Althouse

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• Sunrise — 6:45, 7:00, 7:01.
• Mid-November foliage — 7:04 a.m.
• My hypothesis: The Bidens deliberately froze Kamala Harris's political career.
• If you read the previous post without thinking of the mask mandate...
• Hugh Hewitt writes "'Roe' will be overturned. The federal courts will go back to normal" in The Washington Post.
• "During the interview, Winfrey said she thinks women are going to feel 'liberated' by Adele choosing to leave a marriage that wasn’t working, rather than stick it out only for her child."

Sunrise — 6:45, 7:00, 7:01. Posted: 15 Nov 2021 03:43 PM PST

Mid-November foliage — 7:04 a.m. Posted: 15 Nov 2021 10:27 AM PST

My hypothesis: The Bidens deliberately froze Kamala Harris's political career. Posted: 15 Nov 2021 09:11 AM PST I'm reading this CNN article — "Exasperation and dysfunction: Inside Kamala Harris' frustrating start as vice president" — and reading between the lines. Read it yourself. It's very long. Too long to excerpt adequately. But let me know what you think. My hypothesis is based, first, on a belief that Jill Biden hated the way Harris treated her husband in that first debate. Let me cherry pick from the CNN article and quote just the things that reinforce my suspicion that the Bidens want to disable Harris: Many in the vice president's circle fume that she's not being adequately prepared or positioned, and instead is being sidelined. The vice president herself has told several confidants she feels constrained in what she's able to do politically. And those around her remain wary of even hinting at future political ambitions, with Biden's team highly attuned to signs of disloyalty, particularly from the vice president.... She could be just a year away from launching a presidential campaign of her own, given doubts throughout the political world that Biden will actually go through with a reelection bid in 2024, something he's pledged to do publicly and privately....  She can't start running unless and until he says he won't run. She can't compete with him.  Harris is struggling with a rocky relationship with some parts of the White House, while long-time supporters feel abandoned and see no coherent public sense of what she's done or been trying to do as vice president.... Defenders and people who care for Harris are getting frantic. When they're annoyed, some pass around a recent Onion story mocking her lack of more substantive work, one with the headline, "White House Urges Kamala Harris To Sit At Computer All Day In Case Emails Come Through."... She's perceived to be in such a weak position that top Democrats in and outside of Washington have begun to speculate privately, asking each other why the White House has allowed her to become so hobbled in the public consciousness, at least as they see it.... My hypothesis is that the Bidens want her not just hobbled but utterly deactivated.   A few more things: When Biden picked Harris as his running mate, he was essentially anointing her as the future of the Democratic Party. Now many of those close to her feel like he's shirking his political duties to promote her, and essentially setting her up to fail. Her fans are panicked, watching her poll numbers sink even lower than Biden's, worrying that even the base Democratic vote is starting to give up on her.... Suspicion has sprouted out of the bitterness. Last month, White House aides leapt to the defense of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who was being hammered with outrage by Fox News host Tucker Carlson and like-minded online pundits for taking paternity leave after the adoption of his twins in September. Harris loyalists tell CNN they see in that yet another example of an unfair standard at play, wondering why she didn't get similar cover any of the times she's been attacked by the right....  Buttigieg... is a likely challenger for the next open Democratic presidential nomination, whether that comes in 2024 or 2028....  Several Biden campaign aides spoke of putting "a blanket" around Harris after she was picked as the running mate last year, and advised against bringing on staff from her presidential campaign, though the final decisions around hires and structure were left at her discretion. That's left her with just a handful of current aides who knew her before she was vice president-elect, and they don't know her well.... In and around Harris' circle, they speculate that there must be someone getting in her way. Some think it's the President himself leaving her out in the cold, prioritizing his own agenda. Some blame specific West Wing aides whom they feel sure are out to undercut her...

If you read the previous post without thinking of the mask mandate... Posted: 15 Nov 2021 07:57 AM PST  ... explain yourself.

Hugh Hewitt writes "'Roe' will be overturned. The federal courts will go back to normal" in The Washington Post. Posted: 15 Nov 2021 08:05 AM PST Okay, I'll bite. Let's read it. I'm reacting in real time ("live-blogging" my reading): One of [the weight-bearing walls of constitutionalism] is a federal judiciary confined to its proper role, which is most definitely not that of reviewing state statutes having to do with the regulation of abortion. I'll just have to guess that he's positing this because he thinks abortion isn't a constitutional right, but he might be saying he doesn't think courts should protect individual rights from the choices of the majority or because he thinks only state courts should protect individuals from rights-invading choices made by state and local government authorities.  The high court has been doing it steadily since Roe v. Wade was handed down in 1973, but with its consideration next month of Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, the pattern is likely ending. Is that "likely"? I'd place my bet on the side of preserving the longstanding precedent, but we shall see.  "Out, out damn spot" is the perfect summary of the thinking of serious conservatives toward Roe, as well as Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the 1992 case that narrowed Roe. Out, out damn spot?!! That's what Lady Macbeth says — it's "damned" though, not "damn" — when she hallucinates blood on her hands after committing murder. How going insane perfectly summarizes the thinking of "serious" conservatives I don't know. And spare me the claim that your people's thinking is "serious." My son John recently asked on Facebook "What word do you think is overused?" and I said: "I have 3: serious, deeply, and garner." Watch out for it and you'll see the idiotic effectiveness attributed to the word "serious." If you're serious, demonstrate seriousness. Don't just tell me you're serious. And don't use "serious" in the "true Scotsman" sense, which is what Hewitt is doing with "serious conservatives." The serious conservatives are the ones who see Roe as a bloodstain that's driving them crazy (or whatever HH thinks "Out, out damn spot" perfectly summarizes).  Roe's Waterloo is, finally, at hand.... The subject of "reproductive rights" will return to the control of a self-governing people.... But what about stare decisis, ask my friends in both punditry and the legal academy. What about precedent, indeed? I'd no more be locked into bad constitutional law on Roe or Casey than I would be on Dred Scott v. Sandford, Plessy v. Ferguson or Korematsu v. United States — the notorious trio of worst Supreme Court decisions.... All 3 of those decisions cut against the individual's right. To overturn Roe would be to take away an individual right that Americans have possessed for a long time — a half century.  Whenever the court rules, I think the chief justice will be in the majority. Many conservatives [worry about John Roberts because of] the Obamacare decision... That remains a moment of judicial restraint of the sort conservatives should applaud: When a statute can be, it ought to be upheld.... Hewitt has been talking about confining judges to their "proper role," and here we see him framing that role in terms of reinforcing majoritarian choice. The implication — which he doesn't openly applaud — is that he and his "serious conservatives" reject the role of the courts in protecting individual rights.  Roe and Casey should be discarded because they are bad decisions that perverted the Constitution and took us all into the deep polarization we find ourselves in now. There are many causes of our polarization, and there's no changing the past. Would overturning Roe and Casey, after all these years, help us out of polarization? It would be a radical change. Want to take a flying leap at radical change? Is that what the "serious conservatives" want? When our courts decree, our politics decay.... That's a cute aphorism, but it's patently untrue. Courts take some things out of majoritarian choice. We all have our preferences about which things we'd like courts to leave to politics and which things belong to the decisionmaking of private individuals. Throw everything into politics — religion, speech, racial privileges, the treatment of the criminally accused— and you're going to get some crazy action. I'm not so much picturing "decay." I'm picturing growth —  ravenous, malignant growth.  Left-wing observers think this will be the ruin of the GOP when [the overruling of Roe and Casey] comes to pass. In reality, it will not hurt the party.... I certainly think it will. Look how Roe empowered conservatives. What will you do without that? And look how your opponents will exploit the overruling. Putting "In reality" in front of a bare assertion doesn't make it true. ... and will instead be the triumph of peaceful politics over raw power. Hewitt's side's politics is "peaceful" and the other side's politics is "raw"? No, I think he means that the "triumph" is over the Court — in its activist role, protecting rights. The Court will return to judicial restraint, rubber-stamping whatever rights-limiting choices come out of the democratic political process. It will remind everyone that states matter, that legislatures matter, that citizens matter. And kick them in the head if they thought rights matter. You will read much about Dobbs in the next few months, as the remaining tall towers of elite opinion — the watch fires of the overclass — are being pre-lit ahead of the oral argument. But the writing is on the wall. The elite are in towers and the writing is on the wall. There are "watch fires." Dramatic, metaphorical... but that all just means people are paying attention to this upcoming case.  The anti-Roe constitutionalists have been right that Roe has been doomed for the last 48 years — nearly as long as the 58 years it took Plessy to be tossed out by the Warren Court in Brown v. Board of Education. That's just saying I'm right. But obviously the other side also thinks it is right. It remains — and nothing in Hewitt's column refutes this — a question of who decides what happens within a person's own body, the person whose body it is or the larger group acting through legislatures. I would leave the individual alone to reign over her own body, even if there is another tiny human creature within her bodily domain.  I'm not as arrogant as Hewitt, so I don't declare that I'm right. Maybe I'm wrong. But someone has to decide, and pregnancy is an occurrence within one individual's body, so it seems to me there's insufficient reason to relocate the decisionmaking power and give it to the group. Stare decisis. Let the decision stand.

"During the interview, Winfrey said she thinks women are going to feel 'liberated' by Adele choosing to leave a marriage that wasn’t working, rather than stick it out only for her child." Posted: 15 Nov 2021 04:25 AM PST "'I've read where you said you weren't miserable, but you also knew you weren't happy,' Winfrey said. 'And so you wanted to bring a happy version of yourself to your son. Which I think is about the best gift anybody can give to their children.'"   From "The four most-personal revelations from Oprah's interview with Adele, from her divorce to weight loss to new boyfriend" (WaPo). Make yourself happy, because a happy version of yourself is about the best gift anybody can give to their children. True False It's not that simple!   pollcode.com free polls

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