RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-jackson-hearings-so-far-are-a-rout-for-progressive-pieties/

I have no illusions about the fact that Democratic-appointed judges are almost invariably likely to all vote the same way, at least on big cases. So, my hopes for Ketanji Brown Jackson departing from the party line on the bench are slim. Even with that in mind, however, this hearing so far has been a thoroughgoing rout for progressive theories of law and politics. Jackson has repeatedly embraced interpreting the Constitution according to its original public meaning. More:

She affirmed that “the Supreme Court has established that the right to keep and bear arms is a fundamental right” (although that doesn’t commit her to adhere to that view herself).
Asked by Chuck Grassley about Justice Stephen Breyer’s tendency to cite international law as a source for interpreting the Constitution, Jackson said that she respectfully disagreed with her former boss, and that international law should not be used to determine the meaning of the Constitution.
Asked to name a justice whose philosophy resembles her own, she could have named Breyer, but she didn’t, and declined to name one, instead pointing to her own record.
She has continued to speak movingly about the cops in her family and the role of, and need for, police.
She talked about how her experience growing up was “completely different” from her parents’ attendance of segregated schools, and she cited “how far we have come” as a sign of “the greatness of America.”
She agreed with Lindsey Graham that radical Islamist groups are still at war with us, and that the Authorization for Use of Military Force of 2001 (AUMF) is still in effect.
Asked by Dianne Feinstein about “super-precedent” status for Roe v. Wade, she simply discussed the normal standards for stare decisis and declined to apply any sort of elevated status for Roe. Asked by John Cornyn, she said that she had never heard of a judge describing a case as a “super-precedent.”

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnists/2022/03/22/ketanji-brown-jackson-amy-coney-barrett/7113216001/

The lack of clarity around Ketanji Brown Jackson’s judicial philosophy will be a key question as her Supreme Court confirmation hearings unfold.

The famous “gonzo journalist” Hunter S. Thompson once said, “Politics is the art of controlling your environment.” The confirmation hearing of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson is about to vividly show what Thompson meant. Less than two years after the abusive treatment of Justice Amy Coney Barrett, the Senate is holding a hearing that is dramatically different in the treatment of the Supreme Court nominee and the issues considered relevant to her confirmation.

For those with memories going back to 2020, there have been striking differences in how the news media haved covered Jackson’s nomination in recent weeks. When Barrett was nominated, the media ran unrelenting attacks on her and her background. Nothing was viewed as out of bounds, from her religion to her personal life to fabricated theories of prior assurances on pending cases.

From the start of the Jackson hearing, this is clearly different in both optics and approaches. Barrett was surrounded by pictures of people relying on the Affordable Care Act, a framing to portray Barrett as threatening the very lives of sick people. It was all part of an absurd claim (fostered by liberal legal experts) that Barrett was appointed to kill the ACA.

I objected at the time that senators were radically misconstruing the pending case and that Barrett was more likely to vote to preserve the ACA. (Barrett ultimately voted to preserve the act, as expected.)

https://spectatorworld.com/life/lia-thomas-compassion-swimming-transgender-upenn/

Reka Gyorgy showed commendable courage this weekend for finally speaking out against the National College Athletic Association’s rules regarding trans competitors. The Virginia Tech swimmer and Olympian was bumped out of a finals spot in the 500 free due to transgender University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas’s participation.

In a letter posted to her Instagram account, Gyorgy wrote, “It feels like that final spot was taken away from me because of the NCAA’s decision to let someone who is not a biological female compete… [Thursday] is the result of the NCAA and their lack of interest in protecting their athletes.”

Gyorgy is one of the first NCAA female swimmers to speak publicly about the negative impact Thomas’s participation in the sport has on women. She deserves massive credit for putting her name to her views while others cower in fear of being called transphobic. But even Gyorgy couched her criticism of the NCAA’s rules with an entire paragraph expressing that she “respects” and “fully stands” with Thomas.

https://www.thepostemail.com/2022/03/22/joe-bidens-lust/

“ANTI-SEMITISM ON STEROIDS”

(March 22, 2022)—Let’s dispense with the Mt. Everest of words that have been written to rationalize Joe Biden & Company’s passion––indeed, lust––to put nuclear weapons in the hands of the fanatical mullahs in the terrorist-run state of Iran.

To be sure, the powers-in-power––more accurately those who are pulling their strings––have been busy creating distractions like Covid-19, the corrupt investigation into the January 6th so-called insurrection, and the strange “war” between Russia and Ukraine. But while Biden & Co. rally against Vladimir Putin, the U.S. continues to buy millions of dollars a day of Russian oil, in essence helping to finance the war against Ukraine, and Biden continues to count on ole Vlad to broker the new Iran deal with U.S. negotiators in Vienna.

Looking back, it is more than fishy that on his first day in office, according to Jim Hoft of The Gateway Pundit, “Joe Biden killed off 42,100 jobs in America by ending construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline,” and not long after “waived sanctions on Russia’s gas pipeline to Germany.”

Clearly, this was to set the stage for the Biden regime to actualize their real goal, their mission, their obsession–––finally, finally, finally to get rid of the arch nemesis of all of them: Israel, with the bonus being half of all the Jews on earth.

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2022/03/mugger-money-and-a-new-epidemic-of-crime/

Rob Long is a television writer and producer, author and journalist. He was writer and co-executive producer of the comedy series Cheers.

“Young people in this city,” a native New Yorker said to me last week, “don’t even know what mugger money is.”

He went on to explain. Mugger money was the small wad of bills most New Yorkers would carry around with them between the mayoral administrations of John V. Lindsay (1966–1973) and David N. Dinkins (1990–1993).

Mugger money was what you kept with you because you expected to be mugged eventually and you needed something to hand over to placate the attacker and persuade him not to kill you. It was kept separately from your actual money in your actual wallet—my friend told me that some more theatrical friends of his would keep their mugger money in a dressed-up fake wallet—and you’d toss it to the mugger and then make a run for it.

The criminal would get some cash and the victim would keep the bulk of his money, along with his identification—a bureaucratic nightmare to replace—and his credit cards. It was, as progressive social scientists might say, a win-win. It was the tax you paid for living in the crime-infested City That Never Sleeps.

Mugger money symbolised the thirty-year lopsided truce between the law-abiding citizens of New York and the criminals and marauders who threatened them. New York apartments in the 1970s and 1980s sported doors with multiple locks and steel bars wedged between the door and the floor. Windows were barred or bricked in. Central Park and Washington Square were drug bazaars during the day and off-limits at night. Trash-can fires blazed in the heart of Alphabet City—unattended, unnoticed and certainly ignored by police and firefighters. Times Square was a cesspool of porn and small-time gangsterism. And only fools rode the subway.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/03/21/maryland-and-georgia-governors-suspend-state-gas-taxes-to-offset-fuel-prices/

On Friday, governors in two different states signed bills into law to suspend each of their respective statewide gas taxes, in order to offset the financial burden of rising gas prices on consumers.

The Daily Wire reports that Governors Larry Hogan (R-Md.) and Brian Kemp (R-Ga.) signed such legislation after the bills had already passed through the state legislatures, with Maryland’s gas tax being suspended for the next 30 days, while Georgia’s will be suspended through the end of May. Other states currently considering similar action include California, Michigan, and New Hampshire.

“This bipartisan action will provide some relief from the pain at the pump,” Hogan announced at a press conference prior to the signing of the bill, “and it is possible because of the prudent fiscal steps we have taken, which have resulted in a record budget surplus.”

“This is, of course, not a cure-all, and market instability will continue to lead to fluctuations in prices,” Hogan continued, “but we will continue to use every tool at our disposal to provide relief for Marylanders.” The bill in Maryland had passed through both houses of the state legislature with unanimous support.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/03/21/a-trump-hating-backer-of-bidens-supreme-court-nominee-is-married-to-the-top-j6-prosecutor/

Confirmation hearings for D.C. Circuit Court Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, Joe Biden’s first U.S. Supreme Court nominee, began Monday before the Senate Judiciary Committee. During an event in Washington, D.C. on Monday morning, activists gathered to rally on behalf of the nominee who could be the first black woman seated on the nation’s highest court.

“It’s also, for so many of us, a moment that is personal,” Fatima Goss Graves, president and CEO of the National Women’s Law Center, told the crowd. “It is personal if you have ever been the only person sitting in a room. It is personal if you have ever wondered, ‘Is that for me?’” Over the past several weeks, Graves, a graduate of Yale Law school, has given dozens of interviews in support of Jackson’s nomination.

In a January column for CNN, Graves denounced “the current homogeneity of the legal profession and judicial system” and claimed “the perspective of White men has been treated as the default” in court proceedings.

Graves’ D.C.-based nonprofit promotes any number of radical causes including unfettered access to abortion, gender “justice,” free child care, and LGBTQ equity. Appointed to lead NWLC one month after Trump’s inauguration, Graves was an outspoken critic of the president; she co-founded the Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund in 2018 in the aftermath of the #MeToo movement and strongly opposed the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh.

After the media declared Joe Biden the winner of the 2020 presidential election, Graves, in a racist screed, berated the 55 percent of white women who voted for President Trump:

[Most] White women who support Trump are not blindly voting against their own self-interest. These Trump supporters, aided by a toxic mix of racism and disinformation, seem to be consciously supporting what they believe to be their own group interest, putting them on the same team as the White men society has been largely built to benefit. The right-wing has long focused its sales pitch to White women on the promise of preserving the modest gains a misogynistic system has allowed them—advancing a delusion of forced scarcity that pits White, cisgender, heterosexual women against all others in a zero-sum fight for survival.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2022/03/21/ted-cruz-destroys-democrats-during-jackson-confirmation-hearings-n1568303

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) was on fire Monday during Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s confirmation hearings. He used his time to absolutely destroy the Democrats for their past reprehensible behavior and assured Jackson that Republicans would treat her more respectfully and fairly than Democrats have treated Republican nominees.

“Now, what should this hearing be? And what should it not be?” Cruz asked. “Well, you’ve heard a number of members on the Republican side of the aisle quite clear on what it should not be. This will not be a political circus. This will not be the kind of character smear that, sadly, our Democratic colleagues have gotten very good at,” he said, before detailing the Democrats’ shameful record.

He began by talking about a weekly podcast he did a couple of years ago on which a liberal guest insisted that both Democrats and Republicans smear Supreme Court nominees. But, Cruz pointed out, this person was dead wrong. “It is only one side of the aisle, the Democratic aisle, that went so into the gutter with Judge Robert Bork that they invented a new verb, to ‘Bork’ someone.”

“It is only one side of the aisle that, with Justice Clarence Thomas, was so reprehensible that […] President George Herbert Walker Bush wrote at the time, quote, what’s happening to Clarence Thomas is just plain horrible,” Cruz continued.  “All the groups that tried to beat him up on abortion, affirmative action have now come out of the woodwork, they’re trying to destroy a decent man. As Justice Thomas observed in that hearing, what happened there was, to use his words, ‘a high-tech lynching.’ And I would note the chairman who presided over that disgrace was Joe Biden.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/03/21/ii-tipp-poll-are-you-better-off-today-than-a-year-ago-by-4-to-1-americans-say-no/

Are you better off today under President Joe Biden than you were a year earlier? And are you financially prepared for a downturn in the economy or a job loss? The March I&I/TIPP Poll suggests most Americans would answer “no” to both of those questions.

The poll asked: “Generally speaking, is your family better off today than it was one year ago, worse off than it was one year ago, or about the same as it was a year ago?”

Fewer than one in five (20%) said they were “better off.” while more than twice that number — 42% — said they were “worse off.” Another 36% said they were “about the same.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/03/22/how-is-boofed-pronounced-and-other-vital-questions-ketanji-brown-jackson-must-answer/

By all evidence, Ketanji Brown Jackson’s nomination to the Supreme Court will be a shoo-in. Not because she’s supremely qualified, but because her nomination — as the press reminds us in every headline — is “historic.” Yes, there are and have been black justices and women justices, but never, ever a black woman justice! Who would dare stand in the way of history?

President Joe Biden assumed that by checking all the correct woke boxes his candidate could escape the sort of vicious scrutiny, rumormongering, character-destroying attacks visited upon Republican nominees – apparently forgetting that Democratic nominees always get a free pass from the media, and from genteel Republicans.

Nevertheless, if Democrats want to at least give the appearance of fairness, they should ask Jackson the same questions they asked the last two Republican nominees to the court.

We’re not talking about those silly questions that might reveal her judicial philosophy. Although there is plenty there worthy of careful scrutiny. Joel Pollak over at Breitbart News put together a handy list of such questions, ranging from: Do you believe current penalties for sex offenders are too harsh? What do you think of Biden’s decision only to select a black woman as a nominee? Do you support critical race theory? Do you agree with the “1619 Project” that America was founded on slavery? Do you support court-packing? Can we have rule of law with an open border?

Democrats have already labeled such questions as racist.