Robert Pondiscio, AEI Senior Fellow, in his commencement address to the Atlanta Classical Academy, said this, in part:
We didn’t stop watching movies. We stopped watching them together.
And if we’re not careful, we won’t stop learning—but we may stop learning the same things. We may stop learning together.
One more thing: we will (not may) stop learning as quickly or as thoroughly. The interaction, the joint questioning, facilitate learning to the nth degree.
A short while ago as such things are measured, a Federal district judge was given a private reprimand for having sex in her chambers with a local police department senior-level cop. Many folks, experts as well as my august self, consider that wholly inadequate.
The judge has since been identified as Northern District of Georgia judge Eleanor Louise Ross, and the (still individually unidentified) senior-level cop as a member of the Atlanta Police Department. Furthermore, her relationship with the cop has been identified as an extramarital one, lasting for two, or so, years, and the relationship included repeated sexual encounters in her judicial chambers, generally within earshot of her clerks and other staff.
That private reprimand, though, is all she got, because she’s sorry, and she apologized, so it’s all good.
Pfft.
The article outlined a number of more serious outcomes for her misbehaviors, leading off with impeachment. That, though, would take a majority of the House voting to impeach and a two-thirds majority of the Senate to convict in order to get her off the bench. The article acknowledged the unlikeliness of that outcome, but without suggesting why. I claim the reason is this: even were impeachment a serious possibility, there aren’t enough Progressive-Democrats in the Senate willing to convict one of their own, the Obama appointee who is Ross.
The article also outlined a number of alternative consequences, but while potentially financially expensive in terms of opportunity cost, they would leave her on the bench. The worst realized outcome of all these would be this:
Recusal motions are the sharpest instrument available. …
The Justice Department has already moved to disqualify Ross from a high-profile voter-roll case, citing both the misconduct findings and her attendance at Fani Willis’s 2024 primary victory party. If that pattern continues, she could find herself a judge in title only.
Judge in title only. That actually is nice work for anyone who can get it. Ross’ pay in 2025, just for being a Federal judge, was nearly a quarter of a million dollars. That puts her income higher than 96% of the rest of us working stiffs. Nice work, indeed, especially for someone whose word—professional or personal—is worthless.
Former Vice President Mike Pence (R) is the one misapprehending this time, and he laid it out early in his Sunday Wall Street Journal op-ed.
Where conservatives have historically viewed politics as the art of the possible, progressives see politics as a path to alter society beyond recognition in a quest for material equity, environmental nirvana, or other alleged perfections. Progressives invariably try to destroy whatever stands in their way.
That last sentence lays bare his misunderstanding. Perfecting our society has nothing to do with today’s progressives’ goals, goals hard-sought after by today’s Progressive-Democratic Party and epitomized by that sentence. Were Party interested in perfection, it would adopt a more patient approach and seek to bring along those presently disagreeing with them. Instead, Party politicians try to destroy whatever stands in their way.
For further proof, see Party’s plans, annunciated by House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries’ (D, NY) remarks and his chief minion for this, House Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Jamie Raskin (D, MD):
The Supreme Court is a disgrace. In the new Congress, we’re going to have to do something about this Supreme Court, and let me be very clear: everything is on the table—everything to deal with this corrupt MAGA majority.
And, as paraphrased by the WSJ‘s editors:
[Raskin] recently introduced a bill that would deny the Justices the power to choose which cases they hear. Under the SCCOTUS Act, petitions would be reviewed by a rotating committee of 13 random appellate judges. This is such a radical change that it’s hard to imagine all the implications.
Jeffries sees the Court, especially the conservative Justices, as corrupt because the majority seeks to adhere to what our Constitution and any statute before them actually say, rather than what the other Justices too often insist: that, in the manner of former Justice Thurgood Marshall, the Court should rule on what they want and expect the law to catch up, with the added fillip that if the law isn’t catching up quickly enough, these Justices will rewrite them from the bench.
Raskin would actually corrupt our Court by packing it to thirteen Justices because thirteen appellate circuits. He ignores in his revisionism the history that the number of appellate circuits had been growing beyond nine long before Congress set the number of Justices at nine. In fact, though, that’s just his covering excuse for adding four activist, progressive men and women to the Court, men and women who view our Constitution and statutes as suggestions to be ignored or modified as they see fit.
Pence’s piece loses its import with his lack of understanding of the underlying problem, even as he’s entirely correct in his conclusion: it’s time for Republicans, and especially the dismayingly meek Republicans, to get up off their backs and address these problems loudly and firmly. In particular, this includes Vice President JD Vance (R), who’s busily toadying up to Big Labor in his desperation to become our next President.
Else we lose our Republic.
The European Union is moving toward passing legislation that would allow it to curb imports of heavily subsidized foreign products. The legislation doesn’t single out any particular nation; although, the Peoples’s Republic of China is infamous for such subsidies.
Those subsidies allow PRC businesses to sell their products at less than their cost of production in order to sell at lower prices than European businesses can due to their own, unsubsidized, costs of production. That allows the PRC to put those businesses out of business and to seize nearly all of the market share. In the aggregate, this cascades into steadily increasing PRC influence over European economies.
Naturally, the PRC wants to continue this domination, so it’s threatening countermeasures if Europe continues with the impudence of defending itself.
Chinese authorities could initiate anti-discrimination and supply-chain security investigations into the EU’s “overcapacity instrument,” a social media account run by China’s state broadcaster said Friday, citing unnamed sources.
If the EU advances the tool, China will take immediate action and deploy comprehensive countermeasures, it added.
Of course, that retaliation wouldn’t matter if Europe’s nations were doing no business with the PRC or with businesses domiciled there.
The PRC keeps providing reasons for discontinuing business with or within it. It’s time for the EU and for Europe’s nations individually to act on at least some of those reasons, for their own economic survival.
Ex-FLOTUS Jill Biden, in a CBS News interview, said that during Joe Biden’s 2024 debate with then-Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump she became afraid that her husband was in the middle of a stroke, evidenced by his disjointed, often incoherent performance. Now the press, led by CNN‘s Abby Phillip, is very upset and calling out Progressive-Democratic Party politicians over their deceptiveness regarding Biden’s mental decline.
It’s true enough that Party politicians lied to the rest of us about Biden’s mental capacities. The deceptiveness wasn’t only theirs though.
That rest of us could plainly see Biden’s progressive decline while it was happening. If the press couldn’t see that with their own eyes, they were only deceiving themselves. That alone removes any credibility they might have had regarding their reporting—they couldn’t then discriminate between reality and what they wanted reality to be, and there’s no reason to believe their acuity has improved since.
More likely, though, they were either deliberately oblivious to Biden’s ongoing mental degradation, choosing the lazy path of accepting at face value Party politician assurances of his hale and hearty alertness, or they were actively complicit in the deception. That laziness and/or dishonesty destroys press credibility, and the only way for the press to regain credibility is to achieve a wholesale turnover of news writers, editors, and publishers. The current crop can never again be believable.