Tuesday roundup

 I don't know how politically feasible this would be, but from a procedural standpoint, it would do the trick, it seems to me. Steve Milloy, writing at the Wall Street Journal, outlines the way the Senate - as currently composed - could keep the incoming Biden administration from re-imposong the Paris climate accord:

To prevent the Paris Climate Accord from taking on . . .  undue power [due to a Supreme Court decision similar to the way the rescinding of the DACA program was undone], Mr. Trump should submit it to the Senate, and Majority Leader Mitch McConnell should schedule a quick vote. It would certainly be rejected—ratification requires a two-thirds vote—and it is unlikely any court could subsequently resurrect a legislatively tossed treaty. Without the help of judges, Mr. Biden would need a winning ratification vote to make the accord binding, which he likely couldn’t get no matter how well Democrats do in Georgia’s January runoffs and the 2022 midterm elections. 

Mr. McConnell could also call a ratification vote after Mr. Biden’s inauguration, even if Mr. Trump does nothing. This would similarly elevate the treaty’s status and make it difficult for Mr. Biden to bind his successors to his executive actions.

I think there would be enough Senators with thinking at least somewhat along the lines of Joe Manchin that a Senate vote would yield the result depicted by Milloy: 

West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, a Democrat, hit back at Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez after being the subject of a viral tweet by the Democratic socialist last month, telling The New York Times that she’s “more active on Twitter than anything else.”

At the time, Manchin vowed to stand up against the radicals in his party, particularly on the subject of defunding the police.

“Defund the police? Defund, my butt,” he tweeted. “I'm a proud West Virginia Democrat. We are the party of working men and women. We want to protect Americans' jobs & healthcare. We do not have some crazy socialist agenda, and we do not believe in defunding the police.”

He elaborated:

The senator continued: “We’re not going to defund the police, we’re not for the new green deal. That’s not going to happen. We’re not for Medicare for All — we can’t even pay for Medicare for some.”

Mary Townsend, writing at Plough, explores the influence of Louisa May Alcott on French existentialist Simone de Beauvoir: 

Born in 1908, Beauvoir grew up in the thick emotive haze of leftover nineteenth-century French Catholicism, carried into pre-war France. She was educated in the same sort of immersive religiosity that provided plenty of opportunities for spiritual heroism from very young girls in particular, the same sort of upbringing that produced Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, the Little Flower, who aspired to sainthood from her very early youth and in her death in 1897. Beauvoir, who for several years aspired to be a nun, writes of the exquisite transports of confessional tears, imagining herself swooning in the arms of angels; she prided herself on inventing mortifications in her very few moments alone. But unlike Thérèse, Beauvoir found no lasting comfort within or even distantly alongside Christianity.

It was not by cutting herself off from transports of emotion or by abandoning the metaphysical all-or-nothing that she eventually found an image of adulthood she could live with; nor could the attractions of philosophy, which she first came across through the Thomism of her girls’ school, or the Catholic social justice group she volunteered for, do the trick. It was rather literature, as a kind of Art, and herself as Author, that managed to hold the strongest and most sustainable appeal as vocation. If you can believe it, the first non-saintly individual Beauvoir found really attractive was the fictional American Protestant, Jo March, one of the heroines of Louisa May Alcott’s wildly popular 1868 novel, Little Women. Beauvoir couldn’t quite escape the nineteenth century after all.

Like so many readers, the young Simone was passionately invested in the persona of Jo as a writer, taking up the genre of the short story to imitate her. Inevitably, she also had extremely strong opinions on the Laurie question, the wealthy neighbor who proposes to one and then another of the March sisters. Opening the second volume Good Wives by accident, she came upon Laurie and Amy’s engagement (without the help of Jo’s refusal for context), and her response was immediate and absolute: “I hated Louisa M. Alcott for it.” But the similarities between the Marches’ style of family life (fictionalized from Alcott’s own experience) and her own gave her pleasure: “they were taught, as I was, that a cultivated mind and moral righteousness was better than money.” This was something to hold on to, the more so because like the Marches, and like Alcott herself, Beauvoir’s family dealt with straitened means, the memory of better times, and the all-too-visible wealth and comfort of neighbors and relations. The reward of their virtue was to be found in the causes they took up: for Alcott, abolitionism and suffrage, and for Beauvoir, existentialism, Marxism, and her own variety of existentialist Marxist feminism. The necessity for strict social circumspection in the behavior of daughters was lost on Simone, Louisa, and Jo alike.

How did de Beauvoir wind up with the philosophical stance that she did?

I think Beauvoir settled on atheism because she was unable to imagine an intellectual Christianity. This was not because intellectualism was lacking from the Thomism or Catholic existentialism that she had come across, but because what she wanted was the freedom of a Christian, the freedom to understand God, truth, the Absolute on her own terms, and she was told that there was no way to do this. There’s an irony in her captivation with Sartre’s vision, which she found novel, of the freedom to will one’s own future – all too strangely reminiscent of the argument Luther made in 1520. For Beauvoir, the blind nationalism of the French Catholic church, its triumphal support of colonization, its unwillingness to call private property into question, failed to answer her desire for understanding a world in thrall to capitalism. One must think of Beauvoir as a rebel angel.

 

Matthew Continetti, writing at the American Enterprise Institute website, reminds us what a remarkable human being Natan Sharansky is:

Sharansky was born in 1948 in the Ukrainian city of Stalino. His given name was Anatoly. His parents were educated professionals who downplayed their Jewish identity. They did not want to risk political and social reprisal. “The only real Jewish experience I had was facing anti-Semitism,” he writes. The precocious youth spent his early years playing chess. He learned to navigate a Soviet system that maintained its rule through fear. He became captive to doublethink. He repeated official lies and myths not because it was the right thing to do, but because it was the safe thing to do.

Sharansky enrolled in the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. “I dived into the republic of science,” he writes. “This world seemed insulated from the doublethink I had mastered at home.” Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War prompted him to discover his heritage. “Realizing how little I knew about this country that so many people were now asking about made me hungry to learn more.”

Sharansky studied representations of Biblical scenes hanging from the walls of Moscow’s galleries. He came across a samizdat copy of Leon Uris’s Exodus, a potboiler historical fiction that describes Israel’s founding. “It drew me into Jewish history, and Israel’s history, through my Russian roots. It helped me see myself as part of the story.”

The following year the Soviet nuclear physicist Andrei Sakharov wrote his “Reflections on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom.” Sakharov argued for freedom of inquiry. He demanded the protection of human rights. “Sakharov was warning that life in a dictatorship offers two choices: either you overcome your fear and stand for truth, or you remain a slave to fear, no matter how fancy your titles, no matter how big your dacha,” Sharansky writes. “Ultimately, I couldn’t escape myself or my conscience.”

Inspired by Sakharov, Sharansky applied for a visa to immigrate to Israel in 1973. He was rejected. He was unable to leave the Soviet Union. That made him a refusenik. “My life as a doublethinker, which I had consciously begun at age five the day Stalin died, was over. The professional world I had built for myself, my castle of science, collapsed instantly. Now, I could say what I thought, do what I said, and say what I did.”

The twin concerns of Sharansky’s life—identity and freedom—became fused. “Democracy—a free life in a free society—is essential because it satisfies a human yearning to choose one’s path, to pursue one’s goals,” he wrote in Defending Identity. “It broadens possibilities and provides opportunity for self-advancement. Identity, a life of commitment, is essential because it satisfies a human longing to become part of something bigger than oneself. It adds layers of meaning to our lives and deepens the human experience.” Freedom offers choice. Identity provides direction.

It would be a while before Sharansky could enjoy his own freedom. By 1975, he was working with Sakharov. The next year he formed the Moscow Helsinki Group to pressure the Soviets to live up to the commitments they had made in basket three of the Helsinki Accords. The KGB arrested him in 1977. “I spent the next nine years in prison and labor camp,” he wrote in Fear No Evil, “mainly on a special disciplinary regime, including more than 400 days in punishment cells, and more than 200 days on hunger strikes.”

In prison he played chess games in his head. “I always won.” He would tease the guards with anti-Soviet jokes. He was not afraid. What could they do—put him in jail? He communicated with his fellow inmates through morse code. They would drain the toilets and speak to one another through pipes. He read Soviet propaganda esoterically, between the lines. He figured out what was actually going on by determining what the authorities had omitted.

Sharansky was in prison when he heard that President Ronald Reagan had called the Soviet Union the “Evil Empire.” The year was 1983. Reagan had uttered the famous—and controversial—words in a speech to the National Association of Evangelicals. “It was one of the most important, freedom-affirming declarations, and we all instantly knew it,” Sharansky said in a 2004 interview. “For us, that was the moment that really marked the end for them, and the beginning for us. The lie had been exposed and could never, ever be untold now. This was the end of Lenin’s ‘Great October Bolshevik Revolution’ and the beginning of a new revolution, a freedom revolution—Reagan’s Revolution.”

Sharansky and his wife Avital had been apart since her immigration to Israel the day after they married in 1974. Throughout his imprisonment she worked tirelessly on his behalf, and on behalf of other refuseniks and dissidents. She found an ally in Israel’s U.N. ambassador, Benjamin Netanyahu. She met with Reagan, who began asking Soviet leaders to release Sharansky. Gorbachev freed him on February 11, 1986. He was reunited with Avital in Frankfurt Airport. They flew to Israel. “‘It was just one long day,’ Avital sighed later that night, in our new home in Jerusalem. ‘I arrived in Israel in the morning. You arrived in the evening. It was just one very, very long day in between.’”

He became Natan. He entered Israeli politics. He helped resettle one million immigrants from the former Soviet Union. He opposed the Oslo peace accords. He resigned from Ariel Sharon’s government over the policy of unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. His work as an activist was devoted to building what Reagan had described as “the infrastructure of democracy.” Sharansky distinguished between free societies and fear societies. “The structural elements that enable democratic societies to respect human rights—independent courts, the rule of law, a free press, a freely elected government, meaningful opposition parties, not to mention human rights organizations—were all glaringly absent in fear societies,” he wrote in The Case for Democracy (2004).

This utterance from Joseph diGenova may be the most disturbing example of Trumpism denial of the election results yet:

On Monday President Trump’s campaign lawyer and former U.S. Attorney Joe diGenova said that fired Trump cybersecurity chief Chris Krebs should be executed for saying that the election was the “most secure in United States history.”

DiGenova, appearing on the Howie Carr show, which simulcasts on Newsmax, took aim at Krebs as an aside during a wheels-off segment full of false claims about how the United States election had been rigged.

“Anybody who thinks that this election went well, like that idiot Krebs who used to be the head of cybersecurity [for Trump]. That guy is a class A moron. He should be drawn and quartered. Taken out at dawn and shot,” diGenova said.

This is not just a random Parler troll trying to get attention. This is an attorney speaking on behalf of the President of the United States’ re-election campaign. And while it may read like a macabre joke, the direct nature of diGenova’s comments make it impossible to interpret as anything other than a real wish/threat against a public servant for offering truthful testimony.

Carr responded to the statement with an awkward pause and a laugh and then changed the subject. Some shit is so weird that it even makes Newsmax people uncomfortable.

Matt Walsh at Daily Wire on the absurdity of making Sarah Fuller's field goal attempt for Vanderbilt into a historic occasion:

 On Saturday, Sarah Fuller became the first woman to suit up and take the field for a Power-5 football team. The media has declared Fuller’s performance as Vanderbilt’s kicker a groundbreaking, glass ceiling shattering, historic moment. Many in media and the sports world echoed Hillary Clinton’s sentiment that Fuller proved “women and girls belong on every playing field—quite literally.” In a game of escalating hyperbole, ESPN eventually claimed victory by declaring that Fuller has achieved “immortality” through her play in Vanderbilt’s game against Missouri.

Admittedly, she was spectacular. Fuller went 5 for 5 on field goals, booted 3 touchbacks past the end zone, and even made a game saving tackle as the clock expired in regulation. Just kidding. Actually, she kicked one time, it went 30 yards, Vanderbilt lost 41 to zero, and the head coach was fired after the game. This is reality, not a movie. And in real life, women embarrass themselves when they try to play against male athletes.

Walsh says that a clear-eyed view of the situation reveals how insulting the adulation is for women:

All of this patronizing nonsense surrounding a bad kick from a woman whose ego perhaps exceeds her abilities on the football field is merely annoying for me as a man. For women, though, it is much worse than annoying. It is patronizing, degrading, and insulting.  Are women really so unimpressive and bereft of achievement that we have to treat them like we would a small child who draws a bunch of scribbles on a sheet of construction paper and claims that it’s a picture of a tree? We congratulate the small child for his bad drawing because we do not expect children to do any better than that, and because they are emotionally fragile and in need of constant positive affirmation. Is this the case for grown women? Must we stand and applaud and shout “great kick” when, in truth, it was a very bad kick? Are women so pathetic that we have to call even their failures achievements? Not just achievements — but historic achievements? Is that how sad and mediocre women are, that we must stoop to this?

Answer: no. That’s how sad and mediocre feminists think women are, and perhaps are themselves. But it’s not the reality, and it’s not what I think or what any rational person thinks. Women are capable of extraordinary things in many facets of life. They also are capable of extraordinary things in the realm of athletics. Simone Biles comes immediately to mind. But women cannot compete with men in sports designed by and for men. 

Samuel Goldman, writing at Law & Liberty, says that how we define liberty is going to determine how we can defend it:

 iberty is plural, not singular. Rather than a gross concept outside history, institutions, or social structures, it is a “relational claim involving agents, actions, legitimacy, and ends.” To speak coherently, we need to specify the freedom of whom, to do what, under which rules, and for what purposes. The freedom of Socrates to philosophize is not the same as the freedom of Atheniansto participate in ruling and being ruled. Neither bears much resemblance to the liberty of a Christian described by Martin Luther.

Which liberties require defense? In the spirit of unfashionable opinion, I want to suggest that the answer can be described as the liberties of the modern West.

Scott Atlas has resigned his position as special advisor to the president on the pandemic. 

 

 

 

 

Monday roundup

The White House is bad-mouthing Dr. Fauci. It's sent sent a document to various media outlets that enumerates several instances in which the administration says he's been wrong about the coronavirus.  But if very many of the examples are like this one, it's pretty weak tea:

One example in the short document is a comment made by Fauci on NBC's Today Show in late February that "at this moment, there is no need to change anything that you're doing on a day-by-day basis."

However, that was not the full statement Fauci made during the interview.

"Right now the risk is still low, but this could change," Fauci also told the Today Show at the time. "When you start to see community spread, this could change and force you to become much more attentive to doing things that would protect you from spread."

This woman is on the Seattle city council:

. . . we are coming for you and your rotten system. We are coming to dismantle this deeply oppressive, racist, sexist, violent, utterly bankrupt system of capitalism. This police state. We cannot and will not stop until we overthrow it, and replace it with a world based, instead, on solidarity, genuine democracy, and equality: a socialist world. 

The all-about-me whiner-in-chief:

Callers on President Donald Trump in recent weeks have come to expect what several allies and advisers describe as a "woe-is-me" preamble.

The president rants about the deadly coronavirus destroying "the greatest economy," one he claims to have personally built. He laments the unfair "fake news" media, which he vents never gives him any credit. And he bemoans the "sick, twisted" police officers in Minneapolis, whose killing of an unarmed black man in their custody provoked the nationwide racial justice protests that have confounded the president.

Gone, say these advisers and confidants, many speaking on the condition of anonymity to detail private conversations, are the usual pleasantries and greetings.

Instead, Trump often launches into a monologue placing himself at the center of the nation's turmoil. The president has cast himself in the starring role of the blameless victim - of a deadly pandemic, of a stalled economy, of deep-seated racial unrest, all of which happened to him rather than the country.

In light of the Roger Stone pardon, does Senator Susan Collins still feel, as she did when she voted to acquit the VSG, that he's' learned his lesson?

Quotes from the VSG on the thirteen occasions on which he said the coronavirus would just kind of go away. 

At this rate, the Minneapolis city council may not have to dismantle the police force. One fifth of it is bailing in one fell swoop:

A lawyer who represents police officers has been contacted by more than 150 current officers who seek to file for disability benefits, a move taken before they leave the force. Most of the officers claim they are suffering from PTSD and that the stressful situation since the killing of George Floyd has become the last straw.

I don't really have any skin in this game, since I'm almost certainly not going to vote for Biden or the VSG, but Matthew Continetti says that as cancel culture in post-America proceeds past the general public's tipping point, lots of voters are being driven into the arms of the incumbent. Consider the choice one coffee shop owner is willing to make:

Before Thursday morning I had not heard of Thomas Bosco, and I am willing to bet you haven't heard of him either. He runs a café in Upper Manhattan. From the picture in the New York Times, the Indian Road Café is one of those Bobo-friendly brick-lined coffee shops with chalkboard menus affixed to the wall behind the counter and a small stage for down-on-their-luck musicians to warble a few bars of "Fast Car" as you sip on a no-foam latte while editing a diversity training manual. It looks pleasant enough. "Local writers, artists, musicians, and political activists are regulars," writes metro columnist Azi Paybarah. "And for years, two drag queens have hosted a monthly charity bingo tournament there." Drag queens! You can’t get more progressive than that. Bosco seems like a noble small businessman making his way in a turbulent world.

There’s a problem, though. He once expressed an opinion. Though Black Lives Matter signs are posted throughout the restaurant, and its owner identifies as "a liberal guy who supports almost every liberal cause I can think of," in early June Bosco told MSNBC that he voted for Donald Trump in 2016 and expects to do so again. Omigod no. "The backlash was swift, as you might expect," writes Paybarah. Neighbors denounced Bosco on Facebook. Some vowed not to patronize the café. Randi Weingarten, who as president of the American Federation of Teachers draws close to half a million dollars in salary and benefits, wrote online that it would be "hard to ever go back." No more tips for the barista from her. As for the drag queens, they are taking their glitter elsewhere.

Bosco is distraught. "My staff feels like I let them down to a certain extent," he told the Times. He has supported Bernie Sanders, donated to immigrant groups, contributed to the food pantry, provided child care for an employee, and plans to change the name of the café to Inwood Farm to avoid any possible offense toward the Indigenous. None of this is enough to quell the fury of the Very Online. "Similar backlashes have erupted in liberal New York City, usually after a business is revealed to have financial links to Mr. Trump or socially conservative causes," notes Paybarah, citing the example of Stephen Ross, an investor who had to cut ties to the Equinox and SoulCycle gym chains after it was revealed that he was going to throw a fundraiser for the president. "But Mr. Bosco is no Mr. Ross."

No, Mr. Bosco is not. He is instead one of the countless private individuals whose lives have been upended by the gale of righteousness blowing through this country since the killing of George Floyd in police custody on May 25. For all of the high-profile sackings, vandalism, and cancellations—the editor of the New York Times opinion pages, the CEO of Crossfit, the editor in chief of Bon Appétit, the head of Adidas human resources, the Atlanta police chief, statues of Confederates, Columbus, Grant, and Douglass, and the Washington Redskins—there have been an equal number of stories concerning absolute nobodies, pipsqueaks, formally anonymous men and women whose unpopular opinions or boneheaded errors of judgment, widely publicized on social media, transform them into public enemies, splittists, and heretics whose livelihoods suffer as a result. Andy Warhol’s 1968 prediction of the future was wrong. It's not that everyone is world-famous for 15 minutes. It's that they are infamous.

And it takes ever less time for a cultural phenomenon to go from being deemed praiseworthy to being a pariah:

What was precious and inviolable minutes ago—the musical Hamilton, for example, or Harry Potter—becomes the object of suspicion and derision. The frenzy builds on itself, and grows stronger, and doesn't know where to stop.

And even some whose woke bona fides have been in impeccable order are not okay with where this has gone:

When Noam Chomsky, who had no trouble putting the crimes of the Khmer Rouge into "context," signs a letter warning that "The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted," it is a sign that things …  things have gotten out of control. 

Sports gets less fun by the hour now. Washington Redskins changing their name even though 90 percent of native Americans are just fine with "Redskins."

A Chinese virologist who very early on - as in last December - raised concerns about the coronavirus soon ran afoul of the Chinese Communist Party. And her chcken-s--- husband bailed on her: 

 Fox News has an exclusive interview with Dr. Li-Meng Yan, a virologist from Hong Kong who says she was one of the first doctors in the world to begin investigating the coronavirus outbreak. Her investigation began on December 31, the day word of a cluster of pneumonia cases in Wuhan first appeared in Chinese media.

Dr. Yan’s boss told her to look into it so she began asking questions from a network of doctor friends in China. Right away she learned from a member of the Chinese CDC that there was evidence of person-to-person transmission of the virus. This is something that China would officially deny was the case for several more weeks. Dr. Yan continued to investigate but by mid-January she said the tone had changed. Her friends in China were saying they couldn’t talk about it anymore. When Dr. Yan made a 2nd report to her bosses in Hong Kong, they told her to be very careful.

Dr. Yan decided to share her concerns with a Chinese blogger based in the U.S. That was published on January 19th but it was only in Chinese. Dr. Yan notes that within 4 hours there was a response from the Chinese government which suddenly announced there were 198 cases rather than 62. She says that was also when China admitted there was evidence of person-to-person transmission. Three days later, Wuhan was locked down.
The blogger Dr. Yan had spoken to warned her that she might need to relocate to avoid trouble with Chinese authorities. She decided to fly to America but when her husband, who was also a doctor, found out, he was angry.

Yan told Fox News she begged her husband to go with her, and says while her spouse, a reputable scientist himself, had initially been supportive of her research, he suddenly had a change of heart.

“He was totally pissed off,” she said. “He blamed me, tried to ruin my confidence… He said they will kill all of us.'”

Shocked and hurt, Yan made the decision to leave without him.

Dr. Yan left the country on April 28. Her husband refused to go with her. When she got to customs in America, she told them she was there to tell the truth about China’s coronavirus response and spent time talking with the FBI. But she says that even before her plane had landed, police were sent to her hometown to harass her family.

Then in mid-May, before she had spoken to any English language media outlets, people she believes were working for the Chinese government began attacking her on social media and set up a fake Facebook profile for her. Yan says the account was used to “tell people that I’m kidnapped in the U.S., [that] I tried to lie to people, even that I have a mental disorder.” She expects things will only get worse now that she has spoken out (in English). 

"What awaits is not a womb where everyone is Oprah Winfrey feeling your pain, but the world, and there - there be dragons." A short essay on transformation by Springs Toledo at Plough.  

In the course of my research for my latest Precipice piece, I came across this gospel concert from 1955 at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles. The Pilgrim Travellers, The Harmonettes, The Caravans, The Soul Stirrers, Ethel Davenport, Annette May and Joe May. This will squeeze your crotch and bring you to your knees. Don't be apprehensive. Saul went through such an experience and got his name changed to Paul and was assured of a very special place in God's heaven.

Sunday roundup

I've always maintained that freedom is elegantly simple compared to any alternative. That's demonstrated once again in this piece at Market Watch entitled, ""The US Can Slash Health Care Costs With 2 Fundamental Changes - and Without Medicare For All."

Protests flare across Iran in the wake of a three-fold increase in gasoline prices. 

Denver radio talk show host Craig Silverman was doing his show Saturday, discussing the late attorney Roy Cohn's mentorship of Donald Trump in the 1970s, when suddenly the station went to network news, and program director Kelly Michaels came into the studio and said, "You're done." KNUS is owned by Salem Communications. You'll recall that the website Red State was purged of non-Trumpists after it was acquired by Salem.

Insightful piece at the Washington Examiner by Joel Gehrke on how Mike Pompeo was 'powerless' to prevent Marie Yovanovitch's ouster as ambassador to Ukraine.

If anything I'm mentioning here is a must-read, it's Kevin Williamson' National Review piece on what a crock Marco Rubio's "common good capitalism" is. 

Um, how's that again?

A Texas school district’s decision to allow a drag queen to conduct a class on makeup application has many parents up in arms after the fact. A Willis ISD English teacher added fuel to the fire when he posted on social media that ‘parents should not have the final say’ and ‘don’t know what is best” for their children.

Colin Kaepernick's latest spoiled-brat stunt gets the cold shoulder from the NFL. 

Tuesday roundup

A WSJ editorial on how the leftist media is trying to give the person who will probably take Brett Kavanaugh's old seat on the DC Circuit Court of Appeals the Kavanaugh treatment:

Ms. Rao cleared the Senate for that post with bipartisan support—unusual in the Trump era—after an uneventful confirmation process. She’s certainly qualified for a judgeship. Ms. Rao clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas, taught for a decade at George Mason University’s law school, and worked in George W. Bush’s White House counsel’s office. She’s an expert on administrative law, which is valuable for a court that hears many challenges to federal regulation.

But here comes BuzzFeed with the scoop of the year that Ms. Rao “wrote inflammatory op-eds in college.” Yes, apparently this is why some people get into journalism. The story is clearly an oppo-research dump, probably from the left-wing Alliance for Justice, which is trying to torpedo Ms. Rao.

Not long ago, before everyone’s entire life was politicized, college was a period of intellectual development. Students are young and often write with more passion than wisdom. If writing or remarks at age 22 are disqualifying for public life, then every Member of Congress might as well resign now.

Ms. Rao’s sins aren’t that she was inflammatory but that she is conservative. Ms. Rao took a dim view of racial preferences in a piece about the great African-American scholar, Thomas Sowell. She also wrote that progressives preach tolerance but too often don’t practice it. Q.E.D. Some of her writing is infelicitous or sophomoric, but none of it is relevant to how she might rule as a 45-year-old judge with adult life experience.

One supposedly damning piece touches on how alcohol complicates student relationships. “It has always seemed self-evident to me that even if I drank a lot, I would still be responsible for my actions,” Ms. Rao wrote in the Yale Herald. “A man who rapes a drunk girl should be prosecuted. At the same time, a good way to avoid a potential date rape is to stay reasonably sober.” We look forward to the same people who assailed Brett Kavanaugh for drinking too much beer finding fault with Ms. Rao’s sobriety.

The real motive for destroying Ms. Rao is maintaining progressive control of the D.C. Circuit to rubber stamp the left’s agenda on climate change, health care and more. Then Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid packed the court during the Obama years, but Ms. Rao replacing Justice Kavanaugh won’t alter the composition of the court.

Kamala Harris tries to pull that with-Medicare-for-all-there-won't-be-any-cumbersome-bureaucracy crap, but Ed Morrissey at Hot Air is having none of it:

TAPPER: Just to follow up on that, correct me if I’m wrong. To reiterate: You support the Medicare for All bill, I think initially co-sponsored by Bernie Sanders, you’re also a co-sponsor.

HARRIS: Yes.

TAPPER: I believe it will totally eliminate private insurance. So for people out there who like their insurance — they don’t get to keep it?

HARRIS: Well, listen, the idea is that everyone gets access to medical care. And you don’t have to go through the process of going through an insurance company, having them give you approval, going through the paperwork, all of the delay that may require. Who of us has not had that situation where you’ve got to wait for approval, and the doctor says, “Well, I don’t know if your insurance company is going to cover this”? Let’s eliminate all of that. Let’s move on.

Spoken like someone who never had to deal with Medicare, which — contrary to Harris’ claims here — requires every single step she claims to detest. The biggest fib here is that switching to Medicare eliminates the approval process. It most certainly does not, a fact easily found with about two seconds’ worth of research on the website for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS):

Medicare coverage is limited to items and services that are reasonable and necessary for the diagnosis or treatment of an illness or injury (and within the scope of a Medicare benefit category). National coverage determinations (NCDs) are made through an evidence-based process, with opportunities for public participation. In some cases, CMS’ own research is supplemented by an outside technology assessment and/or consultation with the Medicare Evidence Development & Coverage Advisory Committee (MEDCAC). In the absence of a national coverage policy, an item or service may be covered at the discretion of the Medicare contractors based on a local coverage determination (LCD).

That’s no different than dealing with private insurers, whose coverage is similarly limited by “reasonable and necessary” clauses. Furthermore, Medicare requires plenty of its own paperwork and red tape, with response times that routinely exceed those of private insurers, at least those outside the HMO model. Private insurers also manage care, but at least consumers have some choice for insurers and options for potentially better service and more tailored coverage.

Furthermore, we already know how government-run single-payer systems in the US operate, because we have two of them besides CMS: The Veterans Administration and Indian Health Services. The latter is a disgrace which Congress keeps ignoring, while the former is often a disgrace that Congress can’t quite ignore. Every ill Harris assigns to private insurers is amplified in both systems — delays, red tape, lack of accountability, and arbitrary services. 

There are rumblings in the Freedom-Hater party that perhaps AOC should be primaried.  

Dennis Prager sees in the current spate of disparagement of the institution of NFL cheerleaders the overall war on immutable human nature in microcosm He builds his case by citing some examples of said disparagement:

In The Boston Globe, Margery Eagan, Globe columnist and co-host of NPR's "Boston Public Radio," wrote a column titled "It's time to say goodbye to the NFL cheerleaders." She described NFL cheerleading as "creepy and demeaning."

USA Today sports columnist Nancy Armour came to the same conclusion: "The underlying premise of NFL cheerleaders is degrading. ... NFL cheerleaders need to go."

Chicago Tribune sports reporter Shannon Ryan wrote, "The league has shown only that it regards cheerleaders as pieces of sideline eye candy." To make her point, she asked, "why aren't there scantily dressed male cheerleaders and dance teams?"

Only the well-educated could ask such a stupid question -- because only the highly educated deny that, with few exceptions, the only people who would like to see scantily dressed male cheerleaders are gay men.

In USA Today, Yale Divinity School Director of Communications Tom Krattenmaker added a theological voice to the anti-cheerleader chorus. "It's time," he intoned, "to call this out for what it is: demeaning to women and an anachronism that ought to be beneath the male fans to whom this titillating eye candy is served." This sentence, and his whole piece, is what goes for deep thought on the left today. He doesn't explain how being an NFL cheerleader is "demeaning." He simply declares it so. Did he bother to interview any cheerleaders? I did, and the consensus among cheerleaders is that it is one of their greatest life experiences.

Here's what's really going on:

Why do leftists have contempt for cheerleading and cheerleaders (who, after all, choose to be cheerleaders -- and for virtually no pay)?
A Vanity Fair piece on cheerleaders gave the game away: "The league profits from selling a retrograde notion of masculinity -- big, strong men, unafraid to take a hit, surrounded by enthusiastic, scantily clad women."

Or as a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation article titled "Pro cheerleading 'should be abolished'" reported, former professional basketball player Mariah Burton Nelson said, "Cheerleading implies that women's proper role is to support men, smile at men and fulfill the sexual fantasies of males." 

The left has contempt for masculinity and the male sexual nature that is part of it. The new emasculated man will not look at sexy women. And the new defeminized woman will not want to "support men," let alone appear sexy for them. 

Cathy Young at Reason looks at just how furious the current crop of feminists is.

Modern feminism, with its framework of male privilege and female oppression, takes a simplistic and one-sided view of gender dynamics in modern Western societies. It ignores the possibility that some gender-based biases (such as the expectation that males will perform physically grueling and/or dangerous tasks, paid or not) may benefit women or disadvantage men. It disregards the vast diversity and flexibility of cultural norms. It refuses to recognize that there is no perfect solution to the problem of dispensing justice when someone alleges a crime with no witnesses and both parties tell a credible story.

Rage-driven activism can be particularly destructive when it targets and politicizes interpersonal relationships, an area in which the sexes are probably equal but different in bad behavior. Victoria Bissell Brown's verbal abuse of her husband is hardly a typical example, but even Traister sees nothing wrong with the fact that, at the height of #MeToo, her husband once marveled, "How can you even want to have sex with me at this point?"

Anger can be productive, usually as an impetus for short-term action. But rage feminism is a path of fear and hate. It traps women in victimhood and bitterness. It demonizes men, even turning empathy for a male into a fault, and dismisses dissenting women as man-pleasing collaborators. It short-circuits important conversation on gender issues.

Victoria Bissell Brown penned a particularly silly op-ed a while back:

In October, a few days after Brett Kavanaugh was sworn in as a Supreme Court justice, The Washington Post published one woman's account of channeling her rage into half an hour of screaming at her husband. "I announced that I hate all men and wish all men were dead," wrote retired history professor Victoria Bissell Brown, entirely unapologetic despite conceding that her hapless spouse was "one of the good men."

 

Three House members from the Freedom-Hater party are saying incredibly stupid things about the US stance toward the current situation in Venezuela, a stance shared by most South American and European countries. The three are AOC, Ilhan Omar, and Tulsi Gabbard. Omar in particular sounds like a 1980s apologist for the Sandinistas:

“We cannot hand pick leaders for other countries on behalf of multinational corporate interests."

Listen up, toots. Venezuelans are eating zoo animals and selling their breast milk in order not to starve.

Nike's complete abandonment of all decency

The shoe company is making Colin Kaepernick the face of its 30-years-of-"Just-Do-It" campaign. Not only did Kaepernick start the take-a-knee movement, which has decimated NFL attendance and viewership numbers, not to mention worsen overall societal brittleness, he's been seen wearing pigs-in-cops'-hats socks on multiple occasions, and offering a lame explanation for why he's done it.

The America-hating spoiled brat also wore a tee shirt depicting a 1960 meeting between Fidel Castro and Malcolm X to a press conference in Miami. His explanation for that wasn't lame, it was quite revealing:

After Armando Salguero of the Miami Herald called out the juxtaposition of Kaepernick's anti-oppression stance and his oppressor-promoting shirt, Kaep reportedly had this to say to Salguero:

I am a believer in Malcolm X and his ideology and what he talked about and what he believed in as far as fighting oppression.

Yes, good! But what about the Castro part of that shirt?

The fact he [Malcolm X] met with Fidel to me speaks to his open mind to be willing to hear different aspects of people’s views and ultimately being able to create his own views as far as the best way to approach different situations, different cultures.

I’m not talking about Fidel Castro and his oppression. I’m talking about Malcolm X and what he’s done for people.

Okay, but is that really the best way to communic—OH NO, WHAT ARE YOU DOING?

One thing Fidel Castro did do is they have the highest literacy rate because they invest more in their education system than they do in their prison system, which we do not do here even though we’re fully capable of doing that.

The author of the GQ article linked above is flabbergasted by Kaepernick's utterances, but cannot resolve his cognitive dissonance. He thinks there really is some kind of "mass incarceration and police violence perpetrated against people of color" and that it's a "horrific epidemic," but that Kaepernick just, you know, went a little too far. The author probably can't stand the discomfort of acknowledging that the perpetuation of that kind of lie (and it is a lie, just check out Heather MacDonald's extensive body of work on the subject) is in the service of the overall erosion of the legitimacy of the American experiment, and its replacement with totalitarianism.

The interesting thing to monitor over the next few weeks and months, of course, is any effect on Nike sales.

Corporate acquiescence to the Left (which, contrary to Sheldon Whitehouse's take on what's wrong with corporations, is the real problem with big companies) is pandemic, but it's rarely this blatant. 

It's a point of honor for me that you will not find one pair of this garbage company's products in this house.

Best thing about the Philadelphia Eagles: the high concentration of Christians

Did you notice how many of them said "Glory to God" in their immediate post-game interviews?

It seems to be an ethos that has permeated the team culture rather deeply.

There's quarterback Nick Foles's long-range career plans:

Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Nick Foles says he plans on taking up a higher calling once his football career is over.

“I want to be a pastor in a high school,” Foles said Thursday, according to FOX29. “It’s on my heart. I took a leap of faith last year and signed up to take classes at seminary. I wanted to continue to learn and challenge my faith.”

Foles says the pious journey isn’t and won’t be easy.

“It’s a challenge because you are writing papers that are biblically correct,” said Foles. “You want to impact people’s hearts.”

Then there's the guy he stepped in for:

Quarterback Carson Wentz, who started and excelled for the Philadelphia Eagles up until his injury late into the regular season, is also a devout Christian. 

And yet another quarterback is demonstrating Christian leadership off the field:

Chase Daniel, a quarterback for the team, hosts a Bible study for couples weekly, there’s a weekly Bible study that happens at the practice facility, as well as prayer sessions among the teammates the night before they play a game. Daniel told ESPN: “This is by far the most spiritual team I’ve been on.”

And the team pastor, also a tight end, has baptized five of his teammates:

Trey Burton, who is a tight end on the team and the team pastor, believes that his faith in God has played a role in him being able to heal from injuries, as recently as the beginning of this season.He injured his calf and doctors told him that he would miss several weeks of play.

I had a couple guys here lay hands on me and pray on me and then I went home and had my wife and my kids and one of our pastor friends come and lay their hands on me, and immediately I woke up the next morning and I was totally fine.

He only missed one game.

The players who are of faith are careful not to berate their other team members with religion.

“We can’t just take Bibles and slap them across people’s heads and think they’re going to want to join and learn more about Christianity,” Jordan Matthews, a receiver on the team, told ESPN.

Mychal Kendricks was one of the five players baptized by Burton. He had taken part in the prayer group and says he never read the Bible, but was encouraged to get baptized as an acknowledgment of his faith in Christ and he did. 

And Sports Spectrum has a program called Football Sunday that gives us a glimpse of the role of faith in the lives of many NFL players:

That first Sunday in February is also one of the biggest outreach opportunities for the body of Christ. Through Football Sunday, a movement is growing to bring glory to the Name above all Names on football’s biggest day.

What is Football Sunday? It’s a free resource for churches to provide their people with an inside look at faith in the NFL in a way that’s relatable to all. Included are an in-church sermon-replacement video starring prominent NFL players, a 32-page special-edition Sports Spectrum magazine, and other tools to reach communities.

A Sports Spectrum production, the Football Sunday video features interviews our team shot during the season with numerous players around the league. Then, as the Eagles and Patriots have advanced to play on Super Sunday, our team hits the road again to include Philadelphia and New England players who will compete in football’s biggest game.

This year’s theme is simple: “Seek. Surrender. Serve.” You’ll hear NFL players — including Carson Wentz, Matt Forte, Demario Davis, Josh McCown and Malcolm Jenkins — talk about what it means to seek Christ always, surrender to Him daily, and serve the needs of others. The 28-minute video is hosted by CBS Sports’ James Brown. 

I'd spent the entire season boycotting the NFL because of the take-the-knee-during-the-anthem nonsense. I did watch the Super Bowl last night, and, as you know, it was a great game. I'm gratified to learn, at the end of the latest cycle of NFL competition, that it's not all pigs-as-cops socks and Che Guevara shirts. There are a lot of players who have let the presence of Lord Jesus radiate throughout their lives, their connections with each other, and their engagement of the larger society.

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

Wednesday roundup

How advanced is the civilizational rot? Capitulating to a petition circulated among the snot-nosed, ingrate, West-hating cretins enrolled in it, Yale's English department will no longer require its students to study Shakespeare and John Donne.

This is of a piece with a trend noticed and well-articulated by a couple of the actual scholars remaining at post-America's playpens campuses:

Last year, students at Stanford shot down peers who petitioned to have a Western history survey class reinstated as a basic requirement. The petitioning students cited a Stanford law professor who reported his so-called “best students in the country” are basically know-nothings:

I have taught law students for more than thirty years. In recent years I have noticed that many students have little or no familiarity with the political, intellectual and cultural history that shaped the American legal tradition. I’ve encountered students who have never heard of Hobbes and Locke, do not know the causes of the American Revolution, are unfamiliar with the Lincoln-Douglas debates, haven’t a clue about Progressivism or the New Deal, don’t know what separates Protestants and Catholics, and have only the vaguest sense what race relations were like before the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Recently, Camille Paglia, no conservative nor traditionalist, reported the same about her students at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, noting that this kind of brain rot has trickled down into K-12 schools courtesy of teachers’ university mal-educations:

What has happened is these young people now getting to college have no sense of history of any kind. No sense of history. No world geography. No sense of the violence and the barbarities of history. So, they think that the whole world has always been like this, a kind of nice, comfortable world where you can go to the store and get orange juice and milk, and you can turn on the water and the hot water comes out. They have no sense whatever of destruction, of the great civilizations that rose and fell, and so on, and how arrogant people get when they’re in a comfortable civilization, etc. So they now are being taught to look around them to see defects in America – which is the freest country in the history of the world – and to feel that somehow America is the source of all evil in the universe, and it’s because they’ve never been exposed to the actual evil of the history of humanity. They know nothing!

NFL knee-taking has hurt Papa John's pizza sales. 

Another filmmaker, Brett Ratner, is accused by six women of sexual harassment. And another guy from the journalism world. Michael Oreskes, NPR senior Vice President for news, and formerly of AP and the New York Times. And apparently Ratner's thing was, like it was for Weinstein, having a captive audience when wanking.

Three Dem Senators did the right thing:

This morning, the Senate confirmed the nomination of Notre Dame Law professor Amy Barrett as a U.S. Circuit Judge for the Seventh Circuit. The vote was 55-43. 

Three Democrats — Sen. Joe Donnelly, Sen. Tim Kaine, and Sen. Joe Manchin — broke ranks and voted to confirm Barrett. They thus rejected the suggestion by Sen. Dianne Feinstein and others on the Senate Judiciary Committee that Barrett is too Catholic to be an appellate judge. 

You'll recall that, at Barrett's hearing, Feinstein told the professor that she sensed that "the dogma lives loudly within you." Is that anything like witnessing to your faith?

Talk about being ate up with jihad fervor: Sayfullo Saipov, the New York bike-path van driver, bragged to police from his hospital bed that he was pleased with what he'd done.

Monday roundup

According to a report by Harvard's Kennedy School's Belfer Center, North Korea has biological weapons, stuff like anthrax and and smallpox.

And the US is preparing to put nuclear bombers back on 24-hour alert for the first time since 1991.

Rev. Robert Jeffress is one of those religious leaders who badly compromised his status as a champion of integrity by getting on the Trump train. Erick Erickson at The Resurgent reports on the latest development in that sad situation. Jeffress got into a Twitter snit with Senator Ben Sasse (who ranks high on LITD's list of contemporary good guys) and accused him of doing nothing to advance the 20-week abortion ban bill. Sasse is a cosponsor of it.

I quit availing myself of most contemporary "entertainment" years ago. I rarely listen to music in any genre that was made after about 1980. I have darkened the door of a movie theater maybe once a year for the last couple of decades. I'm not the most intuitive person in the world, but I just sensed an odor wafting off Hollywood that indicated a rot that went beyond the ideology one hears prattled about at awards shows. Now that the cat is out of the bag about what a putrid industry movie-making is, it appears many post-Amercans are drawing a similar conclusion. Or maybe it's just a matter of growing weary of special-effects dazzle-dazzle, milking of franchises, sequels and remakes way beyond their shelf life, and the hard, mean feel of most Tinseltown fare. In any event, it's experiencing a box-office nightmare.

Speaking of the public eschewing morally rotten forms of entertainment, NFL stadiums had seats going begging this past weekend.

Turkey's Erdogan is using Diyanet, a government agency set up  by Ataturk in the early days of modern Turkey to see to religious affairs, to turn his country into an Islamist police state.

University of Oregon president Michael Schill, who got his first taste of campus jackbootery after mere weeks in office back in 2015, when he couldn't finish his state-of-the-school address because hard-left thugs shouted him down, has proven himself to be a pathetic wimp.

Daren Jonescu offers a fresh way of arguing a point that we stress here at LITD repeatedly. He puts it thusly: "free men without virtue will also be the undoing of freedom."