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On the day after the presidential election, Amy Coney Barrett, now beginning her career as a Supreme Court justice, will hear oral arguments in one of the most significant civil rights cases to come before the Court in decades. The case is Fulton v. Philadelphia. The point of contention in the case could hardly be more sensitive, since it pits the protection of religious freedom against the interests of same-sex couples — and the context is the foster care of children. Its journey to the nation’s highest court has been long and bitter. In 2018, city officials in Philadelphia insisted that the Catholic Archdiocese of Philadelphia’s foster care agency certify same-sex married couples as foster parents.

Last week we learned that Pope Francis has torn up the Catholic Church’s teaching that same-sex civil partnerships are gravely immoral. This week he will be rooting for the pro-abortion candidate in the US presidential election. These two surreal developments are causing distress bordering on spiritual despair to conservative American Catholics. Whether you feel any sympathy for them depends on your point of view. The Pope, it is safe to say, is unlikely to lose any sleep over the matter. Francis dislikes the United States in general and its president in particular. That’s not surprising; so do most Argentinians. What is surprising is the depth of his contempt for conservative American Catholics.

American journalism has lost its bearings, and we are all paying the price. For the past four years, egged on by President Trump, mainstream news swiftly descended past the first circle of hell — subtle partisanship — and reached a far darker, hotter one: blatant favoritism, stories killed for purely partisan reasons and occasional propaganda masquerading as solid news.Journalism’s decline mirrors that of other American institutions, but it has compounded the social damage. A thriving democracy depends on free and open debate and informed debate depends on trustworthy news. For most Americans, that trust has evaporated.The Washington Post is exactly right when it says, ‘Democracy dies in darkness.

Donald Trump made a lot of promises during the 2016 campaign. Four years later, it has been mostly a relief to see them all broken. There's the ‘big, beautiful’ border wall, still largely a figment of the President's imagination (as was Mexico's interest in paying for it.) A plan to replace the Affordable Care Act, supposedly just around the corner for years, clearly does not exist. And despite much bloviating to the contrary, multiple Hillary Clinton sightings in the months and years following the election confirm that she is not, in fact, locked up. But perhaps most importantly, Trump made a lot of noise about extricating America from endless wars — instead, he's left us embedded in a brand new one. The Culture Wars are our new Forever War.

It’s been a full week since the New York Post published their first story about Hunter Biden’s laptop, which is currently in FBI possession. The purported contents of the laptop which were released selectively in several news stories by the Post include private emails and photographs. These have yet to be proven as forgeries or inauthentic. Swiftly cable news pundits and liberal-leaning journalists began wondering whether the laptop, the repair service in Delaware, or the source of the leak to the Post were part of a foreign campaign to influence the presidential election. But the DNI, FBI, DOJ and State Department all said there was no evidence to support those theories.

Jeffrey Toobin is a man much wronged. On Monday, the New Yorker writer was suspended by the magazine for which he’s written for two decades, and took a leave of absence from CNN, where’s he served as a legal affairs analyst since 2002. What possible sin could he have committed that forced these pillars of the media establishment to sideline a bonafide star with the presidential election less than two weeks away and Team Joe Biden needing every hand on deck? Toobin masturbated during a Zoom video conference in which he and his colleagues fantasized about forcibly removing Donald Trump from office and throwing him in jail. In other words, Toobin is being punished for having the precise response that the exercise was designed to elicit.

It's been a bad couple of years for Jeffreys... Veteran New Yorker reporter Jeffrey Toobin has been suspended from the magazine after he 'exposed himself during a Zoom call last week', according to VICE. Toobin, who also serves as a CNN legal analyst, must have been reaching for the tissues as he described the incident as an 'embarrassingly stupid mistake' and offered an apology to his 'wife, family, friends and co-workers' in a statement. Cockburn is perhaps most surprised that Toobin is the first significant figure to be caught out during a video-conference, seven months into the COVID pandemic. What took us? Naturally, Twitter users have been having a field day with the story: https://twitter.com/rysimmons/status/1318266346610765829 https://twitter.