Culture critic: Why Do Smart People Send Nude Selfies?
In at least one way, suggests The Atlantic’s Amanda Mull, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is exactly like a huge number of Americans: The world’s richest man “has dashed off explicit texts and some predictably composed nudes to a romantic partner with little apparent regard for whether it could come back to bite him in the ass.” This became known when Bezos disclosed what he called a blackmail and extortion attempt by The National Enquirer. Apparently, “the smart and powerful probably aren’t any less prone to sexting than the rest of us.” That’s especially true in cases of “stepping out behind a partner’s back,” as Bezos was. Moreover, “people who feel like they have irrevocable power are significantly more likely to take risky decisions.” And who has more irrevocable power than Jeff Bezos?
Conservative: An Ominous Moment for Pro-Lifers
The pro-life movement on Thursday relearned “the bitter lesson of 46 years of judicial battles,” laments National Review’s David French: Put not your faith in judges, for they shall disappoint you. With Chief Justice John Roberts joining the four liberals, the US Supreme Court granted an emergency stay of a Louisiana law, upheld by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, requiring all doctors performing abortions to have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital. What makes this ominous is that “emergency stays are granted only when — among other factors — ‘there exists a significant possibility of reversal of the lower court’s decision.’ ” Moreover, Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s dissent was “on the most narrow possible grounds.” In short, “grounds for pro-life optimism are fading yet again.”
Economist: AOC Would Spend US Into Oblivion
Skeptics have even “more reason to worry” now that Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has unveiled her “unrealistic and ruinously expensive” Green New Deal, argues Bloomberg’s Noah Smith. It takes “every big spending idea that has emerged on the political left in recent years and combines them into one large package deal, with little notion of how to pay for them all.” And the most expensive items “are enormous new entitlements paid for by unlimited deficit spending.” How enormous? Smith’s rough estimate is $6.6 trillion a year — or “three times as much as the federal government collects in tax revenue, and equal to about 34 percent of the US’ entire gross domestic product.” With no proposal on how to pay for it, that leaves soaring deficits, which would mean “a devastating collapse of the national economy.”
Foreign desk: ‘Never Again’ Vow Dying in Assad’s Prisons
President Trump may have invoked the Holocaust during his State of the Union Address, but The Washington Post’s Josh Rogin charges that “one look at Syria confirms we are failing” to live up to the vow of “never again.” Citing a new exhibit at the US Holocaust Museum on Bashar al-Assad’s mass atrocities, former State Department war-crimes prosecutor Stephen Rapp says its evidence against Assad “is the strongest since the Nuremberg trial” and the Syrian strongman’s “machinery of death is the worst since the Nazis.” Assad’s prisons are “still churning out dead bodies” — and they’re but “one component of the regime’s war crimes,” which have killed half a million innocent people. As long as Assad remains in power, says Rogin, “there will never be peace in Syria.”
From the right: Media Is Biggest Threat to Press Freedom
The outrage over the Covington high-school kids may have blown over, but the story hasn’t, notes The Federalist’s Mark Hemingway. Attorneys representing Nicholas Sandmann, the “smirking” 16-year-old, have sent letters to 50 major news organizations and reporters that likely will precede defamation and libel lawsuits. But while journalists traditionally have been given “extremely wide latitude by courts in the name of protecting free speech,” recent court decisions “have trended toward winnowing the definition of what journalists are allowed to print.” Moreover, those allegedly wronged weren’t public figures, who must clear a high legal bar — “they were, in fact, children.” This case could force the news media to confront an uncomfortable truth: “The greatest threat to First Amendment freedoms might be irresponsible journalists.”
— Compiled by Eric Fettmann
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