Almost every item in the collection that follows is annoying….

1. In St. Louis, Alderwoman Alisha Sonnier of Tower Grove East, and Aldermanic President Megan Green proposed legislation to “expand the rights of homeless people” at the expense of turning the city into a toilet. Among other things, the proposed law would exempt the homeless from the city’s laws against urinating and taking a dump in public. “After every sporting event, after Mardi Gras, we see (other) people engaging in public urination,” Green said at a news conference after the board meeting. “But … enforcing those laws against that segment of the population is not the same as the enforcement we see against our unhoused population.” So, obviously, rather than enforce the law uniformly, her solution, as woke as woke can be, is to allow some people to drop feces wherever they please. “What are we doing?” Alderwoman Pam Boyd responded, “This is not a third world country. This is St. Louis, Missouri. That’s so disrespectful to us as a community. That’s unhealthy.” Ya think? “Does society have any rules any more?” asked Alderman Tom Oldenburg, of St. Louis Hills. “Give me a break. Homeless people who need to relieve themselves should go to a shelter. That’s where bathrooms exist.”

There go those crazy conservatives again!

2. Larry Tribe strikes again! Showing that not only Democratic Presidents can leak IQ points, once-admired Harvard Law law professor (now Emeritus), made an ass of himself on Twitter/X, and not for the first time. Leaping to “X” to take a cheap shot, Tribes’ reaction to Israel declaring war on Hamas for a brutal surprise attack that killed Americans as well as Israelis was: “Is Netanyahu wagging the dog of war to take attention away from his own war on the independent judiciary? Can anyone put that past him?” This time, Tribe got so much flack that he backed down from his cretinism, which he hasn’t usually done since his brain turned to cream cheese. He wrote to Fox News: “I sent the tweet in response to Netanyahu’s reported comments before I saw the news of what Hamas had actually done, at which point I immediately deleted the tweet as a clearly premature, ill-informed and inappropriate response to incomplete information. I obviously condemn Hamas’s terrorist attacks and unthinkable atrocities against the Israeli people, including the murder and abduction of civilians, in the strongest possible terms and fully support Israel’s right of self-defense, notwithstanding my long-standing condemnation of the Israeli occupation of Gaza and its activities in the West Bank.” 

Imagine, this jerk was once promoted by progressives to be an Supreme Court Justice. If he had been black and female, he might be.

3. Speaking of jerks… when he sticks to baseball, Keith Olbermann is still frequently a solid analyst. I agree with these tweets from yesterday completely, regarding the inequity of the expanded MLB play-offs combined with this year’s “balanced schedule”:

Spot on, Keith. Stick to baseball.

4. And speaking of twerks… Kaylee Timonet, a senior at Walker High School in Walker, Louisiana, had a scholarship endorsement withdrawn and was removed from her position as student government association president after the DJ at a non-school event, a party, took a video that showed her “twerking” suggestively and posted it on social media. Someone apparently sent it to the high school administrators, and they responded by punishing the girl. For conduct unrelated to school. Legal conduct. Ethical (if perhaps a bit vulgar) conduct. Innocent conduct. First Amendment protected conduct.

“How those kids were dancing was not bad. I have seen much worse,” the DJ said. “It was genuinely kids having fun.” Yeah, well who gave you permission to publicize minors dancing, you utter jackass? He’s the first villain of this fiasco. Worse still are the school’s administrators, who told Kaylee that her “lewd” dancing had forfeited her the scholarship she had qualified for, and they stripped her of the post of student government association president. The principal, Jason St. Pierre, told the student that she was was ticking off God..“They basically told me I should be ashamed of myself and that they were concerned about my afterlife if I wasn’t following basically God’s ideals,” Kaylee said.

I hope her parents sue the metaphorical pants off these incompetents. Over at Victory Girls (a frequently provocative blog), Carol Marks writes, “You must be very careful about what you do nowadays. Did the 3-second video of Kaylee’s Footloose Dirty Dancing justify pulling her scholarship possibilities? I think not. But let this be a lesson: you are always on Candid Camera. And moms, teach your daughters self-confidence and self-respect.”

I’m not sure what the last sentence is referring to. In the post, she chides the girl for breaking down crying when she was informed of her fate rather than than “stand up for herself.” I think that’s asking too much of the teen. If Marks is referring to the twerking—it is a conservative blog, after all—I would think adults attacking teens for their dance moves is such a cliche that it would have vanished by now. Nor should we just capitulate to a the developing norm that we should all self-edit our objectively legitimate conduct for fear of cell phones and lurking jerks. I don’t want to live like that. I won’t live like that. [Pointer: Old Bill]

5. Don’t confuse them with facts, their minds are made up….Ever since the Supreme Court came down with two rulings they should have handed down long ago—one declaring that Roe v. Wade was hooey, and the other finally confirming what was long obvious , that “affirmative action” was racial discrimination by another name, the Angry Left has been vocally claiming that the Supreme Court is now entirely dominated by fascist conservatives, that it threatens democracy (that is, progressive laws and policies that violate the Constitution) and must be defied, weakened, or “packed.” Yesterday, in the New York Times, of all places, a law professor and a law student effectively debunked that…can I use “hooey” twice in one post? Among their findings:

…in a majority of the cases the court hears, liberal and conservative justices frequently come together on the decisions….the Supreme Court operates much more functionally and consensually across its partisan divide than most people realize…Judged by a close look at the opinions of recent terms, the Roberts court is closer to a 9-to-0 court than it is a 6-to-3 court. In recent research, we isolated 87 statutory cases — cases that interpret laws rather than the Constitution itself — from the Supreme Court’s last three terms… a set of cases that one might predict would divide the justices because of their methodological and ideological commitments: They all involve not merely the application of case precedent but also the interpretation of text passed by a legislature…. Of those 87 cases, 37 percent were decided unanimously. If you add to that consensual pile any case that has only one member of the court refusing to sign the majority opinion, you get nearly half of the cases (40 out of 87). The other cases do not come out along predictably partisan lines, either: There were actually only 10 cases over three years that generated the ideological division you might expect given the court’s configuration.

But in the Age of the Great Stupid, Facts Don’t Matter (FDM).

6. Today’s “Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias” note: NBC thought that this was newsworthy:

A Reuters reporter decided, 22 years after the fact, to tell Johnson Flash that a congressman—a Republican, of course, because they are evil is descended from the people who, a century ago, enslaved her ancestors. Journalism! About 20% of U.S. congressmen, living presidents, Supreme Court justices and governors have direct ancestors who enslaved Black people. So what? I’m surprised it isn’t more. My father’s grandparents owned a slave or two. His mother, my grandmother, took one of them into her home when she became old and ill, and was the woman’s companion and caregiver until the former slave died. I hold no shame over that bit of family history; it has nothing to do with me at all. Nor are Rep. Guthrie’s slave-holding ancestors relevant to him.

What NBC and Reuters (the source of the linked article) is promoting is the equivalent of blood libel.