Daily Archives: 29 July 2021

Lies of Our President

Posted on by
Reply

Here are some, via Just the News:

I don’t know anybody, including Larry Summers, who’s a friend of mine, who’s worried about inflation.

But, Summers in particular:

These figures and labor market tightness and the behavior of housing markets and asset prices are all rising in a more concerning way than I worried about a few months ago. This raises my degree of concern about an economic overheating scenario.

…you’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations.

But

…growing number of “breakthrough cases”—those testing positive for the virus after being fully vaccinated—are being reported….

Aside: I say, at this point, that the “growing number” are still a tiny number of occurrences compared to the number of vaccine doses administered, and the even rarer deaths still are, in the main, from comorbidities also present. Further, those breakthrough cases are quite mild compared to the non-vaccinated cases that get serious enough to want medical attention. The vaccines aren’t perfect, but your odds (favorable though they are to begin with, if you’re healthy) are much improved by the vaccines. You’re just not bullet-proof as Biden exaggeratedly implies.

…the drugs that are designed to kill the virus came along so quickly. They’ve been working on it for two decades. There’s nothing quick about this. It’s been over two decades.

This is a cynical distortion of the facts. “They’ve” been working on the underlying mRNA technology for many years. The vaccines are a new application of that technology, aimed in a direction not originally envisioned.

We’ve lost more people in the United States — over 630-some thousand people — than every major war we’ve ever fought in the United States of America. More people have died than all our major wars combined. Think about that.

But:

Civil War alone resulted in a conservatively estimated 620,000 US military deaths, and World War II claimed the lives of more than 400,000….

And we’ve fought a few more wars than just those two. Think about that, indeed.

Again, but: Joe Biden has always been dishonest:

His treatment of then-Supreme Court Justice nominee Clarence Thomas and of Anita Hill, a witness against him, was a remarkable display of racism in his treatment of both and of sexism in his treatment of Hill.

He’s never made any bones about not wanting his kids to grow up in a mixed community.

He still pretends he didn’t know what son Hunter was doing in Ukraine.

He still pretends he didn’t know what son Hunter was doing in the People’s Republic of China, despite having traveled there and back with Dad Joe on Air Force Two.

He was quite blunt about his relationship with blacks during his campaign last fall: a black man who doesn’t support him for President isn’t really black.

He still insists, with a straight face, that Georgia’s new voting law, which expands ballot access and strengthens voting security, is Jim Crow on steroids.

He insists that Texas’ voting law is an assault on the very democracy of our nation.

Reverse Roe v Wade?

Posted on by
Reply

That’s part of the goal of an amicus brief being prepared for the Supreme Court for when it takes up the appeal of the Mississippi case Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization (the case itself concerns whether Mississippi should be able to prohibit abortions after 15 weeks).

A coalition of approximately 22 pro-life groups and several legislators collected signatures from more than 300 lawmakers in 35 states in support of the brief, ranging from Michigan State Representative Steve Carra (R-Three Rivers) to Arkansas State Senator Scott Flippo (R-Bull Shoals).
“We’re hoping to accomplish protecting life within our respective states as best as possible,” [University of Michigan Law School] graduate Jacob Weaver [the lead on the brief] told The Center Square. “Roe v Wade was abundantly unconstitutional. It’s now clear that it’s life in the womb, not potential life.”

Alexis McGill Johnson, Planned Parenthood Action Fund President, demurs.

Mississippi has said the quiet part out loud. The purpose of its blatantly unconstitutional abortion ban is to have the Supreme Court overrule 50 years of precedent and allow states to ban abortions. This is not what the American people—80% of whom support safe, legal abortion—want, and it would deny essential health care primarily to people of color, LGBTQ+ people, and people with low incomes.

Her first is both correct and a cynically done exaggeration. Mississippi has, indeed, said a quiet part out loud: that States, not the Federal government—including the Judiciary—should be regulating abortion access and abortions. There is no particular move to ban all abortions, though, except in the minds of a very few, and in the fetid imaginations of hysterical pro-abortionists.

Next, the fact that Roe has lasted 50 years only illustrates the duration of the error; that duration in no way legitimizes the error. Indeed, Roe itself reversed 150 years of precedent in which the Federal government, correctly, played no role in the matter.

Then there’s the business of polling. Johnson has chosen not to cite the poll she claims has produced that result. I’ll leave aside the exposure over the last 5 years of the utter reliability of polls generally. But aside from her claim, she’s assuming “80%” are evenly distributed across all States—or assuming the legitimacy of a Federal, one-size-fits-all status of abortion preference, so that “80%” of California or Illinois should be able to dictate to Mississippi or Texas the outcome, even if “80%” of Mississippians or Texans adamantly disagree.

No, with States in control of their own domestic matters, as our Constitution holds, the citizens of each State would be, as they should, the arbiters of their State’s abortion laws. Each State then will take care of its own minority populations—which would tend to better protect the lives of minority babies otherwise vulnerable to being killed in their mothers’ wombs.

Finally come Johnson’s two dog whistles: that abortion is health care and that LGBTQ+ might be denied access to abortions. Regarding the first whistle, there’s nothing particularly healthful for the babies in their being killed in the womb. Regarding the second shrill whistle, only biology, not “identification,” can make it possible for a member of the LGBTQ+ community even to get pregnant, much less decide subsequently to want to abort her baby.

The rest of the goal of the Michigan amicus is to restore, under the 9th Amendment of our Constitution, that right of individual States to regulate access to abortion and to abortion itself.

“The power to regulate abortion falls squarely into States’ police powers,” as it did for 150 years pre-Roe.
“We argue this depoliticizes the court and that it returns states to their rightful place in the constitutional scheme,” Weaver told The Center Square in a phone interview.

At worst, the Supreme Court should recognize current, realized medical capability. Roe is essentially a technology-based ruling, setting its abortion threshold to the point at which the baby is viable outside the womb—roughly the start of the third trimester at the time of the Roe ruling. Today’s capability brings that viability far earlier in the pregnancy.