I didn’t think I’d watch this video for more than about five seconds, but the whole thing ended up mesmerizing me. I’m not sure why, except the food seemed so unusual – different from the Japanese dishes I know – and this woman took so much care making multiple little tidbits for each meal:
The wait for the Webb…
SCOTUS is on a roll
June is usually a big time for SCOTUS decisions, and here comes another:
Today the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously overturned lower court decisions in the consolidated cases of Ruan vs. United States and Kahn vs. United States. The two physicians were convicted of prescribing opioid pain medicine “outside the usual course of [medical] treatment” and were sentenced to prison.
The jury in Ruan was not instructed to consider Dr. Xiulu Ruan’s “good??faith defense,” i.e., that he was indeed prescribing the drug “legitimately” to treat pain based upon his good??faith assessments of his patients’ medical contexts and requirements. The Eleventh Circuit Appeals Court denied Ruan’s request to vacate the lower court decision on the grounds that he was denied a “good faith” defense.
The Supreme Court held “the Government must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant knowingly or intentionally acted in an unauthorized manner.”
And you know what? That decision was unanimous.
Another case was handed down today:
The case is about a high school coach who used to go out to the middle of the field and offer a private prayer after a game. He did this alone and without inviting anyone to join him. However, some students and players did wind up joining him, as did players from the other team.
The prayers were short.
The District he worked for forbade him from doing this, claiming that the Establishment Clause of the Constitution, and the Lemon “endorsement” test, required them to forbid him from privately praying.
He did it anyway, and the District dropped him as an employee.
Please read the whole thing. This ruling in favor of the coach’s right to offer a private prayer (in public) in the school sports setting was decided by the familiar 6-3 vote.
Why would pro-abortion radicals in deep blue states be so very angry about Dobbs?
Commenter “Kate” writes:
Why pro-abortion radicals are rioting in left-wing jurisdictions is hard to understand. California and New York have virtually no restrictions on abortion up to the point of delivery, and California’s legislature is proposing to effectively extend that to seven days postpartum.
Let me tackle that last part first: no, the California legislature is not proposing to extend that to seven days postpartum. That’s one of those misinterpretations that’s become a rumor that’s been spread around. I read the wording of the law myself and it applies to things that a woman might due during pregnancy – not an abortion – that might end up causing harm or death to the baby. For an example of the sort of situation it’s meant to deal with, see the Chelsea Becker case:
A California judge has dismissed a murder case against a woman who delivered a stillbirth after consuming methamphetamine, saying prosecutors failed to provide evidence that she took drugs knowing that it could kill her baby.
Kings County Superior Court Judge Robert Shane Burns delivered his decision in court Thursday, said Dana Sussman, deputy executive director for the National Advocates for Pregnant Women, which is providing legal counsel for the woman, Chelsea Becker.
The legislature has been revising the wording of the bill to remove any ambiguity and make sure it does not apply to infanticide or even to purposeful neglect after birth:
University College London Hospital clinical lecturer in infertility and a leading voice on medical ethics, Dr Francoise Shenfield, told Reuters: “Definition of perinatal death is stillbirth, plus early neonatal deaths under seven days.”
Rather, the bill seeks to protect parents from legal prosecution if that perinatal death is the result of accidental causes, she said.
Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, I’ll try to answer the implicit question in the first part of Kate’s comment: why would pro-abortion radicals riot in left-wing jurisdictions where abortion is not going to be outlawed and probably is going to become even more unlimited?
A lot of reasons – and let me add that the majority of these people are women, although it’s not limited to women:
(1) They’re being encouraged to do so.
(2) They’re being lied to by leftist leaders and legislators and led to believe that this ruling does constitute some sort of abortion ban, and since a lot of people neither understand law nor follow its ins and outs, that lie gains some traction.
(3) Even if they do understand that their own states will not be restricting abortion, they are used to it being available to all women. Some are old enough to remember the horrors of illegal abortions (some even had them), and many of the younger ones have been told stories about the olden days.
(4) Many women on the left have bought the “Handmaid’s Tale” sort of scenario which goes like this: rigid fundamentalist Christian men are trying to control the reproductive organs of women and will stop at nothing till they get total control. This fear has been drummed up incessantly for many years.
(5) Many also believe that the Catholics on the Supreme Court are intent on imposing Catholicism on everyone and the ruling in Dobbs originates in their Catholicism. There is no separation of church and state here (#5 relies on their not understanding that the ruling actually takes the Court out of the business of ruling on abortion at the federal level, but there are plenty of people who not only don’t understand that but who are not interested in even listening to that sort of assertion, much less crediting it).
(6) A leftist doesn’t want states to be able to make their own decisions – as opposed to the federal government dictating what states can do – unless the issue involves something the federal government is trying to do that the left is against and the right is for. Then states’ rights become good and the left will support them. When Trump tried to enforce immigration laws, for example, the left was in favor of states’ defiance against the feds. But when SCOTUS allows abortion to revert to the states to make their own varied rules as the states see fit, that is an abomination because abortion is a right – after all, Roe said so, and that’s been the law of the land for well-nigh fifty years. The fact that the Court has longer and consistently held that immigration is a federal power and never said that regulating abortion was a federal power until Roe, thus generating a large distinction between the two issues, is irrelevant to the left.
(7) They’re not used to ceding ground. Usually there’s no reversal after they’ve won a battle. There might be a pause, but it should only be temporary.
(8) They’re being told this is just the beginning of what the right is planning. Next there will be a federal abortion ban. Then the Court will reverse previous decisions on gay marriage, contraception, and even interracial marriage, and some states will ban those things and perhaps the Republicans will ban them nationwide through federal legislation if they ever get control of Congress. The fact that Dobbs explicitly stated that reversal of those cases won’t be happening, because different principles apply, is ignored. The left is also using Clarence Thomas’ concurrence – the one about the overuse of the due process clause, a position which none of the others joined – to mount its argument that these bans are on the right’s agenda. But even if Thomas hadn’t written that, the left would have said the right is planning to attack these things next anyway.
(9) It’s all Trump’s fault, and he is evil.
[NOTE: I think the current rage centers on Dobbs, but the concealed carry SCOTUS case Bruen has intensified the anger and even if Dobbs hadn’t been decided as it was, the left would still be mad at Bruen – although not as mad. All gun control cases are considered to be about the exceedingly rare phenomenon of non-gang-related mass shootings. The fact that very few gun-control measures have anything to do with such events nor would the proposals have prevented the events in question is not even part of the arguments the left deigns to deal with.]
Open thread 6/27/22
Tomorrow is the 13th anniversary of commenter FredHJr’s death
[NOTE: The following is a somewhat revised version of a post that has appeared previously on this blog.]
Unbelievable that it’s been thirteen years since commenter FredHJr died suddenly and tragically. As time passes, the number of readers here who don’t remember Fred must necessarily increase, so for those of you who don’t know who FredHJr was, please see this and this, as well as these.
Fred’s death was extremely tragic for his family. But it was tragic for this blog, too, because he was an invaluable and irreplaceable member of our community, a “changer” who knew a lot about the Left, and a keen observer of politics, history, religion, culture—of life itself. I still think about him often, wondering what he’d have to say about everything that’s happened in these last thirteen years.
Every year on the anniversary, I offer some excerpts from his many comments here.
This comment is from October 18, 2008, just a few weeks before Obama was elected president for the first time:
It’s the Marxist/Leninist ethics of expediency. No regrets. Whatever it takes to discredit anything the other side does and excuse the sins of your own side.
…this reveals a lot about who is about to take power and how they will wield it against the rest of us. They get away with it and many will not at all be troubled by it because they are shaped by the post-modernism, cultural Marxism that they imbibed during their formative and educational experience. If we as a people cannot name this accurately and expunge its corrosive influence over our lives, then down into the wages of perdition and disaster we go.
The comment is from October 28, 2008. The election was getting close:
Obama is part of a nexus of interests. What the American dopes who will put him in office are getting is a NETWORK of alliances and interests, running the gamut from Finance (Soros) to academia to media to law. Thus far, in order to appeal to the Middle Muddle he has been packaged as a moderate or centrist. But once in office the venomous swarm of this network will burst out of the nest and devour the host. You wait and see. And I’m not eager for the moment to say “I told you so.” I really would it be the case that it never happens at all.
This was a comment of Fred’s from the very beginning of the Obama presidency, but I think it’s worth mulling over today:
For me, Western Civilization is an incredibly complex work that has eclectically and also seamlessly borrowed the excellence and the virtues of Athens, Jerusalem, Rome, and the Enlightenment. The High Middle Ages and the Renaissance also made important contributions. In its totality it is a meritocracy and a liberation of humanity that has resulted in ever greater learning and material prosperity and health for most of the people who live under it. It is not an unblemished history. Yet in its totality it gleams with advancement when juxtaposed against civilizations which enslave humanity.
I think the beginning of the end of our civilization began with the French Revolution and The Terror. It was the beginning of the elaboration of totalitarian thought and throughout the 19th century this kept on finding newer permutations of elegant, intellectual terror. The 20th century was the culmination of the barbarity of totalitarianism.
These are chosen somewhat randomly, but so very much of what I looked at that Fred had written was on target.
RIP Fred, and may your family be comforted in their grief. We miss you.
Over the years there have been other commenters here who probably have died, and I would like to mention them too, but for no one else did I actually get official word of that person’s death. So it’s hard to be specific. One commenter who comes to mind is “strcpy,” who announced that he was very ill and then disappeared shortly thereafter, about twelve years ago. I wrote him an email but never heard back, and I fear he’s gone. But I don’t know for sure. Another prolific commenter who disappeared many years ago was Occam’s Beard. I was never able to contact him after that, and so I fear something tragic may have happened. Same for parker.
There may be others, as well. I wouldn’t necessarily find out. Sometimes people just stop commenting here because they get busy or they get tired or they get turned off. But it stands to reason some of them will have died. So I’ll take this opportunity to say RIP for all of them.
So, what about my series of posts on the McCraw hearing? Let’s call this Part I
I thought I’d get the first piece out today, but it may not be till next week – Monday, I hope. I was busy earlier today and got a very late start, and it’s one of the more complex issues I’ve tried to tackle. But I hope it will help readers here sort out an enormous tangle of information, and it will present some theories I’ve generated. The point is not just to evaluate what went so very wrong in the Uvalde response – and there’s plenty of that – but analyzing some of this may help somebody or other to come up with prevention and/or reaction strategies for the future.
But for today, I thought I’d just list a few somewhat random facts that McCraw mentioned in his lengthy lengthy testimony, things that have come up in discussions in the past on this blog and were considered somewhat mysterious. In no particular order:
(1) The perp had no trouble getting the money. It came from his fast-food job, and he had no rent or other expenses of the usual sort. He had stopped attending high school in his senior year and worked enough hours to save enough in a bank account (held jointly with his grandmother). He made many purchases online when he was seventeen – not of weapons but of accessories for the weapons he was planning to buy – and then after his 18th birthday he made the purchase of the items (including the firearms) that he was only able to buy after turning eighteen.
(2) He does not seem to have had any juvenile record. Apparently he kept a pretty low profile in the regard. Some acquaintances have reported animal abuse (carrying around dead cats in a bag and talking about it), but no one ever reported it to authorities. Also, despite quite a few apprehensive feelings about him on the part of online acquaintances alarmed by certain things he’d said, he was never reported to local or state or federal authorities for any of this.
(3) As I had guessed, there is no toxicology report yet on the perp because although it’s been done it takes a long time to issue results. He said the results will be made available after that.
(4) The questions of how the classroom door locks operated, whether or not the doors of those two classrooms were in fact locked, whether the officers knew whether they were or weren’t (or whether they even checked to see), and what should or could have been done by the officers to enter those classrooms, is such a big topic it will probably have its own post. But apropos of earlier discussions we had on this blog, a shotgun breach or an explosive breach of a locked door generally would never be used in a classroom situation. That wasn’t the issue here, however.
(5) Quite early on, there were at least two rifles, a Halligan, and several ballistic shields in the hallway of the school. Unfortunately – and this is one of my big criticisms of McCraw’s testimony – he doesn’t say where they were (the hallway had a bend in it), who had them exactly, to whom their presence was communicated, or whether it was in fact communicated to Arredondo or others in any possible coordinating position. McCraw did not even make it clear whether or not there was coordinated communication, and if so what its nature was (that is, how messages were conveyed), nor did he compare the communication that occurred within that hallway that day with what the officers would have been told to do in training in order to communicate under such circumstances. Perhaps there was someone else at the hearing who went into all of that; I only listened to McCraw, who spoke for about four and a half hours. If anyone has watched more of it and those things were touched on in any comprehensive way, please let me know.
(6) Police radios didn’t work in the school – not just the Uvalde police, but even the state police and the federal officers except for BorTac. And even the BorTac radios could not be reliably connected to each other while in the building, for a group call. What’s more, this is not an unusual problem in schools, and it’s somewhat expensive to solve (I’ve read that, anyway; there may be more creative cheaper solutions that haven’t been tried). McCraw also said that police radios are very chaotic in a crisis, with lots of communications coming in, and that can be a problem even if they are working. Quite a few of the officers in the hall had their radios with them, but they did not function and so were useless.
(7) Arredondo and others at the scene were in communication with headquarters by cell phone. But for some unknown reason, none of the content of the 911 calls from the classrooms where the perp was and where the massacre had occurred was ever relayed to Arredondo, so he was unaware of that or even their existence. Apparently there was only one person there (and I believe that person was outside the hallway and not in the building, although I didn’t hear McCraw directly addressing that question) who heard anything about those later 911 calls, and there is no indication that he or she ever relayed the information to anyone. My own thought is that the person may have assumed – and it would seem reasonable to have assumed – that the chief and others already had the same information and thus there was no need to try to repeat it. The lack of awareness of the 911 calls is a small but important point, and it is emblematic of the enormous and really shocking breakdown of communication that occurred on so many levels.
I’ll stop there for today. This is just the very tippy tip of the big iceberg. Unfortunately, McCraw left out a great deal of information that would be extremely pertinent – I don’t know whether he already knows the answers to those things and just isn’t saying, or whether he doesn’t know yet. I plan to get into more of those issues later. His presentation was only based on video and audio evidence, however – not on any interviews with participants or survivors or anyone else, although he said that about 700 such interviews have been conducted so far. I am assuming those will be sorted out and incorporated into a final investigative report, but that will take quite a while.
Trashing the Constitution
One of the problems with discussing Dobbs with anyone on the left is that it was decided on the grounds of what’s in the Constitution and what is not. Why would that be a problem? Simply because the left is not interested in assigning any value to the Constitution except when it serves their purposes. So any argument defending Dobbs on constitutional grounds is akin to defending it with reference to something outdated and outworn, like phlogiston.
Commenter “TommyJay” quotes sports guy David Portnoy as saying something similar. But Portnoy himself actually isn’t on the left; he’s more of a libertarian iconoclast. However, what he says here about the Constitution is something the left has been pushing and embracing for years:
“At what point do you look at the Constitution and say, hey this was written by people who had slaves, and maybe not everything is exactly to a tee in the Constitution,” Portnoy bloviated. “Like a million years from now you’re going to use the Constitution as a document written in… it’s just nuts, in what world. The world evolves, people evolve, technology evolves. You gotta evolve.”…
“The left f*cking hates me. The woke left, the liberals, they’re crazy. They’re insane people. Yet, I end up having to vote for a moron like Biden because the right is going to put Supreme Court people in who are just ruining this country, taking basic rights away,” he insisted.
That’s how someone who seems to hate the left becomes a useful idiot himself in service of it.
When I say that views like that have been pushed by the left for many years, I mean it. I probably could find something similar even earlier if I looked carefully, but the most prominent statement of the sort is something I remember writing about almost ten years ago on this blog. Here’s an excerpt from the post:
Yesterday there was a big brouhaha over an op-ed of Louis Michael Seidman’s that appeared in the New York Times.
It was the type of piece that, on first reading, appears to be some sort of ironic Onion-esque parody—but sadly, it’s not. It’s also the sort of thing you’d expect from a leftist college student with no knowledge of history and no understanding of the Constitution.
But author Seidman is a well-known professor of constitutional law at Georgetown, one of the most elite law schools in the nation…
Read the whole thing if you can stomach it, just for the flavor, and the exposure to the strangely tortured logic (and lack of historical accuracy) of this particular law professor. Seidman not only shows a lack of knowledge (actual? or strategic?) of the true position of most of the Founders regarding slavery, he also expresses the typical leftist position that we should throw away the wisdom of the past (wisdom? how can that be; they’re just a bunch of propertied white guys—just like Seidman, by the way) because we want to do something, and that pesky old white-guy document stands in our way.
At the time Seidman’s piece was written in late 2012, it seemed at least somewhat shocking that it had been published in the Times, because it seemed to be advocating somewhat of an outlier position – at least in terms of public statements as opposed to things only discussed in the bosom of inner leftist circles. Now it’s positively a mainstream view, because the left has managed to shift that Overton window considerably in the decade since.
The last paragraph of my post about Seidman’s op-ed was this:
As for why the Times decided to publish this piece right now, one can only conclude they see the time as ripe for delegitimizing the Constitution in order to further the leftist agenda, and seek to use Seidman’s credentials to make the argument from authority. The ground has been well prepared for this by our president, the MSM, and our educational system, so their calculations may indeed be correct.
[NOTE: That post of mine on Seidman’s article got me a ten-minute-ish gig on The Michael Savage Show, of all places. I managed to save the audio and you can listen to it here:
The interview was done is an interesting way. An assistant of his called me and read me the questions, and I answered while he recorded me. Then later they must have patched in Savage’s reading the questions. I never spoke to Savage himself.]
This is one of The Babylon Bee’s best
Satire is best when it’s closest to the absurd truth.
“Dems Pause January 6 Hearings To Call For Insurrection”:
Democrats have temporarily pushed pause on the January 6th hearings in order to lead an insurrection against the federal government.
“On January 6th, a branch of our federal government was almost overthrown because politicians used dangerous rhetoric that caused—wait, hold on everyone, I just got the update. Roe’s been overturned!” said Representative Adam Schiff. “Okay, well if all the Republicans could please sit tight, there will be a brief recess while our Democratic caucus takes to the streets demanding we overthrow a branch of the federal government.”
After closing down their presentation entitled “How Trump Undermined Institutional Authority”, Democrats raced to join the crowd surrounding the Supreme Court building. “Rigged! Rigged decision!” shouted Senator Elizabeth Warren. “Judges must no longer be allowed to hold power! We will never abide by an illegitimate decision by an illegitimate court. Fight, fight!” she screamed as beleaguered police arrived in riot gear.
Warren didn’t really say that. This is what she actually said, a mendacious and demagogic misstatement of many of the issues decided in Dobbs and likely to result from it, a speech designed to mislead and prey on fears. Warren is a lawyer and former law professor and she knows better. But she thinks Americans are stupid and can’t understand either Roe or Casey or Dobbs.
That is the Democrats’ approach to this, and perhaps it will work with some people. If so, it certainly wouldn’t be the first time.
Open thread 6/25/22
Creative:
More Dobbs reflections
[NOTE: I was originally planning to write today about the McCraw testimony on Uvalde. But other news intervened, and I’m postponing that, probably for tomorrow instead.]
I agree with Professor Jacobson at Legal Insurrection that the leak of the Dobbs ruling has at least somewhat diffused the reaction. That doesn’t mean the response on the part of the left won’t still be very very intense and rageful, perhaps even violent. But that was always a given, and other people have had two months to think about it.
The left – for example, AOC – will try to stir up the pro-abortion crowds. But how big will those crowds be, and what will they actually be doing? Will they become violent, and if so how violent, and will the local police restrain them and will the DOJ try them? We already had a person trying to assassinate Kavanaugh over the prospect of Roe’s being overturned, and that person is being prosecuted. But the people who protested at Kavanaugh’s house have not been arrested as far as I know, and that was a crime as well.
Then there are the political repercussions. The left, which loves to tell us how much they adore democracy, cannot abide the idea of people in each state having the right to decide about abortion for their own state. No, the left wants to dictate to others what to do – after all, as AOC says, “elections are not enough” for the left to get exactly what it wants, at least elections haven’t gotten them that so far. But aside from leftists – who weren’t going to vote Republican anyway, what votes have been changed by the Dobbs ruling?
I don’t know, but previous polls haven’t indicated it will be many. It seems to me the effect will be to intensity the left’s rage, but it was already very intense. Plus, on the right, there might be quite a few people who don’t usually vote because they think that Republicans and Democrats form a big “uniparty,” and the Dobbs ruling could in fact energize some of them who would not otherwise have voted to vote in 2022, enough of them to counterbalance some votes on the other side. It’s possible, anyway.
And then there’s Biden. Here’s some of what the Great Unifier had to say:
“It’s a realization of an extreme ideology and a tragic error by the Supreme Court, in my view,” he stated. “With this decision, the conservative majority of the Supreme Court shows how extreme it is, how far removed they are from the majority of this country.”
But though Biden urged protesters to be “peaceful, peaceful, peaceful” and proclaimed that “threats and intimidation are not speech,” what he still did not do is expressly condemn the actions of 26-year-old Nicholas John Roske, who was arrested in the early morning hours of June 8th after an admitted attempt at assassinating Justice Brett Kavanaugh ahead of today’s ruling. Nor did he expressly condemn the acts of intimidation and violence by pro-abortion radicals that have taken place in churches and at pro-life centers across the country over the last couple of months.
On the new gun control legislation
In other news (besides Dobbs, which is the huge news of the day), Congress seems to be passing a new gun control law, with the cooperation of some Republicans.
This is the legislation I already discussed in #2 of this roundup. Concern centers around the fact that so-called “red flag” gun control provisions are ripe for possible abuse by angry and vengeful relatives (or others, depending on the details) or even by police. Thing is – and I don’t know if most people understand this – the bill apparently does not require states to adopt red flag laws, it merely provides funding for them:
The bipartisan gun bill that is on a fast track through Congress and backed by U.S. Sen. John Cornyn includes new state grants to incentivize red flag laws, which allow judges to temporarily seize firearms from people who are deemed dangerous.
That means it’ll be up to states as to whether they want to take advantage of one of the key provisions of the landmark gun legislation…
It includes $750 million that states can use to implement and maintain red flag programs. Generally, red flag laws allow the authorities to ask a court to take guns away from someone they believe is an imminent danger. In some cases, people beside the police — family members, for example, can petition a court.
But the funding could also be used for other crisis-intervention programs in states that do not currently have red flag laws or are unlikely to enact them anytime soon — like Texas.
So each state should be free to accept or decline, and if they accept, it seems they can enact as many protections against abuse that they can come up with. And SCOTUS can decide whether red flag laws for gun control violate the 2nd Amendment or due process, on a state-by-state basis depending on the details of each law.