"If you want to cancel something, cancel federal gridlock, cancel the incompetence, cancel the infighting, cancel crime, cancel homelessness, cancel education inequality, cancel poverty, cancel racism."

Andrew M. Cuomo is leveraging cancel culture.

Quoted in "Andrew Cuomo has reemerged. But New Yorkers don’t want him back" (WaPo).

ADDED: I can see by the first few comments that I need to make my point more obvious. I'm saying "Andrew M. Cuomo is leveraging cancel culture" because Andrew Cuomo paints himself as the victim of the cancel culture. He's ready for the pushback that will in one way or another insist that he should have stayed canceled. The quote in the post title is the response he's crafted. He must think it's clever and powerful rhetoric... or, at least, the best he can do under his constrained circumstances.

Frank Bruni talks with Camille Paglia and Andy Cohen.

I haven't watched much of this yet, but somebody prodded me to make this available for commenting. Have at it.

ADDED: At about 22:00, Paglia talks about how only a power-hungry "monomaniac" would run for President, because the campaigns "go on far too long." She says "We need to shorten the period, and this will make it more likely that we'll get women candidates, okay, who are not going to have to go around the country and giving up 2 years of their lives, okay. It's brutal."

This immediately made me think of my blog post from 6 days ago about Elizabeth Warren. Warren has a new book in which she tells of her decision not to run for President in 2016. She wrote that she seriously considered it, but decided against it after a discussion with her husband — the aptly named Mann — who said that campaigning for President "looks pretty terrible" and "a lot worse" than running for Senate. I commented:

And you wonder why we haven't had a woman President.

As Barbie once said, "Math class is tough!" And running for President is tough. That's your reason?

Note: I don't really believe that was her reason. I just don't enjoy bullshit that leverages the stereotype that women won't do work that is too strenuous.

But here's Paglia saying that somehow we ought to soften the ordeal of running for President so women (and non-megalomaniacs) will take it on. Contemplating whether Paglia had read my blog post, I was then floored when her next subject was hormones, because my next subject in that post is hormones. I say:

As long as we're talking about the stereotype about women, let me show you something I've been listening to that's kind of blowing my mind — even though I heard it when it originally aired in 2002 — the recently rebroadcast "Testosterone" episode of "This American Life."...

In the video, Paglia proceeds to say that it's not misogyny that's kept women out of running for President, but "the sheer brutal experience" — "you have to be a fighter or have a very thick skin. Most women seem to personalize, the barrage of negativity...." When Bruni asks if women "have thinner skin," she answers: "You know, hormonally, it's true. I know hormones have been out at the New York Times for many a decade."

(If you're wondering whether Camille Paglia even knows who I am, read "My Dinner with Camille.")

Did Chief Justice John Roberts "lose his cool"?

I keep reading about this incident, invariably with the focus on the Chief's demeanor, causing me to suspect that the press is covering for the Obama administration again:

The chief justice accused the solicitor general’s office of being less than candid, by suggesting (as he read the government’s brief) that the secretary of labor in the Bush administration had changed her mind “upon further reflection” when that was not the reason at all. Instead, he corrected, it was “a new secretary now under a new administration” who had done so.

The chief justice scolded, “Don’t say the secretary is now of the view. It’s not the same person. You cite the prior secretary by name, and then you say, the secretary is now of the view. I found that a little disingenuous.”

You can listen to the interchange here, beginning at 29:00. Roberts sharply criticizes the government's lawyer, Joseph R. Palmore, for something that — it seems rather obvious — deserves criticism. I don't hear Roberts becoming inappropriately emotional, which is what "losing his cool" means.

Now, if you want to say Roberts is a hypocrite because his writing is equally disingenuous or worse, that's another matter. It's what Andrew Cohen at The Atlantic is doing in an item titled "The Nerve of John Roberts":

A little disingenuous. This from a judge who disappeared the scope of the Commerce Clause in the Affordable Care Act case.

Disappeared the scope? That's Cohen's way of referring to the identification of some limit on the scope of the commerce power, so that it didn't reach a private citizen's failure to purchase insurance. Congress has power under the Commerce Clause to regulate nearly everything else, which to Cohen's eye is no power at all. Unless it's everything, it's nothing. Disappeared!

This from a judge who gutted decades of First Amendment precedent in the Citizens United case after reaching out, unilaterally, to expand the scope of that campaign finance case.....

Yes, yes, roll out your list of Supreme Court decisions you wish went the other way. That's not in the same category as deceptively stating the facts of a case, which is simply not acceptable in lawyers' briefs. The Solicitor General's office disserved us. The Chief Justice called the lawyer on a deception and — with restraint — said he "found it a little disingenuous."

What I find disingenuous is the criticism of the Chief Justice. And after all he did for you upholding Obamacare! (He used the tax power instead of the commerce power).

But no thanks will be forthcoming. Pressure must be kept up. This is a big term for the Supreme Court — gay marriage (probably), affirmative action, the Voting Rights Act — and Roberts's vote may be required to reach what the media know are the right results. Roberts needs to know that any love for him is purely contingent. He's being watched.

"Justice Kagan's First Dissent."

I admired it myself (for the nicely clear writing), but the Atlantic's Andrew Cohen is downright fawning?

She was even willing to spend some time offering a "hypothetical" to make her point -- just like they taught her at Harvard Law School. Justice Kagan wrote:

Our taxpayer standing cases have declined to distinguish between appropriations and tax expenditures for a simple reason: Here, as in many contexts, the distinction is one in search of a difference. To begin to see why, consider an example far afield from Flast and, indeed, from religion. Imagine that the Federal Government decides it should pay hundreds of billions of dollars to insolvent banks in the midst of a financial crisis. Suppose, too, that many millions of taxpayers oppose this bailout on the ground (whether right or wrong is immaterial) that it uses their hard-earned money to reward irresponsible business behavior. In the face of this hostility, some Members of Congress make the following proposal: Rather than give the money to banks via appropriations, the Government will allow banks to subtract the exact same amount from the tax bill they would otherwise have to pay to the U. S. Treasury. Would this proposal calm the furor? Or would most taxpayers respond by saying that a subsidy is a subsidy (or a bailout is a bailout), whether accomplished by the one means or by the other? Surely the latter; indeed, we would think the less of our countrymen if they failed to see through this cynical proposal.

Well, that is really spiffily written, but I don't see enthusing about her being "even willing to spend some time" writing it. Settle down, Andy. But you see why he's excited, don't you? It's been so demoralizing to liberals to have Justice Scalia writing readable, quotable dissents all these years while the other side of the Court has been so... boring.