Friday someone had left behind the A section of their National Edition of The New York Times at a table where I was eating lunch, so I had something to peruse while chewing. What a pleasure to see a newspaper filled with news! Two-fifty, however, which would make it a slow drain of about the same magnitude as my caffeine habit.
I'm not sure that "the paper of record" continues to deserve the alternate nickname "gray lady." Friday's editorial page, for example, included an article, "Stop Stealing From Strippers," by a stripper or, as her one-sentence bio appended to the article put it, "dancer." The lead institutional editorial took to task the Coca-Cola Company for its "sugarcoated research" indicating that America's obesity problem should be attributed mainly to inactivity. Yes, it turns out, according to the scientists on Coke's payroll, that sugary soft drinks are off the hook! Descriptions of strip-club culture and the skewering of corporate-sponsored "science" are not the normal bailiwick of the gray-haired ladies I know.
Although, to be fair, it could have been an unusually lively specimen of the Times's editorial page, since the last words, in the lower right, were "David Brooks is off today."
On the front page, above the fold, the headline "State's Quirks Offer Kasich An Opening" announced an article about my current favorite Republican. (Not that the competition is fierce.) The state in question is New Hampshire. Its main quirk is that its Republicans are not of the spittle-specked, mentally infirm variety being courted by TrumpCruzCarsonEtAl. The article included this graf:
But what [Kasich] is not saying is just as revealing. During the event, at a country club in a Democratic-leaning part of the state, he dispatched a question about whether he would support legalized abortion in cases of rape, incest and when the life of the mother is in jeopardy with a single word--"Yes"--cutting off discussion of an issue that has addled some of his opponents.
Such as Scott Walker. At the same debate in which Megyn Kelly viciously attacked Donald Trump by asking him to give an account of some of the things he's actually said, Walker stated that his opposition to legalized abortion does extend to cases where the mother's life is in jeopardy. Formerly he had equivocated on this question and he wanted to show, no doubt, that he isn't squishy.
It is beyond me why Trump seems to be winning the Misogyny Derby, while Republican leaders continue to puzzle over the gender gap. Not that being opposed to abortion proves you hate women, but the view that a pregnant woman is just an incubator with unnecessary bells and whistles--central nervous system, cerebral cortex--is, or ought to be, beyond the pale.
Fingerprints at 25 years!
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