Tag Archives: culture

In Which Riley Gaines is Right

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Riley Gaines thinks the only way left for women to protect their sports and their sports programs, to go back to being able to compete on even ground, is to boycott competitions in which a trans athlete(s) is competing, and to be joined by their coaches in the boycott.

We have to have girls who, when the whistle blows, they don’t run, they don’t swim. They stand up on the block and they don’t go[.]
…
I think this will get worse before it gets better. How many girls have to be injured playing against a male, how many girls have to lose out on scholarships and trophies and titles? How many girls have to feel violated in the locker room?

Progressive-Democrat House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D, NY) gives the lie to Party’s and its Leftist supporters’ “argument” against barring trans athletes from women’s sports with his smear against MAGA (Make America Great Again) and Republicans, using those terms as some sort of condemnation:

MAGA Republicans are trying to sensationalize an issue that doesn’t really exist in the way that they are falsely portraying[.]

He deepens his lie by claiming that the problem with biological men competing in women’s sports isn’t a problem.

Trans athletes and their Progressive-Democratic Party supporters could make a better case, or at least an honest one, by arguing, under Title IX, for requiring sports programs already receiving Federal money (which is to say, receiving the tax dollars remitted to the Federal government by us citizens, and then transferred to those programs) and which already have separate men’s and women’s sports programs to have, also, substantially equally funded and supported trans athlete sports programs.

The better solution, and one which likely would have broad bipartisan support (depending on the actual details), would be to amend Title IX, which already mandates program separation based on biological sex, to explicitly include a third separation, trans.

Another Example of Federal Government Run Amok

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This time it’s by President Joe Biden’s (D) infamous medical wonder, HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra, in his attack on those evil Catholics. This attack is on Oklahoma’s Saint Francis Health System. The hospital system maintains, in the chapel of its Saint Francis Hospital South, a candle representing the presence of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist.

That’s no good, insists Becerra, who had—or has tacitly allowed—his Department’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to use the Joint Commission (nominally an independent accrediting organization which CMS uses for Medicaid and Medicare certification) to manufacture a fire hazard (!) from the candle.

Lose the symbol of Christ or lose Federal certification and funding for Medicaid and Medicare is the threat from the Feds.

Fire hazard: this is the candle and its danger, located as it is in the hospital’s chapel:Here is Becerra’s statement, carefully done through a spokesperson, instead of being made by Doctor of Ersatz Becerra himself:

[T]he department “is aware of a safety finding involving a fire risk, made by an independent accrediting organization, issued to a hospital in Oklahoma.”

Apparently, all those flammables are too close to the glass and brass-enclosed flame. Apparently, too, the flame of Christ burns so brightly in Catholics that the candle’s flame might burn through all that glass and brass, leap that distance, and ignite the furniture. Or something.

This is yet another campaign in the Biden administration’s war on religion.

Update: The Biden administration has–for now–decided not to pursue the Saint Francis Health System over the candle in the System’s Saint Francis Hospital South.

After the hospital threatened legal action through The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, the government reversed course on what seemed to be the latest development in a pattern of aggressive regulatory and criminal enforcement actions by the Biden administration against the Catholic Church.

Child Abuse

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The Oregon House of Representatives, dominated as it is by the Progressive-Democratic Party, has moved to legalize child mutilation and sex abuse. Oregon House Bill 2002 B, passed strictly partisanly (the vote was 36-23),

would allow minors younger than 15 to obtain an abortion without parental consent. Doctors would not be compelled to disclose this information to parents unless receiving express written permission from the child.
The legislation would expand taxpayer money to fund gender reassignment surgery—including sterilization for children as young as 15—without their parent’s consent.

This governmental abuse of parents’ children is another path along the Progressive-Democratic Party’s plan to fundamentally transform America,

We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.
—Barack Obama, October 30, 2008
We are going to have to change our conversation; we’re going to have to change our traditions, our history; we’re going to have to move into a different place as a nation.
—Michelle Obama, May 14, 2008

and to fundamentally change things—our economy, certainly, as President Joe Biden (D) only recently asserted but also the relationship between children and their parents and between children and the State.

Not Her Fault—Not Entirely

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President Joe Biden’s (D) Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre is being eviscerated for declaring, at a recent noon o’clock press conference, that illegal immigration was down by 90% since implementing President Biden’s immigration policies.

This is, of course, a straight up lie. While illegal immigration rates are down year-on-year, they’re nowhere near 90% down.

This is not Jean-Pierre’s lie, though; it’s Biden’s lie. The woman is only repeating the words she’s instructed to spout by her boss.

Jean-Pierre does, though, lack the personal integrity to resign rather than repeat her boss’ lies. She can, and should, be eviscerated for having so little personal integrity, while at the same time she should be deeply pitied for being so disturbingly lacking in self-respect.

Reporters’ Contempt for Ordinary Americans

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High-profile media figures gathered for their 2024 Campaign Journalism Conference at the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics a week or so ago. One theme of the conference was the journalists’ concern about the perception of condescension, of looking down your nose at us Americans that we Americans have of the journalism guild and its members.

CNN journalist Jeff Zeleny was one expressing that concern.

So one thing I think the media has done incorrectly in terms of describing Trump voters as interviewing people only after Trump rallies. The vast majority of Trump voters have never gone to a Trump rally, have never, you know, stood in line for hours and hours and hours. And for those of you who’ve covered Trump rallies, you’ve seen some of the same people at rally, after rally, after rally. These are groupies. These are people who are going for the show, for the rock concert, if you will. So I think talking to voters who are interested enough and following things along, but not as obsessed with, you know, the candidate on either side that it sort of tends the view.

Some of those some of the people do attend multiple Trump rallies because they’re groupies interested in the show. An unknown number of them, even unknown by the august Zeleny. Many more, though, attend multiple Trump rallies, not because they’re obsessed, but because they are interested enough and following things along, and want to hear things straight from the horse’s mouth. And they—we–can’t trust the media to present his rallies honestly and with balance. Zeleny chose to claim the one set of frequent attendees were the whole of the frequent attendees, completely ignoring even the possibility of the other set’s existence.

And this bit by Ana Ceballos of The Miami Herald:

…DeSantis never made “small talk” with reporters….

He won’t hobnob with reporters. What a precious whine. More seriously: why would he make “small talk” when journalists are just going to print some of those off-the-record small talk remarks whenever those remarks are convenient to the journalists’ predetermined narrative, all the while attributing them to leaks by “a person familiar with the exchange” or a “high official?”

(Aside: there was a time when editors required at least two on-the-record sources to corroborate anonymous “person familiar” or “high official” claims. Editors have long since walked away from that standard. What concrete, measurable, publicly available standard of journalistic integrity do editors use today?)

Ceballos went on, on the subject of a claimed desire to build trust of the journalist by the staffer and/or politician:

They [DeSantis’ staffers] don’t often get on the phone, either, because they want everything in writing just in case they can attack you for it. So it’s really difficult to even have candid conversations with them and just an on-background, off-the-record conversation.

Yeah. It couldn’t possibly be because they need the written record so they can defend themselves or their administration when journalists leak and distort the on-background, off-the-record remarks in order to attack them. Trust goes both ways.

A canonical example of that lack of trustworthiness, that deliberate distortion, that contempt for us in thinking we’re too grindingly stupid to decide for ourselves how to interpret what we hear, is in their presentation of Trump’s Asheville, NC, speech late in his 2016 campaign. “Journalists” covering the speech, and others merely repeating what their fellows wrote, accurately quoted Trump as saying that there were “good people on both sides of the argument.” But the lie, and the contempt for us inherent in their lie, was in the “journalists'” decision to strip off the context of Trump’s remark and to claim that Trump was talking about the rioters that rioted. Even a casual perusal of the transcript of that speech—unneeded by all those who were present and heard what Trump actually said—demonstrates that far from drawing equivalence regarding the rioters, Trump was plainly talking about the debate over whether certain statues should be torn down or relocated.

The attendees at the Campaign Journalism Conference also seem to have ignored the press’ penchant for rewriting history to attempt to erase their past distortions when they’re caught out. News outlets routinely rewrite headlines when their inaccuracies are exposed, doing it on the sly without fanfare, expecting that we’re too stupid to notice. They do the same with later-exposed errors in the body of their articles, and for the same reason. This is nothing but naked revisionist history that would make any propagandist proud. The honest, the respectful, thing for these outlets to do would be to acknowledge their errors with the same prominence in which they made them and print their correction—their errata, if you will—at the head of the article in which the error was made, while leaving the article and headline otherwise intact.

One more item the conference attendees seem to have ignored: The New York Times‘ front-page announcement during Trump’s 2016 campaign that there should be no more objectivity in news reporting vis-à-vis Trump; journalists should take sides. This was followed by a broadcast news media anchor claiming in all seriousness that there are not two sides to every story. Only one side, very often, was fit to be presented.

The “news” media mavens’ contempt for us ordinary Americans is no perception. They really are contemptuous of us. Zeleny put that on clear display; so did Ceballos. These “journalists,” in their oh-so-much-smarter-than-us obliviousness, their breathtaking thin-skinned-ness, can’t even recognize the contempt they have for so many Americans in their own remarks. This is reminiscent of a politician’s claim that millions of Americans are irredeemable and deplorable. And of another politician’s claim that 15% of us are just no good.

This is what passes for journalism today. This is the actual contempt for us that journalists have.