RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/07/supreme-court-upholds-trump-exemptions-to-obamacare-contraceptive-mandate-for-now/

A victory for the Little Sisters of the Poor, but the case will drag on.

The Supreme Court has upheld the Trump administration’s exemptions to mandatory contraception coverage under Obamacare for employers with sincerely held objections. The ruling is welcome, particularly in its recognition that First Amendment religious liberty is not confined to identifiably religious organizations, such as churches, but to all Americans. Regrettably, however, the justices stopped short of a definitive ruling that would end the litigation, which the Little Sisters of the Poor have had to pursue for seven long years.

That explains the seemingly lopsided 7–2 decision in Little Sisters of the Poor Saints Peter and Paul Home v. Pennsylvania. In his opinion for the Court, Justice Clarence Thomas concluded that the Trump administration had the authority under the Affordable Care Act (ACA or Obamacare) to issue the exemptions. Justice Thomas rejected the objecting states’ claims that the exemptions were not permitted under the ACA; and that, even if they were permitted, the administration had failed to comply with technical notice-and-commentary requirements of the Administrative Procedure Act. (Interestingly, such technical APA flaws were Chief Justice John Roberts’s rationale for joining the Court’s four-justice left-wing bloc to invalidate the administration’s rescission of the Obama DACA decree — notwithstanding that the Obama administration had not complied with the APA in promulgating DACA.)

The Court’s ruling is fine as far as it goes. Nevertheless, Thomas reasoned that because the case could be decided based on the terms of the Obamacare statute itself, the Court need not reach the closely related question of whether the contraceptive mandate violated the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. In Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores (2014), the Court had held that the contraceptive mandate unduly burdened the free exercise rights of closely held corporations with sincerely held religious objections.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16206/farrakhan-threats

For anyone who has followed Farrakhan’s hate-filled career — praising Hitler, calling Jews termites, calling Judaism a gutter religion, attacking gays — the content of any Farrakhan speech comes as no surprise.

Farrakhan — like Nazis and Communists — has a First Amendment right to tell his lies and spread his hate. But no media has an obligation to promote or disseminate his bigotry.

Nor does it demand silence from responsible Black and Muslim leaders, whose voices should be heard condemning Farrakhan’s devaluation of Jewish lives, gay lives, and the lives of people suffering from Covid-19.

Under the principles espoused in Brandenburg v Ohio and other leading cases, “advocacy” of violence is constitutionally protected but not “incitement ” to “Imminent lawless action.” The line between advocacy and incitement has not always been easy to draw.

In his July 4th hate-filled anti-American rant, Louis Farrakhan singled out this author for condemnation and threats for writing an article urging people to take a Covid-19 vaccine if a safe an effective one were developed.

The article also stated that mandatory vaccinations to prevent the spread of a highly contagious lethal disease was held constitutional by the Supreme Court and would likely be upheld by the current Court. This comment led Farrakhan to say the following:

“So Mr. Dershowitz, if you bring the vaccine and say you’re going to bring your army to force us to take it, once you try to force us, that’s a declaration of war on all of us. You only have this one life; fight like hell to keep it and fight like hell to destroy those whose heart and mind is to destroy you and take your life from you.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2020/07/bunch-lefty-thought-leaders-timidly-dissent-mob-daniel-greenfield/

If you expected a moment of courage from liberals, you’ll need to keep waiting because the Harper’s letter isn’t it.

It starts out, in the same fashion as any form of lefty  movement criticism of extremist must these days, with a condemnation of Trump and a warning that the “right” will exploit cancel culture. Except they don’t name it that.

“Resistance must not be allowed to harden into its own brand of dogma or coercion—which right-wing demagogues are already exploiting,” the letter argues. “While we have come to expect this on the radical right, censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture: an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty. We uphold the value of robust and even caustic counter-speech from all quarters. But it is now all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought.”

And then comes the, “we’re living under Stalinsim, but we’re nervous about saying so.”

https://amgreatness.com/2020/07/07/a-reign-of-error/

What we think about things can be as important as the things themselves, because it forms our moral stance toward the world. But what if our thoughts are in error?

At the end of The Unheavenly City: The Nature and the Future of Our Urban Crisis (1968), Edward Banfield presents a prospect regarding race relations that seems to have been fulfilled since his tumultuous years and ours: a reign of error.

Let me set the stage. America had become the wealthiest nation in the history of the world, and the wealth was making its way to the lower classes also. Thus the main “accidental factor” that had locked Americans in a vicious cycle of white discrimination and prejudice on one side and low standards and attainments for blacks on the other would be largely alleviated. Such prejudice, said Banfield, writing during the years of urban riots, was already in decline.

By any reasonable criterion, he was correct about that decline. Consider, for one example, our nearly universal acceptance of interracial marriage. Such acceptance was unimaginable when “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?” was nominated for the Academy Award for best picture of 1967, largely on account of its message (for a much superior and gut-ripping film on interracial marriage, racial animosity, and rank injustice, see 1964’s “One Potato, Two Potato”). More than 1-in-6 new marriages in the United States are interracial. That alone, I had once thought, would suffice to put those animosities to rest, as it had done between other embittered groups.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/07/washington-vs-violent-crime/

The Feds can help address surging urban crime. They cannot quell it.

In New York City, 49 people were shot over the holiday weekend. The death count, so far, is eight. With 101 shooting victims in the last week, shootings are up 300 percent over the same period last year; for the full month of June, they reached a level not seen since 1996. Even before this latest bloodbath, murder was already up by 79 percent over last year; violent and property crime rates are likewise spiking.

Naturally, the hard-Left Democrats who run Gotham figure this is a perfect time to slash $1 billion out of the NYPD budget (a 17 percent cut), and to deny judges the power to detain most accused felons pretrial.

Though significantly smaller by population, Chicago is even worse. Ninety people there were shot over the weekend, with 18 killed. At least a dozen of the murder victims were minors, including seven-year-old Natalia Wallace, whose killing bears the hallmarks of gang violence. Just finished with first grade, she was out playing in a yard with friends. Suddenly, a car screeched to a halt. A group hopped out and started blasting, a round striking the child in the head. A young man, who was also shot and wounded, was probably the main target, but the depraved shooters do not appear to have discriminated. A few hours later, just a short distance away, a 14-year-old boy was one of four people killed in another hail of bullets.

Meanwhile in Atlanta, eight-year-old Secoriea Turner was killed when some of the ubiquitous “mostly peaceful protesters” opened fire at the car in which she was sitting. They had angrily confronted the driver who tried to enter a liquor store in the area they’d cordoned off — just a few blocks from the Wendy’s where Rayshard Brooks was killed in June after instigating a deadly confrontation with police. All told, the city saw at least 31 people shot and five killed over the weekend.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2020/07/07/mapping-the-mega-loan

Yesterday, the Small Business Administration released data on which businesses received forgivable loans under the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) in amounts between $150,000 and $10 million.

So, who received how much taxpayer money through the program? Our auditors at OpenTheBooks.com mapped the big loans – the nearly 83,000 loans between $1 million and $10 million. These businesses are located in 13,700 zip codes across the country.

Now, you can find out yourself, zip code by zip code, with an interactive tool we’ve built on our government transparency website.

This mapping tool allows users to quickly review every PPP transaction exceeding $1 million. Just click a pin (zip code) and scroll down to see the results that will appear in the chart beneath the map.