Category Archives: culture

“diminished public trust in the Court is a good thing”

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That’s the claim of Ian Millhiser over at Vox. He added this, and he actually was serious:

Litigation, in other words, is a far more potent tool in the hands of an anti-governmental movement than it is in the hands of one seeking to build a more robust regulatory and welfare state.

That’s a feature of our republican democracy form of governance, not a bug. Millhiser’s beef is with our Constitution, not with our courts; our Constitution being as clear as it is on who makes the laws (it’s not the courts) and as clear as it is, also, on the lack of sacrosanctness of legislative edifices. Parliamentary Supremacy is a British thing, not an American one.

Millhiser knows this full well, and he destroys his credibility by pretending otherwise.

Giving the Game Away

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NBC‘s Lester Holt is a member of the journalism guild and another member of the Left who’s done so. He said, as part of his long list of our claimed failings in responding to the Wuhan Virus, while he determinedly emoted about the raw numbers of deaths from the Wuhan Virus, that

…we forgot about the unpredictability of free will….

Because we should have obeyed the “science” being put out by our Know Betters in Government. We should have meekly accepted those instructions.

We should have joined our Know Betters in ignoring the larger science behind Holt’s manufactured angst over his soul-crushing milestone of 1 million deaths from the Virus. We should have paid no attention to that larger science behind the curtain, the rest of the story that showed that the Virus’ mortality rate for fundamentally healthy adults is a small fraction of 1% and, for our children, nearly non-existent. That whole story, not the carefully selected bits and pieces that suit the Left’s artificially done hysteria, showed very strongly that the only folks truly at risk from the Virus are those with existing comorbidities and those who are older than 85-ish.

That Holt included in his tear-jerker monologue his concerns about obstructionist free will is entirely consistent with the Left’s contempt of us average Americans and the Left’s drive to reduce us to wards of an all-knowing, all-benevolent State run by those denizens of the Left.

“The Leak” and Its Fall Impact

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Short, and too the point. Assume the leaked Supreme Court Decision in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which seems to overturn Roe v Wade, is substantially the decision the Court will release in its June batch of opinion releases.

The hue and cry that’s occurring now from both sides of the question is the hue and cry that would have occurred in June following the Court’s release of its official opinion. That hue and cry will be very much watered down by this week’s leak reaction, to the point that I don’t see the reaction to the official opinion having much steam left for the summer and fall mid-term campaigns or for the fall elections.

That leads me to two possibilities for the leak. One is that the liberal Justice staff leaker, if that’s who it was, made a tactical blunder with his leak. He virtually eliminated the reaction the official release would have generated, a reaction much closer to the election and so much more likely to have an impact.

The other possibility is that the conservative Justice staff leaker, if that’s who it was, successfully defanged the reaction by stimulating it too early in the season to have much impact.

A clue regarding who the leaker is can be collected from the reactions to the leak. The Left, and especially the Progressive-Democratic Party politicians, all are focused strictly on the putative outcome of the Court’s decision; they wholly ignore the fact of the leak. Here’s a canonical example of that disdain from the head of the Progressive-Democratic Party, President Joe Biden (D):

Not a syllable—not a minim—of concern or comment regarding the illegality of the leak. Indeed, this President’s sole critical caveat, the only thing about which he cares, is whether the leak actually reflects the upcoming ruling.

On the other hand, Conservatives and the Conservative and Republican politicians, while not ignoring the putative decision, strongly emphasize the leak and its illegality.

One side ignores the illegality of the matter; the other side decries the leak for its law-breaking nature. That’s strongly indicative of who the leaker is.

Parental Rights

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Some court cases are being engaged in response to the number of Leftist school boards pushing child sex transition “discussions” onto children behind the kids’ parents backs, and occasionally in defiance of parents’ written instructions.

A handful of court cases are being debated to decide whether school officials should be required to tell parents if their child identifies as LGBT.

These Leftists actually think going behind the parents’ backs is justifiable.

[Lambda Legal lawyer Kell] Olson would like to see parents support school districts’ “reasonable policies” rather than resort reflexively to the courts to uphold parental rights.

This gives away the game. No school policy that denies parents knowledge of the child’s performance at school or of the school’s treatment of their child is reasonable. No school policy that in any way seeks to circumscribe parents’ rights can be reasonable. That especially applies to whose responsibility it is to have discussions with children regarding gender and sex and sexual behavior.

Contrary to Olson’s attempts to justify this abusive behavior, not just of the parents’ rights, but of the parents’ kids, also, here’s Rick Claybrook, representing parents in a lawsuit against the Montgomery County school district:

Kids have their parents to protect them because they’re not able to do so until they reach maturity….

Especially, apparently, to protect them from out of control school boards and school administrators and school teachers.

Disinformation

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…about his new Truth Division Disinformation Governance Board.

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said “there’s no question” he could have more effectively communicated the purpose of his newly-created “disinformation” board….

Mayorkas also said that his

Disinformation Governance Board [is] to combat online disinformation….

Of course, it is. And it’s the Biden-Harris administration personnel and Mayorkas who will decide what is truth and what is fiction and who will dictate via that Truther Board what we American citizens will be permitted to hear, and it’s the Biden-Harris administration personnel and Mayorkas who will tell us how to evaluate what their Board allows to be passed.

And this from Mayorkas:

You know, an individual has the free speech right to spew anti-Semitic rhetoric. What they don’t have the right to do is take hostages in a synagogue, and that’s where we get involved.

That’s a cynically and dishonestly presented red herring. Those two items have little to do with each other, and we already have statutes on the books barring the latter, as well as barring the former from taking the form of inciting the latter. No Truther Board is needed except to push Government censorship.

Putting a woman well-known for her own disinformation-spreading enthusiasm and skill in charge of the Board makes plain the degree of censorship to which this agency’s actions are intended to reach.