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.
THE GODFATHER AT 50: Skip The Offer, Take The Cannoli.
My latest over at Ed Driscoll.com, comparing The Offer, Paramount+’s bloated and highly fictitious Mad Men-esque 10 episode making of series with Mark Seal’s brilliant recent book, Take the Gun, Leave the Cannoli.
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.
June 24, 2022
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.”
CHRISTIAN TOTO: Unwoke Beavis and Butt-head’s Universe Shreds White Privilege. ’90s relics roar back by mocking Antifa and soft on crime policies.
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.”
BIDEN URGES CONGRESS TO CODIFY ROE: WOMEN’S* LIVES ‘NOW AT RISK.’
President Biden called on Congress to codify a right to abortion in federal law on Friday, saying the “health and life of women” are “at risk” hours after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.
“Now with Roe gone, let’s be very clear: the health and life of women in this nation are now at risk,” Biden said in a speech at the White House.
Biden also criticized state laws restricting abortion, which were triggered by the the Court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Clinic, and urged pro-choice voters to elect likeminded politicians in the coming midterm elections, saying “this fall, Roe is on the ballot.”
“Let me very clear and unambiguous: the only way we can secure a woman’s right to choose, the balance that existed, is for Congress to restore the protections of Roe v. Wade as federal law. No executive action from the president can do that,” Biden said. “And if Congress, as it appears, lacks the votes to do that now, voters need to make their voices heard.”
Flashback: 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.’
* When did Joe become a biologist?
GREAT MOMENTS IN SCIENCE FICTION: This Golden Age of Journalism.
In a parallel multiverse far, far away, “Scoop” Rosenthal, managing editor for a major metropolitan newspaper, dives into an embarrassment of riches.
“Hitchens, Woodward, and Pyle,” Scoop barks across the newsroom to his Capitol Hill team. “The Jan. 6 hearings. That trial is all prosecution and no defense. We need to tell the rest of the story.
“Hitch, contact the Republicans Nancy Pelosi barred from the committee and find out what questions they would have asked.
“Woodward, tell us why law enforcement was so unprepared to handle a storm they seemed to know was coming. Look into the claims that undercover agents in the crowd may have stirred up the mob. That sounds crazy, sure, but given the FBI’s puppeteering in that plot to kidnap Michigan’s governor, who knows? Confirm or debunk, it doesn’t matter.
“Pyle, pull together a list of the major 2020 voting irregularities so readers can understand why so many question the result. Make sure to note which claims have been debunked.”
Pyle asks: “Should I include the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story in the weeks before the election that helped swing the race to Biden, or how reports of the successful COVID vaccine trials were withheld until after the vote?”
“Interesting, but off point for this story,” Scoop responds. “That reminds me, we need to compare the charges and treatment of those arrested in the Jan. 6 melee with those picked up during the summer riots. I’m guessing it was not so equal. Okay, get to it.”
Next Scoop calls his undercover specialist. “I’ve got a hot one for you, Bly.”
Bly: “Let me guess, the violence against the pro-life pregnancy centers. I’ve counted 40 attacks so far since the Supreme Court’s draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade was leaked last month.”
As a reader, I really wish that world depicted above existed; it’s a sharp contrast to today’s DNC-MSM:
WHO IS RAY EPPS? You may know him as the big guy seen on video the evening of January 5 encouraging pro-Trumpers to invade the Capitol the next day. He’s vigorously denied being a law enforcement operative or informant, but the Epoch Times’ Joseph Hanneman has an exclusive today reporting new evidence that cast doubt on Epps’ denials.
NOT ME, I SLEEP LIKE A BABY: Nearly two-thirds of Americans use sleep aids, survey finds.
I don’t see why unelected administrators should get to decide what a university’s “values” are, much less impose them on anyone.
HOW LONG BEFORE CANCEL CULTURE CENSORS TARGET ‘SCIENCE’ JOURNAL: The journal Science is one of the most respected, peer-reviewed scientific publications in the world, but that probably won’t spare the editors there from abuse for publishing a new study that sheds positive light on the “fine-tuning” of the universe.
BE PREPARED: Augason Farms Breakfast and Dinner Variety Pail Emergency Food Supply. #CommissonEarned
DAVID MASTIO: USA Today demoted me for a tweet — because its woke newsrooms are out of touch with readers. “I know something about Gannett’s evolution since I was USA Today’s deputy editorial page editor until August, when I was demoted after I tweeted, ‘People who are pregnant are also women.’ That idea was forbidden because a ‘news reporter’ covering diversity, equity and inclusion wrote a story detailing how transgender men can get pregnant. I compounded my sin against this new orthodoxy by calling the idea that men can get pregnant an ‘opinion.’ If I wanted to keep any job at USA Today, my bosses informed me, I needed to delete these offensive tweets because they were causing pain to the LGBTQ activists and journalists on our staff.”
HOW’S THAT SPACE PROGRAM COMING ALONG? Arecibo observatory scientists help unravel surprise asteroid mystery.
HEH: Arizona Gubernatorial Candidate Kari Lake Leaves CNN Reporter Speechless. “I’ll do an interview with you… as long as it airs on CNN+, does that still exist?”
JEFFREY CARTER: Citadel Moves to Miami.
THAT IS THEIR WAY: The Left Freaks Out Every Time They Don’t Get Their Way.
WHENEVER I HEAR THE WORDS “PLANT-BASED” I GROW SUSPICIOUS: Chicken bests plant-based meat alternative for protein intake, study suggests.
VIDEO: Sri Lanka Is Screwed.
If you don’t have the time or inclination to watch the video, Lawrence Person has done his usual excellent job of breaking out the bullet points.
Including this bit: “‘This caused the government to enact strange policies, like banning the importation of fertilizer in hopes of easing its trade deficit. Claiming the ban was to make Sri Lanka organic was simply a way to conceal its dire situation.’ Yes, cutting back the ability of your own people to grow food in order to hide the manifest incompetence of your economic policies is quite the recipe for happiness.”
Was there ever a “green” policy that wasn’t grift, graft, or fraud?
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): No, there wasn’t. Also: Flashback: Looming food shortages is the next ‘slow-moving disaster’ to hit world.
A FEW MORE THOUGHTS ON DOBBS: First, it’s a big win for the rule of law — by which I mean not so much the opinion as that the justices stood firm in the face of unprecedented threats ranging from Chuck Schumer’s “pay the price” language to mobs and an actual armed assassin showing up at their homes. A Supreme Court that can be bullied is a Supreme Court that will be bullied. Unlike Roberts’ flip in the ObamaCare case, the majority here held firm, which will discourage bullying in the future.
Second, the likely result is that a few states will ban abortion entirely, a few will permit it for the entire term, and for most it’ll look something like Europe, with abortion easy to get for the first 12 weeks or so, and much harder after that. (The Mississippi law in question here, which allows abortion for any reason through the 15th week, was actually more liberal than many, perhaps most, European laws).
States won’t be able to ban interstate travel for the purpose of getting an abortion because interstate travel is a separate constitutional right. Congress will not be able to guarantee a right to abortion because its 14th Amendment power to enforce the rights guaranteed by the 14th Amendment doesn’t apply to abortion, which the Court has found isn’t protected under the 14th Amendment. It will not be able to either protect abortion or ban it under its commerce power because abortion isn’t interstate commerce, and is a traditional subject of state regulation.
It’ll take a few years to shake out, but we’re likely to wind up with what we would have had by 1976 or so if Roe had never been decided — a spectrum of laws around the country that will be adjusted over time based on experience and the views of the electorate. Though, of course, the norm may be stricter than it would have been without Roe, which called into being a huge pro-life movement that probably wouldn’t have existed otherwise.
UPDATE: It’ll be interesting to see if this reduces the flow of immigrants from blue states to red. That’ll be a measure of how much people actually care. To be honest, I kinda hope it does slow the flow.
THE NEW NARRATIVE: Inflation and Recession Aren’t So Bad, Ackshully.
WHY DO ENVIRONMENTALISTS HATE SEQUOIAS? Bipartisan group defends sequoia tree bill in California despite opposition. “A bipartisan trio of lawmakers defended the ‘Save Our Sequoias Act’ on Thursday despite more than 80 environmental groups signing a letter to Congress opposing the act earlier this month. The bill introduced on Wednesday is aimed at expediting reforestation and protection efforts in California’s Sequoia National Forest.”
REDUCING THE SURPLUS POPULATION: Global Food Crisis ‘Will Kill Millions’ By Disease, Health Executive Warns.
The global food crisis sparked by the war in Ukraine will kill millions by leaving the hungriest more vulnerable to infectious diseases, potentially triggering the world’s next health catastrophe, the head of a major aid organisation has warned.
A Russian naval blockade of Ukraine’s Black Sea ports has stopped grain shipments from the world’s fourth-largest exporter of wheat and corn, raising the spectre of shortages and hunger in low-income countries.
The knock-on effects of the food shortages mean many will die not only of starvation but from having weaker defences against infectious diseases due to bad nutrition, Peter Sands, executive director of the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria told AFP this week.
“I think we’ve probably already begun our next health crisis. It’s not a new pathogen but it means people who are poorly nourished will be more vulnerable to the existing diseases,” he said in an interview on the sidelines of a G20 health minister meeting in the Indonesian city of Yogyakarta.
“I think the combined impact of infectious diseases and the food shortages and the energy crisis… we can be talking about millions of extra deaths because of this,” he said.
Flashback: Looming food shortages is the next ‘slow-moving disaster’ to hit world.
SELECTIVELY, YOU CAN BE SURE: DoJ to SCOTUS on Bruen: We will just have to enforce federal law, then.
AS THE TRUE GOVERNOR OF GEORGIA™, SHE CAN DO AS SHE PLEASES: Two-Faced Abrams Calls for Raises for Cops While on ‘Defund the Police’ Board.
DEAL OF THE DAY: FLEXISPOT Essential Large Electric Stand Up Desk. #CommissonEarned
BLUE STATE BLUES: Here’s How Much Tax Revenue Illinois Will Lose From Citadel’s Decision To Cut Bait.
Illinois’s richest resident, hedge-fund CEO Ken Griffin, announced on Thursday that he—and his company, Citadel—are packing up shop and heading to Miami, citing a better corporate environment and rising crime rates in Chicago.
The move, which Griffin announced in a letter to employees, will deprive Democrat-run Illinois of hundreds of millions of dollars in annual income tax revenue, a company spokesman told the Washington Free Beacon.
Griffin alone—who is worth approximately $25 billion—pays over $200 million in state income taxes every year, the spokesman said, and Citadel employees have themselves funneled over $1 billion to the state over the past decade.
I’d ask the least person to leave Illinois to turn out the lights, but they’ll probably have gone out before then.
MORE ON DOBBS FROM ATHENA THORNE: Supreme Court OVERTURNS Roe v. Wade, Casey With Dobbs Decision.
SUPREME COURT RELEASING DOBBS OPINON RIGHT NOW, BY ALITO. Roberts concurs. Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan dissent. Roe and Casey are overruled.
Scotusblog is liveblogging the announcement.
The opinion is here. “Held: The Constitution does not confer a right to abortion; Roe and Casey are overruled; and the authority to regulate abortion is returned to the people and their elected representatives.”
Beware the “night of rage” in response.
And from Scotusblog: “Interesting, The majority uses very similar ‘history and tradition’ language that was used in the New York gun case, but this time finding there is no ‘history and tradition’ that grants a constitutional right to an abortion.” It’s hardly surprising that history and tradition might support things with a history and tradition, but not things without a history and tradition, so I don’t think that’s really very interesting. Nor is it contradictory, as this seems to imply. I’m not a big fan of the Scalia history and tradition approach, but it’s a well-laid-out methodology and one that a majority of the Court holds.
Note that the entire release, with opinion, concurrences, dissent is 213 pages, but talking heads are no doubt already speaking as if they’ve read it in its entirety.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: SCOTUS Stands Up for the Second Amendment.
She says she was fired for making an anonymous complaint when the surgeon figured out it was her. No such complaint was filed. She is being fired, though: “Additionally, Cargle has not been fired for the operating room allegation at Harbor-UCLA in unincorporated West Carson, but is facing termination for her conduct with a patient and staff at USC Medical Center near downtown L.A., DHS said, declining to elaborate.”
TRUST THE SCIENCE: NIH spent $500 million on research linked to faked results by former Harvard scientist. “The federal government poured over half a billion dollars into medical research based on fabricated results from a Harvard scientist, according to a recent Reuters report. The analysis published on Tuesday found that the U.S. National Institutes of Health spent at least $588 million on research related to Piero Anversa’s hypothesis that adult stem cells can regenerate heart tissue and cure heart disease. . . . Some of this money came after the federal government had been notified of problems with Anversa’s research. More than 40 percent of these funds were awarded after March 2013, after the federal government had been informed of allegations against Anversa.”
BIDEN ADMIN BRINGING BACK TITLE IX ABUSE WITH NEW REGS. They eliminate students’ right to a live hearing and to cross-examination and adopt a definition of sexual misconduct that (surprise!) can easily be used to censor political speech. FIRE will, of course, be on the front lines pushing back. And for a refresher, the Martin Center recalls some of the more notorious abuses dating from the Obama years. Expect this stuff to return.
EVEN OUR MAINSTREAM MEDIA CAN CARRY ONLY SO MUCH WATER: Bloomberg News Fact-Checks Absurd Inflation Narrative by Biden Administration.
DAVID HARSANYI: The Supreme Court’s Decision Is a Huge Win for the Constitution. But there’s this:
The modern left doesn’t even bother pretending they believe the Supreme Court has a responsibility to act as a separate branch of government and adjudicate the constitutionality of law. Rather than even ostensibly offering legal reasons for their ire, Democrats simply demand the Supreme Court uphold public sentiment (or, rather what they claim is public sentiment), even though SCOTUS exists to ignore those pressures. The fact that that attitude has congealed as the norm in one of our major political parties does not bode well for the future of the Republic.
The left doesn’t value any institution except to the extent it advances the left’s goals of the moment. On the other hand, the traditional flaw of the right is that it respects institutions too much, regardless of whether they’re actually performing their assigned functions. The right, at least, seems to be learning.
MY OLD USA TODAY EDITOR DAVID MASTIO: USA Today demoted me for a tweet — because its woke newsrooms are out of touch with readers.
They really are. Plus: “I was demoted after I tweeted, ‘People who are pregnant are also women.’ . . . What I do worry about is that Gannett shareholders are being taken for a ride. Gannett’s story is that it is becoming the USA Today network in which newspapers in dozens of states will embrace diversity, reflect their communities and bubble up a uniquely accurate view of America that millions will pay for. But what if our journalism is written by people who look like America but sound like the Harvard English Department? What if we look like our communities but don’t think anything like them or share their values and priorities? Readers are bound to notice.”
Oh, they have, which is why my local Gannett paper has shrunk down to something more like the Thrifty Nickel.
And check out David’s new home at Straight Arrow News.
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