News Weakly - 12/21/19

I Don't Think That Word Means What You Think It Means
The Reuters story is about "Tireless teenage activist Greta Thunberg" and goes on to say she ... needs a break. That she needs a break is fine. But "tireless" means "doesn't get tired" and, thus, wouldn't need a break. Oh well. She needs a break because she has been crisscrossing the globe in trains and cars and ... hey, wait a minute! Cars? Those fossil-fuel driven modes of conveyance? Sigh. She won't fly, it says, I guess because everyone knows that one of the major contributors to our environmental crisis is aircraft. I was also interested at the bottom of the story where Elena Costa from Turin said, "We are very excited to have Greta protesting side-by-side with us. We want to explain our goals to everyone ..." Oh, okay, goals. Good ... I'm waiting. Because "Stop it!" doesn't constitute "goals." And "cut back emissions" doesn't constitute a solution. Nor does skipping school every Friday ... unless the problem they're seeking to solve is "too many days a week at school," I guess.

A Double Standard on Rights?
Mississippi (like several other states) tried to save lives by limiting abortions to "pre-life", so to speak -- before viability. A federal appeals court shot it down. "In an unbroken line dating to Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court’s abortion cases have established (and affirmed, and re-affirmed) a woman’s right to choose an abortion before viability," the judges wrote. That is, "The courts have affirmed the right to abortion." No surprise there. I just got to wondering. If the Bill of Rights (which does not guarantee the right to kill babies) guarantees the right to bear arms and the anti-gun folks' efforts to limit access to guns doesn't constitute a breach of those rights, why is an attempt to limit (but not exclude) abortion different? The judges said, "They may not ban abortions," and "up to 16 weeks" is not a ban on abortions -- it's a limitation. The rule for killing babies is "We don't allow limits" but for bearing arms it is "Only what we say it is." (The same goes for free exercise of religion, doesn't it?)

A Climate of Hate
For the third time in 6 months Starbucks is in trouble with police. Once again they've decided they don't like police officers in their store. This time they just ignored the officers. In November they gave an officer his coffee in a cup with the name "PIG" on it. And in Arizona they asked the officers to leave because they made a customer "feel unsafe." Does this mean that Starbucks has an atmosphere of hate for police? No, of course not. But it is a disturbing trend and it does seem to keep coming up and it's not a Starbucks problem; it's a national one. Now, when someone does something racist these days, people clamor that it's Trump's fault, that he's creating a climate of hate. I wonder if the media bias against police isn't doing the same thing. I don't expect the media to fess up to it.

When Did This Happen?
In an ideal world we would be given candidates for office and we'd examine their positions and character and capabilities and say, "That one is the one I want." No more. Now we're in a world of "Never _____" where you fill in the person you don't want to get elected. Then you go for the "other guy" regardless of how good the other guy is or is not. That, in fact, is how Trump got elected. "Never Hillary!" Now conservatives are aiming to shoot down Trump in 2020. "Never Trump!" Which means that conservatives will be voting for a socialist candidate to run the country. It looks like there will be no end of cutting off noses to spite faces.

No News is No News
They say this like it's news, and since they say it's news, I'll put it in the News Weakly, but you and I both know this is not news. President Trump has become the third president in U.S. history to be impeached by the House. It's not news because they've been trying to impeach him since he got elected. It's not news because they've declared from the start that it was their goal to undo the election. It's not news because it is no secret that Democrats don't merely oppose the president; they despise him. So, keep in mind that no president has ever been removed from office by impeachment. Not one. No president has been impeached by both the House and the Senate. And Trump will not be the first. The Trump-hating Democrats would have to control the Senate to do that ... and they don't. I would love to see Pence as president and I would dearly love to have a better offering for a candidate for president for next year, but Trump won't be kicked out of office and this whole charade will come to a whimpering end. (And as for the American public, less than half support the impeachment and a nearly equal amount oppose it. You may also be surprised to know that 82% of Democrats support his impeachment while 10% of Republicans do. If you are surprised, of course, then maybe this whole impeachment thing is news to you.)

In the meantime, having impeached the president in the House, they are refusing to send the articles of impeachment to the Senate to proceed with the next step. They want the promise of a fair trial, because, as we all know, the Senate thus far has promised an unfair trial. Pelosi said, "So far we haven't seen anything that looks fair to us. Hopefully it will be fair, and when we see what that is, we'll send [the articles of impeachment]." I thought it was ironic because many of us have said the same thing about the House proceedings. "So far we haven't seen anything that looks fair to us." And I guess "what looks fair to us" is the promise that they will do what the House tells them to. At least, that's what "justice" looks like in America today. "'No justice, no peace,' by which we mean if you don't give us the verdict we demand, we will call it 'no justice'."

Spin Class
This is how it works. Report the news by all means, but do it with a spin so that your view gets accepted. So the headline says that Israel Strikes Gaza, and there you have it. Dirty, rotten Israel. Just picking on those poor Palestinians. Except that's not accurate. "Oh, wait," the news outlets will say, "that's not what we said. If you read on you'll see that Israel was responding to a rocket attack from Gaza. See? Fair and balanced." And, in the end, it might be, but most people start with "Israel strikes Gaza" and that's all they walk away with. If the story was to be "fair and balanced" the headline would be more like, "Gaza Strikes Israel ... Again" followed by "and Israel responded by hitting a Hamas weapons manufacturing site." You can see the spin in the former, right?

The End of the World as We Know It
In the 1950 movie version of Annie Get Your Gun Betty Hutton sang,

My tiny baby brother
Who's never read a book
Knows one sex from the other
All he had to do was look

Who'd have thought it would be a matter of a court case today? Because the ACLU is planning to sue over the ridiculous notion that men don't have menstrual periods and women do. "Menstrual equity," they call it. You can't look anymore and tell. "The constitutional argument is straightforward. Any law that targets one sex — or one race, or one religion — is inherently discriminatory." That's their argument and they're sticking by it. They are, of course, planning to sue to have urinals put in all women's bathrooms, too, just for equity sake. Oh, no? I wonder why? So we should understand them to say "Any law that targets one sex (women) — or one race (except whites), or one religion (except Christianity) — is inherently discriminatory."

Thanks for that, postmodernism. We can know nothing anymore. Except, of course, that someone is hating someone right this very minute.

Just for Laughs
Overheard: "I looked in the mirror one day and thought, 'I really must be God's gift to women.'" "You mean, like how Santa gives coal to bad children?" "Yeah, and I can only imagine how bad those women must have been."

And I really loved this one: "House Officially Votes To Make Mike Pence President." Too true to be funny?