Consider This! | Conservative political commentary in 10 minutes or less

It's been a good run, but after 10 years, this show is done. I appreciate all my listeners on whatever point on the political spectrum you might be.

I have a few parting thoughts, some reminiscing, and of course some conservative commentary. But this show goes a bit over the usual 10 minutes because, hey, it is a special episode.

A leak out of the Supreme Court suddenly made abortion and Roe v Wade the main topic of outrage from the Left.

But, aside from whether or not the opinion aligns with yours, what are the reasons that the Roe and Casey decisions should be overturned? Are there reasons (that are not religious ones or regarding morality) that those decisions don’t hold up legally?

Listen in to find out. As a bonus, I’ll read the introduction to the Alito opinion after the main show so you can some of his reasoning.

Mentioned links:

Supreme Court leak stuns nation

10 key passages from Alito’s draft opinion, which would overturn Roe v. Wade

Is Roe v. Wade About to Be Overturned? If So, What Are the Implications?

U.S. Supreme Court launches probe into leak of draft abortion opinion

Alito’s draft opinion [PDF]

Show transcript

A leaked draft of a Supreme Court opinion is completely unprecedented, and the content of the one leaked on the evening of May 2nd is remarkable in its own right. It appears, according to the opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito, that the Court is prepared to overturn Roe v Wade because it was poorly decided. That’s something that lawyers from both sides of the aisle have agreed with over the years. Inventing a constitutional right to abortion out of whole cloth is what the Court did, overriding the laws of every state and basically legislating from the bench.

Some are suggesting that overturning Roe would be “undemocratic” and would “politicize the Court”. What they fail to realize is that Roe itself was undemocratic and was itself politicizing. The idea that the “right” to abortion was somehow actually in the Constitution is dishonest from the start. Even worse was the whole trimester setup and what was allowed at each step of the way. Was that in the Constitution? No, it was plain legislating, a power that the Court should never have. We have a legislative branch of government for that, and so that politized the Court. And there is nothing less democratic than a few Justices writing rules for the entire nation, overriding the laws of every state. Overturning Roe restores democracy and gets the Court out of the political realm. Removing the issue from edicts from on high and back to the people is what democracy is all about.

Apparently, that’s the last thing Democrats want; to give the people a vote. Fine then, pass a law through Congress where something like this, that lays out when certain procedures are allowed, is supposed to be created. That, too, is the democratic way, where our representatives make the laws, not a majority of a panel of 9 Justices.

But do you see what the Democrats want to do in order to get that passed? They want to use a misuse of the judicial branch of government and turn the Court into what’s been called a “super-legislature”; rather than merely deciding cases based on the text of the Constitution, they can additionally create laws out of thin air. This is an abuse of the process. But remember; live by the sword, die by the sword. Once you create a “law” in this manner, later on, when the court changes hands by the luck of what President gets to name the justices, you can easily see new laws, or removal of old laws, just as easily. And because these Justices have lifetime appointments, those “laws” will be just as hard to change.

One way newspapers push a particular narrative is mentioning the race of a perpetrator right up front or way in the back. Or not at all. A study was done looking at major newspaper articles going back 2 years and guess what they found. (You can probably guess, actually.)

There was quite a backlash to Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter. Thing is, it really brought out who really is for free speech and who isn’t.

Disney dipped it toe into the political waters, but it may be a bit to hot for them.

Mentioned links:

Yes, the Media Bury the Race of Murderers—If They’re Not White

Twitter employees go ‘absolutely insane’ after Elon Musk buys company

The Rising Storm Disney Can’t Wish Away

Show transcript

One thing that conservatives have had a feeling about is that the media are selective on what they consider national news stories. If the perpetrator is white, it seems they get more press than a person of color. It seems that the narrative is pushing the news.

Well, for now we don’t have any hard data on that, but the Washington Free Beacon has done the work to determine where in a story that the race of a murderer shows up. As an example, they note that the race of Frank James, who was responsible for the subway shootings on April 12th, was not mentioned at all in the coverage by the NY Times and Reuters. The Washington Post only mentioned James’s race in relation to his condemnation of training programs for “low-income Black youths.” The charge is that if he had been white, that would have never happened; race would have been prominent from the get-go.

But now there is hard evidence for that. The Free Beacon reviewed 1,100 articles published by 6 major newspapers over 2 years and found that indeed they downplay the race of non-white offenders. They have a graph in their article, linked to in the show notes, that show in which paragraph the race of the perpetrator was first mentioned. Here’s what they found.

Half of articles about a white offender mention his race within the first 15 percent of the article. In articles about black offenders, by contrast, mentions come overwhelmingly toward the end of the piece. Half of the articles that mention a black offender’s race do not do so until at least 60 percent of the way through, and more than 20 percent save it until the last fifth of the article.

And how about where the race was omitted? Well, the Free Beacon confirmed a murderer’s race from other sources and found out how often journalists skipped it.

Again, the skew is startling: White offenders’ race was mentioned in roughly 1 out of every 4 articles, compared with 1 in 17 articles about a black offender and 1 in 33 articles about a Hispanic offender.

There are more findings in the article, including how these stats changed after the death of George Floyd, which only serve to confirm the bias that conservatives have been confident existed in the media. The narrative is everything and if a news story doesn’t, as they say, confirm their priors, then it gets just the obligatory coverage and then memory-holed.

Oh, that liberal media. And yes, it is liberal.

Employees of a tech company reacted angrily when they found out that their company was to be bought by an African-American. That’s another way of reading the actual headline of a link in the show notes, “Twitter employees go ‘absolutely insane’ after Elon Musk buys company”. Yup, he did it, and it turns out that those employees are not all that hip on allowing speech that they disagree with.

Biden seems to call for regime change in Russia. The media are starting to admit the Hunter Biden story was buried. The Florida Parental Rights in Education bill get smeared.

Sorry for the sound quality this time around. I haven’t unpacked the audio equipment yet from our move.

I thought we’d have some inflation after the lockdowns were over. However, the Biden administration has not been doing much too keep that under control.

I said that when a liberal restaurant owner kicked out a prominent Republican that it was wrong. Today I’m going on the record to say that when it happens on the Right it’s just as wrong. However, this time there is a funny turn of events.

Both Republicans and Democrats have been squishy on the issue of increasing the debt limit. Neither side has been better than the other. But that’s about to change.

Mentioned links:

The incredible, disappearing — incompetent — Team Biden

#EmptyShelvesJoe trending on Twitter amid Biden’s supply chain crisis

WaPo: Bread Lines Aren’t So Bad, Puny Citizens

Florida diner that forbids Biden supporters becomes so popular that it runs out of food

Episode 218: Blacklisted by a Red Hen / ACLU Cools to Civil Liberties / SCOTUS Rules Against Coerced Speech

Growing number of Democrats endorse abolishing debt limit altogether

‘Glorious karma’: Braves bring World Series to Atlanta after MLB pulls All-Star Game

Show transcript

Well it’s been some time since I talked to you. Let’s see what’s been happening.

Inflation has reared its ugly head. Now I will say this; after the shutdowns and lockdowns of 2020, I figured that all that pent-up demand would lead to a buying binge that would mean prices would rise, just like your Econ 101 teacher said they would. But the Biden administration hasn’t been doing such a good job at trying to mitigate it. Getting stuff into our ports has, apparently, been such a hassle for Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg that he’s been taking paternity leave since August. Ships with shipping containers of all kinds of stuff are hanging out waiting their turn to dock at ports on both coasts. This has driven inflation up more than it would have been otherwise. But I guess it doesn’t matter that the price is higher if you can’t buy it anyway. The hashtag #EmptyShelvesJoe was trending at one point complete with pictures of said shelves.

But the Washington Post, dutifully attempting to cover for a Democrat, tweeted this, “Don’t rant about short-staffed stores and supply chain woes. Try to lower expectations.” You see, we’re too used to being a first-world country. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain who’s paying people to stay at home, or whose incompetence at transportation and commerce is hitting us right in the supply chain. Just get over yourselves!

Does anyone think ideas like that would have been published in the Post if Donald Trump had been elected?

Back in 2018 in episode 218 I talked about how a restaurant, the Red Hen, refused to serve Sarah Huckabee-Sanders. I chided the restaurant for outright refusing to serve someone based on their political affiliation. And now I’m going to be consistent in that belief.

The DeBary Diner in DeBary,

It’s hard to believe that it’s been 20 years since the devastating terror attack on September 11, 2001. The memories seem so fresh. But are they?

In this episode you’ll hear my memories, a listener’s memories, and a Romanian’s ruminations on how we came together in the days following.

Mentioned links:

One man’s ‘mirror for America’ (November 6th, 2001)

Show transcript

“They weren’t Canadian.”

These were the first words that I heard when I picked up the phone in my cubicle and said, “Hello, Doug Payton.” I recognized the voice as someone from our Canadian office. “What?”, I stammered, taken a little aback at the unusual greeting.

“They weren’t Canadian.” he repeated. “What weren’t Canadian?” I asked. “The planes.” he replied. “What planes?” I asked. And that’s when I found out that something was disastrously wrong. By this time, both towers had been hit. I tried to bring up various news sites on the web to find out what was happening, but apparently everyone else in the country, and much of the world, was doing the same thing. My web browser just showed me error after error. At one point I managed to get the top portion of The Drudge Report to load, and his headline screamed, “Who did this?”

I remember the voice mail I got at the office from my wife telling me to listen to the news. I remember hearing people in other cubicles relay news reported to them from spouses or friends over the phone (some of which turned out to be wrong). I remember thinking that when the towers came down the death toll could reach into 5 figures. (I remember being so grateful later on that it wasn’t.) I remember my boss telling everyone to go home. I remember watching TV pretty much the rest of the day. I remember when my kids got home from school and we talked about what had happened.

My kids took it well. They asked questions, and I answered them the best that I could. I’ve always tried to instill a sense of history in them when interesting things happened (we talked a lot about the 2000 election debacle), but in this case there was history mixed with a sadness, even a reverence, for those who just went to work that day and never came home.

One of my daughters was studying the state of New York in school and had recently decided to do a diorama of New York City. When it came time to do the buildings, I was going to print out a picture of the skyline, which we’d cut up and give a 3-D look to. When we asked her whether she wanted the Twin Towers there or not, she thought for a second and decided that she wanted them to be in there. She and her sister had visited the Twin Towers a couple years earlier with their aunt from Queens, and they remember looking out from the top.

Sometime after the clean-up at Ground Zero was finished, I took my 3 oldest kids there. I have some pictures of them there, as well as the perfectly-proportioned cross made of steel beams that was found in the wreckage, standing tall in the midst of what should have been two tall towers and thousands of people. Again, I was trying to instill a sense of the historic in them.

I have a lot of memories from 9/11, but not nearly as many as others. One of my brothers-in-law was stuck in downtown Manhattan for 3 straight days. He did maintenance work at a hospital, and for him to leave would have meant putting patients in peril, so he stayed. When he did come home, he ate, slept, and went right back. You want memories? He’s got ’em, and they’re far more emotional than mine.

So 20 years on, we’re remembering the day, each in our own way, based on our own memories. But we, as a nation, have a corporate memory as well; the sum total of all of our thoughts and experiences. This national memory sometimes fades, in and out, especially as the time passes.

The UK's NHS is continuing to kill children. Update on James Younger. And Afghanistan.

This time out, we’re going to have just good news. No conservative commentary. (Well, maybe just a little bit.)

Mentioned links:

We Just Got Proof That Uber Has Saved Thousands of Lives

Man speechless after letter he wrote to Santa in 1961 is found in his old chimney

Man surprises wife with long-lost wedding video after finding it 14 years later, in an unlikely place

Florida man in bubble-like vessel washes up on beach, sheriff says

Show transcript

The rideshare company Uber has been the target of some politicians’ ire because of the way they run their business. Think about it; people voluntarily offer their time and vehicle in exchange for cash from a company that connects drivers with people who need a ride. That’s what the free market is all about.

But there’s a little something more to this company than merely disrupting the corrupt taxi service system. A study by two economists at the University of California, Berkeley examined the impact that Uber, specifically, has had on alcohol-related traffic deaths and total traffic deaths in the US. The study asked the question; by providing people with a safe, convenient, and relatively inexpensive alternative means of transportation, would Uber reduce drunk driving and traffic deaths?

The good news is Yup. Uber reduced drunk driving accidents by 6.1% and total road fatalities by 4%. How much is that in absolute terms? For drunk driving, it comes to 214 lives, and for all traffic deaths it comes to 494 lives. In absolute numbers, these may sound small, but consider that the major competitor Lyft was not included in this study and so those numbers could be double that. And consider these were just for the year 2019.

That’s good news, and because Uber can typically beat the rate for taxis, its disruption of the market translates into more lives saved than with just taxis because it’s an option.

Little Robert Crampton asked his father to write a letter to Santa with his Christmas list. Now, this was just 2 days before Christmas, so he made sure to have his dad write “URGENT” at the top of the page, along with the return address so he knew where to deliver the items, which were mostly cowboy-related. And so on December 23rd, 1961, Robert sent that letter off to Santa and went to bed.

And that was the last anyone saw of the letter. Until recently.

Just a little while ago, on July 20th, Cheryl Thorne found it while she was just doing her job. No, she’s not a postal worker; she’s a…chimney sweep. Cheryl found the letter up inside the home’s chimney. The Crampton’s had since moved, and Robert had grown up, so it took a little doing to reunite him with his letter 60 years later, but it happened.

Now I’m sure you’re either amazed and giddy or totally incredulous to hear that, yes, the letter was found in the chimney, at least if you, like me, are American. You see, Robert lived in Derbyshire, England, and it’s a tradition to write your letter to Santa and then burn it in the fireplace. I did not know this until I looked into this story. The ashes then go up the chimney and off to the North Pole. What’s interesting in this case is that the letter itself, remarkably intact, flew up the chimney and lodged itself somewhere so that it could remain safe until, 6 decades later, a chimney sweep could find it.

Let me leave you with a couple thoughts. Looking back, Robert noted that he did get some of what he asked for; a six-shooter cap gun and a sheriff’s badge. And also, I’m pretty sure that, if you ask one,

Why would you voluntarily seek to represent a group that you disagree with? And should you be replaced in that representation?

When Big Tech social media companies ban someone, some suggest that since they are private companies that’s OK. But there are other considerations. And what happens when they start doing the bidding of the government?

Mentioned links:

Olympic athlete ‘pissed’ national anthem was played while receiving award, claims ‘it was setup’

Jesse Owens [Wikipedia]

Biden administration ‘flagging problematic posts for Facebook,’ Psaki says

Psaki Tries to Justify Getting Social Media to Censor People but Makes It So Much Worse

Show transcript

Why would someone represent, of their own accord, a group or organization that they disagreed with? For example, would you go to a convention and be in one of those information booths for the company you worked for, but then tell everyone who came by that you were ashamed of your company? Now, you may have a perfectly good reason for feeling that way, but then why did you volunteer to represent the company? Now you’ve made your appearance at the convention about you rather than the company itself.

There’s a time and a place for airing your grievance, but this ain’t it. The company would have good cause to replace you with someone who will do the job. And that is what another group in this same position ought to do.

Gwen Berry was participating in US Olympic track and field trials in the women’s hammer throw. She came in third place and, while standing on the podium, the national anthem began to play. Now, there is some question as to whether this was simply being played at a particular time of day or for the competition itself, but either way when it started, Berry made her feelings known about it. She turned away from the flag and then later put her T-shirt over her head with the words “Activist Athlete” showing.

No matter what your grievance with the country might be, this ain’t the time to air it. You are voluntarily trying to get on a team, a team that will represent your country. This is not about you and your political or social disagreements.

In 1936, Jesse Owens won 4 gold medals at the Summer Olympics in Berlin, Germany. Think about what he as a black man living in Alabama was subjected to in this country at that time. And yet when he got on the 1st place stand, he didn’t merely put his hand over his heart when his anthem played, he saluted the flag.

He understood what Martin Luther King would, decades later, say to the nation. The flag stands for a promise of freedom and of equal treatment under the law; a promise that has not been properly kept during this country’s history, but a promise nonetheless. Owens believed that promise and King appealed to that promise.

[MLK audio]

That is what the flag stands for, and if you can’t respect that, no matter your color, I don’t think you should be representing the country.

One of the defenses I hear when Facebook, Twitter, or some other social media company de-platforms someone is that, “since they’re private company, they can do what they want”. Typically this comes from someone who’s trying to appeal to my conservative values that the government should stay out of the private sector. And as far as that goes, that’s a very good argument.

But there are a couple of issues with that when it comes to these massive tech companies. For starters, when the government keeps in touch with those companies in ord...

Can you be censored for stating basic facts? Is there a downside to the enhanced unemployment benefits?