The Wall Street Journal Gets the Texas Abortion Law Wrong By Andrew C. McCarthy

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/09/the-wall-street-journal-gets-the-texas-abortion-law-wrong/

The Wall Street Journal’s editors have posted an uncharacteristically weak editorial on the Supreme Court’s refusal to block Texas’s fetal-heartbeat law from going into effect. The Journal’s editors concede that the five-justice majority correctly decided that the plaintiff abortion providers did not have a case for sundry procedural reasons. Nevertheless, they join the chorus of center-right strategists who maintain that, however well-meaning, the curb on abortions is a “blunder” that will ultimately lose on the merits while “hand[ing] Democrats a political grenade to hurt the anti-abortion cause.”

I’d respectfully suggest that the editors are overthinking it. Their analysis is wide of the mark.

To begin with, the Journal’s editors point out that the Texas law would render illegal pre-viability elective abortions that are permitted by Roe v. Wade (1973) and Casey v. Planned Parenthood (1992). As the editorial acknowledges, however, the High Court already has on its docket for the term that begins a month from now the Dobbs case, involving a Mississippi curb on pre-viability elective abortions after 15 weeks. Given that the justices will necessarily revisit Roe—as revised by Casey—in Dobbs, the fact that the Texas law forbids that which Roe/Casey permits does not necessarily mean the Texas law is infirm.

The Journal is correct that the Texas law does not expressly specify exemptions to terminate pregnancies attributable to rape and incest. It should be noted, however, that rape and incest are not relevant factors in at least 98 percent of abortions. (The Guttmacher Institute has estimated that rape accounts for about 1 percent of abortions, and incest about 0.5 percent.) The act does bar a male who impregnated the abortion patient through an act of rape or incest from bringing a lawsuit under the statute, but it is true that no one else is subject to this bar. The law also provides an exemption if a physician performs an abortion under the belief that a medical emergency exists, but, though it defines a number of pertinent terms, the statute fails to define “medical emergency.” As I understand it, this concept is broadly construed under Texas law, but it is unlikely to include non-life-threatening physical injuries or mental anguish attributable to a rape/incest pregnancy.

All that said, the Journal’s emphasis on the absence of a rape and incest exemption is indicative of the editors’ prioritization of the political implications of the law over its purpose to protect unborn life.

Biden Compounds Disgrace with Willful Blindness about Our Jihadist Enemies By Andrew C. McCarthy

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/09/biden-compounds-disgrace-with-willful-blindness-about-our-jihadist-enemies/

P resident Biden has disgracefully ceded Afghanistan to the Taliban, betraying our government’s first obligation to protect Americans. He left behind hundreds of American citizens, as well as who knows how many thousands of green-card holders and Afghans who assisted our government the past 20 years. Having committed too little of our $710 billion-per-annum military to carry out his evacuation order responsibly, Biden reneged on his vow to get them out.

The president has also abandoned the counterterrorism mission of denying anti-American jihadists sanctuary and operational partnership with the jihadist Taliban regime. Thus, he has imperiled the homeland and virtually guaranteed terrorist attacks against U.S. installations and interests overseas.

Not content with that, the president and his State Department now insist on further humiliating our nation with ignorant, post-surrender claptrap. For example, adumbrating the president’s pathetic speech later in the day, State’s spokesman Ned Price spent Tuesday morning piously spouting that the Taliban need to meet their basic “commitments and obligations in Afghanistan.” These duties, Price says, include “respecting basic rights of the people” and “upholding its commitments on counterterrorism.”

This is sheer idiocy.

Throughout the Obama-Biden administration, I complained incessantly about the government’s refusal to grapple with the ideology of our jihadist enemies. Democrats are aligned with Islamist organizations, many with Muslim Brotherhood ties. Ergo, at the insistence of these Muslim activists, the Obama-Biden administration admonished our law-enforcement, intelligence, and military agencies to avoid focusing on the ideology — sharia supremacism — that catalyzes violent jihad.

Further, the administration adopted a counterterrorism strategy known as “Countering Violent Extremism.” The label “violent extremism” was chosen deliberately.

Since the 1990s and particularly after 9/11, the word terrorism has connoted jihadism. That is not solely due to the spate of mass-murder attacks by Muslim terrorists. Islamic scripture undeniably commands Muslims to use “terror” in fighting their perceived enemies, and sharia supremacists are committed literalists on this point, eschewing interpretations of Islam that “contextualize” these exhortations to brutality as confined to their ancient time and place.

Sydney Williams: Wisdom

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

Wisdom is defined by Random House Webster’s Dictionary: “The quality or state of being wise; sagacity, discernment, or insight.” If that definition leaves you confused as it did me, then read what Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) wrote in Literary Remains, Volume I, published posthumously in 1836: “Common sense, in an uncommon degree, is what the world calls wisdom.” Wisdom involves judgement and the ability to anticipate the consequences of one’s actions. It involves honesty about oneself and the admission of one’s mistakes and limitations. It is empirical not conjectural; it sees a world where reality – not optics – is the driving force.

Wisdom is often associated with age. I recall when I was learning to drive, and that while my father agreed my reactions might be faster than his, he said I lacked judgment. He was right. In The Admirable Crichton, J.M. Barrie wrote: “I’m not young enough to know everything.” But, as can be seen in President Biden’s decision to ignominiously leave Afghanistan, age does not necessarily bring wisdom.

It is, of course, presumptuous to write about wisdom, because the reader must assume the author considers himself wise. That is not my claim. I agree with Shakespeare’s court jester Touchstone who in As You like It says: “The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.” Wisdom is rare and illusive, especially in our Twitter-filled world.

The ego-driven ex-Presidencies of Clinton, Obama and Trump show none of the wisdom of former retiring Presidents, like Truman and Eisenhower. Is it wise to assume interest rates will always remain low? What will be the costs on thirty and more trillions of dollars of debt when interest rates do rise? Regarding the federal budget, has it been wise to let discretionary spending (about half of which is defense) decline from 67% of the budget in 1962 to 30% in 2019, while mandatory spending (mostly entitlements) increased from 25% in 1962 to 62% in 2019? In 1962, we were faced with a USSR that wanted to “bury” us. Today, we are faced with a combative China, a resurgent Russia and myriad Islamic terrorist groups who chant: “Death to America.” Yet defense spending, as a percent of GDP, has declined from 9.3% to 3.4%. Has that been wise? Was it wise to leave billions of dollars of military equipment in Afghanistan, thereby making the Taliban-led government – harborers of terrorism – one of the better armed nations in the world? Should social justice be the goal of our armed forces, or should they focus on strategy and winning wars?

New York’s Descent By Tevi Troy

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2021/09/13/new-yorks-descent/

The Last Days of New York: A Reporter’s True Tale, by Seth Barron (Humanix Books, 304 pp., $27.99)

From 1993 to 2013, New York City underwent a startling transformation — one that defied expectations and redefined what good public policy could achieve. The streets became safer, the city cleaner. Businesses returned, tourists flocked to visit, real-estate prices skyrocketed, and New York became a glittering symbol of promise and potential to millions. Brooklyn, in particular, became the hippest part of America’s greatest city — helping spread change far beyond the five boroughs.

Unfortunately, New York City’s many gains have dwindled over the course of the past eight years. The homeless have returned, in greater numbers and with increasing aggressiveness. Many businesses are fleeing, and tourists are choosing other destinations. The streets and alleys are noticeably dirtier, and, most significantly, crime is rising, as lawlessness has increased sharply. In July of 2020, shootings were up 177 percent over the previous year, and murders were up 59 percent. For now, Brooklyn remains hip, or at least hipper than it was in the dreary 1970s and 1980s.

Part of the reason for the city’s recent decline is of course COVID-19, which both hit New York particularly hard and generated stricter lockdown policies there than in many other parts of the country. Another factor in New York’s decline is the city’s ultra-progressive, Red Sox–supporting, and not-that-hard-working mayor, Warren Wilhelm — a.k.a. Bill de Blasio. So argues author, journalist, and New York City resident Seth Barron in his alarming new book The Last Days of New York. As Barron shows, de Blasio is an inveterate progressive and dedicated ideologue who has systematically undermined every major institution that helped sustain the city and allow it to prosper.

In Barron’s telling, de Blasio’s reign of indolent leftist incompetence is a problem, to be sure, but it is not at the root of New York City’s problems. Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg helped turn the city around during their tenures, but they only held off the inevitable decline, while de Blasio accelerated it. The problem, according to Barron, is progressivism itself, or “the Prog,” as he calls it. New York’s progressives may have been temporarily set back, but their infiltration of the institutions has been ongoing and funded by tax dollars. As Barron explains, public funding “fuels an interlocking complex of political organizations on the left, including en­dorse­ments and campaign work.” All the politicians who run New York, and all the likely candidates to replace them, share the same worldview and will pursue the same policies. De Blasio might go away, but the policies are almost certain to stay the same in the one-party system that governs New York politics.

Stagflation rears its ugly head in US payroll data Employment growth constrained by rising wage costs driven by runaway inflation by David P. Goldman

https://asiatimes.com/2021/09/stagflation-rears-its-ugly-head-in-us-payroll-data/

Inflation in the US is turning into stagflation.US nonfarm payroll growth of 235,000 in August, the lowest in seven months, was constrained by rising wage costs.

Average hourly earnings rose by 0.6%, or 7.5% annualized. The most labor-intensive sectors turned in the worst monthly performance.

Retail employment dropped by 29,000 and leisure and hospitality employment was unchanged for the month.

Leisure and hospitality jobs had risen by more than 800,000 during the preceding two months.

The chart of the day shows a clear inverse relationship between the rate of employment growth and the rate of change of average hourly earnings.

As labor becomes scarcer and more expensive, employers stop hiring, either because they can’t find workers or because they can’t afford them. This is a classic symptom of an inflationary cycle.

The average rent on a newly-signed lease is up 12% year-on-year as of August, according to Apartmentlist.com.

Home prices are up 20% year on year, the biggest jump on record, according to the Case-Shiller Index.

Used car prices are up 25%, and new car prices are probably up 10% after dealer discounts have dwindled.

Manufacturing jobs rose by 37,000, driven mainly by a 24,000 jump in automotive jobs.

But the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ survey of establishments was conducted in the middle of August before major auto companies announced production shutdowns to the global chip shortage.

Kelley Beaucar Vlahos:The long march to disaster

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/long-march-disaster-military-afghanistan/
The US military spends money but cannot win wars

The long march to disaster

In the weeks after the 9/11 attacks, Americans came together in a spirit of grief, resolve and shared national pride. It didn’t last long, but this potent energy animated the US military’s mission and a new generation of recruits who signed up to ‘do their part’ in the wake of the tragedy.

Twenty years later, it is not the same military. As an institution, its impunity, hubris and access to unprecedented financial spoils have led to corruption and mediocrity at the top. The exploitation of all-volunteer forces to fight protracted wars of choice without proper care and attention to their consequences has left veterans jaded and skeptical of the value of their service in a system that continues to fail them. And without candor now about what went wrong, another 9/11 event could again trigger the same egregious policies, and the same mistakes.

At the height of the wars, high-profile brass such as Gens. David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal, who both led forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, showed themselves to be overtly political, out of touch and self-serving. They pushed troop surges while obscuring facts about true conditions on the ground. Critics say such men represent the modern senior officer corps, bred not for innovative and bold thinking but subservience to power, and that those who did push back during the wars were marginalized and squeezed out. As a result, the entire system became a steel bubble, with the rank and file left badly served by a simultaneously inflated and atrophying leadership.

The corruption of the post-9/11 wars spread in a variety of ways. The military took advantage of young, poor kids to fill recruitment quotas, with seemingly amazing opportunities like the ‘quick ship’ $20,000 enlistment bonuses they gave out during the height of the Iraq insurgency in 2007. Standards were lowered, waivers granted to felons. The US shipped out men and women with psychological profiles that should have set alarm bells clanging, and repeatedly redeployed already traumatized veterans.

As the post-9/11 years wore on, the civilian-military gap grew. With less than half of one percent of the population serving, many Americans stopped scrutinizing what the armed services were doing. By the time Eddie Gallagher was court-martialed for allegedly stabbing to death a teenage Islamic State fighter in Afghanistan and posing for a photo with his corpse, Americans had lost the capacity for outrage. Like the Bowe Bergdahl case before it, Gallagher’s story became so hyperpoliticized that no one had the guts to ask the real question — was endless war dehumanizing our celebrated special forces in the field?

Joe Biden’s Excuse for the Horrible Jobs Report Is Ridiculous and Insulting By Stacey Lennox

https://pjmedia.com/columns/stacey-lennox/2021/09/03/joe-bidens-excuse-for-the-horrible-jobs-report-is-ridiculous-and-insulting-n1475789

The wisdom of putting Joe Biden behind a podium more frequently in the wake of the disaster in Afghanistan is questionable. Yet, following the disastrous August jobs report, he ambled out to explain why the projections were off by a factor of three. Today he was mumbling Joe rather than petulant Joe. A slew of recent polling indicates Americans are feeling less safe, less secure, and less prosperous.

Predictably, these sentiments have cause Biden’s approval ratings to crater. While his handling of COVID-19 propped him up above 50% overall approval for most of the summer, polling shows even his marks on the pandemic are sliding. In Rasmussen’s daily Presidential Tracking Poll, his Approval Index dipped to -21 on August 24 and has remained at least -20 heading into the Labor Day holiday. There is speculation that it could be a durable decline rather than a blip.

Incredibly, Biden opened his remarks by saying, “As we head into Labor Day weekend, we have more evidence of the progress of our economy from last year’s economic calamity.” Someone needs to tell him the baseline is February of 2020. No one gets credit for reopening an economy artificially shut down by the government. Employees returning to their jobs and closed businesses reopening is not economic growth. And frankly, even those two things are not happening fast enough.

The only reason the economy did not completely collapse is because the economic fundamentals were strong. By  continuing to blow out spending, the Biden administration is eroding the foundations of the U.S.’s economic strength going into the pandemic. Still, mumbly Joe wants us to celebrate 235,000 new jobs when over 700,000 were forecasted. Employers are not going to create many jobs when there are already more than 10 million open nationwide.

Israel: Still the ‘Strong Horse’ by Lawrence A. Franklin

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17617/israel-strong-horse

Currently — excluding its ventures into South America from where it can more easily threaten North America — Iran, sometimes via proxies such as the Houthis, Hamas or Hezbollah — has successfully inserted itself into Yemen, in a seeming bid to overthrow and supplant Saudi Arabia, as well as in Iraq, Bahrain, Syria, Libya, Lebanon and the Gaza Strip.

The first time around, during the Obama years, one might understand the fantasy that enriching and empowering Iran might lead it to give up its long-desired nuclear program and expansionist activities, not to mention the extreme abuses of its citizens at home. Now, however, the world has seen that the plan did not work, and that Iran had been cheating all along, anyhow.

What in the world, then, is the US expecting from repeating this disastrous exercise? For both the Israelis and the Gulf’s Arab monarchies, Iran’s Shia regional empire and drive to lead the Muslim world is still justifiably considered an existential threat.

Israel — no longer diplomatically isolated — appears to be assuming a more prominent political and military role in the Middle East. Following Israel’s generous peace terms with its Arab neighbors, states such as Egypt and Jordan decided decades ago to establish diplomatic relations with the Jewish state. More recently, Islamic countries such as the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan also decided to normalize ties with Israel. Presently, these strong new ties appear to be leading to cooperation on an ever-deeper strategic level, especially regarding the destabilizing threat to the area posed by an increasingly aggressive and hegemonic Iran.

Australia Traded Away Too Much Liberty How long can a democracy maintain emergency restrictions and still call itself a free country? By Conor Friedersdorf

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/09/pandemic-australia-still-liberal-democracy/619940/

In a bid to keep the coronavirus out of the country, Australia’s federal and state governments imposed draconian restrictions on its citizens. Prime Minister Scott Morrison knows that the burden is too heavy. “This is not a sustainable way to live in this country,” he recently declared. One prominent civil libertarian summed up the rules by lamenting, “We’ve never seen anything like this in our lifetimes.”

Up to now one of Earth’s freest societies, Australia has become a hermit continent. How long can a country maintain emergency restrictions on its citizens’ lives while still calling itself a liberal democracy?

Australia has been testing the limits.

Before 2020, the idea of Australia all but forbidding its citizens from leaving the country, a restriction associated with Communist regimes, was unthinkable. Today, it is a widely accepted policy. “Australia’s borders are currently closed and international travel from Australia remains strictly controlled to help prevent the spread of COVID-19,” a government website declares. “International travel from Australia is only available if you are exempt or you have been granted an individual exemption.” The rule is enforced despite assurances on another government website, dedicated to setting forth Australia’s human-rights-treaty obligations, that the freedom to leave a country “cannot be made dependent on establishing a purpose or reason for leaving.”

Joe Biden Is Lying To Americans About Afghanistan ‘Whether it is true or not,’ this president and his enablers ‘need to project a different picture’: that the Afghanistan retreat was a great success.By John Lucas

https://thefederalist.com/2021/09/03/joe-biden-is-lying-to-americans-about-afghanistan/

John Lucas is a practicing attorney in Tennessee who has successfully argued before the U. S. Supreme Court. Before entering law school at the University of Texas, he served in the Army Special Forces as an enlisted man and then graduated from the U. S. Military Academy at West Point in 1969. He is an Army Ranger and fought in Vietnam as an infantry platoon leader.

Earlier this week, this writer addressed the Biden administration’s instinctive lying on matters big and small, concluding: “When the president allows his key advisors lie to us about a dog bite, the only confidence the American people can have is that he will not be honest with us about these and other life-and-death matters if the truth would hurt his poll numbers or endanger Democrats’ reelection chances.”

Regrettably, recent events confirm that the president’s deceptions and misstatements are intentional and driven by political motives. This was confirmed by multiple events, some the very next day after the previous article published.

The first confirming event was in President Biden’s own words. Biden verified that lying about success in Afghanistan is part of his political strategy.

A Foreign Quid Pro Quo Based on Lies

In a bombshell report on Aug. 31, Reuters reported on an audio recording of a July 23 call between Biden and then-Afghan President Ashraf Ghani. It released a transcript. In the call, Biden stated, “I need not tell you the perception around the world and in parts of Afghanistan, I believe, is that things aren’t going well in terms of the fight against the Taliban.”

Biden then gave Ghani his marching orders: “And there is a need, whether it is true or not, there is a need to project a different picture.” His own words condemn the president: “Whether it is true or not…” As the indispensable Mollie Hemingway noted on Fox News on Sept. 2, “What this phone call shows is that the withdrawal was, like so many other parts of the war, communicated to the American public with lies.” Indeed it was.

But this was even worse. Again, Hemingway: “While the previous president was impeached over a phone call and accused of a quid pro quo, here you actually have a president asking someone to lie on his behalf and conditioning military aid on part of those lies.”