Powerline . . ."Start with our doddering president, Slow Joe. The New York Times reminds us:
Mr. Biden entered the Senate in 1973 as a 30-year-old practicing Catholic who soon concluded that the Supreme Court went “too far” on abortion rights in the Roe case. He told an interviewer the following year that a woman shouldn’t have the “sole right to say what should happen to her body.”...
"President Biden wrote to the major oil companies last week, urging them to ramp up supply as gas topped five dollars a gallon in America.
"President Biden's letter on Tuesday was sent to seven oil companies: Marathon Petroleum, Valero Energy, ExxonMobil, Phillips 66, Chevron, BP, and Shell.
"The president said it's "unacceptable" that oil companies are making record profits during "a time of war.". . .
"This is so outrageous. The parents and children are better off being away from this madhouse.
"Leighton Woodhouse writes at Substack:
They Questioned Gender-Affirming Care. Then Their Kids Were Kicked Out of School.
On May 25, Paul and Rebeka Sinclair pulled their minivan over to the side of the road, just north of Lake Tahoe, and logged onto a Zoom with Katherine Dinh, the head of the Marin Country Day School.
“Today was the last day of school for your children, Charlotte and Carter,” Dinh informed the couple. The Sinclairs—she’s 37; he’s 51—had been driving home from a vacation to celebrate their anniversary. Dinh appeared to be reading a script. Two MCDS board members joined her on the call but stayed quiet. “Please do not contact any other school employees, particularly Charlotte and Carter’s teachers, as your reaching out to them will cause them further stress,” Dinh continued. “The two of you are not to be on campus again.”
It was the closing act of a year-long drama between the Sinclairs and MCDS, which charges $40,000 per student per year and had been teaching first and second graders about “deconstructing the gender binary”—the idea that there’s no such thing as girls or boys, just a spectrum of relative girlness and boyness.
The Sinclairs weren’t the only parents who had protested the new gender-identity curriculum—most families in their daughter’s class were upset and had been talking about it among themselves. But the Sinclairs had been unwilling to stay quiet. As a result, administrators had suggested that they were homophobic and accused them of tarnishing MCDS’s reputation. (An MCDS attorney had accused the Sinclairs of “defamation” for accusing MCDS of “predatory ‘grooming’ of children.” The Sinclairs never made that accusation.) Friends had stopped replying to their texts. Teachers said they felt unsafe around them. When word got out about why Charlotte, 8, and Carter, 5, had been kicked out, the Sinclairs had to decide whether they could stay in the Bay Area.. . .
"As expected, pro-abortion Democrats went absolutely bonkers Friday in the aftermath of the anticipated decision from the Supreme Court where a majority ruled that the 1973 landmark Roe v. Wade ruling be overturned.
"Among those melting down were members of the mainstream media and radical leftists like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), the latter of whom declared the Supreme Court “illegitimate” and encouraged people to get “into the streets” while refusing to condemn calls for violence that were coming from outraged pro-abortion groups.
"Not surprisingly, Rep. Maxine “Mad Maxine” Waters (D-Calif.) also got in on the action, proclaiming her disgust with Friday’s announcement while urging people to “fight in the streets”:. . ."
In spite of this amendment:
14th Amendment of our constitution? Section 3.
No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any state, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any state legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any state, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.
...This is nowhere better demonstrated than by the legions of rioters who participated in the “peaceful protests” of 2020 who found their charges dropped or their bails funded by the glitterati.
"From Madison reading Cato and Cicero when framing the Constitution to the outsized impact both Rome and America had on the world around them, the United States has long been associated with historical Rome. There are great similarities, and there can be much to learn—and what’s happening now does not reflect well on either historical Rome or America.
"When most of us think of the worst emperors in Roman history we think of names like Commodus, Nero, Caligula, and Elagabalus. To a man they were vain, self-centered, bloodthirsty hedonists who took what they wanted and tortured and killed many thousands of Romans and provincials.
"All emperors, including the great ones like Augustus, Trajan, and Aurelian had blood on their hands to one degree or another but most tried to maintain or grow the empire. Commodus et al didn’t. Their goal was to satiate their lusts, whether literal lust or gluttony or, sadly, bloodlust. While there were other bad emperors, these four are among the worst.
"What makes this relevant today is the fact that all four of these “men” were spoiled, pampered, entitled sadists who were given free rein when they were still essentially children. Commodus was the oldest at 19, while Nero was 17, and both Elagabalus and Caligula were 16.
"They were overindulged brats who never faced consequences for their behavior. They were given virtually anything they wanted or, just as often, allowed to take what they wanted with impunity. And at those ripe young ages, and with that upbringing, they were literally given the keys to the kingdom and unleashed on the Empire—and virtually everyone in it suffered as a result.
"Every day in America we see modern-day Commoduses or Caligulas wreaking havoc on our streets and in our stores, restaurants, schools, and more. Instead of a single entitled Emperor, America in 2022 is being ravaged by a generation of young men—many of whom have grown up fatherless—who have been told that they can do and say anything they want and that, regardless of what they do, there will be no consequences for them.". . .