SEE IT: Nancy Pelosi EXPLODES in anger after she's reminded there was a global pandemic that led to job losses under Trump and that Biden has not done really much. WATCH
— Simon Ateba (@simonateba) April 29, 2024
VIDEO: MSNBC pic.twitter.com/DruxLozTsS
April 30, 2024
"If you want to be an apologist for Donald Trump, that may be your role, but it ain't mine."
"Your job is to be clever and agile enough that wherever they put the gates, I'm gonna make the gate."
🇺🇸SEINFELD: EXTREME LEFT HAS DESTROYED COMEDY
— Mario Nawfal (@MarioNawfal) April 29, 2024
“Used to be you would go home at the end of the day, and most people would go:
'Oh, Cheers is on, or Mash, or All in the Family.’
You just expected there'll be some funny stuff we can watch on TV tonight.
Well guess what? Where… pic.twitter.com/JWp2Jyf4DO
"If you break it down, there’s actually so many steps that are involved with showering...."
From "Why Is It So Hard to Shower When I’m Depressed? Issues with hygiene are common symptoms of depression. Here’s why, and how to make bathing a little easier" (NYT).
"There is a long and honorable history of civil disobedience in the United States, but true civil disobedience ultimately honors and respects the rule of law."
Writes David French, in "Colleges Have Gone off the Deep End. There Is a Way Out" (NYT).
Reading poetry out loud "can induce peak emotional responses... that might include goose bumps or chills. "
Writes Alexandra Moe, in "We’re All Reading Wrong/To access the full benefits of literature, you have to share it out loud" (The Atlantic).
April 29, 2024
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit holds that that state health-care plans must cover transgender surgery.
Judge Roger Gregory, writing for the majority, called the restrictions “obviously discriminatory” based on both sex and gender....
[The] states insisted that there was no bias in their coverage limitations, only cost concerns; trans patients, they argued, were entitled only to the same health treatments as everyone else but not specialized care....
The court [wrote that] cost-cutting could not justify covering the same treatments for health concerns other than gender dysphoria. For example, the court noted, the contested plans covered mastectomies for cancer patients but not for trans women....
Mastectomies for cancer patients but not for trans women? Don't they mean mastectomies for cancer patients but not for trans men?! The Washington Post is having trouble keeping up, just like the people it looks down on.
ADDED: The article now has a correction: "An earlier version of this story reported that the contested insurance plans covered mastectomies for cancer patients but not for trans women. The plans covered mastectomies for all cancer patients, but did not cover the procedure for trans men who wanted their breasts removed to treat gender dysphoria."
New York Magazine offers what it says are the top 3 reasons why Kristi Noem is telling us that she killed her dog.
Theory No. 1: Kristi Noem is an incredibly bad politician....
Theory No. 2: Kristi Noem is trying to impress Trump, and he hates dogs....
Theory No. 3: Kristi Noem wants off Trump’s VP shortlist....
Ugh! Poorly done!
My 3 reasons are all so much better:
Althouse Theory No. 1: There were witnesses, so the story would almost surely come out in some form eventually, and Noem chose to control the narrative, telling it in her own words, in her book.
Althouse Theory No. 2: It was a trap to lure coastal-elite people into displaying their arrogance and ignorance. After they have their say, she's predicting, lots of working class people will step up and make fools out of them for failing to understand difficult, down-to-earth farm work and bird hunting.
Althouse Theory No. 3: Noem wanted to counter a stereotype about women, that we are too empathetic and indecisive, and she thought the anecdote about shooting the chicken-killing, person-biting dog showed her fitness to serve as Commander in Chief.
"Over and over throughout the conference, anxieties over the drop in birth rates — the issue that brought the speakers and audience together..."
From "The Far Right’s Campaign to Explode the Population/Behind the scenes at the first Natal Conference, where a motley alliance is throwing out the idea of winning converts to their cause and trying to make their own instead" (Politico).
The federal government has taken sides in the war between the owls.
In a last-ditch effort to rescue the northern spotted owl from oblivion and protect the California spotted owl population, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has proposed culling a staggering number of barred owls across a swath of 11 to 14 million acres in Washington, Oregon and Northern California....
The idea is to take up shotguns and night scopes against half a million of these "invasive" owls.
"What really worries me about this case is that, if Trump isn’t convicted, it is going to turbocharge his campaign."
Says Bret Stephens, in a conversation with Gail Collins, titled "Some Concrete Reasons Not to Be Totally Panicked" (NYT).
The Deep State should have thought about that before going out to get him.
"President Trump and President Biden are very different in their temperaments... extremely different... but the issues that they differ on are in a very very narrow band."
April 28, 2024
"I’ve been reading a lot of Marcus Aurelius’s 'Meditations' book... And the funny thing about that book is..."
"So Bragg would use one dead misdemeanor to trigger a second dead misdemeanor to create a felony..."
Writes Jonathan Turley, in "On Alvin Bragg and the art of not taking the law too seriously" (The Hill).
"We were always taught that we were the best, and so we couldn’t do anything but the best."
Today, this might sound myopic and perhaps naive, but at the time it was the credo of America’s best-known Black educator, Booker T. Washington. He argued that rather than try to topple an entrenched Jim Crow system, Black people could battle back more effectively through economic improvement, self-help and focused teaching. That is precisely what the D.C. schools were doing in the early 1900s, offering a large dose of Black history and prideful learning to students like Duke Ellington. He remembered his eighth-grade English instructor’s dictum: “Everywhere you go, you’re representing the race. And you command respect. You don’t ask for it. … You command respect with your behavior.” Ellington took that message to heart, the more so since it was reinforced at home. He believed that Black is beautiful and made it a principle to live by, long before it became the mantra of Black activists.