Howdy All, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy –
In this issue –
1. Abortion
2. Horse Meds
3. Energy
4. Truth
5. Forgiveness
6. Drygas
7. Abrams
1. Abortion. With the leak of a draft opinion a week or so ago overturning Roe v Wade, abortion as an issue became the Next Big Thing for the political left. The timing of the leak itself was almost too perfect, as was the story itself, as it allowed the democrats to gin up their mobs, tap into their Inner Self-righteous Massive Indignation Child, and toss all their other losing issues aside. Today, it looks like a repeal of Roe may be on the table. Whether or not there are the votes to do so after weeks to months of violent mob action outside the homes of SCOTUS Justices (illegal). Who knows, the mob might actually flip the vote.
- Should Roe be overturned, the issue instantly gets kicked back to the many states, where it has belonged for the last 49 years. There will be 52 (or so) different solutions (Including DC & PR). And at long last, there will be an actual political process at work. The Pro Death side has a real problem with this, as they have spent nearly 3 generations simply yelling “scoreboard” – it’s a Constitutional Right, so we don’t have to argue our point of view at all.
- But today, this is a fundamentally persuasion-based argument. How does the Pro Life side persuade their way to victory? One powerful way would be to reframe the argument. Abortion is always framed as a women’s rights argument. A reframe would note that there are actually 3 people involved, the mother, the father and the child. How do you consider and balance their rights and voices in the discussion? Who actually speaks for the kid? Another powerful persuasion used by the pro aborts has been my body, my choice. Yet they discarded that blithely two years ago with vax mandates. The right to privacy is gone, dead and buried, and they were the ones who killed and buried it. Worse, they celebrated firing people who refused to vax. Add to this the masking mandates, ostensibly another mandate to use what is nominally a medical device.
- So, what do they do? They dox the 6 conservative Justices and turn out the mob at their homes. Clarice Feldman in American Thinker Sunday notes that doing this is a violation of federal law, specifically 18 USC Sec 1507. The Volokh Conspiracy ran a similar piece. This sort of action is also a violation of Virginia State Law, applicable to those Justices living in Virginia. Note that turning out the mob at homes is a well-orchestrated intimidation ploy, with Justice Alito and his family being evacuated to an undisclosed location over the weekend. It is also interference with a formal government activity, which interestingly enough is what most if not all of the Jan 6 political prisoners are charged with, many of them languishing in federal prison for over a year. Can we expect the same sort of treatment for the perpetrators of SCOTUS home protests? Nope, which will fuel successful Habeus Corpus and 8th Amendment release filings in the not-so-distant future by legal teams for the Jan 6 political prisoners.
- Also note how women are a thing again, and men who can have babies are no longer being discussed or birthing persons. Nice pivot, that.
- One of the responses out of democrats has been an attempt to pass legislation legalizing abortion nationwide. I don’t know what they have been smoking, but any opinion that overturns Roe, kicking it back to the states, will also be used to overturn a nationwide legalization of abortion. Such a case shouldn’t even make it to the SCOTUS unless judge shopping finds a sufficient number of O’Bama and Biden judges to ignore an opinion overturning Roe.
- Finally, we have no small number of corporations offering benefits to employees which will allow them to travel from where they live and work to places they can get abortions. In this, the corporations are protecting their bottom line, as abortions are cheaper than maternity care. No public discussion about corporate greed for some reason. The Disney Effect is in play with this one, with consultants recommending corporations not get publicly involved in the argument, which means that the attention getting step worked, at least for a little while.
2. Horse Meds. One of the related fallouts from the abortion argument has been the sudden embrace of horse medicine (the epithet used against Ivermectin during the COVID wars). Ivermectin, like all therapeutics, was routinely trashed by the public health apparat, politicians who supported the public health apparat, CDC, FDA and their mouthpieces in the media. Yet, when another drug used by vets, misoprostol, turns out to be an ingredient in homemade abortion pills it is both embraced and celebrated.
3. Energy. Fun story out of the Daily Caller last week noting that the supply chain for green energy does not exist. The piece is about the God-awful mess the climatistas in the Harris – Xiden administration have made of energy. While unstated, the climatistas suffer the identical problem the economic planners in the old Soviet Union did writing and executing their endlessly failing Five Year Plans. At its foundation, the renewable energy industry is based on government subsidies and mandates. As such, its actual value is never known. Worse, it brings along almost no infrastructure with the windmills, solar arrays, and electric vehicles. At the same time the War on Fossil Fuel was being executed, spiking the price of oil and natural gas, average prices for renewables was also spiking. Project completions for wind and solar over the same time fell off a cliff, with the value of those projects falling from $46 – $7.5 billion 2019 – 2021. Project completions also plunged from 240 – 66. Difficulties include financing, regulatory challenges, shortage of capacity on the grid. The supply chain for minerals needed to build renewables does not exist. The costs of nickel, cobalt, aluminum, manganese or lithium is never considered by advocates. Quite simply, the worldwide production of rare earth metals is woefully insufficient to meet Harris – Xiden goals of replacing half US vehicles with Electric Vehicles (EVs) by 2035. And it’s not only the rare earths, it is the energy needed to fuel all these new vehicles, which is also not ready, nor will they be ready unless we roll out a LOT more reactors than are currently planned. On the good side, looks like technology used in EVs is accelerating quickly, with costs and prices dropping very fast, and performance increasing almost exponentially.
4. Truth. One of the larger stories over the last couple weeks was DHS announcement that they were setting up a Disinformation Governance Board to fight what they define as misinformation. The woman they selected to head the Board is a raving anti-Trump lunatic, who has been trafficking in misinformation for decades. DHS Secretary, apparently having free time on his hands based on doing nothing on the southern border, announced formation of the Board a week and a half ago during a congressional hearing. This has been in process for at least two months. Like everything else out of this (mal)administration, the new head claimed the Board was being set up to “… maintain the Department’s commitment to protecting free speech, privacy, civil rights, and civil liberties.” This was the same women who called the Hunter laptop story likely a Russian influence operation. Note that disinformation is not an original English term. It was coined by Stalin and used extensively by the KGB over the years. To Harris – Xiden, Orwell’s 1984 was not a cautionary tale. Rather, it was a how-to manual. All dictatorships try to control the flow and content of information available to the public. This putative one is no different, and in its formative stage.
5. Forgiveness. Much time was spent last week wrestling with several leaks out of the regime suggesting that they were considering forgiving $1.78 trillion in student loan debt. There were various trial balloons floated, with varying amounts of the loans forgiven from all of it to $50,000 per student. The media trotted out Fauxahontas herself, Senator Liz Warren (D, MA), who announced it was entirely an issue of fairness. In economic terms, the payoff would be forgiving the loans, simply printing money to cover the debts. In political terms, something quite different will happen, as everyone who paid off their loans, worked to put themselves through school, or simply opting for trade school will be branded as saps, working their backsides off while the well-connected, the wealthy on the coasts get freebies for their kiddos. Some long-time democrats understand the danger this brings to them, especially among the working class, aka “saps.” Paul Bagala and Bill Maher called the effort a loser issue for democrats. The Atlantic believes that proposal has most to do with the ability of college graduates to set the political agenda. It goes farther than that, as the universities have become leftist indoctrination mills, immune from any and all economic pressure over the last half century. They want to keep the pipeline of freshly minted leftists into the workplace in place, functioning, and fully engorged with new young skulls full of mush. Worse (or better, depending on your point of view), student debt forgiveness is a payoff to liberal suburban women, the most reliable members of the current democrat coalition. It will also be a slap in the face to every single man who never went to college. I really, really hope they are sufficiently clueless to do this.
6. Drygas. Bill Walker and Heidi Drygas are running for governor / Lt governor in the November general election. Drygas is a former union lawyer Bill Walker appointed as his Commissioner of Labor and Workforce Development. She has been a reliable lefty for a long, long time. Both Walker and Drygas are running as independents. Both are pandering to democrats for their support. But being a former union lawyer does inculcate you in no small amount of leftist weirdness. In this case, forced masking of her own children. During the campaign, Drygas brings her young child, age 2-3 or so, to some of the fundraising events. Sometimes the kid is masked. Sometimes she is not. A fundraiser in Homer a week and a half ago had the kid fully masked for the duration while most of the room including her mother was unmasked for the duration of the event. Masking was always for the Little People. Masking of children, the group of all Americans least susceptible to COVID, and the very least powerful in the political world continues to be very, very popular. Yet the left continues to hide behind The Children for every single policy decision they make and position they support, that is, other than killing them before they are born.
7. Abrams. The Georgia gubernatorial race is heating up nicely with what sure smells like an oppo-research piece dumped in right wing media aimed at Stacy Abrams. This one has her close connection with a private company that got state contracts in 2013. Abrams was the minority leader in the state House at the time. Looks like the company had around $100,000 in 2013 at the beginning of the scam. Its stated mission was to help small businesses grow and quickly morphed into a private lender. In 2014 it secured state contracts that allowed the company to use federal funds to pay off state loans for its clients. Sounds a lot like old fashioned check kiting. Abrams was an integral part of the application process for the customers, which may have taken advantage of her position in the legislature. The federal loan program ended in 2017 when the O’Bama racial spoils administration left town for a little while.
More later –
– AG