Archive for 2022
June 25, 2022
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.