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Controversial comic Dave Chappelle was attacked on-stage last night by a member of the audience as he was performing for a Netflix comedy festival at the Hollywood Bowl. Isaiah Lee, 23,was carrying a replica handgun with a knife blade inside, authorities said. Lee was wrestled to the ground by security as well as comedian Jamie Foxx, then arrested for assault with a deadly weapon.

Chappelle is considered a political correctness villain because of his jokes about transexuals as well as other segments of the LGTBQ collective. The obvious reaction would be to blame his attack on Will Smith’s Academy Awards broadcast assault on Chris Rock for making a joke Smith (or his wife) didn’t find amusing. (Indeed Rock, who was also on last night’s program with Chappelle, reportedly quipped, “Was that Will Smith?”).

After that unprecedented episode at the Oscars, many comedians expressed concern that Smith had placed a virtual target on their backs. (The Oscars didn’t help by allowing Smith to go back to his seat and later collect a statuette as the audience stood and cheered.)

However, the cultural permission to resort to violence and intimidation as a response to to words, opinions and even jokes that seem to counter what those with superior sensibilities and values (or so they assume) want to hear arrived well before “the Slap.” It was given when the Left’s antifa began advocating “punching Nazis,” leftist students on campuses threatened violence to goad universities into shutting down (and up) conservative speakers, and Rep. Maxine Waters, among others, encouraged opponents of the Trump administration to harass conservatives and members of his administration when they and their families appeared in public.

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Comic Dave Smith reveals a great truth: Integrity is the irreplaceable ingredient of trust. Somehow the Democrats and progressives have completely abandoned integrity for opportunism and expediency.

1. See? The Washington Post still has it’s uses!  Virtually every article about yesterday’s leak of the Alito draft of a potential SCOTUS ruling reversing Roe v, Wade (including mine last night) states that no previous Supreme Court decision had leaked to the press before it was released. Experts who the public has good reason to trust also have made the same claim: Neal Katyal, for example, the former acting solicitor general, tweeted that this was “the first major leak from the Supreme Court ever.” He called it the equivalent of the Pentagon Papers. It turns out that a previous SCOTUS landmark decision was leaked. Interestingly, as the Washington Post revealed, it was…Roe v. Wade!

From The original Roe v. Wade decision also was leaked to the press:

The Supreme Court clerk who leaked the story, Larry Hammond… clerked for Justice Lewis Powell. …Hammond confided in an acquaintance he knew from the University of Texas School of Law that the Roe ruling was forthcoming. The acquaintance, a Time staff reporter named David Beckwith, was given the information “on background” and was supposed to write about it only once the opinion came down from the court. A slight delay in the ruling, however, resulted in an article that appeared in the issue of the magazine that hit newsstands a few hours before the opinion was read on Jan. 22, 1973…

Chief Justice Warren Burger was livid….There are obvious and profound consequences if litigants and the public are tipped off to the result in a case before it has been formally announced and adopted. Burger sent a frantic “eyes only” letter to all the justices demanding that the leaker be identified and punished. Burger even threatened to subject law clerks to lie-detector tests if no one was forthcoming. Hammond [told Powell]…what happened and offer[ed] his resignation. Powell would not hear of it and called Burger to tell him that Hammond had been double-crossed.

…Burger showed mercy to Hammond and gracefully accepted his apology… Hammond survived as Powell’s clerk and even served an additional term for the justice before leaving the court to join the Watergate Special Prosecution Force. The story of Hammond’s close call became legend to other clerks on the court at the time and has been passed down as a cautionary tale over time.

“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.’

Justice Samuel Alito, in his tour de force majority opinion draft declaring that Roe v. Wade is  no more.

The next sentence: “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.”

That unequivocal statement by Alito makes it very clear that the Supreme Court majority, whether it be five or, if Roberts doesn’t chicken out, six, fully understands that the pro-abortion forces will go ballistic when and if Roe is reversed. This means that the leak isn’t going to put any more pressure on the Justices than they expected.

Law professor Josh Blackmon [not “Jon,” as I mistyped originally], a libertarian, read the opinion draft and this was his verdict: Continue reading →

In his Comment of the Day this morning, history-besotted commenter Steve-O-in NJ writes regarding the question of whether Biden, as the Washington Post ludicrously claimed in an editorial, is a “huge” upgrade over President Trump, “Biden is so far headed for being 46th of 46.”

From a purely academic perspective, having a clear and unequivocal Worst President Ever would be useful for future ranking purposes, just as George Washington has been an invaluable role model against whom all of his successors must be compared. However, the operative words regarding Biden are “is headed.” It would be unfair, not to mention foolish, to grade Biden as the worst of the worst before he has even served half his term. True, there is little reason for optimism, but the President generally regarded as sharing the Top POTUS title with George, Honest Abe, was looking like a national disaster at this point in his first term.

How do we assess which of our leaders was “the worst”? Without objective standards, any ranking is going to be poisoned by bias and partisanship. When I first began studying the Presidency, Jack Kennedy’s house historian and shameless boot-licker and old New Dealer Arthur Schlesinger Jr. was considered the authority on the subject. He essentially ranked all the Democrats he could as “great” or “near great” and saved the low rankings for Republicans. He even rated Woodrow Wilson, a true villain in U.S. history, as “great.”

This was the beginning of my distrust of historians that has only grown since.

This series has to be shorter than the topic requires, so I will aim at providing a solid foundation. First we need to settle on who the contenders for Worst President Ever are. I’ll disqualify some along the way. Here are the possibilities among our first ten Presidents:

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Well, today we stopped getting the New York Times on our lawn in the morning. The price went up again, and almost a hundred bucks a month is too much for the convenience of seeing where the Times places its propaganda, even though those blue tubular plastic bags the paper arrives in are perfect for cleaning up after Spuds on his walks. And I’ll have to find something else to read in the bathroom….

1. Priorities, Ann. Jeez. Focus! Perceptive but decidedly weird blogger Ann Althouse isn’t interested in the Times devoting thousands and thousands of words smearing Tucker Carlson as a racist, but she is perplexed that the paper used the term “stick-up.”

One more example of how intellectuals who consider themselves above it all are useless, if not worse, during periods when their influence might be helpful.

2. On the other side of the activism spectrum, Noam Chomsky said in an interview that “one Western statesman of stature” is pushing for a diplomatic solution to the war in Ukraine rather than looking for ways to fuel and prolong it, and “his name is Donald J. Trump.” Now what is the ethical response to that? Chomsky has proven beyond the shadow of a doubt that his is a toxic, biased, anti-American world view. Does this show his integrity? Or is the responsible reaction, “Why the hell would anyone care what Noam Chomsky thinks?”

3. Who says the Supreme Court justices can’t agree on anything? In Shurtleff v. Boston, the court held 9-0 that the city of Boston violated the free speech clause of the First Amendment when it refused to let a group fly a Christian flag outside city hall. The guts of the opinion:

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