Elsewhere in the News

Donny Deutsch has been a television commentator and advertising executive.  This is what he said on MSNBC after the mass shooting in Buffalo:  "Brand every Republican"...as the party of "racist, violent replacement theory."  Just despicable.  How about we brand every Democrat as a liar, willing to say anything, and engage in any demagoguery, in order to make a political point.

Although, I wonder if our President is that far from siding with Deutsch.  Here is Biden:  "This MAGA crowd is really the most extreme political organization that's existed in recent American history."  Hmm.  Occupy Wall Street.  Black Lives Matter.  Antifa.  

In Kiel, Wisconsin, some Middle School kids (age 13 years) are being accused of Title IX sexual harassment.  No, not rape, not improper touching, not even calling the "victim" a nasty word.  Their offense?  Not using the desired pronoun.  The "victim" wished to be referred to as "they" and "them."  I do not know if the offenders mocked the individual in question, or repeatedly bullied the other child in some way.  I do know that these school administrators are prone to act too hastily in dealing with these situations, when perhaps a sit down with the involved parties might solve the matter.  But calm reflection and counseling seems to be the road less traveled.   

Robin Abcarian is a columnist at the LA Times.  In today's paper was an Op-Ed by her decrying the overturning of a 2018 California Law mandating that publicly held corporations have a certain number of female directors on their boards.  An LA County Superior Court Judge declared the law to be an unconstitutional denial of the equal protection clause under the state constitution.  Some of you may wonder why it's the government's business to dictate a corporate board's makeup.  So do I.  Are women always to be victims, unable to accomplish on their own?

I am proud to say that one of my daughters works for an organization called "Chief."  Chief bills itself as a women's empowerment group.  Here are a few lines from their website.  "Chief is the only private membership network focused on connecting and supporting women executive leaders."  "Chief drives women to the top and keeps them there."  "Chief is changing the face of leadership."  How about that?  Changing the face of leadership without government involvement.  

I recently had an email exchange with a fellow Jewish colleague who happens to be on the left.  He assured me that any anti-Israel sentiment in the Democrat Party is on the fringe only.  Let's see.  Recently, President Biden appointed Karine Jean-Pierre to replace Jen Psaki as the White House press secretary.  Jean-Pierre has criticized AIPAC (the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a pro-Israel lobbying group) as having "severely racist, Islamophobic rhetoric."  She also accused AIPAC of using "anti-Muslim and anti-Arab rhetoric."  (Full disclosure.  I have donated to AIPAC, as well as to ZOA, the Zionist Organization of America.)  

First, I do not think anyone who has the position of White House press secretary can be said to be on the fringe.  Unless, we also agree that the President being served by that press secretary is also on the fringe.  Second, it is well known that AIPAC is nonpartisan.  It supports both Republican and Democratic candidates for congress.  AIPAC has only one goal - support for the continued existence of the State of Israel.  Democratic leaders and elected officials regularly attended the yearly AIPAC conventions in the past.  It has only been since the party has become increasingly anti-Israel that attendance by Democratic officials has declined.  

Recently, the CUNY (City University of New York) School of Law faculty voted to support a student resolution supporting the anti-Israel BDS movement.  (BDS stands for Boycott, Divest and Sanction.)  The resolution accused Israel of war crimes; and said that the exchange programs with Haifa University and Tel Aviv University were a "form of propaganda," meant to "normalize settler colonial and apartheid rule."  The purpose of this post is not to prove the absurd lies behind those allegations.

However, if anyone thinks CUNY is on the "fringe," think about this.  CUNY consists of 25 colleges, with campuses in all five boroughs of NYC.  A whopping 275,000 students are enrolled.  If an institution of this size and magnitude, in the largest city in the country, is considered "fringe," then I am at a loss to understand the definition of the word "fringe."

Abortion Revisited - What Others Have To Say (A Critical Look)

(This is a follow up to the two 5/15/22 posts on abortion, which followed the leaked Supreme Court opinion in the Dobbs case.)

Here is Jackie Calmes (columnist and author) in the 5/4/22 Los Angeles Times:  "Congress' Republican leaders likewise (along with Chief Justice John Roberts) decried the leak, not the trashing of a longtime constitutional right...The court's integrity has been undermined, all right, but not by the leaker."  This is rather typical of leftist thinking.  It is only the outcome that matters.  If decisions go their way, that is all that the left cares about.  Not the process.  Not the violation of professional obligations.

But here is Professor Jonathan Turley in the 5/4/22 USA Today:  "It was an inviolate rule that members and clerks do not leak either the deliberations or decisions of the court...This was clearly a politically calculated act by someone who was willing to abandon every ethical and professional principle for a political cause."  But when the ends justify the means, as for so many on the left, this violation is completely irrelevant.

An article in the 5/12/22 USA Today discusses the failure of the Senate to pass proposed legislation that they say "would have made Roe v. Wade the law of the land."  But Democratic Senator Joe Manchin was opposed, saying the bill was not a "codification" of Roe, but rather an "expansion."  Yet the authors of the article seemed intent on blaming the 60 vote filibuster rule, when, without Manchin's support, the measure failed by a 49-51 vote.  After acknowledging that the measure did not get even a simple majority, later in the article they still asserted that "...Democrats lacked the 60 votes necessary to overcome the filibuster."  Always better to blame the Republicans and the filibuster.

A 5/9/22 editorial in the Wall Street Journal made this interesting point:  "The notable feature of abortion in Europe is that each country has tailored its laws to local mores after political debate."  Political debate is exactly what the leaked draft decision had in mind - a political debate within each of the 50 states.  "European voters by and large have chosen to permit it (abortion) in a way that would disappoint American pro-lifers.  But even liberal and largely secular Europeans impose the sort of limitations on abortion that America's pro-choice left claims to find intolerable."  And the editorial makes this assertion:  "Keeping abortion politics in the democratic sphere rather than the courts has prevented it from becoming a destructive front in the culture war."

Here is Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank:  "Roe's impending reversal is a 9/11 attack on America's social fabric."  The left seems to revel in making comparisons to truly horrific events when things do not go their way.  Often, it is a reference to the Holocaust.  This was a highly inappropriate reference to 9/11.  Shame on Milbank.

As readers of the blog know, I often read letters to the editor in various papers.  Here are excerpts from a few, without commentary by me, for your consideration.  These are from the 5/5/22 New York Times.  

"I am a proud pro-life Democrat who has long supported overturning Roe v. Wade...A child is a blessing and life is precious.  Ours is a civilized society, and we should be protecting life, not wantonly stamping it out on demand."

"They can make any law they want to make, but they can't make any woman have a baby she doesn't want to have," wrote an 80 year old mother and grandmother, who had an abortion at age 20.  The abortion was performed by a veterinarian, but after hemorrhaging she ended up in the ER.  "I was lucky.  I survived."

And a 22 year old wrote this:  "As I watch the world around me change and convulse in the face of climate change, Trumpism, a global pandemic and everything else that seems to be going downhill, I need to be able to control my body.  I can't imagine choosing to bring a child into this world, and am appalled by the idea of being forced to carry and raise a child that I didn't plan for and have no idea how to raise.  I am scared."