“…The Court’s opinion in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt was about abortion certainly, but the argument between the majority and minority goes deeper. In the final paragraph of his dissent, Justice Clarence Thomas went to the heart of the matter.
He noted first the divisions that always emerge from an abortion case: “Today’s decision will prompt some to claim victory, just as it will stiffen opponents’ will to object.” But, he continued, “the entire Nation has lost something essential.” He said the majority’s reasoning is an acknowledgement that “we have passed the point where ‘law,’ properly speaking, has any further application.”Justice Thomas is accusing his colleagues of lawlessness.
…Justice Thomas pointed out that the Court’s liberals identified new, impossible-to-meet “tests” for allowable state abortion regulation only a week after they waved through college racial preferences with little more justification than asserting “aspirational educational goals” (Fisher v. University of Texas).U.S. law, wrote Justice Thomas, is now “riddled with special exceptions for special rights.”
So please, hold the crocodile tears over our “polarized politics.” What has polarized the country is not specific rights claims. Those will always emerge in a vibrant democracy. The bitter division is the result, in no small part, of a Supreme Court that picks the winners.“
NOT on the basis of the Constitution, or any law however remote; rather their decisions, like those of Thoroughly-Bad Marshall, are based purely on personal politics.
Won’t hear appeal of law banning rifles that resemble military weapons, high-capacity magazines
“…Few had expected the justices to entertain the argument that such bans are unconstitutional. The Supreme Court routinely has turned away attacks on gun regulations since 2010, when it delivered the second of two rulings establishing an individual’s right to keep handguns in the home for self-defense. Lower courts, meanwhile, have almost always upheld state and local gun laws as permissible regulation of any Second Amendment right…”
You probably know where we’re going with this: while the SCOTUS refuses to countenance even the slightest state restriction on a “right” not even remotely recognized in the Constitution (unless one considers an extremely vague emanation from a penumbra discernible only to predisposed Progressives a “right”!), the Liberal majority has no problem whatsoever limiting an unfettered freedom explicitly guaranteed citizens of the United States by the Founding Fathers.
As Kevin Williamson notes at NRO:
“The Supreme Court has added another chapter to the body of law rooted in very little more than the imagination of Justice Harry Blackmun, who, with the assistance of a few of his fellow legal fantasists, delivered the constitutional right to abortion, Athena-like, from his head into the waiting world.
At issue were a number of regulations in the state of Texas governing abortion clinics and the meat-cutters employed therein. (Not meat? Then what?) Texas, with its relatively light regulatory regime, is sometimes regarded in the coastal cosmopoles as something between late-Seventies Hong Kong and the fever dreams of Ayn Rand, but it isn’t quite. Texas in fact regulates all sorts of things, some of them (mortgage lending) rather well. It also regulates health-care facilities, and abortion clinics, under the pretense that they are health-care facilities. Texas passed some rules: Surgeries were to be conducted in surgical facilities, and physicians performing serious medical procedures were obliged to have admitting privileges at nearby (30 miles or less) hospitals.
Burn in Hell, Harry…along with the whore…
…you rode in on!
These regulations were aimed at inconveniencing abortionists, and they succeeded in doing so. The abortionists sued, and the Supreme Court, as it reliably does, stood with them.New acts of imagination were deployed to defend Justice Blackmun’s imaginary constitutional right to abortion. My lawyer friends, many of whom are brilliant, set about dissecting the arguments and conducting the usual exegetical exercises on the majority opinion and Justice Thomas’s dissent. They might as well have been arguing that their local astrologer made a mistake in his charts or that Madame Sosostris committed an error in interpreting her wicked pack of cards.
This is not a question of constitutional law, and it never has been. Not from the first.The issue is that some Americans, a non-trivial number of them, would rather put their unborn children to death than be burdened with the responsibilities of parenthood, even if they are only short-lived responsibilities.“
Thus does the highest court in the land permit Planned Parenthood, NARAL and the rest of the Progressive infanticide industry to go about reaping their deadly harvest without limitation. But PLEASE, just because its dogged devotion to Dimocratic politics has resulted in SCOTUS’ repeated refusal to recognize the supremacy of the Constitution…
Now, here’s an abbreviated post-vacation edition of The Gouge!
First up, the most corrupt Attorney General since Eric Holder…okay, and Janet Reno…has evidently been listening to either The Beatles or The B-52’s:
“…To the LGBT community — we stand with you,” President Obama’s attorney general said. “The good in this world far outweighs the evil. Our common humanity transcends our differences, and our most effective response to terror is compassion, it’s unity and it’s love.We stand with you today because we grieve together, and long after the cameras are gone will continue to stand with you as we grow together in commitment and solidarity and in equality…”
If you’re wondering where you’ve heard this bullsh*t before…
Yeah,…that’s right. As Hope ‘n Change so accurately assessed some months back…
…it’s all part of their act.
Next up, submitted for your perusal courtesy of Jim Gould, the great Victor Davis Hanson describes an…
America In Free Fall
Before the Battle of Chaeronea (338 BC), where Philip II of Macedon prevailed over a common Greek alliance, the city-states had been weakened by years of social and economic turmoil. To read the classical speeches in the Athenian assembly is to learn of the democracy’s constant struggles with declining revenues, insolvency, and expanding entitlements. Rome between the First Triumvirate (59 BC) and the ascension of Caesar Augustus’s autocracy (27 BC) was mostly defined by gang violence, chaos, and civil war, the common theme being a loss of trust in republican values. Russia was in a revolutionary spiral for nearly twenty years between 1905 and the final victory of the Bolsheviks in 1922, ending up with a cure worse than the disease. And Europe between 1930 and 1939 saw most of its democracies erode as fascists and communists gained power—eventually leading to the greater disaster of the outbreak of World War II.
The United States has seen periods of near fatal internal chaos—in the late 1850s leading up to the carnage of the Civil War, during the decade of the Great Depression between 1929 and 1939, and in the chaotic 1960s. Something similar is starting to plague America today on a variety of political, economic, social, and cultural fronts.
The contenders for president reflect the loss of confidence of the times.Bernie Sanders is an avowed socialist. Yet scan the record of big government redistributionism here and abroad—from Chicago and Detroit to the insolvent Mediterranean nations of the European Union and failed states like Venezuela—and there is no encouraging model of socialist success. Hillary Clinton will win the Democratic nomination—if she is not the first nominee in American history to be indicted, on possible charges of violating federal intelligence laws, and perhaps perjury and obstruction of justice. Donald Trump has neither political experience nor a detailed agenda, but has charged ahead on the basis of his vague promise to “make America great again”—a Jacksonian version of Obama’s equally vacuous 2008 promise of “hope and change.”
President Obama, in response to attacks on his record by Trump—and by Bill Clinton, who has spoken of “the awful legacy of the last eight years”—is entering the campaign to brag about the current economy.
But to do so, President Obama must ignore a number of liabilities that are soon coming due.(Then again, “ignore-ance”, from ISIS to the economy, has always been Barry’s strong suit!) Under his tenure, he did not address the unsustainable actuarial realities of Social Security and Medicare. The federal debt doubled in a manner never seen prior and can be now serviced only through de facto zero-interest rates, which in turn ossify economic growth. Due to tax hikes, new financial and business regulations, and the socialization of the health care system, per annum GDP growth under the President’s tenure will go down in history as the worst since the Great Depression. He ignored the Clinton-Gingrich compromise formula of a quarter-century ago of balancing budgets by cutting defense, capping spending, and raising taxes. Instead, Obama slashed defense spending and hiked a number of taxes, but ignored entitlements, ensuring $500 billion annual deficits—deemed successful because they were less than his first-term normal of $1 trillion annual shortfalls. The President points to the 5 percent unemployment as proof of his success, but that figure reflects Obama-era methodologies of not counting all those who have given up looking for jobs. In May 2016, a record 94,708,000 Americans were no longer in the labor force—the highest percentage of non-working Americans since the Great Depression.
Abroad, it is hard to identify a single region or U.S. national interest where things are not worse than prior to 2009. In the Middle East, few believe that the Iran deal will prevent the theocracy from obtaining the bomb; indeed, Iran has never been more active in creating chaos and threatening war. American intervention in Libya, American withdrawal from Iraq, and American neglect of Syria helped to ensure a general Middle East implosion. Reset with Russia empowered Vladimir Putin’s ongoing agenda of reabsorbing former Soviet republics. China is building artificial island bases in the Spratly Islands of the South China Sea to recalibrate the balance of power in Asia—on the understanding that American failure to challenge this bellicosity has translated into de facto acceptance of it. And due to financial disasters, unchecked immigration, and populist revolts against Brussels, the European Union in its present form seems unsustainable. The only mystery is whether its unwinding will come with a slow whimper or abrupt bang.
In President Obama’s interview with TheAtlantic and his chief foreign policy advisor Ben Rhodes’s disclosures to the New York Times, it is evident that the administration holds a general contempt for the American-led postwar order—and the Washington bipartisan and trans-Atlantic establishment (“the Blob”) central to its stability. By any fair measure, President Obama believes that the U.S. does not, and perhaps never has, possessed the moral stature or the wherewithal to lead the Western world, which should be more equitably left to regional powers such as China, Iran, Russia, and Middle Eastern autocracies to adjudicate the affairs in their own environs.
The result has been near anarchy, not just in the natural rise of anti-American rivals, but in the fright of former allies and neutrals who are being forced to make the necessary realist adjustments with old enemies—or in the case of many Westernized allies, to perhaps privately reconsider the once taboo idea of acquiring nuclear weapons for the sake of deterrence.
But perhaps the three most telling symptoms of the current chaos are race relations, immigration, and the status of our universities and colleges—three interconnected issues that often inspire riots, demonstrations, and suppressions of free speech.
President Obama has largely ignored the old ideal of the melting pot and in its place preferred a salad-bowl multiculturalism of competing ethnicities, tribes, and races, whose activism wins concessions from local, state and federal governments. Casual comments and references by Obama—like “bring a gun” to a knife fight, the “bitter clingers” of Pennsylvania, and “typical white person”—stoked racial tensions. So did Attorney General Eric Holder’s crude referrals to “my people” and a “nation of cowards.”
The Ferguson and the Baltimore riots, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the systematic carnage in Chicago all embody paradoxes: facts are sometimes less important than allegations; the police are the culprits of urban violence both for responses that are too aggressive and too passive; and in a static economy, inner city youth can’t find jobs because they have criminal records and lack the skills that would make them employable.
Apparently, the Obama administration never considered that a multiracial America united by one culture was an historical exception.Everywhere else, multiculturalism and tribalism without assimilation, integration, and intermarriage have proved to be an abject and usually violent catastrophe: most recently, in the former Soviet Union, the Balkans, Rwanda, and the Middle East. Europe’s attempt to emulate a multiracial United States is ending in utter failure with unchecked immigration, multicultural incoherence, and rising Islamism.
Divided is right: between the informed and the hopelessly ignorant and misguided.
The recent California riots at Trump rallies, along with the widely reported crimes committed by illegal aliens in sanctuary cities, reveal the wages of unchecked immigration that is increasingly neither diverse and meritocratic nor legal and measured—the traditional requisites that promote rapid and full integration. Over one in four Californians was not born in the U.S.—a statistic that becomes worrisome when coupled with the state’s policy of sanctuary cities and new educational curricula that emphasize grievance and separatism rather than assimilation and unity. When rioting youths in San Diego, Fresno, and San Jose burn or deface American flags, as they have been doing in recent weeks, and wave Mexican flags instead, then we are witnessing a tragic farce, the consequences of decades of ethnic-chauvinism, multiculturalism, and cluelessness of the norms and realities outside of America.
American immigration policy is not so much “broken” as increasingly neo-Confederate and illogical. Three-hundred state and municipal jurisdictions have declared themselves, in good 1850s fashion, immune from federal law as sanctuary cities, while over 1 million illegal aliens have at some point been arrested, and make up nearly 30 percent of the federal inmate population. In Orwellian terms, illegal immigration largely from Latin America and Mexico, is called “diversity,” nullification of federal laws is known as “sanctuary cities,” and foreign nationals residing illegally are referred to as “undocumented migrants.” Ultimately the central paradox of immigration is the strange nexus of anger and grievance against the United States by immigration advocates—and the overriding desire nonetheless to enter and reside in such a purportedly unattractive place.
The universities in some sense are the embryos of social unrest. The 1960s free speech and free love movements, with their rampant drug use, advocacy of unchecked and raucous expression, and resistance to authority have strangely given way to today’s speech codes, safe spaces, micro-aggressions, and trigger warnings. Yesterday’s “anything goes” hippie student is today’s Victorian prude who cannot quite square the circle of relaxed sexuality and drugs with the demands that the university act in loco parentis for perpetual adolescents.
This election year so far has emblemized the perfect storm of unrest and confusion—and an even more worrisome response to it. In the past, when 51 percent of societies no longer believed in or wished to defend their collective values and traditions, there were no longer reasons for them to continue. And so they did not—a warning we should heed.
And for those who still haven’t had time to view it in full, we leave you with this must-see video from Evan Sayet: Hating What’s Right: How the Modern Liberal Winds Up on the Wrong Side of Every Issue:
If he ain’t dead-on balls accurate, no one is!
Then there’s the latest from NRO‘s Kevin Williamson, who details the cold, capitalist reality of…
“…Buc-ee’s is an enthusiastic practitioner of the great American art of billboardery: “Restrooms you gotta pee to believe . . . Eat here, get gas . . . Only 262 miles to Buc-ee’s — you can hold it . . . ” and the simple Texas “Yee-Haw!”
Wawa has its hoagies, Buc-ee’s has kolaches. Its customers may have a great and deep hunger for jalapeño cheese bread, but Buc-ee’s has a great and deep hunger for labor: lots of it, for which it is willing to pay goodly sums.
Over the weekend, I stopped to buy gas at a Buc-ee’s in Bastrop, Texas, and was greeted by (in addition to a man dressed as a giant aquatic rodent) an A-frame sign advertising Buc-ee’s version of the minimum wage: cashiers, $12 to $14 an hour; food-service and car-wash help, $13 to $15 an hour; team leaders, $14 to $17 an hour; assistant, $17 an hour and up. Each job came with three weeks paid time off each year, which employees are welcome to use, roll over, or exchange for cash. If you want 40 hours a week, there’s 40 hours a week to be had; if you want more than 40 hours a week, that can happen, too.
When I mentioned my surprise at what it pays to work at a gas station in Bastrop, I got two reactions, both predictable.One was from a purported conservative (Sure as shootin’ not an intelligent Conservative, thus certainly notus!) who sniffed that this pay scale was absurd for such low-skilled work, and that that was why a gallon of gas at Buc-ee’s cost a dime more than it did across the street. (For the record, this was not true of the Buc-ee’s in Bastrop.) And so I found myself having to accommodate the shock of a so-called conservative who has trouble mentally processing the fact that in a free market, consumers can choose between lots of price points offering different levels of service and amenities. (Given how purchasing decisions are actually made, I think they’re on to a pretty solid strategy here: A single man traveling alone may go to the funky service station across the street to save 80 cents — Hello, Dad! — but a man traveling with a wife and children is going to stop at the place that is famous for having the cleanest bathrooms in the business, even if it costs him an extra buck-and-a-half for a tank of high-test. Or he’s never going to hear the end of it.)There’s a reason that we have first class, business class, steerage, and Spirit Airlines: Some people are willing to pay more for better, and some people hate themselves and don’t care if their flight from Vegas to Houston runs a few hours late or never actually even takes off.
…The left-wing response to Buc-eenomics is just as predictable and just as dumb: If Buc-ee’s can afford to pay gas-station attendants $17 an hour, then why can’t we mandate a $15-an-hour federal minimum wage? Put another way: If it’s a good idea for one specific businessin one specific market at one specific time, why not everywhere? You get the same thing with Walmart vs. Costco: They’re superficially similar businesses, so how come the mean meanies in Arkansas can’t pay like the nice, nice men from Washington State do? The answer, of course, is that every situation is different, and every business is a social-science experiment, trying out different approaches to solving social problems, which is what entrepreneurs and successful firms actually do.If it weren’t for the self-interest of big, nasty corporations, it wouldn’t be a question of clean bathrooms vs. less clean ones: You’d be out there on the side of the road watering Mrs. Johnson’s beloved bluebonnets.
Kolaches don’t stuff themselves.
It’s a funny old world. Some people make a ton of money working as waiters, and some people don’t. Some people look at a $17-an-hour job at the Taj Mahal of gas stations and see an opportunity that maybe isn’t the job of a lifetime but is a pretty good job for right now; others will complain that they aren’t allowed to have mobile phones while on the clock (I endorse this managerial innovation) and insist that their manager has it in for them. You all know that guy whose manager has it in for him, just like his last one did, and the one before that: You could put that guy in a filling station or in a Wall Street investment bank, and you’d get the same results.
My own experience in the gas-station industry was working the overnight shift at a 7-Eleven in Lubbock, Texas, which is exactly as bustling at 3 a.m. on a Wednesday as you would expect. I learned how to clean a Slurpee machine and read a lot of Russian novels. It wasn’t the worst job I’ve ever had.
Here’s a fun fact: The median salary for a women’s-studies professor is more than a hundred grand a year. The average hourly earnings for a graduate with a women’s-studies degree?Eleven bucks an hour, well less than you’d make working the car wash at Buc-ee’s.
Here endeth the lesson.“
As well as the limit of Liberal understanding. We’re second to none in the level of admiration and esteem in which hold Kevin Williamson, but we’re forced to strenuously object to his characterization of Conservatives contained above. It may be representative of an isolated Conservative he knows, but unlike the vast majority of Liberals he lampoons, we cannot think of a single, staunch disciple of William F. Buckley who’d have the slightest objection to the Buc-ee’s model…including us!
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