Media watch: Still Gunning for Kavanaugh Later

Justice Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed to the Supreme Court a year ago Sunday, but the “battle . . . never really ended,” sighs National ­Review’s John McCormack. Witness a recent New York Times column that proved “one of the worst cases of journalistic malpractice in recent memory”: The paper surfaced a new accusation against Kavanaugh from his time at Yale — without noting that the alleged victim had no recollection of the alleged incident. Remarkably, the Times reporters even downplayed their “only real bombshell,” namely the first interview with Leland Keyser, who Kavanaugh ­accuser Christine Blasey Ford insisted witnessed the future justice assaulting her. Problem is, Keyser told the reporters Ford’s story “just didn’t make any sense.” In all, “it is fair to say that Kavanaugh’s ­confirmation was actually a victory for truth over tribalism.”

Iconoclast: The Candor of Quotas

Reading Judge Allison Burroughs’ decision upholding Harvard’s affirmative-action program, The Washington Post’s Charles Lane wonders if the Supreme Court should have just permitted quotas back in 1978, when it handed down its decision in the Bakke case. The court ruled then that colleges and universities can use race as an admissions factor in order to achieve “diversity” among the student body, but not a quota system to remedy “the lingering effects” of discrimination. But there is “little practical difference” between the two systems, says Lane, except that quotas are “more transparent and straightforward” and potentially “finite” — whereas racial discrimination in the name of diversity “has mutated into the touchstone of progressive ideology.”

From the left: Court Challenges Racist Relic

Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern, though no fan of Supreme Court conservatives, notes that they are likely to give progressives a big win soon when the court rules that the Constitution requires “juries to reach unanimous verdicts in both state and federal court.” Out of “flagrant bigotry” in the 19th century, Louisiana and Oregon changed their laws to allow “non-unanimous verdicts in felony trials,” so that minority jurors became irrelevant. Now, a Louisiana man convicted of second-degree murder by a 10-2 vote is challenging non-unanimous verdicts — and Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, both appointed by President Trump, strongly criticized the idea in oral arguments. Expect “an extraordinary” — and likely bipartisan — “shift in criminal justice.”

From the right: Woke Sports

National Basketball Association Commissioner Adam Silver has insisted that players have an “absolute right” to political speech. Unless that is, snarks The New York Times’ Bari Weiss, it’s speech critical of the Chinese Communist Party, “perhaps the greatest strategic threat to our freedoms of any regime in the world.” In response to Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey’s Oct. 4 tweet supporting Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protests, the NBA quickly groveled to “Chinese sensitivities.” Perhaps its massive and growing Chinese business operations had something to do with it? How, though, can an “American league that prides itself on promoting progressive values” square that with kowtowing to authoritarianism? Fact is, fighting against totalitarianism is far more “morally urgent” than pushing for more “gender-neutral bathrooms.”

Health beat: STDs Are Soaring

Venereal disease is soaring in America, The Atlantic’s Olga Khazan reports. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention notes that US rates of sexually transmitted diseases rose in 2018 for the fifth straight year, as combined cases of syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia hit a record high. Why? More “risky behavior,” thanks to the opioid epidemic; reduced condom use now that other drugs can protect against the spread of AIDS; plus budget cuts to “more than half of local STD treatment and prevention programs.” Indeed, “the municipal-health-department work force has shrunk by almost a quarter” since the 2008 recession. These diseases were declining in the 1990s. Indeed, syphilis was nearly eliminated in the United States in 2000, but now “Americans have stopped taking STDs seriously,” and “policy makers are essentially asleep at the wheel as STDs creep up slowly and claim more lives.”

— Compiled by Karl Salzmann & Mark Cunningham