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The vaccines are not all they are cracked up to be they should be focused on the at risk population, not the entire population. The drive to vaccinate everybody is a mistake.
“…Two more aides working in Vice President Harris’s office are expected to leave their roles in the coming weeks in addition to the two high-profile exits of her press secretary and communications director, a source familiar with the departures confirmed to The Hill
Peter Velz, who is the vice president’s director of press operations, and Vince Evans, the deputy director of the Office of Public Engagement and Intergovernmental Affairs for Harris, are planning to leave those positions soon, the source confirmed…”
Richard Daley Mayor of Chicago from 1955 to 1976. This clip is from 1968.
StockingStuffer! pic.twitter.com/sHerjTDhQn
— Kevin Downey, Jr. or The Sequel (@kevindowneyjr) December 1, 2021
WASHINGTON EXAMINER:
“…There is one thing that every serious legal scholar, regardless of his or her opinion on abortion, can agree on: The 1973 Supreme Court ruling in Roe v. Wade is a goofy ad hoc abomination of a legal decision. Don’t take our word for it — take the word of the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who called it a “heavy-handed judicial intervention” and “difficult to justify.”
Roe removed the issue of abortion from the democratic process. It also created a new right to kill one’s baby in utero. In deciding Roe, Justice Harry Blackmun and the Roe court set out to create a new version of women’s equality that the original suffragists would have soundly rejected. They did not care what sort of shoddy reasoning they needed to get there, and it really shows.
The abortion case that will be argued before the justices today, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, offers them an opportunity to revisit Roe and its progeny — cases that have caused the United States to depart dramatically and unjustifiably from the civilized world when it comes to abortion laws.
Dobbs pertains to a Mississippi law limiting abortion to the first 15 weeks of pregnancy. For context, this law is still among the world’s least restrictive. Three-quarters of the world’s nations, including most of Western Europe, ban abortion after 12 weeks — i.e., the first trimester. Consider that if Mississippi’s law is allowed to stand, the Magnolia State will still have abortion laws looser than France. Meanwhile, only seven nations in the entire world, including the U.S., currently permit elective abortions after 20 weeks of gestation, as Roe and subsequent decisions have permitted.
To provide still more context, Democrats in several states have proposed laws to permit abortion right up to the moment of birth. They can still pass such laws even if Roe is overturned. But wouldn’t it be a bit barbaric?
Polls show that most people, regardless of their position on abortion’s legality in principle, support reasonable restrictions such as the one Mississippi is defending. For example, 65% believe that abortion should be illegal after 12 weeks, i.e. after the first trimester, according to a new poll from the Associated Press . This is a typical poll result. If people had been allowed to vote on this issue since the 1970s, laws in states where abortion is legal would probably look a lot like Mississippi’s. That, in addition to the specious legal reasoning behind the original ruling, is a sufficient reason for abolishing Roe and letting the voters decide.
Outside the legal realm, Roe’s legacy has been to make 62 million abortions possible over 48 years. Not only is that greater than the populations of California and Florida combined, but it skews with nearly genocidal disproportion toward the destruction of nascent black lives. According to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data, approximately 21 million non-Hispanic black lives have been extinguished directly by abortion since Roe. In some heavily black jurisdictions, such as Washington, D.C., more than one-third of all pregnancies end in termination. This is not inconsistent with the racist views of abortion pioneers such as Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger.
The Left has convinced itself that abortion is popular — that people will angrily come out and vote to defend it. That didn’t happen last month in blue Virginia. Democratic gubernatorial nominee Terry McAuliffe spent millions telling voters that his opponent would sign a restrictive abortion law like the one that had just taken effect in Texas. Exit polling shows that the voters who voted based on abortion actually broke for the Republican, Gov.-elect Glenn Youngkin, by 20 points.
Pro-lifers should not delude themselves. Not all restrictions on abortion will be equally popular. But they have nothing to fear post-Roe in limiting a barbaric practice and working toward the legislative goal of protecting all human life, both inside and outside the womb.
In the meantime, Democrats are so far outside of the mainstream of public opinion on abortion that it has warped their perception. They will not see the collapse coming until after the courts stop holding up their house of cards…”
The cracks are showing in Roe v. Wade
“…rather than painting an ideological argument framed around complex philosophical, ethical and moral considerations, Stewart argued the court should itself simply be neutral. Abortion, he said, should be outside of the court’s jurisdiction entirely, because the constitution places responsibility for these types of issues, which represent the intersection of changing science, theology, morality and medicine, not with judicial fiat, but with the democratic process.
“On hard issue, after hard issue, the people make this country work,” he said. “Abortion is a hard issue. It demands the best from all of us, not a judgment by just a few of us.”
For an issue often wrapped in emotional appeals and laden with the language of values, Stewart’s argument for Mississippi was notably focused on the standing of the law and a cerebral discussion of the legal matters at play.
At one point, an animated and at times impatient Justice Sonia Sotomayor attempted to unmask a hidden ideological agenda. “How is your interest anything more than a religious view?” she asked Stewart. Stewart acknowledged that many of the issues surrounding abortion are, indeed, philosophical — which is why these questions should be subject to the democratic process, allowing states to decide their own answers rather than the court imposing one view onto the country.
Justice Sotomayor returned with a different tact, centering on the court’s doctrine of stare decisis — a reliance on the court’s prior decisions when making subsequent legal judgments. “Won’t overturning Roe and Casey also put other major cases at risk?” she asked, referencing Obergefell v. Hodges, the case that established a right to same-sex marriage, and Griswold v. Connecticut, which protects the right of married couples to buy and use contraception, among others.
And again, Stewart was quick to distinguish the issues that make Roe and Casey unique. The other cases would not be at risk, he flatly declared, because they promulgate clear rules, which are easily upheld, unlike the muddy legal morass that Roe and Casey are widely agreed upon to represent. Moreover, he finished, neither of the referenced cases involve the purposeful termination of a human life.
Ultimately, Stewart’s appeal to state sovereignty and deft handling of stare decisis concerns appeared to compel most of the court’s conservative justices, which now constitute a 6-3 majority. Of the six, only Justice Clarence Thomas has gone on record about his desire to overturn Roe, joining an opinion by then-Chief Justice William Rehnquist arguing “Roe was wrongly decided and that it can and should be overruled,” and declaring last year in June Medical Services, LLC v. Russo that the right to abortion was one created “out of whole cloth, without a shred of support from the constitution’s text.”…”
“…Disciplinary agency for federal inspectors general withheld damning report on Obama-appointed official for 15 months until after Trump left office.
The body that polices the behavior of federal agency watchdogs drafted a report by September 2019 that accused the Federal Housing Finance Agency’s inspector general of whistleblower retaliation, witness intimidation and staff abuse but withheld its final action for 15 months until after President Donald Trump left office, according to newly released reports to Congress.
The revelation this week is the latest twist in the case of FHFA Inspector General Laura Werthheimer, who was appointed by President Barack Obama and whose husband is a Democratic donor. Wertheimer’s conduct was first flagged five years ago by whistleblowers in a case that dragged on, frustrating members of Congress like Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and defying a speedy resolution to complaints of a hostile workplace where employees complained of being belittled for their physical attributes as well as their work performance…”
“…On issues ranging from vaccine mandates to immigration policy and racial preferences, federal courts across the country have repeatedly found the Biden administration to be pushing policies which violate the Constitution…”
