We have been told what a devout Catholic President Biden is, and how former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi was a good, believing Catholic. President Trump, on the other hand, showed us how fake a Christian he is, because he almost never attended religious services. Clearly, for the left, being a faithful Christian of some denomination or other was a pretty good thing. Or at least it was until someone who is actually a Christian becomes Speaker of the House! Continue reading
Tag Archives: #AmandaMarcotte
Amanda Marcotte gaslighting on stoves
As we have previously noted, wealthy New Englanders renovating their homes on This Old House sure do love their gas heating and hot water systems, despite the climate activists and opinion columnists being given OpEd space in our major newspapers calling for bans on not just gas stoves, but gas appliances in general.
But it isn’t just the wealthy. For Season 42, the Dorchester Triple Decker in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston, the show worked with the owner of a working-class triple decker house which suffered damage from a fire. Unlike the very well-off homeowners we normally see on the show, this one had serious budget constraints, as the homeowner was not wealthy by any means, and the insurance settlement for the fire wasn’t huge.
And in the season 42, episode 23 show, the installation of the gas-fired heating and hot water systems — three of them, one for each apartment — was shown. The final episode, episode 26, showed that all three kitchens, one of which was to be rented not to family but a regular tenant, had gas ranges. We have previously noted that it “seems that almost everybody prefers a gas range,” even though the climate activists don’t want people to have that choice.
Naturally, with the recent stink about the Consumer Product Safety Commission reviewing gas ranges with at least a possibility of banning them, but with that report, both the commission and the White House hurriedly denied that such was anywhere under serious consideration.
Enter the very lovely and self-proclaimed foodie Amanda Marcotte, who took a far different tack.
“Gas stoves!” freak-out is the least convincing fake Republican outrage ever
Suddenly the party that despises kale and Dijon mustard wants to pretend they’re precious about culinary techniques
by Amanda Marcotte | Thursday, January 19, 2023 | 6:00 AM EST
“If the maniacs in the White House come for my stove, they can pry it from my cold dead hands,” Rep. Ronny Jackson, R-Tex., tweeted. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Tex. — essentially a chatbot that churns out culture war nonsense — falsely accused Democratic of being hypocrites for having gas stoves they never said they intended to ban. Gov. Ron DeSantis, R-Fla., tweeted out a stove-based Gadsen flag, declaring, “don’t mess with gas stoves!” So on and so forth. Very predictable and very, very dumb.It’s perhaps telling that Amanda Marcotte’s Twitter biography photo was taken in a bar.
There have been many thoughtful responses to this faux hysteria, carefully detailing how massive a lie it is, how no one is banning gas stoves, and how Republicans gin up these pretend panics to avoid talking about real issues. “Everything becomes identity politics,” Alex Shephard writes for The New Republic. “The right has long since stopped trying to come up with solutions to problems like climate change.”
Here’s where Miss Marcotte fails: conservatives have recognized that many of the articles I linked above supporting the elimination of gas ranges also called for the elimination of all gas appliances, particularly gas furnaces, in favor of heat pumps. Continue reading
Philadelphian Amanda Marcotte is very, very upset that 35 transgender people have been murdered this year, but doesn’t care about 496 killings in her home town
Unless she has moved again, and I missed it — something which is always possible — Salon’s senior politics writer Amanda Marcotte lives in Philadelphia. As of 11:59 PM EST on Thursday, December 15th, the City of Brotherly Love had seen 496 homicides officially, and with 110 deaths listed as “suspicious,” the total is doubtlessly well above 500. At least one other homicide occurred on Friday, but the Police Department do not update the homicide statics until Monday morning, so it’s entirely possible that the city will top 500 by then.
Yet, to Miss Marcotte, the important thing is hate crimes!
Republicans want to blame Club Q shooting and other hate crimes, baselessly, on police defunding
During Wednesday’s House hearing, Republicans minimized the role bigotry plays in anti-LGBTQ hate crimes
by Amanda Marcotte | Thursday, December 15, 2022 | 6:00 AM EST
“To the politicians and activists who accuse LGBTQ people of grooming children and being abusers, shame on you.”
During Wednesday’s House Oversight committee hearing on anti-LGBTQ violence, Club Q bartender Michael Anderson was blunt, both about his experiences and whom he holds responsible for the horrific mass shooting he survived. A combination of “inaction on gun reform” and “hate speech,” he said, led to that terrible night last month in Colorado Springs, where he “saw my friend lying on the floor, bleeding out, knowing there was little to no chance of surviving the bullet wound.”
Matthew Haynes, the owner of Club Q, testified that there is a direct line from Republican leaders who reject LGBTQ rights to the five deaths and massive trauma suffered by his customers and staff. Noting that “169 members of Congress” voted against a recently-signed law protecting same-sex marriage, he asked, “Are LGBTQ people not part of your constituency? Do you not represent us? While we wait for you to answer, we are being slaughtered and dehumanized across this country, in communities you took oaths to protect.”
Well, perhaps some of them represent the great majority of their constituents, many of whom do not accept the notion of same-sex ‘marriage.’
There were, as Miss Marcotte cited, five deaths in the Club Q shooting; that’s only 491 fewer than her adopted hometown has seen through her publication date.
Republicans on the Oversight Committee, however, had a different villain in mind to blame — for not just the Club Q shooting, but for the fact that the past two years have seen record levels of fatal violence against trans and gender non-conforming people. They pointed fingers at Democrats, protests against police brutality, and mostly non-existent police defunding.
Well, I followed the link Miss Marcotte gave us, and found this:
Sadly, 2022 has already seen at least 35 transgender people fatally shot or killed by other violent means. We say “at least” because too often these stories go unreported — or misreported. In previous years, the majority of these people were Black and Latinx transgender women.
The 35 transgender people killed? There had been 35 Philadelphians killed by January 23rd — 37, actually — of this year, but their deaths weren’t worth the notice of the political left.
What was I writing about in January of 2022? I was writing about The Philadelphia Inquirer’s far-left columnist Will Bunch, and his hatred not of crime, but of the police! I was writing about Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner, and his refusal to seriously enforce the gun control laws the city does have.
The left complain that so many ‘transgender women of color’ have been killed, without wanting to recognize that the majority of them were working as prostitutes, and tricking some frequently intoxicated johns into thinking they were real women.
Even beyond Colorado Springs, there’s little reason to think police “defunding” is shaping crime. As the Center for American Progress reported in July, “Democrat-run cities spend more money on policing than Republican-run cities” and of “the 25 largest cities, 20 saw increases in their police budgets from FY 2019 to FY 2022.” The slogan “defund the police” that was bandied about Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 never really took off with Democratic politicians and certainly hasn’t had much impact on actual police funding. For certain, some cities have attempted to reallocate police funding to prevention services, but in general, those efforts have been overstated in the media coverage given to the “defund the police” movement.
Miss Marcotte claimed that the failure of Colorado Springs to enforce the law against the Club Q shooter for his previous crimes, or use the so-called “red flag” law against him, wasn’t the result of defunding the police problems, without recognizing that while Philadelphia hasn’t defunded the police de jure, being around 600 officers short of authorized staffing levels has done so in a practical sense. Philadelphia is her (adopted) hometown; surely a political junkie like her can’t be unaware of that.
But she can be aware of the fact that she just doesn’t care about the crime which isn’t politically useful for the Democrats. She is appalled that Republicans in the state House of Representatives impeached District Attorney Larry Krasner (D-Philadelphia), due to his let ’em loose attitude when it comes to criminals and the city’s homicide rate, blaming it instead on Pennsylvania’s not-terribly-strict gun control laws, but she never did anything really radical like look at the numbers behind those laws. It was about Mr Krasner and “his anti-racist and progressive views on fighting crime,” without looking at the fact that crime has gotten worse, not better. She whined about the National Rifle Association standing up for our Second Amendment rights, after eight people were murdered in Buffalo and another ten in Boulder, blaming it on, you guessed it, evil white men:
The grim reality is that the entire nation is in the thrall to a minority of extremely insecure mostly white men who, drunk on decades of NRA-fueled propaganda, have decided that having the ability to commit mass murder at a moment’s notice is a crucial component of maintaining their manhood against the ever-encroaching threats from de-gendered Potato Heads and lady video game players. Most of these men claim exoneration because they don’t personally grab one of their many overpriced killing machines to lay waste to a grocery store or high school. Grotesquely, some even use these mass shootings to indulge in public fantasies about how they would totally stop an active shooter, though somehow they never seem to actually get around to doing it. But ultimately, they’ve become complacent in the face of mass murder from decades of being told by right-wing media that there’s a binary choice between preventing murder and watching Michelle Obama personally run off with their testicles in her handbag. Worse, the right has cultivated an overall suspicion of the very concept of concern for the lives of others at all.
On the day she published that, March 23, 2021, 111 Philadelphians had bled out their life’s blood so far that year in the city’s mean streets, the vast majority of them black, and the vast majority of their (too few) known killers also being black. Unless my math is very, very wrong, 111 killed in Philly, in her adopted hometown, is a larger number than the 18 victims she mentioned. While not in the daily homicide totals, the Philadelphia Shootings Victims Dashboard takes the information from the city’s Shootings Victims Database, and has noted that, from the beginning of 2015 through Thursday, December 15th, out of 2,779 fatal shootings in the city, 2,129, or 76.61%, were black males, with another 154, 5.54%, being black females.
Think about that: of 2,779 homicides by firearm in Philadelphia, blacks were the victims 2,283 times, 81.15%, in a city in which only 38.3% of the population are non-Hispanic black. And while Philly doesn’t make the statistics by race easy, St Louis does. Out of 191 recorded homicides reported on December 18, 2022, 170, or 89.01%, of the victims were black. Of the 141 identified suspects, 135, or 95.74%, are black.
According to the Census Bureau, only 44.8% of the city’s population are black.
What am I to think other than, when it comes to Miss Marcotte, and just as I have said about The Philadelphia Inquirer, black lives just don’t matter, not unless they are somehow politically useful to the #woke[1]From Wikipedia:
Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from … Continue reading left.
Robert Stacy McCain just published an article on his site, Crime is not just a statistic, adapted from The American Spectator, No Safety in Chicago: A daylight robbery highlights danger in urban crime wave. Somehow, some way, we evil reich-wing white males are actually concerned with the huge crime rate in our major cities, about black people being killed in the virtually normalized gang, oops, sorry, cliques of young men[2]We were reliably informed by The Philadelphia Inquirer that there are no gangs in the city, just “cliques of young men affiliated with certain neighborhoods and families,” who sometimes … Continue reading shootings, while for the oh-so-noble left, those things are normalized and ignored, because they just aren’t politically useful for the left.
The Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page is only updated during normal business hours, Monday through Friday, so the last ‘official’ report was 496 homicides as of the end of Thursday. I’ve already heard of two more, and I’m wondering: will the city hit 500 when the statistics are published again on Monday?
The left don’t like conservatives using the crime statistics for political gain, but conservatives can use the crime statistics that way for one reason, and one reason only: what the left have been doing simply has not worked. But for the left to admit that they have not worked is to challenge their entire mindset, their entire political philosophy.
So, they do the only thing that they can: they hide their heads in the sand and deny reality. For the left, they’d rather keep their governing philosophy, and if that means ignoring over 500 homicides a year in Philly, well that’s just what they’ll do.
References
| ↑1 | From Wikipedia:
I shall confess to sometimes “ironic usage” of the term. To put it bluntly, I think that the ‘woke’ are just boneheadedly stupid. |
|---|---|
| ↑2 | We were reliably informed by The Philadelphia Inquirer that there are no gangs in the city, just “cliques of young men affiliated with certain neighborhoods and families,” who sometimes had “beefs” with other cliques, so we must replace the term “gang-bangers” with “cliques of young men” or “clique beefers”. District Attorney Larry Krasner and his office seem to prefer the term “rival street groups.” |
I suppose that it is much easier to be a ‘progressive’ when you don’t look at the facts
One would think that an actual Philadelphian, even if she’s lived there only a few years, would have a better grasp on the facts in the City of Brotherly Love, but when that Philadelphian is named Amanda Marcotte, you’d be very, very wrong.
Hours before it was announced that Democrats have won a majority in the state House for the first time in 17 years, the lame duck legislature in Pennsylvania made its last stand for MAGA by impeaching Larry Krasner, the district attorney in Philadelphia. While understandably unknown to most people outside Pennsylvania, Krasner has become a favorite punching bag in right-wing media, for his anti-racist and progressive views on fighting crime. Republicans paint him as “soft on crime” and blame him for the rise in gun violence in Philadelphia, even though a likelier culprit is the lax statewide gun laws passed by Republicans.
As always, Miss Marcotte doesn’t look more deeply into the question. Pennsylvania law states is that no subordinate governmental unit may impose firearms control restrictions stronger than those under state law. Thus, while there might be a couple of tiny tweaks in there, the City of Brotherly Love is under the same firearms laws as the rest of the Commonwealth.
I lived in Jim Thorpe for 15 years, and during those 15 years we had two murders in Carbon County, one in 2004 and another in 2006. If there was another one, I never heard of it, and I did search through the data, which is, regrettably, by township and borough in the county, and found only the two mentioned. And, as I recall, neither involved a firearm!
So, if the problem is the Commonwealth’s firearms control laws, why are the homicide rates so very, very different in Philly?
I previously wrote that in 2020, there were 1,009 murders in the Keystone State, 499, or 49.45%, of which occurred in Philadelphia. According to the 2020 Census, Pennsylvania’s population was 13,002,700 while Philadelphia’s alone was 1,603,797, just 12.33% of Pennsylvania’s totals.
It got worse last year: with 562 homicides in Philly, out of 1027 total for Pennsylvania, 54.72% of all homicides in the Keystone State occurred in Philadelphia. Allegheny County, where Pittsburgh is located, was second, with 123 killings, 11.98% of the state’s total, but only 9.52% of Pennsylvania’s population.
The other 65 counties, with 78.11% of the state’s total population, had 33.30% of total murders. It should also be noted that in comparing 2018 with 2021, the homicide rate for the 65 counties which are not Philadelphia and Allegheny (where Pittsburgh is), barely increased, from 3.38 per 100,000 population, to 3.42, a 1.12% rise, in Philadelphia it jumped from 22.31 to 35.53 per 100,000 population, a 59.21% increase.
For some reason, a reason Miss Marcotte did not choose to explore, Philadelphia is simply different from the rest of Pennsylvania, at least in terms of its crime rate. Pennsylvanians in the rest of the Commonwealth are not shooting and killing each other at nearly the rate seen in Philly. Of course, to have investigated that more deeply would have been to ruin Miss Marcotte’s entire point.
As we noted on Friday, there’s more to the story. Under Mayor Michael Nutter, District Attorney Seth Williams, and Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey, Philly’s tremendous homicide rate was brought down dramatically. Sorted by total homicides for the year, five of the six deadliest years from 2007 through this year were under the terms of Mayor Jim Kenney and District Attorney Krasner. When Mr Kenney had Mr Williams as his DA, murders were significantly lower.
Mr Krasner’s campaign website itself tells people what we already knew: he doesn’t like to lock up criminals:
When Philadelphia voters elected Larry Krasner as its District Attorney in 2017, he promised to end the failed tough-on-crime policies of the past, work to support victims and the community, and hold the powerful accountable. He has kept his promises. It hasn’t been easy. Larry inherited an office committed to incarceration regardless of the cost, even when this policy endangered and devastated our communities.
But in just three years, he has upended the office culture and implemented policies that put people first. Under Larry’s leadership:
- The county jail population has decreased by 40% and this summer fell to its lowest level since 1985.
- The amount of time people will spend in prison has dropped by over 18,000 years.
- Years under probation or parole have decreased by 57% overall, 65% for drug offenses and 70% for property offenses in the most oversupervised big city, Philly, and the second most oversupervised state, Pennsylvania.
A rational observer might just wonder: have Mr Krasner’s ‘progressive’ policies actually worked to reduce violence and crime in the city?
Along with Chicago, New York and other racially diverse cities, Philadelphia has also become central to right-wing media efforts to blame crime on the Black Lives Matter movement. Even in his supposedly “serious” campaign announcement speech Tuesday, Trump made the grotesque claim that “The blood-soaked streets of our once-great cities are cesspools of violent crime.” In reality, the spike in crime in the past couple of years seems largely attributable to the pandemic. Gun sales rose during the lockdown and schools were closed, meaning the streets saw an influx of weapons and bored young people, an almost perfect prescription for rising crime. As the pandemic has begun to recede, homicides have also started to decline.
This is kind of laughable. Were people buying guns to shoot the SARS-CoV-2 virus, as one would expect if such was “largely attributable to the pandemic,” or was it because of the huge increase in the crime rate?
Now, it is true that the number of homicides is down, as I have previously mentioned, but, if the number of murders has decreased a bit, the number of attempted murders has increased: according to the city’s Shooting Victims Database, There were 2,107 shooting victims through November 16th of this year, compared to 2,069 people shot in the City of Brotherly Love through the same date last year. More people are surviving being shot, with much of the credit going to the Philadelphia Police Department’s “scoop and scoot” policy of quickly putting shooting victims into their patrol cars and taking them to the emergency room rather than waiting on an ambulance.
Again, had Miss Marcotte looked more deeply into the publicly available data, she’d have known that.
Krasner, for his part, is painting the impeachment as a direct attack on the right of Philadelphians to choose their own leaders. “History will harshly judge this anti-democratic, authoritarian effort to erase Philly’s votes — votes by Black, brown and broke people in Philadelphia,” he said in statement.
This impeachment of Krasner sews together two of the biggest and most racist themes that fuel the MAGA movement: A belief that anti-racist movements like Black Lives Matter are to blame for rising crime rates, and a belief that voters in racially diverse urban areas are “frauds” who are “stealing” elections from white conservatives.
While keeping in touch with my Pennsylvania conservative friends, I’ve yet to see any of them state that “anti-racist movements like Black Lives Matter are to blame for rising crime rates”. I’m the one who has been pointing out that, to the left, and especially The Philadelphia Inquirer, black lives don’t matter, not when talking about them might upset progressive politics. And if the impulse to impeach Let ’em Loose Larry is an effort to reduce the tremendous violence rate in Philly, the primary beneficiaries of such efforts would be black Philadelphians!
Miss Marcotte called Philadelphia a “racially diverse cit(y),” which is true enough, but only if you look at the city as a whole. As even the “anti-racist news organization” that is the Inquirer has reported:
- The eight-county region’s Black-white residential segregation is the fourth highest among the 20 biggest metropolitan areas, as defined by the Census Bureau. The region is the sixth-most segregated between Hispanic and white residents.
- Among the 30 biggest cities, Philadelphia is second only to Chicago in its level of residential segregation between Black and white residents, according to data from Brown University. Between Hispanic and white residents, it’s the sixth-most segregated.
- Considering every U.S. county that has at least 10,000 people and a Black population of at least 5%, Philadelphia is more segregated than 94% of them.
- While residential segregation between Black and white residents has declined nationwide over the last several decades, it’s happened much slower in Philadelphia. The city’s position near the top of rankings of segregated places has stayed almost the same since 1980.
These are things that one would expect a savvy political commentator like Miss Marcotte, who told us in 2019 that her boyfriend and she had moved to South Philly, would actually know something about the city in which she lives. If she actually read what is now her hometown newspaper, she’d have known that Philly’s ‘diversity’ is actually pretty superficial, but, once again, she doesn’t seem to look at these things in any depth. But, then again, to look at the facts in depth would challenge her progressive worldview and politics, and nothing which would do that should be allowed.
Amanda Marcotte loses it over abortion Not that we didn't know it would happen
It’s perhaps telling that Amanda Marcotte’s Twitter biography photo was taken in a bar.
While I knew that the left would wax apoplectic over the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, I was fully aware that Amanda Marcotte would go off the deep end far worse than some of the others. Miss Marcotte wrote:
As many who watch the Supreme Court closely suspected, it now appears all but certain that the draft decision was probably leaked by a conservative trying to pressure Chief Justice John Roberts into joining the majority opinion. That pressure, if that’s what it was, worked.
This is factually untrue. From the conclusion of the Syllabus in the Supreme Court’s release of the decision, found on page 8 of the document:
ALITO, J., delivered the opinion of the Court, in which THOMAS, GORSUCH, KAVANAUGH, and BARRETT, JJ., joined. THOMAS, J., and KAVANAUGH, J., filed concurring opinions. ROBERTS, C. J., filed an opinion concurring in the judgment. BREYER, SOTOMAYOR, and KAGAN, JJ., filed a dissenting opinion.
Translation: while the vote to reverse the decision of the Court of Appeals, 945 F. 3d 265, was 6-3, the Chief Justice did not join with the majority opinion, but wrote separately. While Associate Justices Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh also filed separate, concurring opinions, they signed onto Associate Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion. One thing is clear: Miss Marcotte did not actually read, at least not carefully, the actual decision.
It is also that, of the six justices who voted to uphold abortion bans, only one — Justice Clarence Thomas — was appointed by a president who won the majority of the vote. Both Trump and Bush obtained the White House, and the ability to nominate justices, because of the archaic electoral college system that overweighs the votes of rural whites and marginalizes the majority of Americans who support reproductive rights.
Again, this is factually untrue. While the younger George Bush received fewer popular votes than Vice President Al Gore in 2000, he not only won the popular vote in 2004, 62,040,610 to 59,028,444 for Senator John Kerry (D-M), but with a 50.7% to 48.3% margin, he won an absolute majority of all votes cast. John Roberts was appointed by the younger President Bush on July 19, 2005, which was in Mr Bush’s second term. Justice Alito was nominated on October 31, 2005, also during the President’s second term.
To compound the injustice of this, one of the Trump-nominated judges, Justice Neil Gorsuch, has no right to sit in his seat. He is only there because Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., illegally used his power as then-Senate Majority Leader to refuse to hold hearings for then-President Barack Obama’s 2020 nominee to the court, Merrick Garland.
“Illegally used”? I wonder: did Miss Marcotte ever claim that Senate Majority Leader Ton Daschle (D-SC) was “illegally us(ing)” his authority over the Senate’s schedule to deny votes to several of President Bush’s lower court nominees, stating that if they did not have the support of at least 60 members, the number required to break a filibuster, he would not allow a vote at all?
Of course, there is no law which compels the Senate to vote on any particular nomination. The Constitution, in Article I, Section 5, specifies that “Each House may determine the Rules of its Proceedings.”
Instead, in a direct violation of his constitutional duties, McConnell held the seat open for a year. All so Republicans could install someone who could be counted on to ram through endless amounts of reactionary policies rejected by the American majority that wants a clean environment, sensible gun safety regulations, fair labor laws, and human rights.
Senator McConnell took a real gamble, a gamble that the Republican nominee would win the 2016 election. At the time he did this, Donald Trump was surging and leading in the Republican primaries, and all of the polls had him losing against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. In refusing to allow Mr Garland to be confirmed, he was gambling that the (supposedly) more moderate Merrick Garland wouldn’t be replaced by a flaming leftist appointed by Mrs Clinton. We got lucky, and Mr Trump defeated Mrs Clinton.
And there’s no sign that the restlessness is going away. In his concurring opinion on Dobbs, Thomas openly invites lawsuits to challenge “all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell,” i.e. the decisions that secured the right to use birth control, the right to have sex with another consenting adult in the privacy of your home, and the right to marry someone of the same sex.
It is true that Justice Thomas has long been an opponent of the concept of “substantive due process,” not that Miss Marcotte has any flaming idea what substantive due process actually means, but it is also true that none of the other Justices joined Mr Thomas’ concurring opinion.[1]Justice Thomas concurring opinion begins on page 117 of the .pdf document. Rather, in the majority opinion, Justice Alito specified:[2]Page 66 of the Opinion of the Court, found on page 74 of the .pdf document. This is pointed out again on page 71 of the Opinion of the Court, page 79 of the .pdf document.
Unable to show concrete reliance on Roe and Casey themselves, the Solicitor General suggests that overruling those decisions would “threaten the Court’s precedents holding that the Due Process Clause protects other rights.” Brief for United States 26 (citing Obergefell, 576 U. S. 644; Lawrence, 539 U. S. 558; Griswold, 381 U. S. 479). That is not correct for reasons we have already discussed. As even the Casey plurality recognized, “[a]bortion is a unique act” because it terminates “life or potential life.” 505 U. S., at 852; see also Roe, 410 U. S., at 159 (abortion is “inherently different from marital intimacy,” “marriage,” or “procreation”). And to ensure that our decision is not misunderstood or mischaracterized, we emphasize that our decision concerns the constitutional right to abortion and no other right. Nothing in this opinion should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion.
Miss Marcotte has long claimed that evil reich wing conservatives want to take away the right to use contraception, but when she tried to document this in her book It’s a Jungle Out There: The Feminist Survival Guide to Politically Inhospitable Environments, the most up with which she could come is Quiverfull, a small sect about which Wikipedia said, “One 2006 estimate put the number of families which subscribe to this philosophy as ranging from ‘the thousands to the low tens of thousands’.”
Even taking the extreme position of Miss Marcotte that we evil reich wing conservatives want to ban contraception, it fails the logic test: while we might want our wives to bear us as many strong, fine sons as possible, we really don’t want our mistresses to get knocked up and cause us problems, or cost us child support.
Of course, if our mistresses are married to other men, we do want to get them pregnant, so other, weaker men will have to pay to rear our progeny. 🙂
Is there a sarcasm tag for the previous two paragraphs?
Of course, the author had absolutely no problem with vaccine mandates for COVID-19.
References
| ↑1 | Justice Thomas concurring opinion begins on page 117 of the .pdf document. |
|---|---|
| ↑2 | Page 66 of the Opinion of the Court, found on page 74 of the .pdf document. This is pointed out again on page 71 of the Opinion of the Court, page 79 of the .pdf document. |
Joe Manchin’s popularity soars in West Virginia Amanda Marcotte hurt worst!
My good friend Amanda Marcotte‘s second favorite whipping boy — Donald Trump was, is, and always will be her favorite person to hate! — Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) has been dropped by the writer as a frequent target of late. But I knew nevertheless that she’s wax apoplectic if she saw this story from The Hill:
Poll: Manchin’s popularity skyrocketed over past year
By Elizabeth Crisp | Monday, April 25, 2022 | 12:28 PM EDTSen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) is among the most popular senators in the country after seeing his favorability skyrocket back home over the past year, according to an analysis of survey data released Monday.
Morning Consult found that, even as Manchin has faced backlash from progressives nationally, about 57 percent of West Virginia voters viewed him favorably in surveys conducted from January through March. His popularity jumped 17 points — more than any other senator — compared to the same period last year. Continue reading
You’re despicable!
When Hillary Clinton derided half of the supporters of Donald Trump as a “basket of deplorables,” she created a meme that she hadn’t intended, with millions of people mocking her by calling themselves deplorables. Mrs Clinton later expressed regret for her choice of words, primarily because she was afraid it would cost her votes, but it was, fortunately, too late: following the 2016 elections, Mrs Clinton remained a private citizen.
One would think that Salon’s Amanda Marcotte, even as deeply unself-aware as she is, would understand that certain words used to describe your political opponents become words taht can be used to mock the speaker right back. So, when she calls Senators Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) “2021’s most despicable villains,” she ought to be prepared for the quote from Daffy Duck: “You’re despicable!”
2021’s most despicable villains: Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema
The vast majority of Democrats are eager to save democracy, yet these two ruined the party’s reputation with voters
by Amanda Marcotte | Tuesday, December 28, 2021 | 1:11 PM EST
When Joe Biden won the presidential election, many progressives were relieved Donald Trump lost, yet remained anxious about the future. After Trump attempted to overturn the election, even going so far as to instigate a violent insurrection on January 6, that anxiety only rose. The moment called for a visionary president, an FDR type, someone who was willing to tackle the serious structural failures that had opened the door to the current democratic crisis. Biden spent most of his career as a centrist with an unfortunate tendency to favor rich bankers over working Americans. It was hard to imagine he would have the moxie to fight for the democratic reforms and progressive economic vision necessary to truly stop what was increasingly looking like a growing and successful fascist movement in the United States.
But Biden’s actual presidency has been a wonderful surprise.
I suppose that depends on your definition of “wonderful.” From the wholly botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, to the inconsistent yet authoritarian response to COVID-19, President Biden’s “wonderful” seems more like a wonderful gift to Republicans running for office in 2022.
The famously atheistic Miss Marcotte would probably be aghast that I’m listening to Father Ray Kelly, a parish priest in Ireland, singing a version of Hallelujah at a wedding, while I write this, but I digress. Despite my bad ears, I can hear music if there is no other background noise.
- He went into office taking the threat to democracy seriously, studying “How Democracies Die” by Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt. His theory of how to meet the moment was a sound one: Prove to the public that democracy can work, and people will fight to keep it. So he focused his energies on passing Build Back Better, a massive social spending and economic reform package that was meant to be a New Deal-style rebuttal to the cynicism and disillusionment that allows authoritarianism thrive. There are reasons to criticize Biden’s approach — I certainly felt like he should have put more of a priority on shoring up electoral systems and imprisoning the coup ringleaders — but Biden was absolutely correct that any strategy to save democracy requires demonstrating its value to the public.
Despite Biden’s boldness, however, here we are at the end of 2021, with fascists ascendant and the pro-democracy majority feeling demoralized. Biden’s approval ratings have been underwater for months, with more than half of Americans disapproving of his performance in office. Biden’s theory wasn’t wrong. Saving democracy does require showing that government can work. But Biden isn’t doing that. On the contrary, the message most Americans are getting is that he failed, Democrats failed, and maybe it’s time to give up fighting.
The worst part of all of this is it’s mostly not Biden’s fault. Nor is it the fault of congressional Democrats, 96% of whom support Build Back Better and, almost certainly, some kind of bold democratic reforms to save election systems from Trump’s grubby little fingers. No, the fault lays entirely with two Senate Democrats, both of whom are awash in corruption: Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona.
Of course, what Miss Marcotte alleged was corruption was the normal business of candidates holding fund-raisers, and, shockingly, those fund raisers included people who are opposed to President Biden’s programs. Also shockingly, it seems that Senators Sinema and Manchin are supposed to represent the citizens of their states, all of the citizens of their states, and not just the Democratic Party.
In 2018, Senator Manchin was opposed in the Democratic primary by Paula Jean Sweerengin, a far more liberal candidate; the Democrats of the Mountain State rejected Miss Swearengin 111,589 (69.8%) to 48,302 (30.2%). Senator Manchin then went on to win the general election 290,510 (49.6%) to Republican Pat Morrissey’s 271,113 (46.3%).[1]Miss Swearengin won the 2020 Democratic senatorial nomination with 38.39% of the vote in a three-way contest, but was then defeated by incumbent Republican Senator Shelley Moore Capito in the general … Continue reading
In 2020, West Virginians gave 545,382 (68.62%) of their votes to President Trump, and just 235,984 (29.68%) to Joe Biden; the Mountain State was second only to Wyoming in the strength of its support for Mr Trump.
Senator Manchin, it seems, represents the people who elected him, the people of West Virginia, and not the national Democratic Party. And that Miss Marcotte finds despicable.
Miss Marcotte has found success with her “edgy” writing, but she has found success preaching to those who have supported her positions all along; actually persuading others has never been her strong suit. It’s not exactly an attempt at persuasion to label the two Senators “despicable,” “sinister figures,” “these two jackasses,” or “snakes in the grass.”
I will admit to a sense of schadenfreude here: it’s always a good feeling when Miss Marcotte’s political views are frustrated because, in the end, what she wants is just bad for our country.
References
| ↑1 | Miss Swearengin won the 2020 Democratic senatorial nomination with 38.39% of the vote in a three-way contest, but was then defeated by incumbent Republican Senator Shelley Moore Capito in the general election, 547,454 (70.28%) to 210,309 (27.00%), an utter rejection of liberal policies by West Virginia voters. Miss Swearengin left the Democratic Party in 2021, complaining that it was too conservative, for the People’s Party, a hard-left successor to a draft socialist Bernie Sanders movement. Yeah, she’s way too left-wing for West Virginia. |
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The left blame evil reich wing Republicans for lower vaccination rates, but black Americans are the least vaccine compliant
It’s perhaps telling that Amanda Marcotte’s Twitter photo was taken in a bar.
- I really wanted to get back to my spin class. And for a couple of months, I did just that. Exercising at home for the past year was fine, but nothing beats a 45-minute spin class for leaving one red-faced and sopping wet with sweat. But it’s that “sopping wet” part that became a problem this week when the gym sent out a memo bringing back their indoor mask mandate. This isn’t a 5-minute jaunt in a grocery store with a mask. Exercising with a sweat-soaked mask is like being waterboarded. So I canceled my class and sent a polite but angry note to my gym. Philadelphia’s new regulations allow businesses to choose between mask and vaccine mandates, and they chose poorly, penalizing those who did the right thing to coddle those who refuse. Masking the already vaccinated to protect the unvaccinated helps a little, but is a little like trying to cover someone in a rainstorm by holding an index card over their head.
Miss Marcotte is just hopping mad that her rights are being violated! Of course, she wants other people’s rights, their privacy rights — something, as an abortion-up-until-the-final-contraction supporter she otherwise strongly supports — to take a back seat to her being able to go to her spin class. When it comes to other people’s rights, she’s kind of like Dirty Harry. Continue reading
Who knew so many black Americans were Trump supporters?
The very perspicacious Amanda Marcotte, a senior political writer for the online magazine Salon, most certainly knows how things go! Continue reading