies!” she concluded. “Nobody does!”
Many people online were horrified to infer that Navarro was implying disabled people were better off dead than to be born into families that might struggle caring for them.
In Germany, this was dubbed “Lebensunwertes Leben.”
DISPATCHES FROM WEIMAR AMERICA: Roe-pocalypse Now: “Not only does the Walt Disney Company — formerly the gold standard of American family-friendly wholesomeness — fully favor grooming children into genderqueerness, but now it will pay its female employees to go to pro-abortion states and terminate the lives of their unborn children. If you had predicted this fifty years ago, people would have thought you insane. As Kangmin Lee said, abortion was widely seen as a necessary evil. Now it is considered by the class of people who run most of America as a sacred rite…It is really something to think about how the Left today, post-Dobbs, is left to feel the same things that many of us on the Right have felt over and over again: defeat on an issue that is dear to us. They are not used to losing — not our ruling class. They are used to getting their way, and expecting the rest of us to fall in line and know our places.”
SOCIALIST “IT GIRL” CONTINUES TO PAY DIVIDENDS: Could AOC Be Getting a Little ‘Insurrectiony’ With Her New Revolutionary Friend?
Meanwhile, at America’s Newspaper of Record: Dems Pause January 6 Hearings To Call For Insurrection.
READER FAVORITE: Sun Joe Electric High Pressure Washer. #CommissionEarned
THE ENEMY WITHIN: West Point teaches cadets Critical Race Theory, public records reveal.
I GUESS THEY DON’T LIKE AN UPPITY BLACK MAN: Protests Planned Outside Justice Thomas’s Home After Abortion Ruling. I’ve noticed that most of the hate aimed at individual justices I’ve seen on social media is directed at Thomas, even though he didn’t author the Dobbs opinion, Alito did. That’s racism, straight up.
READER BOOK PLUG: From Scott Spacek, China Hand.
OOPS: Just 5% call abortion top concern. “Abortion, the No. 1 concern in today’s media and politics, ranks nearly dead last among areas voters care about as they struggle with paying daily bills, soaring inflation, and interest rate hikes, according to a just-released survey. While the Supreme Court’s decision overruling the 1973 Roe v. Wade right to abortion has dominated today’s network and cable coverage, the latest McLaughlin & Associates poll said just 5% of voters call it a top concern. Just below abortion, at 1%, is reviewing the 2020 election, over which the media are also obsessing.”
It’s as if the political class lives in a bubble.
Plus: “Only 5% said abortion was top issue. That might change a little, but not with people who can’t afford food or gas or rent or medical bills.”
As I’ve noted, there’s a huge, but largely unremarked class component to abortion politics.
MY NEW YORK POST COLUMN: The leak, the threats, the violence — reaction to Roe is dark day for nation.
UPDATE: From the comments:
For the record, those calling for violence in the name of Ginsburg (i.e., “Ruth Was Here”) don’t reflect her thinking at all. She thought Roe v. Wade went too far. “Measured motions seem to me right, in the main, for constitutional as well as common law adjudication,” she argued. “Doctrinal limbs too swiftly shaped, experience teaches, may prove unstable. The most prominent example in recent decades is Roe v. Wade.” Ginsburg noted that Roe struck down far more than the specific Texas criminal abortion statute at issue in the case. “Suppose the court had stopped there, rightly declaring unconstitutional the most extreme brand of law in the nation, and had not gone on, as the court did in Roe, to fashion a regime blanketing the subject, a set of rules that displaced virtually every state law then in force,” she said. “A less encompassing Roe, one that merely struck down the extreme Texas law and went no further on that day, I believe and will summarize why, might have served to reduce rather than to fuel controversy.” Ginsburg went on to contrast the court’s landmark decision in Roe with a slew of decisions from 1971 to 1982 in which the court struck down “a series of state and federal laws that differentiated explicitly on the basis of sex.” Rather than creating a new philosophy of law and imposing it on the nation immediately, “the court, in effect, opened a dialogue with the political branches of government…In essence, the court instructed Congress and state legislatures: rethink ancient positions on these questions,” Ginsburg noted. “The ball, one might say, was tossed by the justices back into the legislators’ court, where the political forces of the day could operate.”
Indeed. (Bumped).
PEOPLE GENERALLY DO WHAT THEY MEAN TO DO, THOUGH:
Ann Althouse: “Begin with the hypothesis that what they did is what they wanted to do. If they postured that they wanted to do something else, regard that as a con. Work from there. The world will make much more sense.”
REPUBLICANS HAVE TRIED THIS SEVERAL TIMES, BUT the Democrats blocked it:
Flashback: Republicans Can’t Stop Talking About Over-the-Counter Birth Control. “The controversy has put Democratic candidates in the odd position of seemingly opposing a policy proposal that voters are inclined to believe they support: the availability of birth control without a doctor’s prescription.”
Related: Over-the-Counter Contraception Is Immensely Popular. But Democrats Have Doomed It.
Rather than working with Republicans to craft a compromise measure—say, one that protected insurance coverage for contraception but also paved the way for over-the-counter pills—and helping to secure a rare bipartisan win for women’s health care, liberals actively advocated against conservative colleagues’ efforts.
Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood, suggested, without evidence, that making pills available over the counter would hike costs for individual women to $600 a year. Republican politicians pushing for OTC pills, she said, would somehow “drag women back to the 1950s.”
In 2014, Planned Parenthood’s political arm bought ads in multiple states. “In its first TV ad buy of the 2014 cycle,” noted HuffPost, “Planned Parenthood’s political arm is warning voters in North Carolina and Colorado that Republican Senate candidates’ support for over-the-counter birth control is not what it seems.” . . .
This was a dark moment in Democratic politics: Even as they ramped up efforts to portray Republicans as the harbingers of a Handmaid’s Tale scenario and to portray themselves as hip to the needs of marginalized groups, Democrats sacrificed an opportunity to help women struggling to obtain birth control prevent unintended pregnancies. Instead, at the expense of undocumented immigrants, low-income women, victims of domestic violence, and others, they opted to help middle-class women save $10 a month—and prop up insurance providers, pharmaceutical companies, and the Democratic fundraising machine in the process.
All the while, they insisted that they were putting contraception in reach for more American women. But evidence suggests they were merely shifting around costs.
Planned Parenthood is a big provider of birth control prescriptions.
DEAL OF THE DAY: RockDove Men’s Sherpa Lined Memory Foam Clog Slippers. #CommissionEarned
“PUBLIC HEALTH” HAS LOST ITS RESONANCE POST-COVID, I SUSPECT: ‘Squad’ Members Call on Biden To Declare Public Health Emergency in Wake of Roe Ruling.
HAPPY 119TH BIRTHDAY: On this day in 1903, Eric Arthur Blair, better known to us as George Orwell, was born in Motihari, Bengal, British India.
HMM: Nate Silver’s take on the political reality post-Roe won’t go over well with Dems.
Plus: “Conservatives have been focused on the federal judiciary for decades. Anecdotally, I’ve seen liberal activists focus more on pronouns or removing statues than on the SCOTUS.”
IT’S ALWAYS PROJECTION WITH THESE PEOPLE: Election Deniers.
Recently the Democrats have coined the phrase “election deniers” to smear those who worry about our lack of ballot security, as reflected in the 2020 election, by associating them with Holocaust deniers and other cranks. But who are the real election deniers? The Democrats haven’t conceded that a Republican was legitimately elected president since George H. W. Bush carried 40 states in 1988.
The RNC put together this 12-minute video of Democratic Party election deniers. It is painful in some respects, but a useful reminder of how unprincipled the Democrats have been for a long time, and how hypocritical they are today.
OPEN THREAD: Here they come, those feelings again. I believe he’s still married to Cecilia Noel.
BANNING ASAT TESTS, and other “space sustainability” moves.
Here’s a piece Rob Merges and I wrote about space debris a while back.
YES, THE ACTUAL EFFECT OF THE DOBBS DECISION WILL BE TO MAKE OUR ABORTION LAWS MORE EUROPEAN.
And then there’s Sweden’s restrictive abortion law.
Related thoughts on making America more like Europe.
WHO COULD HAVE SEEN THIS COMING? Larry Kudlow: Biden is using Roe as a distraction from inflation. It won’t work for long.
OUT ON A LIMB: No, Gay Marriage Isn’t Going to Be Overturned After Roe v Wade.
WHY DO THE HEATHEN RAGE? Roe v. Wade overturned: Liberal journalists rage at Ruth Bader Ginsburg for not retiring. I’m so old I can remember when she was a hero to the left.
Related: Supreme Court abortion ruling leaves Democrats with scant options. I suppose persuading voters is already off of the table.
JOSH BLACKMAN: On abortion, justices demonstrate courage under fire.
Five justices were willing to take this bold and correct legal step in the face of never-ending personal attacks, efforts to pack the court, fallout from the leaked draft opinion, protests outside their homes and even an assassination attempt. . . .
The justices should be commended for displaying this fortitude in the face of crushing public pressure. During Supreme Court confirmation hearings, senators have excoriated and attacked nominees with one primary goal in mind: to save Roe. Families and friends were dragged through the mud in an effort to cow the would-be justices into submission. We now know that those efforts failed.
And a good thing, too.
Related: D.C. businesses boarding up windows in case post-Roe protests turn “mostly peaceful.”
HAPPY ROE V. WADE IS OVER? NEW TITLE IX REGS MAKE THAT RISKY TO SAY ON CAMPUS. “The Biden administration’s proposed regulation uses a definition of sexual harassment that is similar to one that was struck down by the federal appeals court in Atlanta… [T]he court noted that it had ‘asked the University’s lawyer a series of questions about whether particular statements would violate the discriminatory-harassment policy: (1) ‘abortion is immoral’; (2) ‘unbridled open immigration is a danger to America on a variety of levels’; and (3) ‘the Palestinian movement is antisemitic.’ The University’s lawyer could not rule out the possibility that such speech would be deemed sexual or racial harassment under the policy’s broad language, without first considering ‘all the facts and circumstances’ surrounding the speech.”
(Bolding is mine.) There’s always another trick up the sleeve, isn’t there?
ATHIRA AND ALZHEIMER’S. “Sadly, it’s not really news when a biopharma company has an Alzheimer’s clinical trial failure. To a very good approximation, they all fail, or at least they have so far.”
