It’s Wednesday, June 6th, 2018, the 74th anniversary of the greatest amphibious operation in history:
“…that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
“We few, we happy few, we band of brothers; for he to-day that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile, this day shall gentle his condition; and gentlemen in England now a-bed shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here…”
We, like you, will never forget their sacrifice.
Now, here’s The Gouge!
WE INTERRUPT OUR REGULARLY SCHEDULED PROGRAMMING FOR THIS NEWS FLASH FORWARDED BY GEORGE LAWLOR:
Though, considering the source (Newsmax.com), we’ll withhold judgment pending further developments.
We now resume our regularly scheduled programming.
First up, the WSJ puts some pointed icing on…
The Supreme Court’s Half-Baked Cake
Kennedy saves a baker from anti-religious bias he said couldn’t happen.
The Supreme Court ruled 7-2 Monday for a baker who refused to custom-bake a cake for a same-sex wedding out of sincere religious belief. Hold the champagne—this apparent victory for religious freedom may be short-lived.
As Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in legalizing same-sex marriage in Obergefell (2015), the “First Amendment ensures that religious organizations and persons are given proper protection as they seek to teach the principles that are so fulfilling and so central to their lives and faith.”Therefore, he predicted, the decision would pose “no risk of harm to themselves or third parties.”
Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission has forced Justice Kennedy to eat those words.In 2012 a gay couple asked Colorado baker Jack Phillips to bake a cake for their marriage, which at the time wasn’t recognized under Colorado law. Mr. Phillips refusedbut offered to sell the couple any baked good or cake off the shelf.Creating a wedding cake for an event that “celebrates something that directly goes against the teachings of the Bible, would have been a personal endorsement and participation in the ceremony,” he said.
The Colorado Civil Rights Commission ruled that Mr. Phillips had violated the state public accommodation law, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. A state appellate court agreed.
While seven Justices on the High Court held for Mr. Phillips, the majority decision could have gone the other way had some facts been different. Writing for the majority, Justice Kennedy notes that Mr. Phillips was “entitled to a neutral decision-maker.”
Yet several commissioners evinced overt hostility toward religion.One declared that “freedom of religion and religion has been used to justify all kinds of discrimination throughout history, whether it be slavery, whether it be the holocaust” and “it is one of the most despicable pieces of rhetoric that people can use to—to use their religion to hurt others.”
As is his wont, Justice Kennedy strains to avoid a clear and decisive ruling. While “religious and philosophical objections [to same-sex marriage] are protected, it is a general rule that such objections” don’t allow the denial of services “under a neutral and generally applicable public accommodations law,” he writes.
Perhaps the best that can be said is that florists, make-up artists, photographers and other people of faith have lived to fight another day. A ruling against Mr. Phillips would have been catastrophic for religious liberty, but the majority’s muddle provides only gossamer protection.
The American Civil Liberties Union gloated that the Court ruled “based on concerns unique to the case but reaffirmed its longstanding rule that states can prevent the harms of discrimination in the marketplace.” The message is that governments can punish religious beliefs as long as they keep their animus toward religion in the closet.
Justices Neil Gorsuch (joined by Samuel Alito ) and Clarence Thomas tag-teamed with forceful concurrences that would have gone further to protect the free exercise of religion and speech. Justice Thomas explained that custom-baking a wedding cake would have made Mr. Phillips “an active participant in the wedding celebration.” Invoking Court precedents that tolerated white supremacist expression, he notes that “States cannot punish protected speech because some group finds it offensive, hurtful, stigmatic, unreasonable, or undignified.”
Justice Gorsuch took the commission to task for applying a different standard in a case involving a baker who had refused to bake wedding cakes that criticized same-sex marriage: Civil authorities may not “gerrymander their inquiries based on the parties they prefer.”Justices Elena Kagan and Stephen Breyer defended the commission’s disparate treatment in their concurrence. While they agreed with Justice Kennedy that the commission had evinced bias toward Mr. Phillips, they said the commission could have legally punished him if commissioners had shown no overt religious bias.
Though Justice Kennedy rescued Mr. Phillips from the prejudice that he said in Obergefell couldn’t happen, the writing may be on the wedding cake. Four liberal Justices aren’t content with the right(fabricated though it is) to same-sex marriage; they want to coerce everyone else to celebrate itno matter their religious beliefs, and politicians will follow.
The fundamental constitutional issue may have to be settled by a post-Kennedy Court, while lower courts in the meantime will decide case by case whether governments can compel religious people to endorse conduct with which they (constitutionally) disagree.Masterpiece Cakeshop won’t go down in history as a legal masterpiece.
For more on the principled person at the center of an unprincipled, manufactured controversy which should never have been, we turn to Townhall.com‘s Guy Benson:
“…By way of background, here is a piece detailing the treatment Masterpiece Bakeshop endured at the hands of officious bureaucrats, relayed by The Federalist’s David Harsanyi:
It is worth mentioning that public accommodation laws have been on the books for a while. Phillips had never turned anyone away in his shop, and the incident at Masterpiece Cakeshop in 2012 went down before gay marriage was legal in Colorado, or anywhere else in the country, for that matter. In fact, at the time of the incident, Colorado’s constitution featured an amendment, passed in 2006 by a 56 percent margin, codifying marriage as a union between one man and one woman. (Disclosure: as a columnist at The Denver Post during these battles, I regularly argued in support of gay marriage.) The commission was not above retroactive punishment, however. At the time, being found guilty of violating civil rights laws didn’t only mean the end of Phillips’ life’s work. The punishment for refusing to make a special cake for a gay wedding was $500 and one year in prison per charge (jail time was only later amended out of the law when general public learned about the statute). The shop was not only ordered to alter its policy and start participating in gay weddings or else face debilitating fines, it was told to provide comprehensive staff training, ensure compliance, then file quarterly obedience reports with the government for two full years.
…Masterpiece Cakeshop would (and did) serve gay people on a regular basis, fulfilling nearly all categories of baked goods needs, for all comers. It would not, however, create custom cakes for same-sex wedding-style ceremonies ([again] this episode played out prior to legalized gay marriage). Masterpiece declined to make specialized cakes for events such as bachelor parties and Halloween, as well, also on religious grounds. Prior to the fateful 2012 confrontation, Phillips had directed same-sex clients to other bakeries for wedding-specific work, conflict-avoiding referrals that managed to avoid angry protests or lawsuits. (Sounds more than fair to us!)Crucially, the following context proved decisive, given rationale set forth in the High Court’s decision, handed down this morning:
In 2015, a Christian activist named Bill Jack walked into three separate bakeries, one an erotic-themed shop, and asked for each to design a cake in the shape of a Bible, with one side saying, “God hates sin – Psalm 45:7,” and the other, “Homosexuality is a detestable sin – Leviticus 18:22.” On another cake, Jack requested that the bakery inscribe a Bible verse on one side: “While we were yet sinners Christ died for us – Romans 5:8” and on the other “God loves sinners.”In all instances, the proprietors refused to take the project. And why should any American be forced to create something that clashes against their conscience?So Jack, obviously hoping to prove a point, filed a complaint with the Colorado Civil Rights Commission. Christians, after all, are also ostensibly a protected class in the state. What to do? Well, the commission decided that bakers who discriminate against Christians were offended by content of the message and not the patron’s Christianity. At the same time, the commission claimed the opposite was true for Phillips, whom they asserted wasn’t offended by the gay wedding cake itself but rather by the sexual orientation of the couple.
‘Pro-gay’ cake makers’ consciences were protected by Colorado’s panel of civil rights arbitrators, whereas ‘anti-gay’ cake makers were forced into compelled, conscience-violating expression.Why? Because the commissioners claimed to have divined the root intentions behind each defendant’s professed objections.It was thisdisparate treatment, and the state-level bureaucrats’ undisguised hostility toward Mr. Phillips’ religious beliefs, that served as a key underpinning of today’s SCOTUS result. I’ll repeat: The clear good news for First Amendment advocates is that Colorado’s aggressive bureaucrats were handed a richly-deserved rebuke by seven justices.However, the Courtpunted on the key questionof whether, under parallel circumstances, another government tribunal could constitutionally mandate a similarly-situated small business (a baker, or florist, or photographer) to provide its artistic services to a same-sex wedding…
…If another commission were to reach the exact same conclusion as Colorado’s, while sufficiently disguising or neutralizing its antipathy for orthodox Christian beliefs (Colorado’s arrogant crew didn’t even attempt to do so, and thus received quite a lashing from the justices) and applying its standards more evenly, would that pass constitutional muster?The unsatisfying news in today’s decision is that we don’t know the answer to that question, which the Court left open. The justices chose not to establish a landmark, binding precedent in this case; that task has evidently been left for another day. Essentially, religious liberty defenders have been handed a short-term victory, coupled with a longer-term question mark…”
Here’s the juice: this entire sordid episode was a set-up. Stay tuned: the opposition is playing for keeps!
Next up, as Jim Geraghty notes at his Morning Jolt, we stand corrected: Bill Clinton’s just as twisted and bitter as his harpy other-half and moonbat offspring:
Bill Clinton assures us that he was the hero during the impeachment and scandal relating to his affair with Monica Lewinsky: “Former President Bill Clinton spoke out about the MeToo movement and the Monica Lewinsky scandal as NBC’s Craig Melvin sat down with him and author James Patterson, saying, “If the facts were the same, I wouldn’t” act differently today than he did at the time. “A lot of the facts have been conveniently omitted,” he says. “I defended the Constitution.” (Though how masturbating into a door jamb in the Oral Orifice and lying under oath constitutes defending the Constitution remains rather murky, primarily because NBC’s Craig Melvin failed to ask what inquiring minds would want to know!)
Rarely do you see such a symphony of hypocrisy and not-so-suppressed rage.
“I think partly they’re frustrated that they’ve got all of these serious allegations against the current occupant of the Oval Office, and his voters don’t seem to care,” Clinton says in the interview.
Whoa, whoa, whoa. There are a lot of people in this world who can complain about Donald Trump and the numerous allegations of gross sexual harassment and abuse surrounding him,(all prior to him entering the Oval Office!)and the fact that a significant portion of the presidents’ supporters either refuse to believe the allegations or dismiss them as unimportant. But Bill Clinton doesn’t get to make the complaint about the public not taking allegations of presidential sexual misconduct seriously enough. Dear God, have some self-awareness, man.
Clinton also has the audacity to declare, “I like the MeToo movement; it’s way overdue.”
Clinton gets surprisingly combative with NBC’s Melvin: “You, typically, have ignored gaping facts in describing this, and I’ll bet you don’t even know them. This was litigated 20 years ago. Two-thirds of the American people sided with me. They were not interested in that. I had a sexual-harassment policy when I was governor in the Eighties. I had two women chiefs of staff when I was governor. Women were over-represented in the attorney general’s office in the Seventies. You are giving one side and omitting facts.”
Do facts gape?
Clinton really fumes about being asked about this. “You think President Kennedy should have resigned? Do you believe President Johnson should have resigned? Someone should ask you these questions, because of the way you formulate the questions. I dealt with this 20 years ago, plus, and two-thirds of the American people stayed with me.” (Note how the purported ignorance or lack of interest by a portion of the “American people” somehow constitutes a legal defense!)
Clinton was on The Today Show to promote his new book, a thriller co-written with one-man-publishing-machine James Patterson, entitled “The President Is Missing.” The New York Times finds some…odd plot choices:
Readers may wonder why the authors decide early on to kill off the first lady, who was a brilliant law student when she first dazzled Duncan, and why some of her last words were: “Promise me you’ll meet someone else, Jonathan. Promise me.”
Wonder how Hillary Clinton…
…felt about that passage.
We’re going to go out on a limb and say, “pretty pissed off”!!!
Speaking of Dimocrats looking to rewrite history, at his Best of the Web, Jim Freeman observes the curious dichotomy of…
“The outrage over President Trump’s Friday jobs tweet may be fake, but there’s a real issue here over the way our government should communicate.
Here’s the story: On Friday, more than an hour before the release of the Department of Labor’s monthly jobs report, the President tweeted, “Looking forward to seeing the employment numbers at 8:30 this morning.” The report turned out to include plenty of good news—more job creation than expected and an encouraging increase in wages, particularly for those on the lower rungs of the economic ladder.But the President’s vague early tweet sparked an intense reaction from former aides to his predecessor and from many members of the press corps.
“Trump Touts Jobs Report Before Official Release, Breaking Protocol,” announced a New York Times headline on Friday. It was just one of many reports focusing on the President’s early tweet.
President Trump “has proven he cannot be trusted with the information,” proclaimed former Obama White House aide Aaron Sojourner.
Jason Furman, who served as Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers during President Obama’s second term, addresses the issue with an op-ed in the Journal:
If—69 minutes before the numbers were set to be released—President Obama had signaled via Twitter that they were going to be great, I’d have been shocked.
A president who signals advance news about economic data invites concern that he also is bragging about the good news privately, which could result in the information’s exploitation for enormous private gain by some well-connected investor.
The handling of such data certainly requires great care. But it’s not clear just how shocking such an event would have been during Mr. Obama’s second term. Mr. Furman has raised—without evidence—the possibility that Mr. Trump might privately share non-public jobs data. What about Mr. Obama?
While disclosures of economic data are rare, they aren’t unprecedented. In February 2009, with the U.S. economy in crisis and Congress debating a stimulus package, then-Senate majority leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.) heard from Mr. Obama around midnight that the following morning’s jobs report numbers “would be somewhat scary,” he told the Senate after the report’s release. The Labor Department reported a loss of 598,000 jobs in January.
And Harry Reid was not alone.The Congressional Record for February 6, 2009includes the relevant passagefrom Mr. Reid’s remarks on the Senate floor about his talk with then-President Obama:
Mr. REID. Mr. President (that’s the President of the Senate, not POTUS), around midnight last night I was in conversation with the President and some others, and the President indicated that this morning, unemployment numbers would come out, and they would be somewhat scary. That was absolutely true. At 8:30 this morning, the unemployment numbers were reported for January, and they hit a 16-year high of 7.6 percent.
Who were the others? And did they talk to anyone else about the jobs report between the time they heard about it from Mr. Obama and its formal release?
As it happens Mr. Obama had been discussing the forthcoming release long before midnight. On February 5, 2009, the Associated Press reported that in remarks to employees at the Department of Energy, Mr. Obama said, “Tomorrow, we’re expecting another dismal jobs report on top of the 2.6 million jobs that we lost last year.We’ve lost 500,000 jobs each month for the last two months.”
The same day, a Congressional Quarterly transcript quotes Mr. Obama offering similar remarks at a gathering of the House Democratic Caucus.
Five months later in July of 2009, according to a speech transcript from Congressional Quarterly, Mr. Obama said that “when we receive our monthly jobs report next week, it’s likely to show that we’re still continuing to lose far too many jobs.”
But many people who worked for Mr. Obama seem unaware of this history.Former Obama Director of the National Economic Council and current Harvard professor Larry Summersrespondedto Mr. Trump’s Friday tweet with a tweet of his own:
If during the Clinton or Obama Administrationsthere had been a statement from @POTUS or anyone senior official in the morning before the Employment Report it would have been a major scandal—with all sorts of investigations following on.
On Sunday he added:
It’s extraordinary that premature Presidential observations on sensitive data releases are barely newsworthy in 2018, given all else that @POTUS is doing.
They were certainly not considered newsworthy in 2010 to most of the press corps…”
Not to mention The Great Divider’s disciples!
Since we’re on the subject of The Obamao’s disciples, in today’s installment of the Environmental Moment, with the emphasis on “mental“, as this piece from The Washington Times courtesy of Tom Bakke records…
Think about it: lacking proper training, as clearly demonstrated by the photo above, a number of our sailors are incapable of effectively handling their vessels; a significant portion of the aircraft in every branch of our Military are grounded owing to deferred maintenance and a lack of spare parts; our ground forces are overextended and often under-equipped.
Yet the Pentagon, under “Mad Dog” Mattis, continues to expend time, energy and money combatting climate change.
This snippet from the Times article says it all:
“One of the biggest risks in the U.S., officials say, is Naval Station Norfolk, a century-old landmark military installation that houses the Atlantic Fleet and now is at perpetual risk of flooding.
“Superstorm Sandy was a wake-up call for a lot of people,” said Tom Hicks, who spent seven years at the Pentagon, including two stints as acting undersecretary of the Navy. Had the 2012 storm “hit Norfolk, the world’s largest naval complex, I don’t know what that would’ve done for our forces.It would have been absolutely tragic.”
Despite not having the faintest clue “what it would have done”, Hicks is nonetheless darned certain the impact “would have been absolutely tragic“.
Yeah,…
Hurricane Sandy barely reached status as a Category 1, with sustained winds of only 80 mph when it made landfall in New Jersey. The storm’s impact was heightened by a full moon, which served to significantly increase Sandy’s storm surge, not to mention it hit one of the most densely populated areas of the country.
If a “wake-up” call for the threat posed to coastal areas by hurricanes were truly needed, we’d have thought the great Galveston Hurricane of 1900 would have served the purpose; not to mention Hurricane Isabel, which in 2003 drove directly through Hampton Roads and the Norfolk Naval Base with sustained winds of 115 mph and a resultant storm surge which flooded downtown Baltimore and the U.S. Naval Academy…yet somehow failed to significantly impact operations at the Norfolk Naval Base.
It’s worth noting…
“Mr. Hicks now serves as a founding principal at The Mabus Group, an advisory firm founded by former Navy Secretary Ray Mabus(The worst SecNav ever to curse the Navy) who was one of the most outspoken Pentagon officials on climate issues during his tenure“
So Hicks, a former undersecretary of the Navy, now works with a former Secretary of the Navy advising the Pentagon on the continuing need to combat climate change. Any chance The Mabus Group is receiving significant fees for their “advice”?!? No conflict of interest to see here, folks…move along!
In a related item from the WSJ, Steve Hayward suggests the scam of…
“Climate change is over. No, I’m not saying the climate will not change in the future, or that human influence on the climate is negligible (Though WE are!). I mean simply that climate change is no longer a pre-eminent policy issue. All that remains is boilerplate rhetoric from the political class, frivolous nuisance lawsuits, and bureaucratic mandates on behalf of special-interest renewable-energy rent seekers.
Judged by deeds rather than words, most national governments are backing away from forced-marched decarbonization. You can date the arc of climate change as a policy priority from 1988, when highly publicized congressional hearings first elevated the issue, to 2018. President Trump’s ostentatious withdrawal from the Paris Agreement merely ratified a trend long becoming evident.
A good indicator of why climate change as an issue is over can be found early in the text of the Paris Agreement. The “nonbinding” pact declares that climate action must include concern for “gender equality, empowerment of women, and intergenerational equity” as well as “the importance for some of the concept of ‘climate justice.’ ”Another is Sarah Myhre’s address at the most recent meeting of the American Geophysical Union, in which she proclaimed that climate change cannot fully be addressed without also grappling with the misogyny and social injustice that have perpetuated the problem for decades.
The descent of climate change into the abyss of social-justice identity politics represents the last gasp of a cause that has lost its vitality.Climate alarm is like a car alarm—a blaring noise people are tuning out…”
Which brings us, appropriately enough, to The Lighter Side:
Finally, we’ll call it a day with the SOME Signs Deserve Your Full Attention segment, and this just in from the U.K.’s The Sun:
“A swimmer has died after a shark ripped off his penis and part of his leg as he swam in the sea in Brazil. Jose Ernestor da Silva was attacked yesterday afternoon while bathing in waters off the Piedade beach near Recife, on Brazil’s north-east coast.
…Rodrigo Matias, from Recife’s fire department, said Mr Ferreira was swimming with his brother and friends in deep waters near the shore, in an area marked by signs warning of shark attacks. Seeing that the group was drifting further out, lifeguards called for them to return to shallower waters. He said: “At the exact moment in which the lifeguards asked for them to come closer to the beach, he was bitten.”
…It is the second time in less than two months that a shark attack has left a swimmer in a critical condition at the same beach in the Jabotao de Guararapes district of greater Recife. On April 15, 35-year-old Pablo de Melo had to have a leg and a hand amputated after being attacked by a shark at almost the exact same spot…”
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