Biden poised to name first black woman to Supreme Court
Ha! He has to get his nominee past Manchin and Sinema and both could say no to anyone extreme. It will be a difficult pick for him
The US Supreme Court is set to get its first black woman, with the retirement of liberal justice Stephen Breyer paving the way for Joe Biden to make the historic nomination ahead of this year’s midterm elections.
One year into his first term, the groundbreaking pick may be exactly what the US President needs to reinvigorate his Democrat base after months of policy setbacks.
While Breyer’s retirement won’t alter the balance of power on the bench - conservatives will still make up six out of the nine sitting judges - it will give Biden his first chance to shape America’s top judicial body as it oversees issues such as abortion, immigration and gun rights.
What’s more, appointing an African American woman to the nation’s highest court would deliver on a key election commitment, galvanising Democrats and activists to turn up and vote in critical battlegrounds come November.
There’s no shortage of younger, highly qualified, and potentially more progressive candidates who could be nominated to replace Breyer, an 83-year-old centrist who has served on the bench for 27 years.
The frontrunner is 51-year-old DC Circuit Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, who Biden elevated last year from the Federal District Court to the US Court of Appeals.
Also in the mix are many other accomplished black women, including former Obama administration official Leondra Kruger, who is now an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of California; J Michelle Childs, who has been a district judge in South Carolina for the past decade; and civil rights attorney Sherrilyn Ifill, who served as president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defence and Educational Fund.
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Ric Grenell Reveals Who Is Acting As ‘Shadow President’ for ‘Weak’ Biden
I will be the first to admit that I had hoped that justice would be done and those who spied on Trump and his campaign would be held accountable and trust would be restored in our federal ‘law enforcement’ agencies.
Well, that didn’t work out, now did it?
Instead of those people engaged in the coup being held accountable, they are not RUNNING THE White House & OUR FEDERAL GOVERNMENT. To say ‘this is not good’ is the understatement of the century.
Newsmax reported:
‘Ric Grenell, who served as acting director of National Intelligence in the Trump administration, is blasting Susan Rice and says she is acting as a “shadow president.”
His comments came during an interview on CPAC Now. An excerptof the interview was posted on Twitter by the Conservative Political Action conference.
“Susan Rice has been appointed as domestic policy adviser,” he said. “ That’s a joke. She doesn’t know anything about domestic policy.
“So, she’s a foreign policy expert that’s been placed in the domestic policy role. And that is just a clear signal that all of our international issues, our foreign policies, are going to be treated like domestic policy.
“This is a problem for the Democratic Party. The foreign policy mess that they are creating is a mess because they are placating the far-left domestically. It’s part of that cancel culture.+
Rice and Biden Via Politico
“They’re beating up on Israel because it pleases the far-left. They are trying to reach out to Iran and pretend like the Iranian regime should be respected because it pleases the far progressive left. This is the upsidedown world of the Biden administration. President (Joe) Biden is too weak to stop the progressive left from taking over the domestic and foreign policy. (Vice President) Kamala (Harris) does not understand what’s going on…
“And Susan Rice is really happy that Biden is so weak. We have a shadow president in Susan Rice and no one is paying attention.”
Rice is the former national security adviser for President Barack Obama. At one point she had emerged as a serious contender for consideration for Biden’s running mate in 2020.
Rice has faced criticism over her role in the failed Benghazi response that left four Americans, including the U.S. ambassador, dead.
She was also implicated in the unmasking of Americans in intelligence reports during the presidential transition. Some of those Americans turned out to be Donald Trump associates. Rice has denied any wrongdoing.’
They said they were going to ‘fundamentally change’ the United State of America … they weren’t kidding.
https://uafreport.com/mark/ric-grenell-reveals-who-is-acting-as-shadow-president-for-weak-biden/
*************************************************How woke whites hurt black communities
In August 2020, a business professor from the University of Southern California gave a Zoom lecture in which he counselled his students against the overuse of filler words such as “um” or “you know”. The professor was teaching American and international Chinese students management communication skills, so he explained that in Mandarin, “the common (filler) word is ‘that, that that … In China, it might be na-ge, na-ge, na-ge.”
Anonymous black students accused the academic of racism and harming their mental health by using a Chinese word that sounded like the n-word. They called for him to be sacked.
Astoundingly, the professor was suspended while the university launched an investigation into his past student evaluations, checking for signs of cultural or racial insensitivity. None were found and he eventually resumed his job – though not the communications course he had been delivering for years. Meanwhile, news of the American students’ complaint reached China, where social media commenters said that punishing an academic for using a common Chinese word amounted to discrimination against Mandarin speakers.
American academic and author John McWhorter refers to this incident in his latest book, Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America. As its provocative title suggests, McWhorter’s book is a scorching denunciation of the politically correct excesses that masquerade as anti-racism across many university campuses and public and private institutions in the 21st century.
He's a white man with a brown skin, by the look of him
He clearly supports that unfairly targeted USC professor. He quips that a black student who feels a Mandarin word that “sounds kind of like the N-word deprives him of his ‘peace and mental well-being’ urgently needs psychiatric counselling”.
McWhorter – who is African-American – does not merely expose the perverted logic and evangelical fervour of woke ideology; he also argues that white activists are endorsing reforms – such as moves to “defund the police” in high-crime African-American neighbourhoods – that can only harm those communities.
“The ideology in question,’’ he writes, “is one under which white people calling themselves our saviours make black people look like the dumbest, weakest, most self-indulgent human beings in the history of our species and teach black people to revel in that status.’’
This quote gives you some idea of McWhorter’s take-no-prisoners rhetorical style.
As a black intellectual, he expects to be dismissed as “traitorous” and “self-hating” by a “certain crowd” for writing his scathing polemic. But he reasons that white and black readers who have bought into “unempirical virtue signalling about race” will be more likely to accept a critique of the new ideology if it’s written by an African-American. “I consider it nothing less than my duty as a black person to write this book,” he says.
In Woke Racism, he argues that a well-meaning but insidious form of anti-racism has hardened into a dogmatic religion that sees white privilege as the “original sin”, and weaponises cancel culture to end careers and undermine reputations. This religion, often policed by smug activists whom he calls the “Elect”, has anointed particular writers and thinkers – whose views are treated as sacrosanct – as their clergy.
Those authors include Robin DiAngelo – the white woman who penned the runaway bestseller White Fragility – and black writer Ibram Kendi, who has said it is impossible to be “not racist”. McWhorter argues DiAngelo’s book engages in “Orwellian poppycock” and he dismisses its central argument about white people being too “fragile” to admit their racial privilege: “ ‘You’re a racist, and if you say you aren’t it just proves that you are’– is the logic of the sandbox.”
He does not deny the existence of white privilege “in terms of one’s sense of belonging”. After all, whites are the default category in western societies and see themselves reflected in authority figures. Nonetheless, he accuses the Elect of pushing “a catalogue of contradictions” and imposing an “ideological reign of terror” under which white people are meant to feel permanently tainted by their privilege, even if they are poor, while black people are meant to believe that “the essence of your life is oppression”.
He calls the new religion Third Wave Anti-Racism. While first wave anti-racism activists fought slavery and segregation, and second-wavers battled racist attitudes in the 1970s and 80s, third wave reformers insist that “racism is baked into the structure of society, white ‘complicity’ in living with it constitutes racism itself, while for black people, grappling with the racism surrounding them is the totality of experience and must condition exquisite sensitivity toward them’’.
McWhorter is no card-carrying conservative. He is a respected linguist who teaches at Columbia University and has published more than 20 books including The Power of Babel – an account of how different languages evolved – and Losing the Race, in which he argued that racism’s most poisonous legacy was the defeatism that had infected black America.
He is that rarest of intellectuals – a bravely outspoken academic who cannot be easily classified as left or right-leaning. He is not against the “basic premise” of Black Lives Matter, sensible police reform or the left per se. “What happened to George Floyd was revolting,” he writes. Rather, he is “arguing against a particular strain of the left that has come to exert a grievous amount of influence over American institutions, to the point that we are beginning to accept as normal the kinds of language, policies and actions that Orwell wrote of as fiction”.
Take The New York Times food writer who was suspended in 2020 for “passingly” criticising world-famous Asian celebrities Chrissy Teigen and Marie Kondo. The Anglo food writer was accused of “punching down” on non-white women. Yet as McWhorter points out, Kondo and Teigen have far more power and influence than the humble hack who was temporarily exiled from her workplace.
The new anti-racism, argues McWhorter, reaches well beyond those individuals whose careers are damaged by saying something the gatekeepers object to. He says it is costing “innocent people their jobs. It is colouring academic inquiry … and sometimes strangling it like kudzu.” In the US, the ideology has infiltrated school-parent meetings, American school and university curriculums and progressive media outlets such as National Public Radio.
The new-wave ideologues do not “genuinely care about the welfare of black people”, he argues, as they insist, for example, that Americans should turn a blind eye to “black kids getting jumped by other ones in school”. Here, he documents how, over the past decade, US teachers have been accused of racial bias because black male public school students from impoverished backgrounds were over-represented in suspension and expulsion statistics.
After the suspensions were labelled racist, under-reporting of violent incidents in schools grew. This led to higher tolerance of classroom disruption and compromised learning in public schools often dominated by non-white students. McWhorter concludes: “The Elect(’s) … religious commitment numbs them to the harm their view does to real children living their lives in the real world.’’
Meanwhile, he claims an ideology that characterises objectivity, command of the written word and punctuality as “white things” is being “foisted on” school districts across America. This is an unsettling development that deserves more attention than McWhorter gives it. It has parallels with how, in some remote Australian Aboriginal communities, western education has at times, been painted as a threat to traditional Indigenous culture, rather than as a tool of empowerment.
McWhorter is a contributor to The New York Times. Even so, he calls out the double standards inherent in the awarding of a Pulitzer Prize to black NYT journalist-turned-academic Nikole Hannah-Jones, despite her widely-attacked claim in the 1619 project that one of the “primary reasons” for the American War of Independence was the preservation of slavery.
He argues, as have prominent historians, that Hannah-Jones’s claim is “quite simply false” (It was later modified by the NYT). Nonetheless, says McWhorter, “our current cultural etiquette” requires that it be “broadcast” in educational materials. Among white woke folk, such reluctance to point out Hannah-Jones’s contentious interpretation of historical documents may “feel like a kind of courtesy, but it is actually patronisation”, he writes.
Interestingly, McWhorter is not the only writer of colour to have resonated strongly with readers by criticising woke posturing, double standards and hypocrisy. Woke Racism made The New York Times bestseller list when it was published late last year and an earlier 2021 release, Woke Inc by American-Indian entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, also surged to the top of the sales charts. Ramaswamy’s book offers an insider’s account of corporate America’s woke “scam”, including aggressively-marketed social justice measures which camouflage business practices that undermine human rights and employees’ rights.
Importantly, Woke Racism is not just a blistering takedown of the Elect’s soft bigotry. McWhorter also proposes practical solutions to entrenched African-American disadvantage, including ending the war on drugs that sees many black men jailed, thus rendering them permanently unemployable and leaving their children without father figures.
He also recommends teaching phonics rather than the whole-word method, as the former is more effective at turning children from impoverished homes into accomplished readers. Thirdly, he wants vocational training for African-Americans to be “as easy to obtain as a college education”. For many poor Americans, black and white, “attending four years of college is a tough, expensive and even unappealing proposition”, yet the debate about educational advancement often focuses solely on university admissions.
While McWhorter asserts that racism remains a real problem, he also contends that “most Americans’ racial attitudes have progressed massively beyond what they were a few decades ago”. Woke activists deny or “talk around” this reality. This should not surprise us, because as McWhorter points out in his courageous, illuminating and beautifully-written book, “with progress, the Elect lose their sense of purpose”.
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The Church of England's diversity mission has gone too far
Now embracing racism
Is the Church of England on a mission? It should be, of course. But it appears to have confused its purpose of preaching the gospel with seeking to make itself more representative. From now on, at least ten members of the House of Bishops, part of the General Synod, must be from an ethnic minority. This will help create a ‘church that truly embraces people of global majority heritage at every level of its life,’ says the Archbishop of York Stephen Cottrell.
But it’s hard to reconcile Cottrell’s words with those of Paul to the Galatians:
‘There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.’
For the Christian, skin colour should make no difference in spiritual terms. The enlightened Anglican hierarchy of the 19th century certainly understood this. In 1864, the church braved controversy and appointed its first black bishop, Samuel Crowther. An ex-slave freed in 1822 by the Royal Navy’s West Africa squadron, Crowther was jointly presented to the Archbishop of Canterbury for consecration by a colonial prelate and the bishop of Winchester.
While his appointment was historic, it owed nothing to his skin colour. Yet, to borrow the words of Martin Luther King, the House of Bishops’ new scheme risks judging people on the colour of their skin, not on the contents of their heart. There is no doubt the initiative is entirely well-meaning. It will, it is said, make church leadership more representative. But it is still worryingly wrong-headed, and needs to be fought hard.
A church, which very creditably opposed apartheid in South Africa – and many of whose members called out overt racism here in the 1950s and 1960s – is making a serious mistake in setting up what is essentially an official non-white constituency within the Anglican communion.
To make matters worse – and while this was surely not the aim of those who dreamed up this plan – it seems to carry an implicit suggestion that non-white Anglicans are not just as capable of arguing about theology and church government as others and need special help to get their view across. Both these developments should have any decent worshipper, white or non-white, up in arms.
In a church’s governing body, by all means it is right to ask that all shades of spirituality or theology – liberal and conservative, high church and evangelical, and so on – be able to have their voice heard and be represented. But whatever the position with secular governments, it is not the function of a church to be representative of – or promote the interests of – other secular social groups, whether denominated by politics, social class, or race.
Ironically at a time in the liturgical year traditionally associated with prayers for church unity, we have here a suggestion that the church as an institution should become explicitly race-conscious. It’s as if one’s spirituality somehow varies according to a person’s ethnicity or tribal origin. But this is exactly the kind of thought that Christianity has always opposed.
A great deal of religion two thousand years ago was indeed depressingly particular; it was perfectly normal for your acceptability as a worshipper to depend on your ethnicity, position or allegiance. Christianity was as radical as it was – and as attractive – precisely because it turned this view on its head; it openly defied orthodoxy by drawing no distinction at all between those whom it sought to proselytise.
Whatever an average worshipper in a socially-distanced pew may think, these days the talk in General Synod, and on bishops’ benches, is not so much about making the world conform to God’s law as ensuring God’s law as interpreted by the church fits in as neatly as possible with secular trends. Activism aimed at social justice, anti-racism, human sexuality, or whatever, now largely trumps matters of the spirit.
About 60 years ago Michael Wharton, writing the Peter Simple column in the Daily Telegraph, saw a development of this kind coming. You may remember his caricature Dr Spacely-Trellis, the go-ahead Bishop of Bevindon, who habitually referred to Jesus’s disciples as his staff of trained social workers.
The antics of the House of Bishops in calling for things to be seen through the prism of race are not what we should expect from any religious body. But they are exactly what you would expect of a coven of social workers in the Stretchford conurbation. What was a joke in the 1960s is, to the church’s discomfiture, now depressingly real.
https://spectator.com.au/2022/01/the-church-of-englands-diversity-mission-has-gone-too-far
********************************************Psaki Attacks DeSantis as ‘Crazy’ After FDA Halts Monoclonal Antibodies
White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki framed Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s objection to the Food and Drug Administration pulling the Emergency Use Authorizations for monoclonal antibodies treatments as “crazy” on Tuesday.
“The FDA yesterday withdrew the EUA for some monoclonal antibody treatments because they don’t work against Omicron,” a reporter asked. “But Florida continues to push for the treatment for people in the state. What’s your response to Governor DeSantis and what’s your message to the people in Florida?”
This was Psaki’s response. Watch:
“Well, let’s just take a step back here just to realize how crazy this is a little bit,” she said. We’ve approached Covid treatments like filling a medicine cabinet. We’re not relying on one type, one brand, or treatment, we invested in and continue to buy a variety across monoclonal antibodies, pre-exposure prevention therapies, and oral antivirals.”
“We have provided 71,000 doses of antivirals to Florida, including 34,000 additional treatments that do work against Omicron just this last week. I’m sorry about a range of those treatments, I should say to be clear.”
“What the FDA is making clear is that these treatments, the ones that they are fighting over, that the governor is fighting over, do not work against Omicron, and they have side effects,” she said with a straight face. “That is what the scientists are saying. We have sent them 71,000 doses of treatments that are effective against Omicron, and are effective also against Delta. And they are still advocating for treatments that don’t work.”
“We’ve seen unfortunately from the beginning in our pandemic response, a range of steps or pushes that have been made through social media platforms, unfortunately from the mouths of elected officials advocating for things that don’t work, even when we have things that do work, injecting disinfectant, promoting other pseudoscience, sowing doubt on the effectiveness of vaccines and boosters, and now promoting treatments that don’t work,” she went on. “We know it works, vaccines and boosters, we have a range of doses of things that do work and treatments and we are providing those to Florida.”
Psaki is therefore casting people who tout the efficacy of many early treatments as crackpots and crazies, comparing their usage to a belief in ‘pseudoscience’ and dredging up the misleading talking point about ‘injecting disinfectants,’ a slight on Donald Trump that has been taken out context.
The controversy exploded late Monday when the FDA has pulled the EUAs, causing thousands of monoclonal antibody (mAb) treatment appointments to be suddenly canceled. There was strong evidence that the mAbs were helping Covid survival rates under the Delta wave, but even Regeneron stated in December that the effectiveness of the treatments had waned — similar to how the vaccine and booster efficacy has waned.
“We’ve seen unfortunately from the beginning in our pandemic response, a range of steps or pushes that have been made through social media platforms, unfortunately from the mouths of elected officials advocating for things that don’t work, even when we have things that do work, injecting disinfectant, promoting other pseudoscience, sowing doubt on the effectiveness of vaccines and boosters, and now promoting treatments that don’t work,” she rambled on.
“We know it works, vaccines and boosters, we have a range of doses of things that do work and treatments and we are providing those to Florida,” she added.
The Florida Department of Health had made an announcement on Monday about the FDA’s “abrupt decision” to pull the EUAs for bamlanivimab/etesevimab as well as Regeneron.
“This evening, without any advanced notice, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) revised the Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) for bamlanivimad/etesevimab and REGEN-COV,” Florida Health announced. “The revised EUAs do not allow providers to administer these treatments within the United States.”
The Florida Health Department informed patients that their appointments for the Covid-19 treatment have been canceled. DeSantis had set up infusion sites in five counties: Palm Beach, Broward, Miami-Dade, Duval, and Seminole.
“Florida disagrees with the decision that blocks access to any available treatments in the absence of clinical evidence,” the announcement continued. “To date, such clinical evidence has not been provided by the FDA,” it added.
Gov. Ron DeSantis demanded the Biden administration reverse “its sudden and reckless decision” in a statement.
“Without a shred of clinical data to support this action, Biden has forced trained medical professionals to choose between treating their patients or breaking the law,” DeSantis said. “This indefensible edict takes treatment out of the hands of medical professionals and will cost some Americans their lives. There are real-world implications to Biden’s medical authoritarianism – Americans’ access to treatments is now subject to the whims of a failing president.”
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair
Bliss: What every woman wants: to feel safe and secure in the arms of her man. Robert Irwin and Rorie Buckey. See 
1 comment:
Mcwhorter is the type of person we as a nation need to stand and shout his conclusions from the mountain tops. He is 100 percent correct that this is about power and control for the elites of any color. Equity is a divisive word that generally means you have, I want, it’s not fair, even if you worked for it and I didn’t because 160 years ago my ancestors were slaves. Every one in this country has the same opportunity to succeed. The only reason not to(beside mental or physical illness) is laziness and greed. New immigrants succeed because they work to take advantage of the opportunities. If you spend your life saying someone is holding you down, you will never win. There has been enough civil rights progress in this country that there is inequality in pay and if some one tries, they would be sued up the butt.
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