“The most pressing issue at hand is the rate at which Americans are killing offspring!”

Fighting Abortion Now Requires Fighting Americans’ Increasing Hatred Of Children

BY: BRENNA LEWIS at the Federalist:

MARCH 08, 2022

(Article sent by Mark Waldeland:)

The impending change in the federal abortion landscape with the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case promises plenty of added legislative battles over abortion, including efforts to curtail the epidemic of chemical abortion.

Exposing abortion as lethal violence towards innocent people and abolishing it as such is the fight of our lifetime, and knowing exactly who (or what) that fight is against is mission-critical.  

In the nearly five decades that unrestricted abortion has been legal in the United States, pro-abortion sloganeering has explored many avenues, sheltered safely in the realm of misdirection and ambiguity. To defend abortion honestly requires a fairly stark deviation from the standard moral compass that requires we protect the weak and helpless. Hence, vague propaganda like “reproductive rights,” “never again,” “no uterus, no opinion,” and “my body, my choice” became mainstays over the years for Women’s Marchers and angsty college students alike. 

But old slogans have been increasingly joined by a new fellow: “F-ck them kids.” Signs with the crass message were spotted at Women’s Marches nationwide in 2021, and again at campus protests against Students for Life of America President Kristan Hawkins during a speaking tour visit to the University of San Diego in the fall. 

It’s easy to write these off as a few rage-filled outliers. But a recent Pew Research study suggests this hateful new addition to the pro-choice mantra family is grounded in a depressing reality; “childless” Americans flat-out do not want kids. Like, ever. 

Surveys of the Selfish

Along with the rise of the term “childfree” (reducing the idea of children to burdens), Pew is finding that an unprecedented number of Americans don’t plan to have children for no reason other than that they don’t want them. The study, released in November 2021, found that a whopping 44 percent of childless 18- to 49-year-olds said they’re not too or not at all likely to have children.

Of the childless, more than half (56 percent) said they “just don’t want kids.” Another 74 percent of those who have kids said they don’t plan to have more.

Other polling hones in further on specifics, with one outlet noting, “3 in 5 childless millennials say kids are too expensive” and “they want to focus on their career.” Mic.com took an audience poll on why young people did not want children and received answers like, “The physical changes my body would go through with the pain of birth is not appealing at all to me,” “With the way I want to live my life, kids would get in the way,” and “I don’t want kids because they’re a f-ckton of work.”

A desire to remain childless doesn’t exactly explain the bitter vitriol that staunch “F-ck them kids” abortion supporters seem to harbor towards children. Perhaps Pew ought to explore that dark enigma next. Nevertheless, the pro-life movement now faces the challenge that reasons for abortion seem to have shifted towards undisguised selfishness, laziness, careerism, and contempt for children, versus the older data that showed women were choosing abortion for reasons of circumstance, such as finances, relationship trouble, coercion, or health concerns.  

De-Stigmatizing Children

If Roe v. Wade is indeed reversed this summer, the right to regulate abortion will be returned to each individual state. Nearly half of states are projected to ban abortion, meaning the pro-life communities in those states will be busy offering assistance to women who would’ve otherwise found themselves at Planned Parenthood. Now, on top of those not insignificant duties, pro-lifers are set with the task of de-stigmatizing children.

When attempting to appeal to a population of self-interested young adults, perhaps the most compelling approach is indeed an appeal to self. Rabid abortion supporters, “anti-natalists,” and other child-averse groups may have their minds most effectively changed on the issue via data that conclude a positive outcome for parents. 

A lot of research on parents is very nuanced, with many studies on “parental happiness” presenting more than a few flaws (most notably, an inflated definition of happiness itself as the end-all, be-all of human existence).  Writing for The Atlantic, Paul Bloom squashes this horde of deficient parental happiness studies: 
 

there’s more to life than happiness. When I say that raising my sons is the best thing I’ve ever done, I’m not saying that they gave me pleasure in any simple day-to-day sense, and I’m not saying that they were good for my marriage. I’m talking about something deeper, having to do with satisfaction, purpose, and meaning. It’s not just me. When you ask people about their life’s meaning and purpose, parents say that their lives have more meaning than those of nonparents. A study by the social psychologist Roy Baumeister and his colleagues found that the more time people spent taking care of children, the more meaningful they said their life was—even though they reported that their life was no happier. 

America would benefit from more babies, and rejecting the furtherance of our species harms us all. The United States has been riding a downward spiral of population since before Covid, having seen record-low birth rates each of the last five consecutive years. Right now, we rest below the replacement rate.  

Happiness, selfishness, and procreative aversion aside, the most pressing issue at hand is the rate at which Americans are killing offspring as opposed to not conceiving them at all. 

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Working mother Brenna Lewis is a staff writer with Students for Life of America.

and then: There Is KAMALA HARRIS!

 BY STEVEN HAYWARD IN KAMALA HARRIS

KAMALA HARRIS, SELF-HELP GURU

It is increasingly evident that Joe Biden’s most genius political move in 2020, after deciding to “campaign” from his basement to conceal the obvious, was naming Kamala Harris as a running mate. Even Slow Joe could figure out that with Harris a heartbeat away from the presidency, everyone would think three times before trying to remove him from office.

That’s the main complication with the analyses of some of our friends that the New York Times admission last week that the Hunter Biden laptop and its contents are authentic is the bat signal from the Deep State to commence “Operation Joe Removal” in order to save the Democratic Party. But perhaps the Democratic Party’s “in case of emergency break glass ceilings” plan has a secret codicil that will somehow provide for Kamala Harris’s removal from her current residence in the Naval (Gazing) Observatory up on Massachusetts Ave. My theory is that Democrats expect Republicans will do their dirty work for them after the mid-term election, with endless hearings about Hunter Biden and other issues.

I have no idea how this could unfold, but I got to thinking that we haven’t checked in for a while with the great J.P. Sears, who notes the obvious below—Harris has a great future as a self-help guru. In fact she’s perfect for the TED talk circuit. Here’s JP’s pitch (about 6 min long, and worth every second):

FELLOW AMERICANS! Try To Describe The Nature And Cause of TODAY’S FASCIST SCREWBALL FEM DEMS!

March 24, 2022

Tucker savages Ketanji Brown Jackson, transgenderism, and tech tyranny

By Andrea Widburg at American Thinker:

Even before Ketanji Brown Jackson’s extraordinary statement that she does not know what a woman is, I’d concluded that she’s a dim bulb and, really, the judicial equivalent of Kamala Harris: an uninspiring Black woman who’s floated effortlessly upward through affirmative action and fealty to leftism.  I’d spent the day mentally writing an attack on her, only to see Tucker Carlson hold forth with an incendiary monologue that attacked her “I’m not a biologist” lunacy, the whole transgender madness that the left is advancing, and the real agenda of remaking society in an ugly way, especially through the death of free speech.

As you watch it, keep in mind a point I’ve made repeatedly: the giveaway that this whole transgender thing is a con is the word “transgender.”  If swimmer Will Thomas really were a woman (and really believed he is a woman), he wouldn’t call himself a “transgender woman.”  He’d just say, “I’m a woman.”  The same is true for Richard Levine, the assistant secretary for health.

The moment that word “transgender” comes out, it’s a tell that this isn’t a real gender.  Indeed, if you get confused as to whether a “transgender woman” is someone born female and claiming to be male, or vice versa, simply substitute the word “fake” for “trans.”  Will Thomas is a fake woman who is stealing swimming awards and accolades from real women.  Richard Levine is a fake woman who stole the title of first female admiral in the United States Public Health Service Commissioned Corps from a future real woman.

Again, trans = fake.

And that gets us to why the left is encouraging people like Thomas and Levine.  Tucker helps us understand this with his exhilarating attack on Brown Jackson, the lie of transgenderism, the leftist turnaround on what constitutes a woman, and the frightening role of social media, especially Twitter, in ending free speech as a way to push these lies throughout society.  I’ll have something to add after the video:

If you watched the whole video, you saw that Tucker covers Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal’s express attacks on free speech, which he considers a danger to a “healthy” society, a danger that he and others like him must destroy.

Here’s a different way of thinking about the social media sites’ role in America.  Combing the principles behind the First Amendment and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 makes what Agrawal is saying and doing unconstitutional and unlawful — as in, attorneys general need to step in to stop them.

The Civil Rights Act arose because private businesses were shutting their doors to people based on race.  One could argue that freedom of association gave these businesses the right to choose who was allowed to enter.  But that’s not the path Congress chose.  Instead, in Title II of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Congress stated:

(a) Equal access All persons shall be entitled to the full and equal enjoyment of the goods, services, facilities, privileges, advantages, and accommodations of any place of public accommodation, as defined in this section, without discrimination or segregation on the ground of race, color, religion, or national origin.

In a way, social media are places of public accommodation.  Today’s censorious tech giants, rather than being in the business of selling food, lodging, or entertainment (the targets of the Civil Rights Act), are in the business of selling and re-selling ideas.  If they close their doors to classes of people they dislike, their monopolistic status means that the targeted class is out in the ideological cold.

Perhaps the most basic premise of the United States is that the free exchange of ideas is essential to a free country.  If the government can break up monopolies in oil, transport, lodging, and dining, it’s inconceivable that it cannot break up a monopoly on the most important thing that matters: the free exchange of ideas and information.

Indeed, I would argue that there’s a powerful argument to be made that we need not update the Civil Rights Act or create new laws directed at the tech tyrants.  Because the Constitution is about the spread of ideas, and because the tech giants are impairing the 21st-century method of spreading ideas, their behavior is a prima facie violation of the Constitution that can be barred without any legislative acts — although it’s certainly helpful to use the Civil Rights Act by way of analogy.

Image: Tucker Carlson. YouTube screen grab.

Why Is Our American Left SO BRAINLESS OF TRUTH? IS IT SCHOOLING? WHERE DID THIS JACKSON COME FROM?

Dana Milbank: Ted Cruz is a hypocrite for sending his kids to a school with some of the same books in the library

JOHN SEXTON Mar 24, 2022 3:20 PM ET

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AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin

Tuesday I wrote about Sen. Ted Cruz’s questioning of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson on the topic of critical race theory. After pointing to some of the backlash to Cruz’s line of questioning I wrote:

All of these responses are a pretty good indication that folks on the left would prefer people dismiss Cruz and not actually see the questioning or hear Judge Jackson’s answers. What the Cruz critics won’t tell you is that at one point, Judge Jackson seemed to be at a loss for words, uncertain how to answer a fairly simple question. If the questions were such a failure, why were they so hard to answer?

In case you missed it, here’s one of the questions Cruz asked about a book recommended by the school of which Jackson is a board member: “Do you agree with this book that is being taught with kids that babies are racist?”

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The attempt to push back hard on Sen. Cruz for asking these questions hasn’t let up. Last night, the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank accused Cruz of hypocrisy.

Georgetown Day School, in the nation’s capital, does indeed take a strong “anti-racism” approach. So does St. John’s School, the private school in Houston where, as the New Republic’s Timothy Noah noted, Cruz sends his daughters…

there in the St. John’s library catalog is — wait for it — Kendi’s “Stamped (for Kids),” the very book Cruz demanded Jackson account for at Georgetown Day School. Cruz’s office didn’t respond to a request for comment.

The fact that Kendi’s books are part of the school’s library or that the school is committed to diversity, equity and inclusion isn’t quite the same thing as having the book Antiracist Baby recommended for K-2nd graders at Georgetown Day. Milbank continues:

Jackson’s status as a member of the board of GDS got the full Cruz treatment, with posters and books for props on the dais. He mocked Kendi’s “Antiracist Baby,” which he said is taught at GDS, demanding of Jackson: “Do you agree with this book that is being taught with kids [at GDS] that the babies are racist?”

But at his own daughters’ school, the chair of the school’s committee on “diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging” speaks about teaching faculty and parents about “antiracism.” The school, she said, was also contemplating an educational series on “cultural competency, race thought and inclusion.”

Here’s what the chair of the DEI committee actually said:

We have also discussed incorporating some of the educational series done this summer for faculty and parents as a means to provide professional development for our alumni focused on
antiracism, cultural competency, and learning.

We plan to develop an educational series including a possible book club as well as presentations from alumni with expertise in cultural competency, race thought, and inclusion.

So there was a series over the summer for faculty and parents and the DEI chair is thinking about expanding that to alumni as a form of professional development. She also discussed an educational series with presentations from alumni which hadn’t happened yet. It’s not clear who that series would be for or what the content would be.

The bottom line is that summer seminars for willing adult parents is not the same thing as recommending K-2nd grade student read Antiracist Baby as part of the curriculum. If that’s the best Milbank can do then he hasn’t really demonstrated any hypocrisy on Cruz’s part.

What Milbank has done (based largely on an article from the New Republic) is come very close to violating one of the few remaining rules in Washington: Don’t drag people’s children into it. I watched Sen. Cruz’s questioning of Judge Jackson about the Georgetown Day curriculum and he never mentioned her children. He asked questions about what was being taught at the school and whether Jackson supported the content of that material.

And after a long pause, Judge Jackson said she did not support the some of the fundamental concepts of antiracism and added that no child should be made to feel as if they are racist. As I pointed out previously, that’s a sentiment that would be embraced by many of the supporters of anti-CRT bills introduced around the country recently. Isn’t the fact that Judge Jackson seems to agree kids shouldn’t be made to feel like racists more newsworthy than what’s in the library at the school Sen. Cruz’s daughters attend? You would think so.

Sen. Cruz pressed Jackson on critical race theory, pointing to children's books used at a school whose board she sits on.

"I have not reviewed any of those books, any of those ideas. They don't come up in my work as a judge, which I'm respectfully here to address," she said. pic.twitter.com/9J5u5St95x

— CBS News (@CBSNews) March 22, 2022

While Do Dems GO FASCIST BUT GOP GO DUMB?!

March 24, 2022

Meanwhile, America’s Troubles Continue

By J. Robert Smith at American Thinker:

Watching cable news and listening to talkers and a parade of congressional Republicans, you’d think someone waved a magic wand, making all of America’s troubles vanish.  The Ukraine war is very visible, however.  The war for the nation’s future is gone, as are the many battles that comprise that war… a war that decides whether or not America is free and prosperous or succumbs to authoritarianism, whatever the brand.  

Conservatives — those gripped by war fever with Russia — are ignoring the cold civil war raging in our country.  “American Marxism,” conceptualized by Mark Levin, is no less a threat to the nation.  Lose the war to that ism and America is finished, even if it’s still called the “U.S.A.” and retains some of its trappings.  

Republicans are making a serious strategic blunder.  Their preoccupation with Putin’s aggression won’t win the GOP seats in congressional and downballot elections this November.  Voters will tire soon enough of Ukraine, 24/7.  Moreover, due to Joe Biden’s stunning incompetence and ideologically driven agenda, Americans are grappling with inflation-induced gas and grocery price hikes, an open border, and worries about crime.  Those issues are uppermost for voters.  They’re priorities.    

In the last ten days or so, it’s conservative and Republican voices that are being heard the loudest on the war.  Democrats and their media allies have drawn back.  Biden has made it clear that he won’t risk war with Russia.  A no-fly zone is a nonstarter.  Sending fighter aircraft is a no-go.  Democrats make political calculations about everything.  Maybe they’re sensing that banging war drums won’t win midterm elections? 

Lest anyone need reminding, the U.S. has no vital or national security interests in Ukraine.  To underscore, none whatsoever.  That doesn’t mean that Putin’s aggression isn’t reprehensible, but “reprehensible” occurs across the globe daily.  Ask oppressed Cubans, Venezuelans, Uyghurs, and Hongkongers, among others.  How about Mexicans, whose country is being ripped apart by narco-war?  That war is rarely reported in the U.S. media… a war that’s edging closer to the U.S.’s evaporated southern border.  Thank Biden for that.    

Republicans and their media allies are racing down a warpath shouting, “Democracy must be defended!” 

Ukrainian democracy has been rife with corruption.  Our commander-in-chief, Joe Biden, and his wastrel son, Hunter, participated in it.  We know about the fat retainer Hunter received from Burisma.  His role was a fixer.  We know that Joe lied about not having knowledge of Hunter’s affairs in Ukraine.  We know about Joe pressuring Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to fire a prosecutor investigating Burisma’s dealings.  And per Tony Bobulinski, we know about the not-so-mysterious “Big Guy” getting cuts of Hunter’s action.            

If the democracy argument won’t convince Americans about military intervention in Ukraine, the humanitarian crisis is next.  On Fox News and Newsmax, we hear from processions of retired military brass that Ukraine’s humanitarian tragedy compels us to “do something more.”       

Apart from the fact that all wars are human tragedies, one wonders how NATO intervening militarily in Ukraine relieves suffering?  One would think that a major war between NATO and Russia commencing in Ukraine would only compound suffering there, suffering that would quickly spread across Europe.  For good reasons, Great Britain, France, and Germany aren’t keen on escalating NATO’s involvement in the war. 

Speaking of democracy, what about the ongoing threats to it here at home?  Amid the war fervor, have Republicans forgotten the corrupted 2020 presidential contest?  Despite Democrat claims to it being the cleanest election in history, it was, in fact, marred by conspiracy and fraud.  Democrats and their allies fixed it so Trump would lose.    

Big Tech and corporate news media shut down news unhelpful to Joe Biden, like the Hunter Biden laptop story.  They wholesale shadow banned or cancelled accounts and voices to stymie opposition in a runup to the election.  Through litigation and legislation, they made sure that mail-in balloting wasn’t hamstrung by chain-of-custody issues.  Ask Pennsylvanians about that. 

On election night, Democrats shut down vote counting in blue jurisdictions.  Philly, Atlanta, Detroit, and Milwaukee among them..  Happenstance?  Hardly.  Democrats learned years ago that shutting down counts is useful to assess how many votes must be manufactured to beat GOP candidates.

Democracy imperiled?  How about the conspiracy — under investigation by John Durham — of the Russia Collusion Hoax, which was nothing short of a concerted effort by elements in and out of government (the Clinton presidential campaign, foremost) to topple a duly elected president?  Coups are antidemocratic, aren’t they?  Isn’t there unfinished business in seeing that justice is done in this matter?  Is there any concern about permitting this treachery to stand?   

Do Republicans, now spoiling for a fight with Putin, wonder what election chicanery Democrats have in store for November?  Democrats got away with thievery in 2020.  Why aren’t they emboldened to try again?  What’s the GOP’s plan to prevent election theft this time?       

Speaking of humanitarian concerns, Americans, a giving people, are generously assisting beleaguered Ukrainians.  NATO countries are taking in Ukrainian refugees.  What is needed are diplomatic solutions to end hostilities in Ukraine on fair terms.  Might Republicans better invest their time and energies seeking an end to hostilities?  

What about the human tragedies and crises plaguing our own country? 

Drug abuse is an ongoing crisis.  Last year, it’s estimated that 100,000 Americans died from drug overdoses.  Fentanyl and other illicit drugs are pouring across our shattered southern border.  Proceeds from drug sales here help fuel Mexico’s drug wars, which, as mentioned, have begun seeping into the U.S.  The PRC furnishes drug makings and drugs to Mexican cartels.  That serves two purposes.  It provides profits to Xi Jinping’s cronies and damages America, which Xi sees as an enemy.  

U.S. Homeland Security reports that in 2021, border patrol agents had “2 million encounters with illegal immigrants at the southern border.”  Among the illegals crossing into the U.S. are a variety of criminals, including gang members. 

The Washington Examiner reported, August 16, 2021:

Unprecedented numbers of known or suspected terrorists have crossed the southern border in recent months, the outgoing Border Patrol chief said.          

Isn’t the war that Republicans need to wage against Democrats’ ruinous open border policies, Mexican drug cartels, and exploitive communist Chinese?

How about American cities?  We witnessed historic destruction of U.S. cities in 2020.  The spark was Georgie Floyd’s death in Minneapolis, but the riots that followed were stoked by BLM and Antifa with Democrats’ acquiescence.  Evidently, urban violence was useful in defeating Donald Trump.

But the riots were instructive, in that they cast spotlights on cities that have been deteriorating for years due to Democrats’ corrupt governance and failed policies.  In Portland, Seattle, Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Baltimore — add to the list — criminals and homeless roam the streets.  Squalor is commonplace.  Police are demeaned.  Woke prosecutors grant lawbreakers passes.  Urban crime reaches into suburbs.  America’s cities are in various stages of collapse. 

Who suffers most from the travesty of failing cities?  The black underclass.  They’re the victims of exploitive leaders — black and white — who harvest their votes.

America is a fractious country.  Its problems are many.  The potential for a storm of crises is real.  In this important election year, Republicans, particularly, would be wise to keep primary focus on challenges at home.    

J. Robert Smith can be found regularly at Gab @JRobertSmith.  He also blogs at Flyover.    

Image: PxHere

DOES BIDEN KNOW WHERE HE IS?

Airlines to Biden: We’ve had enough of mask mandates

by ED MORRISSEY Mar 24, 2022 at HotAir:

More accurately, customers of ten airlines have grown fed up with mandated mask wearing for hours on end. Their CEOs have published an open letter to Joe Biden asking him to end the mandate for air travel as well as any “predeparture testing requirements.” These “no longer make sense in the current public health context.”

The letter comes after Biden pledged to veto any congressional action lifting the mandates:

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In a letter to President Joe Biden, Airlines for America, a trade group, wrote: “The high level of immunity in the U.S., availability of high-quality masks for those who wish to use them, hospital-grade cabin air, widespread vaccine availability and newly available therapeutics provide a strong foundation for the Administration to lift the mask mandate and predeparture testing requirements. We urge you to do so now.

“We are requesting this action not only for the benefit of the traveling public, but also for the thousands of airline employees charged with enforcing a patchwork of now-outdated regulations implemented in response to COVID-19,” read Wednesday’s letter, which was signed by the heads of 10 airlines, including American, Delta and United.

The Transportation Security Administration announced last month that it was extending the mask mandate on public transportation until April 18.

Will that convince Biden to reverse course? Eight days ago, Biden insisted that he would issue the veto as ending the mandates was “premature.” The Senate vote on a bill to end the TSA mandate was bipartisan, if not terribly overwhelming:

The U.S. Senate voted 57 to 40 on Tuesday to overturn a 13-month-old public health order requiring masks on airplanes and other forms of public transportation, drawing a quick veto threat from President Joe Biden.

Last week, the White House said it would extend the current COVID-19 mask requirements at airports, train stations, ride share vehicles and other transit modes through April 18 but pledged a new review. The order was set to expire on Friday. …

The repeal vote fell shy of the two-thirds majority that would be needed to override a Biden veto. The White House said Tuesday “circumstances under which masks should be required in these settings should be guided by science, not politics.”

What science supports a mask mandate on airplanes, though? The science on masking efficacy has been dodgy at best, especially in terms of hours-long close proximity to others. If anything, the current status of the science — CDC data — shows that this would be the appropriate time to end the mandate:

The deaths are correlative counts, not causative, as the CDC still doesn’t distinguish between the two. New case counts are at or near pandemic lows. As Leana Wen argued this week, if we’re not unmasking now, then it’s not related to science but to a decision that we’ll never unmask.

Furthermore, travelers know full well that mask mandates are unnecessary. Some people might still choose to mask, especially those with particular vulnerabilities, but most probably would look at case counts and shrug — especially if they’ve been vaccinated and/or exposed before. Having flight attendants enforce a mandate that accomplishes nothing but hours of discomfort for no good purpose puts them in an unfair and potentially dangerous position, a point that the CEOs raise specifically in their letter to Biden.

So will Biden finally back down? Probably not, although you can bet that the airlines will start putting pressure on Congress to act anyway. It’s time for consumers to do the same. We have vaccines, widespread natural exposure, and lots of ways to treat COVID-19. The time for mandates has come to an end, except for those who fell in love with the power that created the mandates in the first place. And that’s a bigger problem than wearing masks.

Whose Worse As A Problem In U.S. History, Kamala Harris OR JOE BIDEN?

Democrats’ Kamala Harris problem

by Byron York, Chief Political Correspondent at Washington Examiner:

DEMOCRATS’ KAMALA HARRIS PROBLEM. The Democratic Party has a unique problem when it considers the 2024 presidential election. Joe Biden, the oldest president in U.S. history, will be 82 at the end of his first term. There is widespread speculation he will not run for reelection, although he insists he will. The suspicion among many in the political world that Biden will not run again threatens to turn him into a first-term lame duck. Or perhaps it already has.

The situation has naturally resulted in attention being paid to Vice President Kamala Harris, who would be Biden’s obvious successor should he not run. To say Harris has not shone in the job would be an understatement. Her defenders say Biden has given her some impossible tasks, such as slowing the flow of illegal border crossers from the Northern Triangle countries and passing the Democrats’ doomed voting procedure bills on Capitol Hill, although she specifically asked for the second job.

Harris was set up to fail, some of those defenders say — and fail she has. She has little or no progress to show on her portfolio, and the public gives her even lower ratings than Biden. In a recent Economist/YouGov poll, just 37% of respondents said they had a favorable opinion of Harris, versus 55% who had an unfavorable opinion. A Politico/Morning Consult poll taken at the time showed an almost identical 39% favorable and 53% unfavorable result.

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Harris’s fortunes are not helped by her tendency to say odd things, or to say things oddly, in public. The most recent was her soliloquy on Monday on the “passage of time.” Harris had visited a community center in Sunset, Louisiana, to talk about high-speed internet access. Afterward, she struggled to describe what she had discussed with local officials and workers. This is from her remarks:

The governor and I and we were all doing a tour of the library here and talking about the significance of the passage of time, right? The significance of the passage of time. So, when you think about it, there is great significance to the passage of time in terms of what we need to do to lay these wires, what we need to do to create these jobs. And there is such great significance to the passage of time when we think about a day in the life of our children and what that means to the future of our nation…

To be charitable, just say it was a head-scratcher. The point is that Harris, now in her second year as vice president, has not made much of a favorable impression on the voters or inside the administration. Now, a soon-to-be-released book details some of the tensions she has created. In This Will Not Pass, New York Times reporters Jonathan Martin and Alex Burns write, “One senator close to her, describing Harris’s frustration level as ‘up in the stratosphere,’ lamented that Harris’s political decline was a ‘slow-rolling Greek tragedy.’ Her approval numbers were even lower than Biden’s, and other Democrats were already eyeing the 2024 race if Biden declined to run.”

Martin and Burns report that Biden noticed that anti-Harris leaks out of the White House were hurting Harris, and he threatened to fire anyone behind them. But the damage was already done. According to the book, Kate Bedingfield, who is the White House communications director, got sick of accusations that the White House was somehow “mismanaging” Harris. “In private, Bedingfield had taken to noting that the vice presidency was not the first time in Harris’s political career that she had fallen short of sky-high expectations,” Martin and Burns write. “Her Senate office had been mess and her presidential campaign had been a fiasco. Perhaps, she suggested, the problem was not the vice president’s staff.”

For her part, Harris, the first woman vice president of color, stewed over her sense that the Biden team looked down on her. According to the book, she sent a top aide to complain that White House aides did not stand when she entered a room, which she took as a “sign of disrespect.” Burns and Martin continue: “Some of Harris’s advisers believed the president’s almost entirely white inner circle did not show the vice president the respect she deserved. Harris worried that Biden’s staff looked down on her; she fixated on real and perceived snubs in ways the West Wing found tedious.”

And even though Biden took some steps to stand behind Harris, it’s fair to say that all was not positive toward Harris in the Biden household. The book reports that during the campaign, candidate wife Jill Biden was not thrilled when the vice presidential search focused on Harris, who had fiercely attacked her husband on racial issues. “Speaking in confidence with a close adviser to her husband’s campaign, the future First Lady posed a pointed question. There are millions of people in the United States, she began. Why, she asked, do we have to choose the one who attacked Joe?”

Maybe some others in the White House are asking that question now.

It’s hard to exaggerate how odd the Biden-Harris situation is for Democrats. A first-term president is expected to run for reelection. No president wants to be a lame duck in his first years in office. And yet that is where Biden could be headed. And that shines an especially intense light on the question of succession, and the first in line: a very unpopular, very problematic Vice President Kamala Harris.

For a deeper dive into many of the topics covered in the Daily Memo, please listen to my podcast, The Byron York Show — available on the Ricochet Audio Network and everywhere else podcasts can be found. You can use this link to subscribe.

Are GOPers Dumb Enough TO BACK LEFTY “unWOMAN” Ketanji Brown Jackson AS U.S. JUDGE!

How Can Ketanji Brown Jackson Rule In Sex Discrimination Cases If She Can’t Define ‘Woman’?

If trial courts must call on ‘biologists’ every time the subject of sex comes up, it is hard to see how justice can be done.

by KYLE SAMMIN at the Federalist:

Judicial confirmation hearings are rarely illuminating. Since the introduction of television cameras, they mostly serve as a way for senators to say what they want their constituents to hear and for judicial nominees to say as little as possible. Nothing is learned, at least not on purpose.

But occasionally, we learn something by accident. At Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s confirmation hearing on Tuesday, Sen. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee asked a seemingly innocuous question: “Can you provide a definition of the word ‘woman’?”

The nominee was unable to do so.

It might seem like a question that goes more to politics than to the job of a judge, but when sex discrimination is frequently before the court — including as recently as last year in Bostock v. Clayton County — it behooves a judge to have some inkling about what “sex” means.

Blackburn’s questioning began with a reference to the 1996 case of United States v. Virginia, in which the Supreme Court struck down the Virginia Military Institute’s policy of only admitting men by a 7-1 vote, with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg writing the opinion of the court. (You can watch the testimony here, beginning at about 13:10:00.) Blackburn quoted from that opinion, specifically to Ginsburg’s point that “[p]hysical differences between men and women, however, are enduring: ‘[T]he two sexes are not fungible; a community made up exclusively of one [sex] is different from a community composed of both.’”

“Do you agree with Justice Ginsburg,” Blackburn asked, “that there are physical differences between men and women that are enduring?”

It sounds like a softball — even young children know that there are physical differences between men and women. Jackson knows it, too. Everyone in that room knows it. But she declined to admit it.

“I am not familiar with that particular quote or case,” she said, which strains credulity. Had she committed that line to memory? Probably not. But to be unfamiliar with a landmark case, the most consequential majority opinion Justice Ginsburg ever authored? United States v. Virginia was surely a topic of discussion in 1996, Jackson’s third year of law school, where she was an editor of the Harvard Law Review. It beggars belief to say she was unfamiliar with it entirely.

The senator pressed on: “Do you interpret Justice Ginsburg’s meaning of ‘men and women’ as ‘male and female’?”

Judge Jackson demurred. “Again, because I don’t know the case, I don’t know how I interpret it.”

So Blackburn made it even simpler: “Can you provide a definition of the word ‘woman’?”

Again, Jackson pretended to not understand something that people have understood since the beginning of time.

“I can’t,” she said. “Not in this context, I’m not a biologist.”

The problem of pretending “sex” and “gender” are indefinable terms bears heavily on decades of anti-discrimination jurisprudence. Reading further into Ginsburg’s opinion in U.S. v. Virginia, it is clear that her arguments for legal equality between the sexes are nonetheless premised on the idea that there are two separate sexes.

‘Inherent differences’ between men and women, we have come to appreciate, remain cause for celebration, but not for denigration of the members of either sex or for artificial constraints on an individual’s opportunity. Sex classifications may be used to compensate women ‘for particular economic disabilities [they have] suffered,’ to ‘promot[e] equal employment opportunity,’ to advance full development of the talent and capacities of our Nation’s people. But such classifications may not be used, as they once were, to create or perpetuate the legal, social, and economic inferiority of women. (internal citations omitted)

The Supreme Court in the VMI case noted that men and women were different and noted further there are circumstances in which that difference can matter in law. Ginsburg’s point, and that of the six justices who signed on to her opinion, was that it did not matter in that case.

The court’s ruling was not that there was no difference between men and women, or that there was a difference, but no one could possibly know what it was. It was that men and women do have “inherent differences,” but that the state should not discriminate on that basis absent some “exceedingly persuasive justification.”

To say that the definitions of “man” and “woman” are unknowable absent some expert training in biology is to turn the whole precedent on its head. Justice Neil Gorsuch’s opinion in Bostock last year already degraded this principle, stretching the meaning of sex discrimination to cover discriminating against someone based on “traits or actions it would not have questioned in members of a different sex.” But even that reimagining of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act still hangs on the idea that the classifications known as “man” and “woman” exist and are knowable.

If sex is unknowable, how can a law against sex discrimination be enforced? If an element of the offense is literally indefinable, the law must fail under the “void for vagueness” doctrine.

First explained in Connally v. General Construction Co.in 1926 and upheld many times since, the doctrine requires that laws be clear if they are not to violate the due process clause. A law “must be sufficiently explicit to inform those who are subject to it what conduct on their part will render them liable to its penalties.” Therefore, “a statute which either forbids or requires the doing of an act in terms so vague that men of common intelligence must necessarily guess at its meaning and differ as to its application violates the first essential of due process of law.”

Until recently, no one would say that the definition of “woman” was something “so vague that men of common intelligence must necessarily guess at its meaning,” but Judge Jackson seems to disagree. What would this mean for our sex discrimination laws, where being unable to define “sex” makes it impossible to determine if the law even applies to a situation? If trial courts need to call expert “biologists” every time the subject of sex comes up, it is hard to see how justice can be done.

Fortunately, this is all a lie, not a genuine misunderstanding.

Judge Jackson, like Blackburn, is a woman, and she knows exactly what that means. Bowing down to the postmodernists’ mystery cult is something prominent people on the left deem politically necessary, but should a future Justice Jackson be called upon to decide a case in which a woman was paid less than a man for the same job, her recollection of the definition of “woman” will be magically restored.

But that does not solve the problem. The point of voiding vague laws is that the vagueness means they will be interpreted based on the whims of the state, not a neutral principle. Knowing what it means one moment and pretending not to the next introduces vagueness where none existed before, and with the same effect: the growth of arbitrary state power.

Ignoring facts leads to ignoring laws. Jackson’s misstep on this point undermined the idea that she would rule neutrally on politically sensitive matters and threatens to introduce a dangerous arbitrariness to American jurisprudence.

KETANJI B. JACKSON IS A DISASTER!!!

Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Big Lie to Sen. Blackburn Exposes Progressivism

by Roger L. Simon at EPOCH TIMES:

March 23, 2022

When Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) asked Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, during Jackson’s U.S. Supreme Court confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, to define the word “woman,” she got the response “I can’t.”

When Blackburn responded with an incredulous “You can’t?” Jackson replied: “Not in this context. I’m not a biologist.”

It takes a biologist to define a woman? Does Jackson think we’re morons?

In a way, yes. Or she doesn’t care.

She’s a progressive, and progressives have been redefining language—English and many others—to fit their purposes dating back to the Spanish Civil War and undoubtedly earlier. (See Davis Hunt III at The Pamphleteer.)

Jackson bloody well knows what a woman is. The nominee has known this all her life, as we all have. But these days, in her part of the political world, she’s not supposed to.

So, she lied.

She simply parsed her words in order not to offend a constituency that has become imbued with “transgenderitis.” By that, I mean a group taking what we all know—that a small percentage of people suffer from gender dysphoria to a degree that they seek to change sexes—and extending it into absurd public policy for reasons of power and control and, ultimately, money, not to mention a completely distorted and harmful view of gender itself. (In this case, see swimmer Lia Thomas.)

Those with that form of dysphoria, as do all with serious problems, deserve our sympathy and support, but no more so than everyone else with difficulties.

Nevertheless, they have been singled out for now and are being manipulated and exploited by the left, just as have many minorities before them.

The transgendered are the favored class du jour. Tomorrow—I’m sorry to tell them—it will be someone else.

Meanwhile, however, considerable damage is being done. As Blackburn alluded to, children as young as 5 are being instructed in “gender choice,” notably at a school with which Jackson is associated.

This is, in essence, a form of child abuse masquerading as “progress.”

The ensuing suicide rates for this instruction (actually propaganda), is something these people will have to live with. My guess is they won’t even notice.

But speaking of progressive language distortion and what it yields (see also Orwell’s “Homage to Catalonia”), Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) further asked Jackson when she thought life begins.

Jackson again demurred, as if the plain English question were incomprehensible or above the pay grade of an aspiring associate of the Supreme Court. Perhaps Kennedy should have been more specific and queried her on whether she thinks life begins at the moment of conception, i.e., the uniting of sperm and egg to form unique DNA that never heretofore existed?

It would have been interesting to see how she would have parsed that.

Jackson has been paraded before us proudly as the first black woman to go on the court. She’s certainly not the first black. Thurgood Marshall on the left and Clarence Thomas on the right were there long before her.

Both of these men had estimable legal reputations. Also arriving with a distinguished reputation was the first woman on the court, Sandra Day O’Connor.

I have to confess I never heard of Jackson before her nomination. I suspect I am in the majority in this regard. Her major qualifications seem to be race and sex, something you could call racist and sexist, when looking at it with a modicum of objectivity. It’s identity politics all over again.

But that shouldn’t be a surprise. As I’ve noted, linguistic manipulation is a hallmark of the left. There’s nothing progressive in any literal sense about the word “progressive” itself. It represents an ideology at least as old as Marx, and one that multiple times has proven deadly, figuratively and literally.

The word “progressive,” under its political use, should really be translated for what it is: “reactionary.”

Jackson will undoubtedly go on the court. That’s the way of the present world. But we owe a debt of gratitude to Blackburn for making it especially clear who Jackson is and the ever-changing basis on which she will be making her decisions.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

 Roger L. Simon is an award-winning novelist, Oscar-nominated screenwriter, co-founder of PJMedia, and now, editor-at-large for The Epoch Times. His most recent books are “The GOAT” (fiction) and “I Know Best: How Moral Narcissism Is Destroying Our Republic, If It Hasn’t Already” (nonfiction). He can be found on GETTR and Parler @rogerlsimon.

“Uncanny Predictions of Ukraine War by Russian, MP NEVZOROV

The Russian who predicted a debacle in Ukraine

ALLAHPUNDIT Mar 23, 2022 at HotAir:

The clip at the end of this post was filmed in April 2021, if you can believe it, but it’s making the rounds on political Twitter today thanks to some new English subtitles that reveal the prescience of the speaker, Alexander Nevzorov. A little googling proves him to be an interesting character, a journalist turned parliamentarian turned filmmaker turned horse-riding enthusiast turned fierce critic of religion and Putin’s government. Some of his specific forecasts about a war between Russia and Ukraine turned out to be on the money, as you’ll see, from the high morale of Ukrainian troops that no one in the Kremlin expected to the shocking haplessness of the Russian air force.

But everything he says flows logically from one core assumption, that the Russian military is undisciplined, thoroughly corrupt, and therefore likely to be exposed as incompetent once it met a highly motivated foe on the battlefield. The Russian war machine is essentially a Potemkin village, Nevzorov surmised. How does that assessment look 11 months later?

In Ukraine today, local officials are mulling how to solve a new problem: What to do with the corpses of Russian soldiers rotting out in the open as the weather warms.

The first warm, sunny days of spring in the southern Mykolaiv region are ushering in a grim new reality: the smell of the dead…

In his nightly video address on Saturday, Vitaly Kim, the region’s governor, called on local residents to help collect the corpses and put them in bags, as temperatures rise to above freezing. “We’re not beasts, are we?” he implored residents, who have already lost so many of their own in this war…

“The problem with Russian bodies is really huge. It’s thousands of them. Before the war, the weather was cold, it was okay but now we have problems because Russians don’t want to take the bodies,” [Ukrainian advisor Viktor] Andrusiv said. “I actually don’t know what we will do in the next weeks with their bodies.”

New estimates from NATO today place the total number of Russian KIA at between 7,000 and 15,000, in line with the number that mysteriously appeared on a pro-Kremlin website a few days ago. One can only guess how many of them will ever be repatriated to Russia for a proper burial by their families.

Still, even a disorganized and demoralized army can do great damage with enough firepower. Noah Rothman pointed out today that if you didn’t know better, you’d think you were looking at colorized footage of Dresden in 1945 while watching this clip:

https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?dnt=true&embedId=twitter-widget-0&features=eyJ0ZndfZXhwZXJpbWVudHNfY29va2llX2V4cGlyYXRpb24iOnsiYnVja2V0IjoxMjA5NjAwLCJ2ZXJzaW9uIjpudWxsfSwidGZ3X2hvcml6b25fdHdlZXRfZW1iZWRfOTU1NSI6eyJidWNrZXQiOiJodGUiLCJ2ZXJzaW9uIjpudWxsfSwidGZ3X3NrZWxldG9uX2xvYWRpbmdfMTMzOTgiOnsiYnVja2V0IjoiY3RhIiwidmVyc2lvbiI6bnVsbH0sInRmd19zcGFjZV9jYXJkIjp7ImJ1Y2tldCI6Im9mZiIsInZlcnNpb24iOm51bGx9fQ%3D%3D&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1506605644102750219&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fhotair.com%2Fallahpundit%2F2022%2F03%2F23%2Fthe-russian-who-predicted-a-debacle-in-ukraine-n457491&sessionId=4f4594b65cb46f4b9ee115c9b9f08e585e682e58&siteScreenName=hotairblog&theme=light&widgetsVersion=2582c61%3A1645036219416&width=550px

This afternoon the State Department formally accused Russia of committing war crimes in Ukraine. “Russia’s forces have destroyed apartment buildings, schools, hospitals, critical infrastructure, civilian vehicles, shopping centers, and ambulances, leaving thousands of innocent civilians killed or wounded. Many of the sites Russia’s forces have hit have been clearly identifiable as in-use by civilians,” Tony Blinken said in a statement. Looking at that video of Mariupol, who could doubt it?

Here’s Nevzorov peering into his crystal ball last spring.

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