Editorial Opinion With Spittle Flecks

NYT Editorialist Michelle Cottle's breathless over-reaction to the Kavanaugh appointment really piles on the BS in this excerpt:

Monday was the kind of day that the president lives for. As the clock ticked down to the announcement of his new Supreme Court nominee, the entire political world hovered in a state of suspended animation and frenzied speculation. Had the president made his decision yet? Who had he chosen? Would his pick get leaked ahead of time? Had any of the top finalists been seen anywhere near the White House?

With all of the build up to the 9 p.m. announcement, it’s a miracle none of the political commentators’ heads exploded from the suspense. The entire production was, in short, classic Trump — an overhyped, self-aggrandizing display aimed at focusing the spotlight on himself for reasons of both personal gratification and political expedience.

The "entire political world hovered in a state of suspended animation and frenzied speculation"? Uh, no they didn't.

A pre-written — and poorly edited — statement from the Women’s March on President Trump’s Supreme Court nomination became the subject of mockery on Twitter on Monday night, including from Mr. Trump’s former press secretary.

The feminist group blasted out a statement shortly after Mr. Trump nominated Judge Brett Kavanaugh, saying him confirmation would “further erode protections for almost every marginalized group in America.”

The introduction to the statement read “In response to Donald Trump’s nomination of XX to the Supreme Court of the United States.

So I'm not objecting to the characterization of people being frenzied, but they really weren't fussed about who it was going to be. The frenzy was that of bulls at a rodeo gate, raring to go, not speculating about whether they'd have Barrett or Kavanaugh to gore. Although "XX" is the gender chromosome for females. It's also the Roman Numeral twenty, as in they will probably be screaming about Kavanaugh for the next 20 years.

Cottle also hits at least three Trump Derangement Syndrome Bingo spaces in the piece. You have some bathroom lingo ("leakier than a busted toilet"), reference to his crisply knotted tie (nota bene: all modern Presidents wear ties for these occasions) and of course the overarching sprinkling throughout with the reminder that all President Trump really amounts to is a reality TV star.

Do you think she seems to dislike this President?

What to expect from Senate Democrats in the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings

The definition of prejudice

Prejudice. Judging someone or something before you know anything about it. Born of ignorance, and rightly ridiculed.



The one girl actually claims she "just saw the pick". False memory. It happens.

Students hate Trump's SCOTUS pick. The first two words are all you need to know: "Students hate."

It's worse than you think

Keith invited my comments on the Obergefell decision today over at his fine post on King v. Burwell (RTWT, as they say).  Because my take on this SSM decision will be too long to comfortably fit in a comment, tho -- it'll have to be in this new post.  But as I said, read Keith's post too.

As indicated in the title, my take on the Supreme Court decision regarding SSM is that it is worse, far worse, than you might be lead to believe from the media reports.  All you need to know about the majority holding is contained in its first sentence:

The Constitution promises liberty to all within its reach, a liberty that includes certain specific rights that allow persons, within a lawful realm, to define and express their identity*.

The holding then invokes the previously-tried much-reviled doctrine of "substantive due process", by which those fundamental rights as identified by the "reasoned judgment" of the courts as "so fundamental that the State must accord them its respect" are protected by the Fourteenth Amendment -- i.e., protected by the imposition of state laws that impinge on those rights. This approach of "substantive due process" was used in Dred Scott (which C.J. Roberts reminds us was "overruled on the battlefields of the Civil War"), and in the reviled, overruled, and now (by this case) resurrected Lochner case.  But history doesn't slow down Justice Kennedy --- not when his "reasoned judgment" can rewrite it by claiming that the Framers intended this result:

The generations that wrote and ratified the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment did not presume to know the extent of freedom in all of its dimensions, and so they entrusted to future generations a charter protecting the right of all persons to enjoy liberty as we learn its meaning.

Like Hell they did.

Anyhoo, then the obvious bootstrapping of same-sex marriage into such a fundamental right then occurs, and voila: same-sex marriage is a fundamental right that must be granted by each state, and honored across state lines.  End of analysis.

All of the four dissents are strong, and do not shy from pointing out the damage that is done by the majority opinion.  All citizens should read all four of them.  Roberts points out Dred Scott and Lochner, and the evils those cases inflicted, as noted above.  Scalia rightfully rails against the "naked judicial claim to ... super-legislative power, a claim fundamentally at odds with our system of government".  Justice Thomas gives a lesson on the meaning of liberty, with this lead-in:

[T]he majority invokes our Constitution in the name of a "liberty" that the Framers would not have recognized, to the detriment of the liberty they sought to protect. Along the way, it rejects the idea -- captured in our Declaration of Independence -- that human dignity is innate and suggests instead that it comes from the Government. This distortion of our Constituion not only ignores the text, it inverts the relationship between the individual and the state in our Republic.

And Justice Alito wraps up the larger effect at the end of his dissent:

If a bare majority of Justices can invent a new right and impose that right on the rest of the country, the only real limit on what future majorities will be able to do is their own sense of what those with political power and cultural influence are willing to tolerate.... 

... I do not doubt that my colleagues in the majority sincerely see in the Constitution a vision of liberty that happens to coincide with their own.  But this sincerity is cause for concern, not comfort.  What it evidences is the deep and perhaps irremediable corruption of our legal culture's conception of constitutional interpretation.

Yeah, it's that bad.

Keith makes the point that the states make "cohabitation licenses" available to all comers, without discrimination, and that whatever the rest of us want to call it is up to us.  That might have been a response had the Supreme Court applied "equal protection" analysis -- but it most certainly is not a valid response given this decision.  We now have Supreme Court law that says that marriage is a fundamental right that must be granted by the state to any pair (for now) of humans (for now) who want it.  Discrimination has nothing to do with it -- marriage itself, as defined by the Court today and by courts in the future, is itself a fundamental right because of the dignity that it allegedly confers. So sorry, Keith, that ship has sailed.

And contrary to Flambeaux's point (while granting that this die may have been cast long ago -- but not as long ago as Justice Kennedy says), this case will in fact cause incalculable damage beyond its specific holding today.  Just like Roe v. Wade, much of the populace will interpret this "right" to same-sex marriage as a public good -- "gee, if the state can't prevent me from getting (an abortion; married to another guy), it must be a good thing for me to do."  This case is worse than Roe, though, because at least in Roe the Court allowed room for some limitations, regulations, etc. in its out-of-the-blue trimester analysis.  There's no such room here -- this one is carved in stone totally, and completely.

Of course, this was the goal of the gay political agenda all along -- to require the Nation to agree that gay is just as good as hetero, and that it is immoral to think, much less say, otherwise.  You especially can't say otherwise in this current age of bigotry witch hunts, in which one evil racist nut acts out his own bigotry, meaning of course  good-bye to Lake Calhoun.

Legally, we'll now be in the realm of clashing rights:  same-sex marriage vs. religious freedom.  One would think that the judge-invented SSM right would lose to the express First Amendment free exercise right, but all you have to do is look at the abortion counseling cases to see how that often doesn't matter.

Courage and action (not BOp "strategic retreat") will be required in this new age. A price will be exacted for one's convictions.  Parochial schools and universities may well have to do without federal and state funding. Murray Option actions will be required.  And states and communities that want to resist may well have to suffer the inevitable corporate embargos.

Freedom is not free.

* Any in the class have any ideas as to what current hot topic might fall within "defining and expressing their identity"? Bueller?  Bruce (I mean) Kaitlyn?

My thoughts on the recent Supreme Court rulings

First and foremost, with respect to the first ruling in King v. Burwell, I owe Pik an apology. I had defended Chief Justice Roberts way back when for taking a strategic long view with an eye to setting up Obamacare for the kill later on. But Roberts' arguments in King now clearly show he sees the Court's role as one of providing a legislative rehabilitative salvation for the law rather than ruling on the text of it. That, and getting more Likes on Facebook.

He, at least I think Roberts is the one who made passing reference to this, is right on one point, though. It's fully in the hands of Congress to repeal and/or replace Obamacare as it sees fit. This is entirely as it should be. We shouldn't be hoping SCOTUS will do our difficult work for us any more than we should be hoping Roberts will shoot our dog for us to spare us the unpleasantness of the task. Now the situation is crystal clear: elect a Republican Congress with spine and a Republican President to sign their work into law and handle this whole matter the right way, as the writers of the Constitution intended.

Now, with respect to today's opinion in Obergefell there is one enormous question that immediately eclipses everything else: who will be the third and greatest fool in the Greater Fool Theory of Publishing to sign up to lose money on Rod Dreher's BO book? Dreher has been positively leaving a trail of bodily fluids the last several days in eager anticipation of today's ruling coming down as it did, because what's bad for Christian conservatives is good for anyone wanting to push a snake oil cure for what just hit them.

Aside from some unknown publisher's as yet unbooked losses, though, let's work through what today's Obergefell ruling really means.

First, if you're Rod Dreher or Ace at AOSHQ and you're reprising Bill Paxton's "Game over, man!" (NSFW) scene from Aliens, here's what's really going through your head: "Okay, I'm bent over this stump, I've dropped my pants, oh, my, what will happen to me next? Will they use a lube? Oh, it would be so much more terrible if they didn't use a lube, wouldn't it? It would! It would! I can hardly wait!"

Since I myself am not stump broke like Rod Dreher, here is, alternatively, what is going through my head.

A cohabitation license issued by the State must be available to all comers in order not to discriminate, which carries this interesting little clusterbomb implicit within it. Nothing in Obergefell mandates for two-person marriages or against triad or larger unions, plus, this is no longer the States' problem, not even the Feds' - it effectively rebounds right back to SCOTUS as soon as it arises.

Whether you wish to call two guys cohabiting for butt sex marriage or a dog show remains entirely up to you. If you whine, "but they'll make me call it marriage!", see stump broke, above.

If your church recognizes gay unions, consider getting another church that does not. Those that do not do so voluntarily can not and will not be forced to do so.

As for federal funding, if you can be bribed, please send your name and the particular favors, skills, goods, or elite access you are willing to barter for money to Keith care of EQE so that I may consider whether I have a need to buy you and use you for my own ends in some capacity.

In the meantime, the betting pool is now open on the publisher even more stupid than Judith Regan turned out to be.

Charles Krauthammer on Jonathan Gruber: "We're hearing the true voice of liberal arrogance"

Daily Caller has the scoop, but this video is a little longer one I found on Youtube.



Text from the Caller piece:

This is exactly what conservatives have been saying for four years, what we’re hearing now is the true voice of liberal arrogance. They believe this. They believe that the voters are stupid, as he said, and they believe that they know the right way, they have to lead the masses to the Promised Land, and they can only do it by deception. And that’s what he said openly: ‘We wanted to get the bill, we didn’t care about how we did it, so we lied about everything. We lied about if you can keep the plan, knowing that you can’t keep your plan. We lied about the fact this would be a transfer of wealth, a massive transfer of wealth.’ Because, as Gruber said, had they known that, it would never have passed. They lied about every aspect of this, and I think that is what has been charged all along.

And it is a scandal of the media that this has to be discovered in the sixth year of the presidency rather than talked about at the time, when it was obvious they were lying about all this. The idea of it being a transfer of wealth was known from the beginning. But they got away with it.

And now another video of Gruber has surfaced where he states that Obamacare passed because “the American people are too stupid to understand the difference.”

I hope Justice John Roberts is watching this drama unfold. Obviously he is numbered among the huddled masses of hapless, duped Americans. If Gruber brings the whole mess down then man, it could be beautiful to watch.

Toobin makes two large errors

“You’re entitled to your own opinion, but you’re not entitled to your own facts.” This quote is attributed to Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and it's true no matter who said it first. With that in mind, we have to make some corrections to Jeffrey Toobin's article praising Ruth Ginsberg for being, oh, so smart and prescient in her Hobby Lobby dissent.

There was an exemption already for religious institutions. Hobby Lobby, a closely held corporation, is a secular, for-profit business, but the Court held that because the owners of Hobby Lobby held a sincere religious belief that certain forms of birth control caused abortions, they could deny employer-paid insurance coverage for them.

Is this just bad writing? Unclear. It's not a "religious belief" at all that "certain forms of birth control caused abortions" or, I think he means to write cause abortions. But syntax errors aside, there are certain forms of birth control which cause abortions. The links here would be useful to Mr. Toobin as sort of a science primer.

One of the problems with the whole debate and discussion is that "birth control" is somewhat of a misnomer. Birth prevention is really the goal of both contraception and abortion. The latter is more morally egregious than the former, but those who approve of contraception but are against abortion may want to consider the continued use of the softer phrase "birth control" as something which dilutes the strength of pro-life/pro-child argument against the anti-child mentality, or the contraceptive mentality as it is sometimes called.

Here's the next "mistake":

What about religious individuals who say that they have sincere objections to conducting business relationships with gay people or immigrants?

Oh stop it. You obviously mean, Mr. Toobin, to indicate illegal immigrants, so why not use the word? The use of the single, neutral word "immigrants" is meant to suppress or diminish the amount of eye-roll from the general public who are tired of the gay whining.

This line should offend legal immigrants tremendously because it implicitly lumps them together with illegals. Why? Because no mainstream religious denomination objects to legal immigration. This article is obviously written from a biased point-of-view, but these errors are either due to sloppiness and laziness or malevolence and they need to be pointed out whichever is the case.

"That's not enough for me."

One can imagine Jimmy Dimora being advised to take a plea deal a year ago and responding "That's not enough for me." He wanted it all and so he bet that when the roulette wheel stopped spinning, the ball would land in a hole marked "innocent". Too bad he lost.

In the conclusion to this great article by Robert Samuelson, "Obama's Ego Trip" we see another ego trip at work, and perhaps Obama's ego is even fatter than Dimora himself.

Considering the ACA's glaring -- and predictable -- economic and political shortcomings, why did Obama make it his first-term centerpiece? The answer seems to be his obsession with securing his legacy as the president who achieved the liberal grail of universal coverage. In his book "The Escape Artists: How Obama's Team Fumbled the Recovery," Noam Scheiber recounts a telling incident. Obama's advisers tell him he can be known for preventing a second Great Depression. "That's not enough for me," Obama replies.

The ACA is Obama's ego trip, but as a path to presidential greatness, it may disappoint no matter how the court decides. Lyndon's Johnson's creation of Medicare and Medicaid was larger, and he isn't deemed great. And then, unlike now, government seemed capable of paying for bigger programs.

What can we do now? Maybe say a Rosary for Justice Anthony Kennedy. That's what I'm going to do.

Then, I will pray to Mr. Kennedy this little prayer I adapted:

Tony, Tony, come around!
Save us from this Obama clown!