• The report from the Kent County medical examiner matched the conclusion of an expert hired by the family of 26-year-old father-of-two Patrick Lyoya
• Lyoya, a refugee from Congo, was killed during a physical struggle with white Officer Christopher Schurr on the morning of April 4
• Lyoya was face down on the ground when he was shot by Schurr, who was on top of him and can be heard on video demanding Lyoya take his hand off the taser 
• The autopsy revealed that Lyoya's blood-alcohol level was 0.29, more than three times over the legal limit for driving, when his car was stopped in Grand Rapids
• An attorney for Lyoya's family maintained that his blood-alcohol level was irrelevant in the investigation and 'was not punishable by execution'
  

Put that level of subsidy into support within Central America and the migration issue would correct.  Unfortunately, as more people are becoming aware, the location of Biden’s financial emphasis is a feature of the White House plans, not a foreign policy flaw.

Ukraine is viewed as a priority because the DC politicians and corporations gain financial benefit from Ukraine spending.  If Biden were to drop $30 billion in central America, it would impede the White House agenda to keep the southern border crisis going.  The border collapse is a goal of the White House, not a mistake.

GUATEMALA CITY — Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador started a five-day tour to four Central American countries and Cuba on Thursday by lashing out at the U.S. government.

López Obrador criticized American officials sharply for being quick to send billions to Ukraine, while dragging their feet on development aid to Central America.

On his first stop in neighboring Guatemala, López Obrador demanded U.S. aid to stem the poverty and joblessness that sends tens of thousands of Guatemalans north to the U.S. border. The Mexican leader had been angered that the United States rebuffed his calls to help. (read more)

• Justice Clarence Thomas said on Friday that the court cannot be 'bullied' by protesters over the leak of the Supreme Court decision regarding Roe v Wade 
• The leak set off a political firestorm, with abortion-rights supporters staging rallies outside the courthouse and at locations around the United States 
• Thomas, one of the most conservative justices on the nine-member court, made only a few passing references to the protests at a conference in Atlanta 
• As a society, 'we are becoming addicted to wanting particular outcomes, not living with the outcomes we don't like,' Thomas said 
• 'We can't be an institution that can be bullied into giving you just the outcomes you want. The events from earlier this week are a symptom of that'
  

The Right Wire Report presents the Truth Be Told Podcast with Bekah Lyons. The Truth Be Told Podcast discusses the important political and cultural issues of the week and provides analysis that will give a different perspective and how these stories will affect us all in the near future. Now, stop reacting and start thinking. The topical notes for this May 7, 2022 “The Left’s Clump of Cells Hail Mary” episode include:

• SCOTUS sprang a leak just in the nick of “Midterms” time.
  • Justice Alito’s 98-page draft – read here.
  • Justice Roberts’ statement – see here.
  • Real Insurrection is WH and Leftists supporting the targeting of Justices – see here.
  • Senator Warren “We are going to Fight Back!”  – see here.
  • Leftists call for intimidating and targeting Justices – see here and here.
  • Antifa attacks pregnancy crisis center in Portland – see here.
  • The strawman – the case if overturned does not end abortion – see here.
  • Abortion polling and charts – see here.
  • The political calculation and predictions.

   Whenever someone gets preferential access to a job or a promotion because of his race or ethnicity, someone else of a different race or ethnicity gets displaced. In the U.S., the displaced person is usually a non-Hispanic white. The result is an income transfer from whites to "preferred" minorities. We call it the Robin Hood effect. We have assessed its size by using a simple device: the correlation of income and IQ. From this relation we can construct a profile of the workforce as it would exist in a meritocracy,

The Income-IQ Nexus 
   Income-IQ correlation is well documented. Recently, the link has been forged conclusively. (See for example, Charles Murray, 1998. Income Inequality and IQ, AEI Press.) The connection, however, is not perfect. Various factors contribute to produce fluctuations in the IQ-income curve. There is, for example, variation in human drive or ambition. We might not expect someone with an IQ of 120 to be a clerk, but he might not push himself hard enough to be, say, a dentist. Also, income does not always govern our job choices. We might surmise that professors at research universities are as a group more intelligent than dentists. Dentists, however, generally earn more. If research did not pay a decent wage, then many professors might also choose to make a living poking about in the mouths of strangers. But since professors and dentists both earn well, room is left for other considerations. 

   Then there is luck. A person must be available when an opportunity pops up. Geography may be a factor. New Yorkers have more opportunity to earn well than West Virginians. Sometimes, ties to family and geography will constrain people from seeking or taking the best jobs. Lastly, other qualities like personality, work habits, ethical or moral values, to name a few, factor into the ability to earn. All these and more produce fluctuations in the income-IQ curve, a problem we need to solve. 

   By dividing the workforce into broad ranges, say quintiles, we can virtually eliminate the fluctuations. Each quintile will contain millions of earners. Dentists and professors, with rather different incomes, will fall into the same income quintile. If IQ correlates well with income, it will correlate almost perfectly with the income of a work force so partitioned. 
 
Income Distributions
We ask three questions:

1) What would income distribution by race and ethnicity look like in Utopia? 

2) What would income distribution by race and ethnicity look like in a meritocracy? 

3) What is the actual income distribution by race and ethnicity in the U.S.? 

"As long as women make up only 8 percent of engineers, 31 percent of scientists, and 16 percent of physicists, we have much work ahead of us." 

Meritocratic distribution.
The IQ-income nexus allows us to estimate the income distribution in a meritocracy. First divide the labor force into quintiles according to income. Imagine the quintiles to be boxes. Each box holds 20 percent of the workforce. From the pool of all earners, find the most intelligent and throw him into the highest income box. Locate the next smartest worker and throw him in for company. Proceed down the line, each time choosing the most intelligent of those left, until the highest-income box is filled. Then fill the next highest-income box in the same way. When it is filled, go to the next box and so on until all five boxes are filled. In the end the highest IQ workers will populate the highest-income quintile, and so on down the line. 

   To generate the rank ordering of the workforce on IQ, required to construct the meritocratic distribution, we used mean IQ differences from the National Longitudinal Study of Youth (NLSY): 1.21 SD for the white-black difference, and 0.93 SD for the white-Hispanic difference. The mathematical procedure for populating the quintiles is described in an Appendix. 

Actual distribution.
The U.S. Government compiles impressive amounts of social data. Virtually every social statistic is recorded somewhere in its archives. We used data from the Annual Demographic Survey (ADS) to construct the quintile distribution. The survey is jointly sponsored by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Bureau of the Census. It tabulates income by race, ethnicity, sex and age. We used ADS data of 1997. 

   The ADS classifies workers as black, white, Hispanic, and white-not-Hispanic. Since Hispanics can be of any race, we formed the classification Hispanic-white by subtracting the white-not-Hispanic data from the white data. Ultimately, we formed three non-overlapping groups: black, Hispanic-white, and non-Hispanic white.  For simplicity, from now on we refer to these groups as black, Hispanic and white, respectively. All but a few percent of Americans who earned income in 1997 were included in our analysis. (The ADS data of 1997 did not include Asian Americans.) 

   Income in the ADS is broken into $2,500 bins: $0 to $2,499, $2,500 to $4,999, and so on through $97,500 to $99,999. Finally, the last bin is for earners making $100,000 or more. The ADS breaks down the population of each bin by race, ethnicity, sex and age. We included in our sample only workers between the ages of 25 and 64, the mainstream of full-timers. They numbered 126,362,000 in 1997. 

It’s the left’s worst nightmare. They’re about to lose their grip on the bogus legal precedent from 1973 that undergirds the foundation of their platform and aims. It’s the decision that, to this day, enables them to carry out their values of convenience, population control, and pandering by dehumanizing unborn children before dismembering them and calling it “empowerment.”

That’s probably why they leaked the opinion.

Sure, we don’t yet know all the facts of the current situation, so we don’t know who surrendered the document — showing at least a 5-4 majority for conservatives on Dobbs — to the press. But it doesn’t take Einstein to piece this one together.

First, the left is desperate. They’re severely underwater headed into the midterms and need something to draw out the Democrat vote, and it’s not going to be the economy or foreign policy or Covid. A threat to their beloved abortion access could be the golden ticket.

Second, with a conservative SCOTUS majority and clear public opinion against the evils of abortion, the left has always faced an uphill battle with Dobbs, but bullying the court could be a hail Mary. It’s common knowledge that Chief Justice John Roberts’ fidelity is to his own public image over the Constitution, and what about fresh faces such as Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett? The public now knows for the first time the trio’s written intent to strike Roe as bad law — but before it’s published. It’s a recipe for harassment, threats, and intimidation to swing their opinions before they’re codified.

Third, we know that the iconoclastic left is committed to tearing down foundations from the family and the church, to monuments and our history, to the very meaning of “sex.” The Supreme Court is no exception, and we know this not only because they are actually saying “Let’s burn this place down” out loud, but also because any time they realize they can’t get their way through legislation, they entertain the idea of packing the Supreme Court with progressive activists who will legislate from the bench.

But even more than all those things, we also know the history of the left on abortion itself: They will do absolutely anything just so they can kill babies.

During the Obama administration, the left used the Internal Revenue Service and its chief of tax exemptions, Lois Lerner, to persecute conservative nonprofits. This included harassing pro-life groups, which continued even after the scandal came to light.

When he was attorney general of California, Xavier Becerra, a pro-abortion extremist who now heads Biden’s Department of Health and Human Services, sued the Little Sisters of the Poor, an order of nuns that provides shelter for poor elderly people, over abortion coverage. As The Federalist’s Tristan Justice characterized it, Becerra “weaponized the full power of the administrative state” against the nuns to bully them into compliance with Obamacare’s contraceptive mandate.

In the run up to the 2016 election, Democrats including Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama spied on then-candidate Donald Trump as part of a plan to weasel feminist champion Clinton into the White House. When they failed spectacularly, the left continued the persecution of then-President Trump, who vowed to nominate jurists who faithfully apply the Constitution, and his allies through the duration of his presidency with more spying, slimy investigations, and attempts to remove him from office.

When Trump appeared to deliver on his promise by nominating Kavanaugh to the bench, the left concocted a gang rape hoax against him. They threatened to kill him and his family. They amplified fake witnesses. They dragged him through an unconscionably malicious confirmation process. They lionized his accuser and slandered his name.

In 2020, when the right was energized to re-elect Trump to a second term and the left had nothing better than an incoherent Joe Biden hiding in a basement, they did everything they could to rig the election against the pro-life champion and for the pro-abortion candidate. They stopped at nothing to cover up the Biden family scandals through blatant censorship, banned the sitting president from his primary channels of communication, stuffed government elections offices with Democrat operatives funded by a tech oligarch, and unlawfully changed or broke voting laws to allow mass mail-in balloting.

These are but a few recent examples. When the left can’t get enough congressional votes to codify abortion rights through legislation, they threaten to nuke the filibuster to lower their vote threshold, as Sen. Bernie Sanders did immediately after the Dobbs leak.

When the left can no longer convince adults that unborn babies are “clumps of cells,” they resort to brainwashing children into thinking abortion is wonderful. They try to force anti-abortion centers to provide pro-abortion information to the hurting expectant mothers who walk through their doors. They’re working to force pro-life nurses to violate their consciences and kill babies anyway, even if it terrorizes their own souls. And this is hardly an exhaustive list.

The demonic left will stop at nothing to defend its religious ritual of sacrificing babies to the god of self. Yesterday that meant packing the court, but today it seems to mean just burning that court to the ground. (read more)

On narrowly partisan grounds, not many Republican operatives would advise that the best strategy for the 2022 midterms and 2024 presidential elections is to put abortion rights front and center in a consuming national debate. But if the court follows through with its draft opinion — obtained by POLITICO and published Monday night — front and center is where it will be, even as polls consistently show majorities of 60 percent or more wish to leave the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision intact.

Alito plainly does not care about that.

For years, on abortion, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has been divided by jugglers and brawlers. Jugglers, led by Chief Justice John Roberts, have tried to balance competing principles — a willingness to revisit Roe at margins while also respecting precedent and trying to preserve the mystique of oracular detachment on which he believes the court’s legitimacy depends.

The brawlers, led in this instance by Alito, say to hell with that.

His draft opinion on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization — the case has not yet entered the national shorthand, What’s your view on Dobbs?, but presumably soon will — runs for 98 pages of argument and citations. But its essence can be summed up in three words: Bring it on.

Let’s stop pretending, he writes in bristling, vehement words that he plainly has been sharpening in his mind for decades, that intensely opposing views about the morality of abortion can or should be resolved by the courts. Let’s recognize, he argues, that much of the language swirling around the legal debate — Latin phrases like stare decisis, medical concepts like fetal viability or gestational trimesters, and so on — is so much sophistry and an evasion from the heart of the matter.

As he sees it, the heart of the matter is that there is no legitimate constitutional right to abortion and never was — “Roe was egregiously wrong from the start” — and so the whole matter should be thrown to the political arena. That’s where one of the most intimate dimensions of human life can be debated in a loud, thrashing, angry debate, right out in the open.

Even people who have labored for decades to preserve a woman’s right to decide for herself whether to carry a pregnancy might agree there is something crisp and free of pretense about where a majority of the Supreme Court appears ready to go. In recent years, many of these activists — seeing the legal foundations of Roe gradually eroding — have voiced their own version of the Alito argument: OK, then, you want a political fight? Let’s have it.

Historically, many abortion rights supporters have believed that putting that debate out in the open — and on the ballot — at a moment when the stakes are undeniably clear is a winning proposition for them. The logic is that anti-abortion activists are always focused and hyper-engaged, while the broader majority who supports abortion rights often will organize and vote on the issue when they feel their rights are imminently threatened.

A related argument is that Roe v. Wade had the opposite effect of what many of its backers wanted. Instead of removing the issue from politics, a backlash to the court was the engine for a new conservative movement in the 1970s. It may even have inhibited the process by which political debate in the states was gradually leading to more liberal laws and possibly a more durable consensus on abortion rights. In some moods, such feminist legal pioneers as the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg explored this possibility. Alito, almost tauntingly, quotes her from 1992 (a year before joining the high court) on how Roe may have “prolonged divisiveness” and “deferred stable settlement of the issue.”

It is hardly the most relevant angle on the story — not compared to the tangible, real-world effect on individuals if the draft opinion or something close to it is what the Supreme Court decides in its official decision in coming weeks — but one must note that there is plainly a kind of rough-hewn principle in Alito’s thinking.

He clearly has strong ideological views, but that makes it harder to level a charge of partisanship — especially if Democrats are able to mobilize voters around abortion rights.

Compare this case, for instance, to the 2000 case of Bush v. Gore. Then, a narrow majority of Republican-appointed justices seemingly put partisanship over legal principle when they ignored their own pious sermons about interpreting the Constitution narrowly to invent an ad hoc rationale that awarded a disputed presidential election to George W. Bush.

Alito doesn’t look to be guilty of that kind of hypocrisy. His eagerness to attack Roe v. Wade has been obvious since he joined the court in January 2006. He seems entirely sincere when he writes in the draft that justices should not be “affected by any extraneous influences such as concern about the public’s reaction to our work.”

Fidelity to his own principles seems closely linked to another trait that jumps off the page of his draft. He comes off as a contentious, self-assured loudmouth. Many passages sound less like a formal legal ruling than the argumentative tones of a relative who gets carried away at Thanksgiving — Do we have to talk politics over dinner? — or the fellow at nearby table at a neighborhood tavern— Sir, would you mind terribly lowering your voice just a little?

His draft vibrates with contempt. Arguments made in previous abortion cases are not just misplaced but “very weak,” just as Roe was not just wrong but “egregiously wrong.” He doesn’t stop at saying there was not much support for a constitutional right to abortion until the latter half of the 20th century, he adds: “Zero. None.”

These brawling instincts were apparently compelling — at least in the privacy of Supreme Court chambers — to four colleagues who voted with him: Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett. It’s worth remembering that a draft opinion is a draft: Some of these people may, upon consideration, decide that they would rather try to keep juggling on abortion for a while. That would lead to a more modest final opinion, that trims Roe v. Wade but defers the fateful confrontation that Alito so urgently wants.

Whatever happens, however, the self-confidence of his jurisprudential mind is now part of the public record. It invites the question: What makes him so sure of himself?

The draft opinion is replete with references to the advantages of turning a complicated moral issue over to the political debate in 50 states. But there’s nothing to stop the nationalization of the debate at the congressional level — outlawing abortion everywhere if Republicans chose to do so with a narrow majority next time they take control of Congress, or the opposite when Democrats are in charge.

Alito declares that none of the arguments in his ruling will affect current law on the right to marry or contraception. But he can hardly declare that by fiat, since some of those rights rest on the same legal principles and precedents that buttressed Roe. The idea that abortion will now primarily be the province of the political branches rather than the judicial one seems unlikely. If some states are right that abortion is the equivalent of taking a human life, court cases with plaintiffs that all fetuses in all states have the same constitutional protections are inevitable.

Citing sources from Abraham Lincoln to 20th-century philosopher Isaiah Berlin, Alito reflects on the 14th Amendment’s reference to “liberty” before lecturing, “we must guard against the natural human tendency to confuse what the Amendment protects with our own ardent views about the liberty that Americans should enjoy.” But there is not a hint in the draft opinion that Alito is applying those cautionary words to himself.

Bring it on means bring it on. Neither Alito nor anyone else can be sure what will follow and where it will lead.

Chief Justice John Roberts on Tuesday confirmed the authenticity of the Supreme Court draft opinion that would strike down Roe v. Wade and announced an investigation into the document’s disclosure, which he described as “a singular and egregious breach” of the court’s trust.

“To the extent this betrayal of the confidences of the Court was intended to undermine the integrity of our operations, it will not succeed,” Roberts said in a statement. “The work of the Court will not be affected in any way.”

Roberts’ statement came after POLITICO published an initial draft majority opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito that would undo Roe’s guaranteed federal protections of abortion rights — as well as a subsequent 1992 decision, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, that largely maintained those rights.

Justice Samuel Alito’s draft opinion, which would overturn Roe v. Wade, wages a frontal assault on the reasoning of the landmark 1973 opinion that found a federal constitutional right to abortion.

Alito’s draft is labeled as a proposed majority opinion, though the wording of the court’s ultimate ruling and the line-up of justices who support it could change before final release, expected by late June or early July.

• “We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled. The Constitution makes no reference to abortion, and no such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision....”

• “Roe was egregiously wrong from the start. Its reasoning was exceptionally weak, and the decision has had damaging consequences. And far from bringing about a national settlement of the abortion issue, Roe and Casey have enflamed debate and deepened division. It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.”

• “In the years prior to [Roe v. Wade], about a third of the States had liberalized their laws, but Roe abruptly ended that political process. It imposed the same highly restrictive regime on the entire Nation, and it effectively struck down the abortion laws of every single State. … [I]t represented the ‘exercise of raw judicial power’… and it sparked a national controversy that has embittered our political culture for a half-century.”

• “The inescapable conclusion is that a right to abortion is not deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and traditions. On the contrary, an unbroken tradition of prohibiting abortion on pain of criminal punishment persisted from the earliest days of the common law until 1973.”

• “In some States, voters may believe that the abortion right should be more even more [sic] extensive than the right Casey and Roe recognized. Voters in other States may wish to impose tight restrictions based on their belief that abortion destroys an ‘unborn human being.’ ... Our nation’s historical understanding of ordered liberty does not prevent the people’s elected representatives from deciding how abortion should be regulated.”

• “We have long recognized, however, that stare decisis is ‘not an inexorable command,’ and it ‘is at its weakest when we interpret the Constitution.’ It has been said that it is sometimes more important that an issue ‘be settled than that it be settled right.’ But when it comes to the interpretation of the Constitution — the ‘great charter of our liberties,’ which was meant ‘to endure through a long lapse of ages,’ we place a high value on having the matter ‘settled right.’”

• “On many other occasions, this Court has overruled important constitutional decisions. … Without these decisions, American constitutional law as we know it would be unrecognizable, and this would be a different country.”

• ”Casey described itself as calling both sides of the national controversy to resolve their debate, but in doing so, Casey necessarily declared a winning side. … The Court short-circuited the democratic process by closing it to the large number of Americans who dissented in any respect from Roe. … Together, Roe and Casey represent an error that cannot be allowed to stand.”

• “Roe certainly did not succeed in ending division on the issue of abortion. On the contrary, Roe ‘inflamed’ a national issue that has remained bitterly divisive for the past half-century....This Court’s inability to end debate on the issue should not have been surprising. This Court cannot bring about the permanent resolution of a rancorous national controversy simply by dictating a settlement and telling the people to move on. Whatever influence the Court may have on public attitudes must stem from the strength of our opinions, not an attempt to exercise ‘raw judicial power.’”

• “We do not pretend to know how our political system or society will respond to today’s decision overruling Roe and Casey. And even if we could foresee what will happen, we would have no authority to let that knowledge influence our decision. We can only do our job, which is to interpret the law, apply longstanding principles of stare decisis, and decide this case accordingly. We therefore hold that the Constitution does not confer a right to abortion. Roe and Casey must be overruled, and the authority to regulate abortion must be returned to the people and their elected representatives.”
  

The Supreme Court has voted to strike down the landmark Roe v. Wade decision, according to an initial draft majority opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito circulated inside the court and obtained by POLITICO.

The draft opinion is a full-throated, unflinching repudiation of the 1973 decision which guaranteed federal constitutional protections of abortion rights and a subsequent 1992 decision – Planned Parenthood v. Casey – that largely maintained the right. “Roe was egregiously wrong from the start,” Alito writes.

The document, labeled as a first draft of the majority opinion, includes a notation that it was circulated among the justices on Feb. 10. If the Alito draft is adopted, it would rule in favor of Mississippi in the closely watched case over that state’s attempt to ban most abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy.

A Supreme Court spokesperson declined to comment or make another representative of the court available to answer questions about the draft document.

POLITICO received a copy of the draft opinion from a person familiar with the court’s proceedings in the Mississippi case along with other details supporting the authenticity of the document. The draft opinion runs 98 pages, including a 31-page appendix of historical state abortion laws. The document is replete with citations to previous court decisions, books and other authorities, and includes 118 footnotes. The appearances and timing of this draft are consistent with court practice.

The disclosure of Alito’s draft majority opinion – a rare breach of Supreme Court secrecy and tradition around its deliberations – comes as all sides in the abortion debate are girding for the ruling. Speculation about the looming decision has been intense since the December oral arguments indicated a majority was inclined to support the Mississippi law.

Under longstanding court procedures, justices hold preliminary votes on cases shortly after argument and assign a member of the majority to write a draft of the court’s opinion. The draft is often amended in consultation with other justices, and in some cases the justices change their votes altogether, creating the possibility that the current alignment on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization could change.

The chief justice typically assigns majority opinions when he is in the majority. When he is not, that decision is typically made by the most senior justice in the majority.

A George W. Bush appointee who joined the court in 2006, Alito argues that the 1973 abortion rights ruling was an ill-conceived and deeply flawed decision that invented a right mentioned nowhere in the Constitution and unwisely sought to wrench the contentious issue away from the political branches of government.

Alito’s draft ruling would overturn a decision by the New Orleans-based 5th Circuit Court of Appeals that found the Mississippi law ran afoul of Supreme Court precedent by seeking to effectively ban abortions before viability.

Roe’s “survey of history ranged from the constitutionally irrelevant to the plainly incorrect,” Alito continues, adding that its reasoning was “exceptionally weak,” and that the original decision has had “damaging consequences.”

“The inescapable conclusion is that a right to abortion is not deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and traditions,” Alito writes.

Alito approvingly quotes a broad range of critics of the Roe decision. He also points to liberal icons such as the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe, who at certain points in their careers took issue with the reasoning in Roe or its impact on the political process.

Alito’s skewering of Roe and the endorsement of at least four other justices for that unsparing critique is also a measure of the court’s rightward turn in recent decades. Roe was decided 7-2 in 1973, with five Republican appointees joining two justices nominated by Democratic presidents.

The overturning of Roe would almost immediately lead to stricter limits on abortion access in large swaths of the South and Midwest, with about half of the states set to immediately impose broad abortion bans. Any state could still legally allow the procedure.

The draft contains the type of caustic rhetorical flourishes Alito is known for and that has caused Roberts, his fellow Bush appointee, some discomfort in the past.

At times, Alito’s draft opinion takes an almost mocking tone as it skewers the majority opinion in Roe, written by Justice Harry Blackmun, a Richard Nixon appointee who died in 1999.

“Roe expressed the ‘feel[ing]’ that the Fourteenth Amendment was the provision that did the work, but its message seemed to be that the abortion right could be found somewhere in the Constitution and that specifying its exact location was not of paramount importance,” Alito writes.

Alito declares that one of the central tenets of Roe, the “viability” distinction between fetuses not capable of living outside the womb and those which can, “makes no sense.”

In several passages, he describes doctors and nurses who terminate pregnancies as “abortionists.”

When Roberts voted with liberal jurists in 2020 to block a Louisiana law imposing heavier regulations on abortion clinics, his solo concurrence used the more neutral term “abortion providers.” In contrast, Justice Clarence Thomas used the word “abortionist” 25 times in a solo dissent in the same case.

Alito’s use of the phrase “egregiously wrong” to describe Roe echoes language Mississippi Solicitor General Scott Stewart used in December in defending his state’s ban on abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy. The phrase was also contained in an opinion Kavanaugh wrote as part of a 2020 ruling that jury convictions in criminal cases must be unanimous.

“We emphasize that our decision concerns the constitutional right to abortion and no other right,” Alito writes. “Nothing in this opinion should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion.”

Alito’s draft opinion rejects the idea that abortion bans reflect the subjugation of women in American society. “Women are not without electoral or political power,” he writes. “The percentage of women who register to vote and cast ballots is consistently higher than the percentage of men who do so.”

The Supreme Court remains one of Washington’s most secretive institutions, priding itself on protecting the confidentiality of its internal deliberations.

“At the Supreme Court, those who know don’t talk, and those who talk don’t know,” Ginsburg was fond of saying.

That tight-lipped reputation has eroded somewhat in recent decades due to a series of books by law clerks, law professors and investigative journalists. Some of these authors clearly had access to draft opinions such as the one obtained by POLITICO, but their books emerged well after the cases in question were resolved.

That 1.3 to 1.6 million DHS admitted estimate is since January 21st.  The general scale is around 500,000/month.   That scale aligns with the DHS projections of 18,000 per day moving forward after Title 42 is dropped.  18,000/day equals 500,000/month.

There’s no reason to believe the numbers were less in the month of January, so we can add another 500k to the currently admitted number of 1.3 to 1.6 million.  Putting the current year illegal alien releases around 2 million through the end of April, with a projected 4 million more to come this year. (read more)

Skipping past the discussion of the DHS “disinformation board,”….. While appearing on an ironically named CNN broadcast “The State of Our Union”, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas tells John King’s ex-wife, that for several months DHS has been preparing to start handling and processing 18,000 illegal aliens per day (540,000/mo) as soon as CDC Title 42 is lifted.

If DHS estimates are accurate, between now and the November mid-term election, DHS will import an additional 3,000,000 illegal aliens from various nations around the world, through the U.S-Mexico border.

Progressive witer Judd Legum, for example, claimed DeSantis was overstating the presence of critical race theory (CRT) in curricula, noting that it "is not something you typically find discussed in a K-12 math textbook."

Though DeSantis pointed to some specific examples of CRT-inspired teaching materials, it's not as simple as pointing to math problems in a textbook. CRT is a lens that tints every subject, and it's endemic to classrooms in the Pacific Northwest.

Seattle Public Schools introduced the CRT lens into math classes through the district's ethnic studies department. In 2019, the department released guidelines for K-12 math teachers to use in the classroom as part of a pilot program at a handful of Seattle public schools.

The framework claims that "mathematical knowledge has been appropriated by Western culture" and that "math has been and continues to be used to oppress and marginalize people and communities of color."

Seattle math teacher Shraddha Shirude is a believer, using ethnic studies in her high school course Mathematics for Liberation to tell students that the subject is "used to oppress people." She says she enjoys teaching through the ethnic studies lens because it dismantles the "toxic" white culture of math classes.

"When we're only teaching them that one master narrative, that's the master narrative that is around in society too, because they grow up, and then they teach their kids that, and that's how they approach the world. That's how they engage with other people. That's what they see as normal. That's what they see as standard. That's what they see as law. It's all based on white supremacy culture," Shirude explained to the South Seattle Emerald.

This framework has hurt Seattle students.

As noted in Luke Rosiak's book Race To The Bottom, black students' state math exam scores in these pilot programs plummeted to shocking lows. After years of consistent progress at John Muir Elementary, for example, the passing rate for black students fell from 28 percent to 18 percent after the introduction of the ethnic studies framework.

Despite the results, the district doubled down.

The basic argument from the "math is racist" crowd is that "white supremacy culture" is endemic to mathematics classrooms, and it's why black students' math scores are lagging white students'.

A coalition of left-wing educators introduced A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction, a toolkit introducing "an integrated approach to mathematics that centers Black, Latinx, and Multilingual students in grades 6-8." The group hopes educators will help remove white supremacy culture from math classes "as they navigate the individual and collective journey from equity to anti-racism."

Left-wing educators were quick to embrace the "pathway." Last year, the Oregon Department of Education promoted and legitimized this fringe resource in a training session for teachers, igniting a firestorm of controversy.

The toolkit warns educators that "white supremacy culture" shows up in the classroom every time teachers "treat mistakes as problems by equating them with wrongness" because it "reinforces the ideas of perfectionism (that students shouldn't make mistakes) and paternalism (teachers or other experts can and should correct mistakes)"—both among the ideas commonly ascribed to "white supremacy culture."

The text even argues that "requiring students to raise their hand before speaking can reinforce paternalism and powerhoarding, in addition to breaking the process of thinking, learning, and communicating."

Oregon math teacher Muhammad Rahman told a local news outlet that he's been using the toolkit to inform his instruction.

"There's something I might be doing that could be problematic, so just looking inside and trying to make sure I'm the best version of myself and make sure I'm teaching the best way I can to my students," Rahman explained.

But if Rahman is injecting this toolkit into his classroom—pretending it's white supremacy culture to use money in a math problem because it "uphold[s] capitalist and imperialist ways of being"—he's not serving his students.

One could forgive DeSantis for not being able to quickly release a mountain of examples of CRT in math textbooks. How do you provide easy-to-digest snapshots from a textbook framed around CRT?

You won't find a textbook titled "Math: A Critical Race Theory Examination." And you won't see word problems like, "If black student David is 10 times more likely to suffer microaggressions than white student Stephanie, and Stephanie suffered seven microaggressions today, how many microaggressions did David endure?"

It takes a close examination of the textbooks' framing to understand where CRT exists. And there's big money flooding CRT education groups, ensuring that it will continue to spread across the country.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation funded the groups behind A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction with nearly $140 million. That includes millions to The Education Trust, a fringe education advocacy group that refers to student loan debt for black students as "Jim Crow debt," and Teach Plus, which encourages teachers to become "social agents of change."

TeachingWorks is another recipient of Gates Foundation funding. Its founder believes that math is a "harbor for whiteness" and "the very nature of the knowledge and who's produced it, and what has counted as mathematics is itself dominated by whiteness and racism."

The activists pushing to create anti-racist math classes seem to believe that if minority students underperform in a subject, schools must penalize high achievers (usually white and Asian students) to ensure they aren't at an academic advantage.

The Vancouver, Washington, school board director moved to dramatically alter advanced classes because too many white kids were enrolled. He would force the higher achievers into classrooms with underachievers to meet the district's equity commitment.

Meanwhile, the Democrat-controlled Oregon legislature passed a law ending a high school graduation requirement that students demonstrate proficiency in math (along with reading and writing) after minority students failed at high rates.

Momentum is on the side of the Left, which seeks to dismantle our education systems and rebuild them on their own terms. They've seen victories in the Pacific Northwest. DeSantis should be lauded for taking them on. (read more)

“This is this,” DiNiro’s character “Michael” famously told Cazale’s “Stan” in The Deer Hunter, explaining the metaphysics of the bullet in his hand, and pretty much everyone watching the movie got the drift of that cryptic utterance. Likewise, Elon Musk’s character “Elon Musk” explained to America’s Maoist managerial legions: “Free speech is free speech” — as if, a week after Twitter’s surrender to Elon, there was some part of the formulation that the Left didn’t understand. (Apparently, all of it.)

What a concept! Free speech is free speech. It has bowled over the — what? — maybe twenty-three percent of the country that considers free speech “a threat to democracy.” This is what comes of inverting and subverting language itself for the purpose of mind-raping the nation like Jeffrey Epstein on a 15-year-old. The Left has exercised a Macumba voodoo death grip on free speech for years now. The deeper the Left’s crimes against the constitution and common decency, the harder they strangled the flow of news, information, and opinion until the mental life of the USA turned into a gibber of shamefully obvious unreality.

It’s one thing to lose your dignity as citizens, and another to just lose your country altogether, and that is the circle of hell that the Left has dragged everyone else into since even before Hillary Clinton booted the 2016 election. This tyrannical Maoist managerial mob, grown paradoxically rich beyond precedent, became a tool of the state itself working around the inconvenient first amendment to hog-tie public debate. Will the US government allow Mr. Musk to get away with liberating the new “public square?”

It looks like the DOJ, the SEC, and perhaps other nefarious actors of degenerate officialdom are fixing to go after the rogue Tesla mogul who had the effrontery to oppose totalitarian control of the narratives driving public life. It’s rumored that money-losing Twitter could not exist without the government footing the bill for the vast, backstage server arrays that enable all Twitter’s messaging. In an odd twist, though, the shareholders were not necessarily benefitting from that symbiotic relationship as Twitter’s stock fell from $71 a share in July ’21 to $32 in March ’22.  But the C-suite of Twitter’s executives were already too massively rich to care about anything but punishing their political enemies — which they did with sadistic zeal — when Mr. Musk surprisingly stepped onto the scene.

The government’s first counter-move, under the vividly deliquescing “Joe Biden” — whose treasonous corruption became Twitter’s job-one to conceal — was to concoct a brand-new agency under Homeland Security called the Disinformation Governance Board, to be run by one Nina Jankowicz, “internationally-recognized expert on disinformation and democratization,” who also happened to be a RussiaGate shill and publicist for the fifty national security officials  who labeled the Hunter Biden laptop story “Russian disinformation” (turned out: not). In other words, America now has a “truth” kommissar who is a soldier in the War on Truth.

Such a desperately stupid maneuver could only come from a regime close to collapse — just as the feculent particulars on Hunter Biden’s laptop are being revealed by many in possession of copies of the laptop’s hard-drive, and while, concurrently, the US attorney in Delaware, David Weiss, leads an investigation into Hunter B’s business dealings. Those include large-ish payments from nations hostile to American interests for opaque services rendered. So, you have a chief executive (“JB”) compromised mentally and legally, and installed via a janky primary and a dubious election, and, some young cookie fresh out of the Princeton fellowship bakeshop is going to defend him like Wonder Woman wielding her Magic Lasso of Aphrodite?

Homey don’t think so. Homey think the whole wretched episode of orchestrated national mindfuckery is about to come a’tumblin’ down, along with the miserable ghoul in the Oval Office. And that will be followed by the fun of seeing them try to eject Kamala Harris from the scene and replacing her with the likes of Barack or Michele Obama. (Don’t believe it? Just watch.) Of course, all that will be small potatoes to the reveal of cosmic ineptitude or gross criminality (perhaps both!) that is bound to come as Twitter opens up to discussion of our government’s role in the Covid-19 fiasco — which I aimed to help kick off with my first Tweet in a long long time.