Favorable Weather for Deregulation. Walz and Frey: Heirs of Bull Connor? Bad Bunny in Translation. Mamdani & Freezing Homeless. More
Looks like the climate is favorable to deregulation.
“Trump to Repeal Landmark Climate Finding in Huge Regulatory Rollback” is a front-page story at the Wall Street Journal. The significance is huge:
The Trump administration is planning this week to repeal the Obama-era scientific finding that serves as the legal basis for federal greenhouse-gas regulation, according to U.S. officials, in the most far-reaching rollback of U.S. climate policy to date.
The reversal targets the 2009 “endangerment finding,” which concluded that six greenhouse gases pose a threat to public health and welfare. The finding provided the legal underpinning for the Environmental Protection Agency’s climate rules, which limited emissions from power plants and tightened fuel-economy standards for vehicles under the Clean Air Act.
“This amounts to the largest act of deregulation in the history of the United States,” EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said in an interview.
It’s certainly large enough to induce fear and loathing at the New York Times. The headline there this morning: “Trump Allies Near ‘Total Victory’ in Wiping Out U.S. Climate Regulation.” Despite the apocalyptic tone, the New York Times tells a fascinating story about how a small group of smart and dedicated conservatives (not quite how the Times characterizes them) worked to debunk the overreaching endangerment finding. Sneaky: A Wall Street Journal editorial yesterday highlighted an attempt to “guide” judges dealing with complicated climate or regulation cases:
The manual begins with a foreword by Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan, who writes that while judges are “generalists” who often learn about scientific issues “through the adversary process, . . . sometimes it also helps to have a dispassionate guide.” Judges will do their job better when they learn from the technical expertise of scientists, she writes, and “the law will become stronger as it further reflects sound science.” …
In case judges didn’t get the hint, the paragraph concludes this “sometimes occurs as a result of strategic manipulation from stakeholders who stand to be harmed if the public were to understand the true state of scientific consensus” such as in the cases of “tobacco, ozone depletion, and climate change.”
Where Is Nina Simone Now That We Need Her for An Update? “Minnesota Burning” is the headline on Bill McGurn’s WSJ column this morning. He writes:
Does Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz understand the argument he’s making, and which side of history it puts him on?
It dates to 1964, when Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy dispatched the Federal Bureau of Investigation to Mississippi to find three young civil-rights activists who had gone missing. Their bodies were discovered six weeks later beneath an earthen dam. The men had been killed by members of the Ku Klux Klan and the local sheriff’s office. The film “Mississippi Burning,” starring Gene Hackman, was loosely based on this story.
“Walz and Frey have put themselves in the same constitutional camp as Bull Connor and the Southerners who led the ‘massive resistance’—as they called it then—campaign to Brown v. Board of Education,” says John Yoo, a UC Berkeley law professor.
New York Post cover headline: “Tragedy of His Own Making.” A story inside the paper notes:
Critics are enraged by Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s hands-off policy leaving homeless New Yorkers on the streets during extreme cold, and pleading that the city do anything in its power to protect the vulnerable population.
But the administration refused to budge as the Big Apple’s winter death toll rose to 18 — even as a nearby big-city mayor admired by Mamdani rolled out a policy to get people inside.
Shelter workers were tragically unable to help freezing homeless people.
Something else Hizzoner wouldn’t budge on: He did not attend the installation of New York’s new Archbishop Ronald Hicks, becoming the first Mayor of New York in 100 years, or maybe ever, to boycott the ceremony.
After thinking it over, I’m glad our sometimes-a-bit-too-loquacious President Trump weighed in on Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl performance. Calling Bad Bunny’s segment “a complete humiliation ritual” and “anti-American garbage,” State of the Day provided an English translation of the uncensored version of the rapper’s English-free performance. What degeneracy.
The Federalist has two pieces on Bad Bunny at the Super Bowl: “The Super Bowl Halftime Show Was Literally [sic] About Erasing ‘America’” and “Media’s Fawning Bad Bunny Coverage Is Just Another Psyop To Demoralize And Mislead Americans.” Salon, meanwhile, found that Bad Bunny’s vulgar performance “showed what the joy of unity looks like.”
It certainly appears that the collapse of “trans” dominance in mainstream culture is imminent. “Good Sense on Transgender Children” is the headline on a Wall Street Journal editorial on the recent recommendations of a surgeon’s guild:
Progressive politics has infected much of today’s medical establishment, and no more so than in surgical and hormonal treatments for children with doubts about their biological sex. So credit the American Society of Plastic Surgeons for restoring some common sense.
Last week the ASPS issued a formal position recommending against gender-related surgeries for patients under 19. There’s “insufficient evidence” of “a favorable risk-benefit ratio” for endocrine or surgical interventions for children, the surgeons guild said.
The plastic surgeons’ statement cited the landmark 2024 Cass Review from the United Kingdom, among other research. That review warned that the scarce studies on gender medicine are often of “poor quality.” The Cass Review added that clinicians have no way of knowing whether or not children will have “an enduring trans identity” or transitory gender distress, and it recommended a holistic treatment approach that includes screening for other neurodevelopmental and mental-health conditions.
Spiked Online says that we need to talk about the scandal of sex in prisons. We have frequently addressed the subject of male prisoners finagling their way into women’s prisons by claiming they have become women. But this story is about female prison guards and inmates:
I am by no means opposed to dating in the workplace. I’m also a sucker for a story about forbidden love. But even freaks like me have to draw the line somewhere, and for reasons I didn’t think needed spelling out, prison guards having relations with inmates is where that line should be.
Every few weeks, like clockwork, there’s another headline about a prison officer, usually female, and an inmate. …
Or maybe the truth is simpler: women no longer want the man in uniform. Authority is out, accountability is tedious, and the new fantasy appears to be a bloke in tracksuit bottoms with nothing to lose, nowhere to be and an extremely flexible schedule. Hey, it’s the norm in the real world. Why not add a frisson of danger to the equation by involving a convicted criminal?
President Trump, so far, hasn’t been damaged by the Epstein releases. But U.K. Labor Prime Minister Keir Starmer is barely clinging to his job in the wake of revelations about former Ambassador to the U.S. Peter Mendelson. But the quest for ever more Epstein revelations continues apace. Ghislaine Maxwell testified via video from prison before a House hearing yesterday. She took the Fifth on all questions. “Of Course she did,” Andrew McCarthy writes at National Review.
Madame Maxwell wants a deal: exoneration for both former President Clinton and President Trump clemency. Wonder if President Trump would give her half a loaf?
Nancy Rommelman has penned a truly riveting article for Real Clear Investigations: “Caring for Mom Is an Education in Scams and Fraud.” Astonishing. … Republicans will find Doug Schoen and Carly Cooperman’s “How Weak Are Republicans for the Midterms? Likely Less Than You Think” riveting. … The curious and frightening case of the disappearance of Nancy Guthrie seems far from resolution (here, here, and here). Our hearts go out to the Guthrie family.
