Middle school student allegedly sent home for refusing to change shirt that said ‘There are only two genders’ (Fox)

The Anatomy of a Washington Post Smear Campaign

Kyrsten Sinema’s Party of One (New York Times)

Student sentenced to 10 days in jail for peaceful protest of anti-trans policies

A Hot Mess in the Georgia Republican Party (N.Y. Times) Spreading Narrative FUD.

The secret delegate battle that will decide the 2024 Republican nominee (Vox) Spreading Narrative FUD.

The first arrests from DeSantis’s election police take extensive toll (Washington Post)

Clash Erupts Over Work Requirements for Federal Aid

Washington Post Front Page Hypes ‘Far Right’ Freedom Caucus ‘Pledges Fiscal WAR’

Al Franken: Supreme Court is ‘Illegitimate’  But not as much of a bastard as Franken.

12-Year-Old Student Pulled From Class Over T-Shirt About Gender

Is Fox News holding Tucker Carlson hostage?

Sen. Schumer Letter to Dems: ‘MAGA’ Debt Plan ‘Far-Right Ransom Note’  MAGA is the New Nigger.

Indiana Republican Faces Liberal Outrage After He Jokes That He’s Now a Lesbian Trans Woman of Color

6 Scandal-Plagued Senate Democrats Attack Clarence Thomas Over Ethics 

NYC Mayor: Abbott Busing Migrants to ‘Black-Run’ Cities  I.e. Democrat cities.

Carbon capture technology “can never be an excuse” for business as usual, advocates say (CBS News)

NYC co-op owners, covering over 800K apartments, rebel against massive climate law costing millions (N.Y. Post)

The Conversation: “Can we justify … botanic gardens in an age of climate change … ?”

Lithium-ion batteries a growing fire hazard in NYC garbage trucks

EV’s Have 12.5 Percent Less Range Than EPA Estimates

Washington Free Beacon.

Young Democrats are abnormally nervous, depressed, bisexual, and eager to defund the police, according to a new poll from the Harvard Kennedy School of Politics.

Politico.

It’s rare to have an open congressional seat in Rhode Island. So when there is one, ambitious pols pounce on what could literally be a once-in-a-generation shot to go to Washington.

More than a dozen Democrats have declared their candidacy for Rhode Island’s 1st Congressional District — a crowded field that has formed before outgoing Democratic Rep. David Cicilline, who has represented the district for over a decade, even officially resigns. He’s set to leave Congress in just a few weeks to become CEO of the Rhode Island Foundation, a philanthropic organization in the state.

It’s a reliably blue district, all but guaranteeing the victor of the Democratic primary will prevail in the general election.

I think it’s safe to say that each and every one of them sees it as a chance to grow fat from a government paycheck while coercing the citizens of the U.S. into Wokery. (The pension you get for being a member of Congress, vested after five years, is also pretty sweet.)

Read it.

If, of course, that’s what you want to do.

I understand that running over it with an SUV is equally effective.

The American Mind.

Americans suspicious of our elites’ lust for foreign entanglements and of their sending billions down foreign policy ratholes probably have looked askance at recent news of fighting coming from the African country of Sudan. What does it all mean, and why should we care, beyond the fact that thousands of U.S. passport holders were left behind when the Biden Administration evacuated diplomats from our embassy in Khartoum?

The fighting in Sudan is essentially between two armies, both of them with a grim past and a history of corruption and human rights abuses. Each one seeks to dominate and replace the other while eventually controlling the state. The struggle is over power, money, personal ambition, and institutional rivalry tinged with ethnocentrism. The two sides have different geographic and ethnic origins.

The Guardian.

Sales of private jets are likely to reach their highest ever level this year, placing an increasing burden on the planet, while many of the owners escape aviation taxes, and there are few curbs on the greenhouse gases emitted, according to a report.

The report is by the Institute for Policy Studies, a hard-left think tank in D.C.

Note that the objections focus on plane owners escaping the government-imposed burdens of taxation and environmental regulation that the statists at The Guardian can’t tolerate.

The Foundry.

Education choice is on the march.

So far this year, four states have enacted education choice policies that will be available to all K-12 students. Arkansas, Florida, Iowa, and Utah have now joined Arizona and West Virginia in making every child eligible for education savings accounts (ESAs) or ESA-like policies that allow families to choose the learning environments that align with their values and work best for their children.

The education choice movement has already made more progress this year than ever before—and the year is far from over. Late last week, three state legislatures gave final approval to bills that would create new education choice policies or significantly expand existing ones.

Read it.

The bones of the modern global economy might still be labor—albeit off-shored to people willing to do it under ruinous conditions—but the lifeblood of that economy is the massive population of workers demoralized by the uselessness of their day-to-day tasks and incentivised to defend (at least passively) existing economic arrangements: the flunkies and goons, duct-tapers, box-tickers, task-masters, and their wannabes.

Read it.

Markets work, even when you don’t want them to.

When government benefits pay more than working, you get fewer workers.

The Hill.

Texarkana Texas Police said officers were called to a shooting in a neighborhood near Spring Lake Park Saturday evening. A short time later, officers were called to the park for a baseball player that may have been shot.

Spring Lake Park is in a majority-black area of Texarkana, which has a black population of 29%, over twice that of the national average.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that….

The Antiplanner.

The bill also includes more funding for “affordable housing.” Some of that funding is supposed to come from a “fee” on new housing, thus making that housing (and all housing that competes with it) more expensive. But how is this a fee and not a tax?

Under Colorado’s Taxpayer Bill of Rights (TABOR), a constitutional amendment, the state can’t increase taxes without voter approval. But it can increase fees, so the legislature is redefining many taxes as fees so they can raise them without having to go to the voters.

Read it.

What will the 40 percent (and falling) of Scots separatists do now that their vehicle for independence is spluttering to a halt? Like a clapped-out old car, rust is creeping up its innards, parts of it are falling off, and an incompetent driver is at the wheel who seems to have neither a map nor a clear sense of direction.

For a short time, the Scottish National Party (SNP) led the most vibrant movement of its kind in the modern world, secure in its moral and civic purpose and outperforming all other campaigns for secession. Catalonian separatists are disheartened and disunited while the campaign for the Bavarian independence in Germany was only able to muster 1.7 percent of the vote in the last general election. The SNP’s authoritarian leadership, on the other hand, has managed to keep splits and factionalism to a minimum—until recently, at least.

The case for the independence of what was a sovereign state until the 18th century was pressed with unwearying fervour, larded with flattery of the Scots’ genius and contempt for the (English-dominated) Westminster government. For nearly two decades, the UK-wide parties—Conservative, Labour, and Liberal Democrat—had been consigned to the futile sidelines of political power. Two-thirds of Scots voted to remain in the European Union during the 2016 Brexit referendum, and the SNP’s pledge to rejoin upon winning independence was seen as a way of righting a terrible wrong.

I find it impossible to take seriously a ‘Scottish National Party’ whose leader is named Humza Yousaf. Sorry. Just can’t do it, any more than I can pretend that Dylan Mulvaney is a woman.

Read it.

Liberals love to talk about threats to “our democracy,” which just means threats to Democrats winning elections. Voting is a threat to “our democracy” when it doesn’t go their way.

But there is a very real threat to our democracy making its way through state legislatures. It is the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. I wrote about it as far back as 2019. The “compact” is legislation, adopted state by state, that outsources voting in presidential elections.

States that subscribe to the compact agree that their presidential electoral votes will be cast, not for the candidate who won their state, but rather for the candidate who got the most votes nationwide. So if you live in a small or medium-sized state, you are essentially outsourcing your presidential votes to California, Texas, New York, Florida and Illinois.

John Hinderaker at Power Line.

The Left has launched a comprehensive war on modern agriculture. One aspect of that war consists of attacks on animal husbandry, which to some degree ties in with longstanding crank theories espoused by vegans and others. However, contemporary attacks on meat are mostly climate-based. As such, they are dangerous to your family’s health.

Steve Sailer.

From the New York Times news section, a classic NYT upside-down article with the big news buried until most subscribers have stopped reading….

Read it.

Consider Kellie-Jay Keen, aka Posie Parker, a women’s rights activist who holds rallies under the rubric Let Women Speak. She advertises a place and time, turns up with stewards in hi-viz jackets, and hands the mic to any woman with something to say. Some talk about men who identify as women using women’s toilets and changing rooms at workplaces and gyms, or muscling into women-only support groups for everything from addiction to the menopause.

One frequent speaker served a prison sentence locked up with a trans-identified man; another, a disabled woman, fears asking for a female carer only for a man who identifies as a woman to turn up. An increasingly common theme is schools colluding with gender-distressed children’s delusion that they can change sex.

In a sane world, what these women say wouldn’t attract criticism; indeed, it wouldn’t even need to be said. But often they are drowned out by transactivists shrieking threats and slogans of the sort Robert Jay Lifton, in his 1961 book Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism, called thought-terminating clichés: “brief, highly reductive, definitive-sounding phrases [that] become the start and finish of any ideological analysis”. “Trans women are women”. “Trans rights are human rights”. “Kill all terfs [trans-exclusionary radical feminists]”.

Read it.

Our auditors at OpenTheBooks.com recently determined from official Federal Freedom of Information Act filings that we pay Beltway bureaucrats in the federal executive agencies outside of the Defense Department and the U.S. Post Office some $576 million per day.

That’s more than $210 billion per year for the 1.44 million employees of 125 rank-and-file general administrative, civil enforcement and federal law enforcement agencies.