gehringer_2

If you can't make an argument that doesn't depend on some kind of mystically revealed 'truth', you shouldn't be given authority over the local dog pound let alone a superior court in a polyglot nation. I don't care what any judge believes when they have their robes off, I just don't want to be able to figure it out from their decisions. That's what the oath to the Constitution should promise to every American, the majority of whom are neither Catholic nor Evangelical, Muslim, Jewish or anything else. And for that matter it's also simple politics, the nation claims to be majority deist by survey, but no organized church or doctrine is supported by more than a minority. It's a historical habit of mind of Catholics and more recently Evangelicals to forget that many people believe in God but come to vastly different answers to many questions than they do.

No, you don't have to be an atheist, but you should always argue as if it's an atheist that you have to persuade of the soundness of your reasoning.

The topic of the article was whether ACB was going to follow the advice she was once happy to dispense to others that judges facing decisions where existing law and personal religious belief conflict should recuse. Barrett's topic at the time was the death penalty and here the writer (S. Sherry) re-framed the question wrt Abortion. However, the question of judges who profess fealty to higher standards of impartiality but then abandon them when facing the chance to advance their own political/religious agenda is certainly broader than just abortion. You can certainly criticize a Douglas for text as mushy as 'emanations of penumbras' but even mushy secular arguments are less dangerous to the republic than those whose real premises are religious.

Lol. You are the one fixated on abortion. All I want is exactly what I stated, which is judges willing to subordinate whatever they may believe as religious teaching to the supremacy of a system of secularly derived law.

And of course you know well that no jurist on any GOP short list would make a statement like Kennedy’s today as they would instantly be off that short list.

Lol. Scalia made it clear enough over the years In his public statements that he didn’t take that oath seriously when it came to religion

I've already stated clearly the criteria I prefer - it's allegiance to law as promulgated by a constitutional process over received religious doctrine. If a Muslim won't swear allegiance to the Constitution over the Koran honestly he should be excluded just as much as any Catholic or Evangelical or Hindu or Sikh or Bahia or Buddhist or anything else that doesn't take the oath honestly. If you recall, John Kennedy did actually make a promise to the public during his election campaign in that regard. have any of our current examples ever made a statement like this?

you have a choice to make as to where you look for "supreme law". It's institutional Catholicism which creates the issue with threats to deny sacraments to or excommunicate those in political power if they don't toe the doctrinal line, so don't act like this isn't an issue of their own making.

If they will not recognize the supremacy of secular democratic authority over that of the their church, I would have no problem with baring anyone on that grounds. They take an oath to support the Constitution which includes the 1st amendment and there are at least 3 of them on a given day that that are more than happy to violate it. It defies logic to me that they construe constraining the authority of the state to preserve life through public health actions as an example of free exercise. When you are willing to constrain the democratic action of the state for the benefit all in the interest of some religion, you are establishing that religion. That is prohibited. I doubt seriously that they would be so solicitous if the petitioners were not of their same sectarian bent.

quick stop on the way back east to visit some folks in Vancouver.

Anyone religious enough not to recognize the supremacy of secular law in a republic that guarantees freedom of and from religion should be all rights be barred from judicial service and if they were intellectually honest they would not seek the role. Religious zealots like like Scalia and Barrett are a scourge on the 1st amendment.

Just a light flurry going here so far.

The weird sense of transposition leaving an LAX that was so crowded you needed a shoe horn just pry your self enough room to stand in, and landing in Portland where a cannon shot down the terminal wouldn't have hit a soul.

Cheers!

remember, it took a while before any one matched ARod's contract. Not every new contract set a new baseline. Correa's hoping Lindor is not ARod. Maybe he'll be right, maybe not.

fair point. I think SF has the right narrative though. When Covid started the Reds weren't being affected and the evangelicals could just call it God's judgment on all them city sinners. Problem is once having picked sides it's not so easy to back out of the logic to which you committed.

Yeah - I don't see what why what a guy is asking for is any kind of hard determinant on what you might want to offer. Your FO may have a more realistic idea of what he is going to have to settle for than he admits to.

I should know better by now to never post anything from my phone!

No way to predict that. Mutation is fundamentally a random process. It’s true that a bug that kills its host too efficiently won’t be able to keep spreading very well, but the morality rates for all the Covid variants are low enough that probably doesn’t figure much into their survival probability. So far that has been mostly a matter of the other side of the coin— their infectivity.

there are certainly issues with the regulatory state, but the primary one is the loss of democratic control of the government that runs the regulatory state. The problem is not a government that regulates - any good government must - and the clear difference between requiring people to take reasonable measures to insure the public health of all, as opposed the rent seeking lobbies that have given you permitting requirements to fix your own head as the result of their political expenditures should be self-evident. You have gotten as far as identification of the problem, but the reflexive response that anarchy and unrestrained power for those that can buy it is the wrong solution. The problem with the regulatory state in the US is that today it is driven more by the money contributed by commercial interests than the public interest. I'll give you three guesses how best to solve that, and the 1st two need not even count.

Merry Christmas, Morans!

There is a very simple reason for this - at least in MI, which is that as the vaccine was sequentially approved for younger people the denominator in the percentage calculation increased and the % vaccinated dropped, then eventually got back to the previous level when enough new vaccinations had occurred to get the the same percentage of a now larger target population. This has all been explained on the Mich Covid (MDPH) site at each stage of the process - approval to 12 yrs and then approval to 5 yrs.

the other thing about the numbers in the US is that in places like MI, you have an average of 60 but half the places are at 80 and the other half are at 40, so for all intents and purposes you have half the counties in the state at such a low level that it's no different from zero for for the purposes of epidemic suppression.

Somewhere up thread I posted about the difference between a vaccine's clinical effectiveness and its epidemiological effectiveness. They are different things. Early evidence is that Omicron will still replicate in a vaccinated individual enough for that individual to pass the virus on, so that's much not help wrt epidemic spread. But OTOH, so far preliminary evidence is that the vaccines are effective for Omicron at reducing the severity of clinical outcomes (morbidity/mortality). Meaning that getting vaccinated now is even more a matter of self-interest rather than social responsibility than it was previously.

the opt out problem for Correa in that scenario is that even if he has two great years, in the eyes of most buyers, as a short stop he is probably still losing value faster with age than performance can overcome.