Last week, amid news of several states’ abortion laws (intended to provoke SCOTUS-ready legal challenges to Roe V. Wade), one-time “actress” Alyssa Milano declared a “sex strike”.

It fared about as well as you’d expect.

And Milano – whose movie credits include “Who’s The Boss”, [NOTE TO MITCH: TRY TO CARE ABOUT ALYSSA MILANO’S “ACTING CAREER” LONG ENOUGH TO GET A LIST IN HERE BEFORE YOU PUBLISH THIS], and, uh, “Who’s The Boss”, reacted, well, about as well as you’d expect:

With states continuing to restrict abortions despite her #SexStrike protest, Alyssa Milano became so furious that she destroyed her own property, she admitted on Twitter Wednesday.
“I just threw my phone across the room. Cracked the screen. Read this. Please,” Milano tweeted, linking to CBS News story about an 11-year-old girl who couldn’t get an abortion because of Ohio’s “heartbeat bill.”… “Heartbeat bills,” which prohibit most abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, have passed in four states this year, and Alabama lawmakers on Tuesday voted to effectively outlaw the procedure entirely. Gov. Kay Ivey, a Republican, was expected to sign the legislation.
Although none of the laws have gone into effect amid legal challenges, pro-choice advocates fear they will push the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade, a landmark 1972 ruling enshrining the right to abortion.

She’s a former child star, and not used to getting her way. But then, progs are largely the same.

…but they can’t catch everything:

Remember to not put it on your face https://t.co/KfeEtTI1Hw

— Adam Trahan (@AdamTrahan) May 16, 2019

I don’t cry much – but I love, love, love this video of a progressive pro-infanticide snowflake trying to argue that she’s above the law, that there’s a different set of rules for progressives in campus…

…and then…slowly…

I so so so love a happy ending.

“Infinite Elgintensity” is a comically-arrogant and usually hilarious lawyer and Youtube bodybuilding videoblogger…

…who does some of the best commentary about the Social Justice militia out there, on the side.

I say that to point out that while I thought about writing something about Burger King’s self-parody-ingly “woke” Unhappy Meal campaign, once I saw IE’s video take, I gave up and decided to punt to him. Language not safe for work, btw:

(His two cents on the Gillette fiasco were worth at least a nickel as well)

And it makes me wonder – will there come a time when Millennials get tired of people not only walking on eggshells around their seemingly paper-thin collective skin, but talking and advertising down to it?)

As I remind pouty millennials, the state of the world has never been better.

A lower percentage of the human race is beset by war or famine than at any time in history.

For the first time in history, obesity is a bigger problem than famine.

But sometimes, you get a cold, hard reminder that not everything is working out.

The recipe for all entertainment in an industry dominated by Big Left:

1. Find a great story.
2. Carefully excise any reference to faith in a higher power that may have motivated the story in the first place.

I wonder if these kids will get lionized and treated as the authorities that David Hogg has?

Survivors of a Colorado school shooting walked out of a vigil for their slain classmate Wednesday night in protest of politicians and other groups using it as a platform for gun control, a local report said.
The students from STEM High School, where two gunmen killed a student and wounded eight others Tuesday, began yelling from the stands that they “wanted to be heard” after two politicians and pro-gun control advocates addressed the crowd, according to the local NBC affiliate, KUSA.
They then stormed out of the vigil after Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet and Democratic Congressman Jason Crow addressed the crowd, the Denver Post reported.
The kids chanted “Mental health” and hurled expletives at the media, according to the report.

And I don’t know about you, but suddenly I”m feeling kind of proud:

“What has happened at STEM is awful. But it’s not a statistic. We can’t be used as a reason for gun control. We are people, not a statement,” one student said, according to video by KUSA.
Speaking of the lone fatality, 18-year-old Kendrick Castillo, another student added, “We wanted Kendrick to be mourned. We wanted all of you to join us in that mourning, but that was not allowed here. We all walked out. We were not kicked out.”

This nation needs fewer tragedies.

But if we had more of this kind of moral courage, we’d have a great start.

Remember this drawing?  It ran during the last Arab-Israeli conflict, to illustrate the moral difference between the tactics used by the two sides.

That kid who’s on all the news shows, David Hogg, the one demanding gun control?  The Left insists nobody is allowed to disagree with his silly proposals because as a shooting survivor, he has absolute moral authority.  And he’s just a kid, so arguing with him is “punching down.”  Ya big bully. 

I strongly suspect he’s an example of the Palestinian side of the drawing.  He’s the child shielding the people behind him.  They are the true evil.  Their tactics reveal it.

Joe Doakes

He’s sort of the Cindy Sheehan of the 2010s.

…who saw David “Going to Harvard” Hogg’s tweet…

The young people, will win. @lauren_hoggs @Alfonso_Cal pic.twitter.com/HcgUTkytdW

— David Hogg (@davidhogg111) June 10, 2018

…and thought it looks like “the young” need a good laxative?

The one question people never ask about transgender athletic competition is why.  Why do we have separate Boys’ and Girls’ sports?  If boys and girls are identical in every way that matters, with lifestyle differences simply a matter of personal choice that can be changed at whim, why don’t we have one competition for all?
Minnesota State High School record holders:
Boys’ 100-yard dash: 9.6
Girls’ 100-yard dash: 10.8
Boy’s Shot Put: 65 feet 6 inches
Girls’ Shot Put: 54 feet 8.5 inches.
It’s not about personal choice, it’s about biology.  The fastest girl is slower than every one of the top 10 boys.  The strongest girl’s throw is 11 feet shorter.  At the margin where champions are determined, girls cannot compete against boys.  It sucks.  It’s unfair.  But it’s reality.
People who deny reality are delusional.  We should not allow delusional people to make decisions affecting our children.

And if you ask the the question, the subject gets changed.

Every. Single. Time.

Management ordered Building Maintenance to turn down the heat to fight global warming and save the world. Employees complain they are freezing.
The maintenance guy uses a fancy electronic thermometer to verify the temperature is 68 degrees, precisely as ordered, therefore people can’t be cold.  He is mixing units.  Degrees are a measurement of heat activity, not of comfort. “68 degrees” and “chilly” are perfectly consistent descriptions of the same office space.
Americans have this problem on a broader scale, with politics. We don’t define what we’re measuring, so we can’t explain why we think America was once great and could be again, and why they think it was never great and won’t be until they replace it with something else.
Joe doakes

I think it’s more a matter of intentionally avoiding defining what we’re measuring.

I almost thought this tweet, apparently by a 20 year old Grievance Studies major from Oberlin College, to be the sort of thing that only Snopes would think wasn’t parody:

Does…anyone at that White House understand the significance of that song? https://t.co/IK9h8fOwNj

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) April 18, 2019

Of course, “Edelweiss” was written by Rogers and Hammerstein, in the late fifties. For a movie about some escaping from Naziism.

Here it is, in all its storm-trooper-y goodness:

Silly millennials

UPDATE: I’m told that Ms. Haberman is not actually a grievance studies major from Oberlin, but in fact NBC’s White House correspondent and one of the “elite” “gatekeepers” that are supposed to keep the public’s news safe and hygienic.

My mistake.

The Jussie Smollett case showed us that there’s a whole different set of rules for people who know the right people, politically.

Or at least, it shows it to people who’ve been hiding under a rock and are juuust starting to pay attention.

Prosecutors in Maryland have dropped even the most token charges against the woman who assaulted Kellyanne Conway while she tried to eat at a restaurant.

In short, Montgomery County prosecutors have usurped the role of lawmakers who criminalized assault and determined the range of penalties for it, and of judges who evaluate mitigating factors. Consider the statement of Montgomery State’s Attorney John McCormick:

Was this woman rude? Yes. Did she violate Ms. Conway’s space and try to embarrass her? Yes and yes. Is this a case where criminal sanctions would have been appropriate? No.

But wait! “This woman” did more than violate Conway’s space and try to embarrass her. She physically assaulted Conway. That’s a crime and should be treated as such.

The message sent by McCormick is clear: Montgomery County residents can assault conservatives and Trump administration officials with impunity here. There has been a wave of confrontations by leftists of such figures in the Washington, D.C. area. Montgomery County is saying that it’s okay during these confrontations to grab and shake the target.

Of course, the Woody Kaine case in Saint Paul – where the son of the Democrat veep candidate and his “Anti”-Fa pals didn’t even get slapped on the wrist for an incredibly violent assault – already showed it to anyone who’s paying attention; in Blue America, even the apparatus of “law enforcement” is doing its part to “other” non-“progressive”thoughts, institutions, and ultimately people.

What the heck – let’s make *everyone* angry.

Rep. Omar has been taking flak over a video in which she says:

Ilhan Omar isn’t just anti-Semitic – she’s anti-American.

Nearly 3,000 Americans lost their lives to Islamic terrorists on 9/11, yet Omar diminishes it as: “Some people did something.”

Democrat leaders need to condemn her brazen display of disrespect.pic.twitter.com/k3meEbUOAk

— Ronna McDaniel (@GOPChairwoman) April 9, 2019

“[the Council on American Islamic Relations] was founded after 9/11 because they recognized that some people did something and that all of us were starting to lose access to our civil liberties.”

Now, the local media and the Associated Press leapt into action to tell the reader that the video is edited to show the remark out of context – which is great, and would be even better if they’d be as diligent on being honest about context on both sides of the aisle. And no, they are not. Only for Democrats.

But it’s true. Here’s the part that came before:

“For far too long we have lived with the discomfort of being a second-class citizen and, frankly, I’m tired of it, and every single Muslim in this country should be tired of it”

The part the GOP oppo researchers clipped out basically makes the remark in the video just a little bit dishonest. Let’s be honest – Omar is not an articulate woman, and it’s easy to nitpick peoples’ statements after the fact. And for those of you who’ve never had to try to operate on a functional, much less professional, level in a language other than your native one, don’t get too cocky

And of course, the media *are* dishonest when they fail to give the same fact-checking diligence to similar smears against conservatives. They fact that they do not – nearly never – is itself proof of corrosive media bias.

But here’s the deal – Omar’s original, in-context statement is even worse than the part in the video.

Second class citizens? Please.

Name a country in the world in which Muslim immigrants have been treated *better*, and been able to more thoroughly integrate into society, than the US? Not “claiming asylum” and “getting benefits”, mind you – actually getting accepted in a society and prospering? In what country in the world, with or without a massive terrorist attack by their radical coreligionists, have they been *more* welcomed and, when they so choose, prospered and enjoyed the *real* benefits of our society *more* than in the US?

Because one can not “become” German or French or Swedish. You can immigrate. You can learn the language, send your kids to school, become a citizen, get a job maybe – but being a German or Dane or Pole or Italian is a matter of birth, language, shared history and ethnicity.

You CAN *become* American – and most Muslim immigrants to the US (Somali teething problems notwithstanding) have, and vastly more successfully than in Europe, which is why there are no “no go” Muslim neighborhoods in the US (and none can every be allowed to happen – for them or any other ethnic group).

What she *actually* said was more ungrateful, more disgusting, more un-American than what the video actually showed.

(This post is about Rep. Omar. Not Islam at large. The usual wave of taqqiyah-theory memes will be purged without comment. Don’t waste your energy. Stay on topic, or find someone else to yap at).

One of the reasons I’m such a yuge fan of Dennis Prager is his weekly “Happiness Hour” – in which he talks not only about the practice and moral imperative of being happy (hint:  it’s not just for you), but about the struggle to become happy.

One of his sayings, and his advice, on the subject comes close to an old Hungarian saying I’ve been fond of most of my adult life; “the best way to become wealthy is to appear as if you already are”.   Prager notes that this basic philosophy applies to so very much in life – about getting in shape, about falling or staying in love with one’s partner, and of course happiness.

There’s some science to the premise as well.  There’s a reason that disciplines from music to the military drill one endlessly on things they want to impress into the human brain – because almost nobody plays a piano scale or a guitar chord or clears a rifle jam automatically or intuitively.  But if you drill on them often enough, they become what people call “second nature”, because your brain develops space – neural pathways – for them.

Happiness works a little like that.  Not entirely – being happy isn’t quite as easy as playing a first-position “F” chord – but the idea of wiring the brain to be something isn’t all that conceptually different.

I believe you can push yourself toward happiness.  There’s some science, not to mention thousands of years of human experience, to support the premise.   It’s basic cognitive psychology.

And since one can wire one’s brain to be many good things via practice – a musician, a soldier, a happy person, whatever – it stands to reason you can do the same with unhappy, useless, miserable, depressing things.

Having raised, and working with roomful of, millennials, I’ve observed that the generation seems to collect psychological and psychiatric maladies in young adulthood the same way they used to collect Pokemon cards in childhood.  “I’ve got mild self-diagosed bipolar, which beats your dysthymia and separation anxiety!”.

Modern academia and media preach some miserable stuff to the kids; a common refrain among the young ‘uns is what a miserable world the “boomers” “left” them, with the misery being expressed in terms of climate change, the changing economy and, er, Trump.

And the few times I engage on the subject I mention that I can kind of relate – when I was a kid, the worries were nuclear war and overpopulation.  Of course, there actually were nuclear weapons all about the place, including 25 miles from my hometown, and there were still famines happening.   The nukes are mostly gone, and the obesity is a bigger problem among the poor than famine for the first time in human history.

And our presidents – Nixon and Carter – actually were corrupt and incompetent (respecively).   So compared with the world I grew up in, my kids have it pretty decent.

But I digress.

I thought about the way the world – academia, entertainment, the media – seem to be wiring the younger generation to be a bunch of dysfunctional, whiny mopes when I read this sad, pathetic story about a guy of color who dumped his perfectly good white girlfriend because, well, read the story.

Or don’t.  Maybe you’ll be happier if your brain doesn’t rewire itself just a little bit wrong with that little bit of dysfunction.

Or make yourself a little happier by considering that if this is all the younger generation has to fret about, we’ve done a good job.

I confidently expect your Progressive readers to support Utah’s new law restricting abortions, under the theory of state’s rights the Left is using to propose restrictions on firearms.  Looking forward to it. 
Joe Doakes

Pointing out logical and moral inconsistencies in “progressives” is a little like solving Rubik’s cubes. You can do it a lot, and you can do it fast, and you an do it all day – and in the end, it’s pretty much just kept you occupied.

Here is Question One on the Mid-Term Exam for the 1-credit class:  “Making Literature Relevant.”
1.  Explain how China’s Social Credit system is completely different from, and totally superior, to the Puritan attitudes described in The Scarlet Letter.  For extra credit, describe why and how a similar system could be implemented in Minnesota.
Joe Doakes

MILLENNIAL: “Scarlet Letter? What’s a letter? Also – what’s Scarlet?”

Some think the admissions scandal currently in the news is a mortal blow to the importance of the Ivy League.
After listening to last night’s moronic “Westminster Town Hall” on MPR, featuring David Hogg – well, until I burned the radio out of my dashboard with a blowtorch – I’m pretty sure it’s the fact that Harvard invited him to attend.
Hogg’s address claimed the 2nd Amendment exists to protect “white supremacy”, and even linked it to “climate change” – further proof that Big Gun Control is entirely about logrolling the low-information, emotion-driven voter. He calls, naturally, for sweeping gun controls – and while polls show millennials are actually more libertarian on firearms than their elders, well, I’m pretty sure that’s why Big Left is funding Hogg and his fellow pocket fascists so heavily.
But let’s cut the crap, here.
————–
If you agree with Hogg, and want to exploit hysteria to ban a class of firearms that are mechanically indistinguishable from about 2/3 of the firearms in circulation, and are actually used *less* frequently in crimes, per capita, than any other – or, what the heck, ban all guns, as Hogg pretty much demands – there’s really only one route.
You’ve got to repeal the 2nd Amendment.
That means getting a 2/3 majority of the House and Senate on board. Even the current US House with its thin Democrat majority and growing neo-socialist caucus isn’t getting anywhere close. The Senate won’t, and never will – for reasons we’ll see in the next paragraph.
But you’re not done yet!
At the same time, you’ve got to get the legislatures of 37 states to call for the repeal. So far, I’m counting California, Massachusetts, New York, Connecticut, New Jersey, Delaware and Rhode Island, and maaaaaaaybe Illinois, Vermont, and even less likely Washington and Oregon. In the unlikely event they get every single one, that’s 11. The other 26 *will never happen*. And the battle over the issue would likely set in motion city-vs-outstate battles in NY, IL, WA, PA and OR that will make today’s red/blue divide look like a Mr. Rogers marathon, and perhaps even provide the final impetus for California to finally break up into 2-6 smaller states, 1-3 of which would likely vote “Molon Labe” (Kids, ask your friends’ gun-owning parents).
Think we’ve got tribalism today? You ain’t seen nothing yet.
So no. You’re not going to ban guns, or even broad classes of guns. Not legally.
————————
Of course, your other option is to just forget about that pesky Constitution, and go do it anyway. Which *will* – no “maybe” about it – lead to a civil war, one that’ll make the last one look like the Women’s March.
“Hahah, Merg, that’s Treason!”, some will say (indeed, have said). Perhaps, but not in the way they think.
Some greet that notion with a cavalier brushoff. “We’ve got the nukes!” says Rep. Swalwell. Huh. Let that rattle around your head for a bit.
Others – as long as I can remember – respond “What, you think you’re going to fight a tank with a rifle?” Which betrays a serious misunderstanding, I think, of who the military actually are, and where they come from. Hint: largely, not the political class who are pushing this sort of resolution.
———————
Take a deep breath and get real. Gun crime is down over the past 20 years by rates that, had they happened to cancer deaths or high school dropouts or DUIs would be considered modern day miracles.
Schools are 1/4 as dangerous as they were 25 years ago.
The US is NOT the most violent place in the world.
Stop being logrolled by emotional ninnies and the not-very-closeted authoritarians behind them, and get serious.

Some of my conservative – and in some cases “conservative” – circle of acquaintances are exercised over Ilhan Omar’s Muslim faith. Some of the more hysterical believe she’s the vanguard of an invasion bringing “Sharia” law to the United States.

In its time, the US has withstood attacks by the greatest empire the world has ever known, by international socialism, Naziism and Communism. A seventh-century ideology that can barely feed its own people isn’t going to conquer us. And Muslims make up less than half a percent of the American population; if they manage to impose Sharia on the other 99.5% of the population, the majority will probably deserve what befalls them.

But the problem with Ilhan Omar isn’t that she’s Muslim. It’s that she’s a “progressive“:

Ilhan Omar attended a 2017 conference in Istanbul with left-wing advocates, including a pro-abortion group that calls for “abortions beyond laws and borders,” and activists who aim to “challenge patriarchal structures.”
Rolling Stone recently lauded the congresswoman, who has repeatedly made anti-Semitic comments, as “everything Trump is trying to ban.” Omar told the magazine she was afraid to leave the country in early 2017 after President Donald Trump signed an executive order restricting travel from seven Middle Eastern countries the administration identified as terrorist hotbeds.
“I had just gotten sworn in [to the Minnesota Legislature] two weeks before,” Omar said, remarking on the executive order 13769, signed on Jan. 27, 2017. “There was lots of chaos, people being stopped at the airports. I had a flight scheduled a week after to speak at a human-rights conference in Turkey. I didn’t know whether I could go.”…The conference was in Istanbul, Turkey, which was not affected by the travel ban. Nevertheless, Omar used her upcoming appearance at the International Human Rights Defenders Conference, which was organized by the local Turkish government and the British Embassy in Ankara, as a cudgel to attack the president.

“Progressivism” will destroy this country long before Islam will.

“But she’s an anti-Semite!”

So are “Progressives”. Any antisemitism that comes from her Muslim background is an intersection with her real religion, “progressivism” – not an addition.

Is it just me, or are people getting worse?

I worked at a job once upon a time – decades before #MeToo – where the boss took a lot of indecent liberties, verbally if not physically, with the women at work. This was in the 1980s.

And he wound up as the subject of seven sexual harassment lawsuits, and lost his job after about a year.

Again – 1988.

And as I’ve slogged through three decades in the working world since then, I’ve listened to a lot of pundits bemoaning that there just aren’t enough female managers, and enough respect for women. I’ve also worked for a lot of women; my first field after radio, technical writing, was pretty much dominated by women. My current field, perhaps less so.

I’ve also heard few stories from women about predatory bosses and coworkers. A few, to be sure – I’ve had a few good female friends who’ve related some shocking stories of coworkers and sexual predation on at least a rhetorical level…

…all pretty much followed up by a visit to HR, and some sort of consequence for the guy, commensurate with the severity of the indiscretion.

Let me sum up; over thirty years in the workforce, and a generalized knowledge that there are consequences, at least in the civilized world (forget about ad agencies and showbiz) for guys acting like neanderthals.

And so since then, as I have watched the #MeToo “movement” make sexual harassment a part of the “national conversation” yet again (that’s right, kids – it’s not the first time), and read stories like this…”

All woman live on a spectrum of misery because, we can only assume, we are women. I have endured attempted rape, and sexual assault on public transport. I have been fired from jobs for not being demure or flirtatious enough (because only two female archetypes are acceptable, and both have terrible pitfalls.) On my first day of work at a famous newspaper, a famous male journalist invited me to place a cigar in a place from which no words come. I giggled, and that giggle – it was a tragic giggle – tells you everything.

via, ironically, “Unherd“

I’ve had to wonder – am I (or, really, the decades of female friends I’ve had in the work force) been unshakeable pollyannas? Have I managed, at random, to steer a course through the working world without encountering my share of predatory guys? Have I – who spent most of the past 20 years neck-deep in raising kids – just been too buried to notice?

It’s possible.

Or is it the industries that’ve spawned “#MeToo” – the “elite” reaches of showbiz, the media, academia and politics, where power is one of the perks (for men and women), and the sense of entitlement that comes with the career for people who’ve never really known anything else?

Or is it the current generation, the millennials who as adults collect grievances and diagnoses the way they used to collect Pokemon cards? And for whom, like the raft of fake hate-crime hoaxers that’ve plagued our campuses, the perception of grievance is the same as an offense?

It’s not a rhetorical question.

The barring and harassment of conservative speakers on campus – even campuses like Grand Canyon and Northwestern in Saint Paul, which recently got heartburn over Star Parker – isn’t just a series of random snowflakes yelling themselves hoarse:

Lefties call this kind of challenge a structure test. It’s an evaluation of capacity. Organizations (or people) can either pass a structure test, or they can fail. In the case of the [Grand Canyon University] challenge, [Young America Foundation] passed. So, the next question is whether YAF has the capacity and willingness to pass that structure test somewhere else for the sake of Parker, who is a less prominent name than Shapiro.
After that, the question will be whether YAF can pass that test again, and again, and again. It’s an unending series of questions: Are you willing to fight? How much? For how long? How many fights can you sustain? How many fights can you keep track of? How many lawsuits can you afford to file?

Even I lose track.

The answer?

Organize – finally, once and for all. Of course, it’s easier said than done:

First off, let me stress that this kind of organization isn’t something just anybody can do. Some people are better placed to do it than others. The ideal person to be involved in this work is somebody who’s active in her alumni network, was active in campus life as a student, and has a good number of healthy contacts, preferably among people who are active donors.
If that’s you: sit down and make a list of people you know personally, who donate time and money to the university, who are unhappy with the way things are. Call them up on the phone—don’t text, don’t email, don’t Facebook. You’re using a personal connection here, and the human voice is important.
Sound them out, make sure they’re on your side, then make it clear you’re putting together a group of donors who want to pressure the university to make it a better place for conservatives. They should ideally be of a variety of ages — that way their networks will consist of different graduating cohorts. Discuss what you’re doing, what your demands will be, and get people to sign on.
This is your organizing committee

Read the whole thing. It’s worth it.

How do you lecture the rest of the country about “racism” when one of the people in charge of your foreign policy is a corrosive racist who exudes antisemitism more often than Gerald Ford stumbled?

When you’re today’s Democrats, that’s a bit of a problem. House Dems put together a resolution saying “No Anti-Semites Here, Nossirreebob”:

The resolution, which began circulating to members Monday night, comes after a backlash from top Democrats who accused [Minneapolis representative Ilhan] Omar of anti-Semitism for referring to pro-Israel advocates’ “allegiance to a foreign country.”

Omar, not being the brightest crayon in the package, is doubling down:

[Congresswoman Nita] Lowey condemned Omar’s use of “offensive, painful stereotypes,” leading to a fight on Twitter as Omar dug in on her comments and was cheered by some on the left.
“Our democracy is built on debate, Congresswoman!” Omar wrote, later adding, “I have not mischaracterized our relationship with Israel, I have questioned it and that has been clear from my end.”

She’s “just asking questions” about all them Jiiiews.

Where have we heard that?

Good job, Minneapolis. We’re proud of you.

To: My Various Pro-“Choice” Friends
From: Mitch Berg, Disgusted Peasant
Re: WTF

So when we had our discussions over the years about abortion, I responded to your palaver about “women owning their bodies” with an incisive “Yeah, but let’s give some moral weight to the fact that the fetus is intended to become a human.

To which you responded “Look, nobody wants an abortion” – which seemed fair enough – and the ever-threadbare “We want abortion to be safe, legal and rare“.

To which I nodded my head, not really believing you believed it.

Monday, my misgivings got strapped to the top of a rocket and shot straight into the Capitol: the Senate failed on a procedural vote to pass a law that would have protected babies that were already born alive. Not inviable; not inches from emerging from the birth canal.

Alive. Human, even according to the infanticide industry’s orthodoxy of, it seems, mere weeks ago.

One after another, Democratic senators took to the floor to smear the bill as an attack on women’s health care, a baseless criticism that they failed to substantiate. In the process, they revealed their belief that allowing unwanted infants to perish after birth constitutes a form of women’s health care.
Senator Ben Sasse (R., Neb.) reintroduced his Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act in direct response to Virginia governor Ralph Northam’s endorsement of permitting mothers and doctors to let infants die of neglect. “The infant would be delivered,” Northam said, explaining a hypothetical case in which a woman in labor wanted an abortion. “The infant would be kept comfortable. The infant would be resuscitated if that’s what the mother and the family desired, and then a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mother.”
This “discussion” is what Democrats voted on Monday to preserve — a discussion not about health-care options for women but about whether or not to extend health care of any kind to newborn infants. With their votes and their speeches, 44 U.S. senators embraced Ralph Northam’s position, which, despite attempting to clarify, he has never retracted.
“I want to ask each and every one of my colleagues whether or not we’re okay with infanticide,” Sasse said at the start of floor debate on Monday. “This language is blunt. I recognize that. It is too blunt for many people in this body. But frankly, that is what we’re talking about here today. Infanticide is what [the bill] is actually about.”

I gotta say it – after the bloodbath of the midterms, I predicted the Democrats, in MInnesota and DC, would overreach.

As bad as the party of Tide Pod Eviita has been on soooo many issues, this one may be the nauseating acme.

That is all, baby-killers.

Planned Parenthood – bloodthirsty ghouls. Emphasis added:

In 2017, a Planned Parenthood client came forward to share her story of wanting an abortion at 22-weeks and seeking that procedure from Planned Parenthood. The abortionists at the clinic walked her through the procedure and stated if they were “to proceed with the abortion and the baby was to come out still alive and active, most likely we would break the baby’s neck.”
This practice carried out by Planned Parenthood abortionists in Minnesota directly violates the Born Alive Infants Protection Act, that states if the baby “breathes or has a beating heart” regardless of “whether the umbilical cord has been cut” or if birth occurred by “induced labor, cesarean section, or induced abortion.”
The Planned Parenthood client who came forward engaged in a two-day abortion procedure. On the second day, she had a change of heart and decided she wanted to keep her baby and continue her pregnancy. She expressed how insistent the abortionists were on continuing the abortion and felt “as if they were trying to sell me this abortion.” She finally convinced them to let her keep her baby and now has a happy and healthy child.

I try to keep calm and collected about this kind of thing, but my disgust is starting to grow claws.

Not-especially-seemly confession; I’ve never been to a strip club.

But there are a few photos circulating from thirty years ago that, I suspect, a few lefty social media gerbils would flog their nether bits into frenzies of microturgidity if they could find ’em; I’m talking with a couple of strippers in a bar.

We’re all working in the bar (including them – clothed. It was a promotion for the sleazy DJ service I worked for). And they were friends of mine; we shared a stretch of our lives working in bars entertaining drunks in widely varying ways.

I thought about that when I saw an article recently about a Buzzfeed piece in which the “writer” “slut-shamed” Tucker Carlson for sharing a friendly (literally, nothing more) moment with a “Sex Worker” at the funeral of a mutual friend. It was a display of the sort of moral cretinousness that today’s left is perfecting.

And the responses have been interesting; Big Leftymedia tittered like a bunch of fourth-graders (or perhaps fourth-graders titter like “liberal” “journalists”); in the meantime, the conservative commentary site “The Federalist” gave the woman a forum:

That it was made an issue speaks to the fact that a progressive journalist believed that a man to whom she has ascribed a belief system would be shamed by being in this photo. She attempted to call out his hypocrisy, as journalists so often do. But the hypocrisy didn’t exist. Moreover, if Aurthur, as a good leftist, has no problem with sex work then why would she have an issue with someone else not being troubled by it either?
Christina Parreira, the sex worker featured in the photo, found a place to speak her truth in The Federalist, a conservative outlet long derided by the progressive left for mostly vacuous reasons. The fact that a sex worker had to set the record straight in The Federalist about a Twitter-based kink shaming hoax speaks to the change that has been happening throughout our media. Outlets that were once considered to be beacons of free expression are now more prudish and censorious than the outlets they critique.

Their only real morality is “tear down the ‘opposition'”.