Archive for 2022

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.

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.

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 justiceaccording 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.”

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.”