Wednesday, April 03, 2024

Quick Hits: Volume CCCXLIV

 - Am I supposed to be outraged by this





To be honest, I'm not able to muster anything more than an eyeroll. 


All that said, I would be curious if, say, a retired pro hockey player like a Brett Hull expressed surprise that a black dude on an NHL team overwhelmed the opposing club with his stellar play. I'm gonna guess it wouldn't quite be met with the same wave off. 



- Speaking of NCAA Women's hoops, their Final Four will take place this weekend in Cleveland. The last time this event occurred in The Land was 2007, about which Cleveland's WEWS-TV news reporter John Kosich reminisced via Instagram.


The caption from that post: 


Pulling up a story from the last time the Women’s NCAA Final Four was in Cleveland 17 years ago I came across this clip talking with Rutgers Head Coach C. Vivian Stringer. Totally forgetting that a few days after this interview, Don Imus would make a racist comment about her team that would lead to his firing by MSNBC. It left the network, which simulcast his radio show, with a 3-hour hole in their programming which they eventually filled by creating a new show, Morning Joe.


That fact Morning Joe sprung from that debacle means that Imus's undeniably despicable comments weren't the only regrettable incident from 17 years ago. 



- This November there's a nonzero chance that Donald Trump could be elected President and the U.S. Senate could flip to the GOP. With that in mind, progs are feeling a slight sense of deja vu


Democratic senators are not joining calls on the left for liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor to retire. But for the first time, they’re publicly expressing an unease that history could repeat itself after Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s refusal to step down in 2014 ended in the Supreme Court lurching sharply to the right.

Ginsburg, then 81 and a cancer survivor, could have retired and been replaced by a Democratic appointee when President Barack Obama was in office and his party controlled 55 Senate seats. She rejected the calls — and died in September 2020, allowing then-President Donald Trump to replace her.

It was a history-making moment: Ginsburg’s successor, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, gave rise to a 6-3 conservative majority. Barrett went on to cast a deciding vote to overturn the landmark Roe v. Wade abortion rights ruling less than two years later.

With that humbling history in mind, some liberal commentators say Sotomayor — who is 69, a lifelong diabetic and the oldest member of the court’s liberal wing — should retire while Joe Biden is president and Democrats control the Senate, echoing similar calls directed at Ginsburg a decade ago that went unheeded.


I guess progs have grown weary of trying to goad the black guy (Clarence Thomas) into retiring and are now proclaiming that the first ever Hispanic woman to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court oughta call it a career. 


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