Notes on the Way
Some stuff that caught my eye plus an administrative announcement
San Francisco district attorney Chesa Boudin, a radical leftist whose parents and guardians were actual Weather Underground terrorists, has been kicked out of office by fed-up voters in a recall election. Boudin, notorious for his soft-on-the-criminal, anti-law enforcement policies, was blamed for a sharp deterioration of quality of life in a city long dominated by progressive elites. So of course, he blamed his loss on “right-wing billionaires.”
The Lady Ludicrous of the Left, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has been complaining about her fellow Democrats’ reluctance to use the term Latinx in place of the grammatically correct Latino and Latina. She’s not deterred in this crusade by the fact that very few people of Hispanic background have even heard of Latinx, and that most of those who have think that it’s kind of stupid. But as so often where AOC is concerned, stupidity is beside the point. The Spanish language needs urgently to be purged of its sexist preoccupation with, er, gender—and Lady Ludicrous is on it!
The Justice Department has been warning about the domestic terrorist threat and by golly, I have to admit that it’s right! Just yesterday, a man armed with a gun and burglary tools was arrested in the vicinity of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s home. He told the cops that he wanted to kill Kavanaugh because, you know, Roe v. Wade. This comes in the wake of a series of terrorist strikes targeting pro-life pregnancy centers, most recently a firebombing near Buffalo, New York, by a group called Jane’s Revenge. Well! I guess Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer wasn’t kidding when he warned that Kavanaugh and his colleague Neil Gorsuch would “pay the price” if they ruled against “abortion rights.”
Hey, are you ready for today’s May inflation report? The Biden Administration and the Democrats are bracing for more terrible news, fueled this time by the Unmerry Month of May’s rapid rise in gasoline prices. The most sanguine forecast is an 8.2% inflation figure, down just a tiny bit from 8.3% in April. That would be what passes for good news in this season of Joe Biden and the Dems’ discontent.
New York City Mayor Eric Adams was swept into office on a wave of indignation and hope. Fed up with rising crime and a deteriorating quality of life, voters decided to take a chance on a former cop with a tough line of talk. Now his popularity is in free fall, and it’s not hard to see why. As the crime wave tormenting New Yorkers rages on, the Mayor’s tough talk looks less credible by the day. In a recent poll just 29% rated his performance as excellent or good. When he announced his candidacy various people familiar with his record warned that Eric Adams is a flake. His feckless performance in office so far tends to indicate that the critics were correct.
Tuesday was the seventy-eighth anniversary of D-Day: the Allied invasion of France on 6 June 1944. The men who landed on the beaches of Normandy that day are mostly gone now and in a few years no living memory of that “day of days” will remain. I thought it worth mentioning, though, that D-Day was only the first day of a sanguinary battle that culminated in the virtual destruction of the German Army in France. The Battle of Normandy lasted some eight weeks, and the price was high. Between 6 June and 31 August, the US First and Third Armies suffered 124,394 total casualties, with 20,668 killed in action and 10,128 missing in action. The First Canadian and Second British Armies suffered 83,045 total casualties, with 15,995 killed in action and 9,054 missing in action. The Allied air forces lost 16,714 pilots and aircrew. On the German side as many as 250,000 men were killed, wounded or reported missing, and some 200,000 were taken prisoner. Lest we forget…
Oh yes, and let me not forget that administrative announcement. Your Humble Correspondent has been summoned to jury duty, a dismal prospect but a citizen’s responsibility. The case, whatever it is, may yet be settled out of court but if not Un-Woke in Indiana’s publishing schedule may be somewhat curtailed while we give the guilty bastard a fair trial…