Politics

Not too long ago, pro-choice activists wished for abortion to be “safe, legal, and rare.” Their argument was that no one was really pro-abortion but that the procedure was a morally complicated but regrettable necessity. In fact, they would have been insulted by the label “pro-abortion." The reaction to the leak of a Supreme Court opinion that would overturn Roe v. Wade shows those days are long past. Take, for example, a tweet from a rabbi scolding those who claim that “nobody is PRO-abortion!” Comparing abortion to an appendectomy, she answers her imagined interlocutor: “Both are life saving medical procedures Why wouldn’t I be ‘pro’ a life-saving medical procedure?

Can the left-wing hysteria over the Supreme Court's leaked opinion on abortion get any more ridiculous? Corporate media have claimed that the potential overturning of Roe v. Wade marks only the beginning of a slew of conservative judicial decisions that will ban everything from sodomy to birth control. "Next they'll go after gay marriage and maybe Brown v. Board of Education," Joy Behar postulated on The View. “They want to send us back to the dark ages,” 85-year-old woman Eleanor Oliver, who procured an illegal abortion in Washington, D.C. in the 1950s, told a Washington Post columnist. The justices who have reportedly endorsed the draft opinion have been called “barbarous and cruel.” The prospective ruling has been accused of racism.

I'm not ready to celebrate the death of Roe v. Wade just yet. The reason has more to do with baseball than it does with the Supreme Court. I'm a lifelong Boston Red Sox fan, which means I know what it's like to think you're about to win only to be crushed yet again. I remember well game seven of the 2003 ALCS when the Sox battled the Yankees 11 innings deep only for Aaron Boone to finish it with a walk-off home run. The next year, when Boston won the World Series for the first time since 1918, I didn't breathe until Keith Foulke threw to first for the final out. So it is now with Dobbs v. Jackson, the most important Supreme Court case of my life.

If you had "Trump goes to jail" in the office pool, you just lost. The end of any possible criminal prosecution out of New York over Donald Trump's finances has come as the grand jury seated to find them has sunsetted. The possibility of a civil penalty, likely a fine, looks poor, but anything is possible. This is all a long way from predictions that the walls were closing in back when these cases were initiated in the Southern District of New York (SDNY). Dems, dragging all their Biden baggage along, are going to have to beat Trump at the ballot box, assuming anyone can afford the gas to drive out to vote.

Bruce Robinson’s 2011 film The Rum Diary, an adaptation of Hunter S. Thompson’s novel, was a critical and financial flop. It’s doubtful anyone would remember it a decade later were it not for one salient feature: it introduced its star Johnny Depp to the actress Amber Heard, leading to what was initially one of the most glamorous romantic pairings in Hollywood. Yet after their separation and divorce, the fallout from their relationship has been immense, waged through a series of ugly and very public court battles that have laid waste to their reputations. After a court defeat in London, in which Depp sued The Sun for defamation after the newspaper called him a wife beater, Depp has now moved onto another expensive and humiliating legal case.

America's diplomatic corps is the latest victim of diversity uber alles. Choosing diplomats for the 21st century is now about the same process as choosing which gummy bear to eat next. But fear not, because the State Department assures us that America will have "an inclusive workforce that... represents America's rich diversity." At issue is the rigorous entrance exam, which once established a color-blind baseline of knowledge among all applicants and was originally instituted to create a merit-based entrance system. Until now, becoming an American diplomat started with passing this written test of geography, history, basic economics and political science, the idea being it was probably good for our diplomats to know something about all that.

Cockburn has the good fortune to be invited to all the right places. And one of the rightest of places on Palm Beach Island is the home of Beth Ailes, widow of the man that was the “I” in the masterclass book of persuasion, You Are the Message. On occasion, an invitation to a good liberal party comes Cockburn’s way. But they are getting few and further apart. He'll be going to the Coachella of mainstream moralism, the White House Correspondents' Dinner this weekend. (A subject for another missive). But for now let’s get back to Palm Beach, Florida, where the girls are pretty and the streets not gritty. The occasion for the party was Andrew Giuliani — son of America’s Mayor, Rudy — who was in town doing the political rounds.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer knows how to fix inflation: higher taxes. “If you want to get rid of inflation, the only way to do it is to undo a lot of the Trump tax cuts and raise rates,” surmised the New York Democrat to reporters on Tuesday, after meeting with West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin about the budget. “No Republican is ever going to do that. So the only way to get rid of inflation is through reconciliation.” Manchin saw it slightly differently, portraying tax increases as budget reduction tools. He believes debt reduction is “the only way” to fight an inflation problem that threatens to wash away Democratic majorities in Congress.

Beware of pundits bearing scare quotes Three days after the announcement of Elon Musk’s Twitter acquisition, the great freak-out over the future of the platform rumbles on. Amid many hyperbolic warnings about what the maverick tech billionaire’s ownership means not just for the social media site but for democracy as we know it, one argument sticks out for its perniciousness. It’s not the idea that Musk, a professed free speech absolutist, will under-police the social network and let the trolls run wild. Even if I think Twitter has been far too censorious in recent years, there is a reasonable debate to be had about how social media companies should police speech on their networks.

Murders skyrocketed in the United States in both 2020 and 2021, increasing 5 percent over 2020 and 44 percent over 2019, according to an analysis of crime trends released earlier this year by the Council on Criminal Justice (CCJ). That increase was felt the most in major urban areas, and affected black Americans more than any other demographic. Just don’t tell that to the corporate media. They’re still obsessing over supposedly deadly and racist police. The Washington Post recently featured a front-page story on an African immigrant family whose son was killed by police in Michigan. The angle was obvious: yet another example of how police in America are disproportionately killing blacks. Nor is this piece an anomaly at the Post.