"I believe that scripture, the Bible is very clear that God is the one that raises up those in authority."

Said Mike Johnson, orating just before taking the oath as Speaker of the House:

Transcript. 

Excerpt:

"A passenger on a flight from Houston to Washington D.C. has accused United Airlines of giving her first-class seat to U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee..."

"... and then threatening to remove her from the plane for complaining and snapping a photo of the Houston congresswoman," the Houston Chronicle reports.

"It was just so completely humiliating," said Jean-Marie Simon, a 63-year-old attorney and private school teacher who used 140,000 miles on Dec. 3 to purchase the first-class tickets to take her from Washington D.C. to Guatemala and back home. When it came time to board the last leg of her flight home from George Bush Intercontinental Airport on Dec. 18, after a roughly hour-long weather delay, Simon said the gate attendant scanned her paper ticket and told her it was not in the system.... Her seat, 1A, was taken, she was told. Simon was given a $500 voucher and reseated in row 11, Economy Plus. Simon later learned that Jackson Lee was in her pre-purchased seat and has alleged that the congresswoman received preferential treatment, which United denies....

I don't know whether Simon or United is telling the truth, but: 1. Don't take a photograph of another passenger without permission, and 2. That's what first class looks like on United?!

Jackson Lee's response is classic. This is just great if you are — like me — a fan of biting sarcasm enclosed in ludicrous faux-niceness:

"Since this was not any fault of mine, the way the individual continued to act appeared to be, upon reflection, because I was an African American woman, seemingly an easy target along with the African American flight attendant who was very, very nice.... This saddens me, especially at this time of year given all of the things we have to work on to help people. But in the spirit of this season and out of the sincerity of my heart, if it is perceived that I had anything to do with this, I am kind enough to simply say sorry."

2 big problems with "taking a knee" as the new standard form of protest.

1. It's sexist. See the problem:

If you wear a skirt (other than a very long skirt), you can't go down on one knee without creating an upskirt view. It's interesting to me to see that photograph taken with the woman in the short skirt in the most prominent position. She's not in the taking-a-knee position, because she's down on both knees, for the obvious reason. But I don't know how she managed to get into that position without exposing whatever she's wearing under the skirt. Maybe she prepared and — like a figure skater — donned some sort of exposable undershorts. I'm thinking of something like this, but even then, people are going to think it's not intended to be exposed. I'd hate to find myself in some sort of work event — as a lawprof, I usually wore an above-the-knee skirt — and expected to go along with a group activity that put pressure on me to expose myself. It's a disparate burden with an element of sexual harassment.

2. It's ageist and ableist. Look at Sheila Jackson Lee taking the knee at the end of a House speech on the subject of the First Amendment:



She's an older woman — 67 — and I don't know about her health, but it's a long way down for her, and the last 6 inches or so are more of a fall. And to get back up, she pulls on the lectern. It's one thing for professional athletes to go down on one knee, hold the position, and then get back up, but many people are not able to do it easily, gracefully, or without pain. Many cannot do it at all. It's just not an inclusive gesture. Here is this trending expressive activity some people might want to be part of, and they are forced to think about their own physical limitations, which they might feel bad about, but nobody is paying attention to. They may think: Why don't they care about me? Why are they making me expose my weakness?

Rush Limbaugh on Mars, part 2.

Part 1, yesterday, ended: "I started out this post thinking I could defend and support Rush, who riffs and takes risks as he thinks out loud. But he couldn't work up the material he thought he was going to find in there and he wouldn't admit it. 'We're dealing here with desperate leftists who will do anything to advance their agenda here on earth' — he really does deserve to have that line turned against him."

That addressed Rush's Monday show, which drew mockery in the liberal media by those who take bait that he knows he's offering, and of course he came back the next day, Tuesday, to mock the mockers for taking things out of context and getting him wrong. I tried yesterday to anticipate what these explanations would be, but going over the Monday transcript, I saw that he got lost within his own riffs and covered up when he couldn't pull his ideas together. He was trying to talk about how left-wing media and corrupted scientists would use the idea of flowing water on Mars to push the climate change agenda on earth. But how could that work, when the focus on earth is man-made climate change and there are no men on Mars?

I saw traces of "the monologue that could have been — the one that could have worked — which would not have been about climate change on Earth but about NASA's interest in getting us to support sending people to Mars."

So let's check the Tuesday transcript, "What I Really Think About Mars":

I doubt that anybody reporting on what I said actually knows what I said.  I doubt that any of them actually went to my website to read the transcript of what I said and then report on it....

Well, I sure did! I went through the whole transcript, sympathetically, and I explained what went wrong.