The Friday Letter / No. 485/ March 25, 2022
Several days after the New York Times admitted last week that it lied in claiming the Hunter Biden laptop story was “Russian disinformation” when it knew the New York Post story was indeed true, taxpayer-funded NPR continues to hold the false claim in a death grip. Here is a snipit of what you paid to have published by NPR public editor Kelly McBride at The Public Editor website:
Even if Russia can’t be positively connected to this information, the story of how Trump associates Steve Bannon and Rudy Giuliani came into a copy of this computer hard drive has not been verified and seems suspect. And if that story could be verified, the New York Post did no forensic work to convince consumers that the emails and photos that are the basis for their report have not been altered.
But the biggest reason you haven’t heard much on NPR about the Post story is that the assertions don’t amount to much. “We don't want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don't want to waste the listeners’ and readers’ time on stories that are just pure distractions,” NPR Managing Editor for News Terence Samuel told me. “And quite frankly, that's where we ended up, this was … a politically driven event and we decided to treat it that way.”
It’s comforting to know that the government 's house organ is protecting us from petty distractions like Hunter’s work for the Biden Crime Family.
Recall that the government's propaganda partners Twitter and Facebook censored the New York Post story, and corporate media giants like the New York Times and Washington Post refused to acknowledge that it even existed. Now only a hardened Biden acolyte could deny it with a straight face.
Will Biden's clever trick work?
Biden's puppeteers must be smug in thinking they've boxed in opponents of their affirmative action choice for SCOTUS. The thinking is that anyone who opposes Ketanji Brown Jackson is a racist because, don't you see, she is a black female and therefore unassailable.
Somebody noted a while back that Judge Jackson's elevation to the Court would do much more than maintain the conservative-liberal balance of 5-4. It would replace a principled and thoughtful liberal Justice Breyer with an activist ideologue whose rulings on the lower courts have been political, not constitutional.
Her answers in the confirmation hearings this week reveal her to be ideological in her opinions, thin in knowledge. She could not, for example, explain the legal principles of Dred Scott v. Sanford, arguably the Supreme Court's worst decision, familiar to any first-year law student. She said she wasn't familiar with the arguments. This is what you can expect when the prerequisites for appointment were based on sex and race, not constitutional scholarship.
With possible help from Senators like Romney and Murkowski and some other squishy Republicans, Jackson will likely be confirmed. She would join Justice Sotomayor in helping to transform the Court into just another legislative body governed by politics. How sad.
Though likely headed for SCOTUS, Jackson at least gives her Senate opponents some cover. On Wednesday she proved herself to be unfit for this or any other court when she couldn't answer Sen. Blackburn's straightforward question: What is a woman?
Blackburn: Can you provide a definition of the word “woman”?
Jackson: I can't. . . I'm not a biologist.
As Tucker Carlson noted Wednesday night, that is like saying you can't tell if it's raining because you’re not a meteorologist.
Judge Jackson might have suffered temporary amnesia. In her first day of questioning by the Senate Judiciary Committee she invoked references to women 14 times.
This is critical, because she may have to rule on a sex crime appeal some day. As Nicole Russell noted in a Daily Signal piece this week, “If 'male' and 'female' cannot be described, that leaves multiple expressions to be codified into law which would create loopholes for predators to abuse women and children.”
That's the intellectual problem with Judge Jackson. The political objection is equally important, her embrace of Critical Race Theory as a consideration in sentencing, and her support of the debunked New York Times 1619 Project. Lefty columnist David Leonhardt tried to deny this in his Morning Briefing email Thursday, but it's true. She said so in her confirmation questionnaire.
Election fraud update
An activist Arkansas judge who survived impeachment attempts declared four of the state's new election laws unconstitutional: curbing absentee ballot fraud, shortening the time to request an absentee ballot, restricting loitering near polling stations, and requiring voter identification.
Pulaski County Judge Wendell Griffen ruled in favor of suits brought by two leftist organizations, the Arkansas League of Women Voters and Arkansas United, an organization that supports amnesty and other rights for illegal aliens.
The Arkansas House attempted to impeach Judge Griffen after he joined a 2017 anti-death penalty protest in front of the Governor's Mansion and ruled in favor of a drug maker that sought to bar the state from using its products in executions. The Arkansas Supreme Court revoked his ability to hear capital cases and filed an ethics complaint, later dropped when the statute of limitations was about to expire.
We nosed around in the Arkansas Constitution and must admit we didn't read the whole thing. But our cursory inspection failed to discover any constitutional ban on requiring identification for opening a bank account, boarding an airliner or Amtrak train, visiting a doctor, getting a driver's license – or voting. We look forward to an adult court overturning this one. See more at the Arkansas Times.. .
Georgia's Election Board moves to secure evidence in its probe of fraud that handed the state's electoral votes to Biden in the general election and Senate control to Democrats in the runoff. It issued subpoenas after a whistleblower told an election integrity group about his role in a large operation that paid party workers $10 for each absentee ballot they delivered. Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger claimed victory for the subpoenas, even though he continues to deny fraud in the general election and faces a Republican primary challenge as a result. From a story at Just the News.
Short takes on the news
The Biden regime ratchets up suppression of independent reporting, detaining reporters from Real America's Voice TV Network at gunpoint at the border while 60 illegals stand by watching, unguarded. The network is a partner of Just the News. The Border Patrol didn't give a reason for detaining the reporters. The incident follows an announcement by AT&T's Direct TV unit that it is removing conservative voice One America News from its cable lineup. OAN has started a subscription internet service as a replacement. . .
Alliance Defending Freedom scores a First Amendment win when a court orders the State of Michigan to pay Catholic Charities' $250,000 legal costs, after the state agreed to repeal its ultimatum that the charity either change its policy on adoption and foster placement or close down. Catholic Charities gives priority on placement to a married mother and father. ADF challenged the order in a lawsuit. . .
Checkmate? Last year Harry's Razors pulled its advertising from a Ben Shapiro podcast after the show host opined that men are men and women are women. This week Shapiro fired back, launching his own razor company, Jeremy's Razors, “dedicated to the proposition that everyone, regardless of politics, deserves a good shave.” Its motto: “Shut up and shave.” – from Shapiro's column at The Daily Signal.
Joke of the year
Comedians complain that comedy is dead because satire, their stock-in-trade, is banned from social media. And so, Twitter just barred the Babylon Bee for naming Richard Levine, a divorced father of two who now calls himself Rachel, its Man of the Year after USA Today named him its Woman of the Year. Dr. Levine is assistant secretary for health in HHS who promotes chemical castration of boys.
And so we assumed The Federalist was trying to put one over on us with this story about Doernbecher Children's Hospital in Portland. We worried that Twitter might ban it for satirical hate speech. Turns out the story is dead serious.
The hospital, a unit of Oregon Health and Science University, operates what it calls a “gender clinic” where boys are taught to tuck in their genitals to keep them from developing and girls are taught to bind their breasts in similar fashion. “Tucking can reduce any concerns you have about your body, how your clothes fit and how safe you feel in public,” the hospital's “Safe Tucking” handout explains. See more of this absurdity at The Federalist – further evidence that comedy is no laughing matter.
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Recommended reading
For a contrary viewpoint on conservatism, see John M. Greer's piece on “petty conservatism” at Revolver News
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Please consider joining the discussion. The Left twisted itself into a knot this week after skeptics of Judge Brown's credentials asked to see her LSAT scores, which of course she refused to do. Suspicion of her legal intellect is understandable given her confirmation answers. LSAT may not be the best indicator of her credentials, but isn't it reasonable to want to know more about her? She doesn't seem to have a deep grasp of legal and constitutional principle, her rulings reading more like that of a legislator promoting a bill than a jurist explaining a constitutional concept. If Democrats think these questions are inappropriate, why were they so silent when Sen. Booker -- arguably the most obnoxious member of the Senate -- demanded to know if Brett Kavanaugh drank beer on a Wednesday during the summer when he was in high school?