Pun Salad

Salma Hayek has been steadily sharing bikini and one-piece selfies on her Instagram. They're all from one trip, the 54-year-old actress told Entertainment Tonight, and she has absolutely no plans to stop posting them or regrets sharing so many pictures.

"I had to lose a lot of weight and exercise to get into the bikini towards the end of last year," she said, telling the outlet that she took many photos once she got down to the size she wanted while on her trip. "I'm glad I took a lot of pictures, I have no shame on it, because it was the first week of the vacation." She said that sharing the shots generally has been "liberating."

Yet another white supremacist — Newt Gingrich — has emerged to hector New Hampshire about what it should think about Critical Race Theory (CRT) and systemic racism by misappropriating MLK’s “… dream of a nation in which people are judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character …”

Today, we know well the content of Gingrich’s character.

IN 1978, I won my first election to Congress, replacing a pro-segregation Democrat. The first day in office, I co-sponsored a bill to make Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday a national holiday.

I believed strongly in Rev. King’s vision because it echoed the vision of some of America’s greatest heroes – men like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass.

His dream of a nation in which people are judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character epitomized the central principles of our founding – which ultimately he proclaimed to be the most potent and effective weapons against bigotry and injustice.

We were privy to some welcome confirmation this week that the backlash against Critical Race Theory (CRT) is real, organic, and threatening to the elite consensus around this set of ideas. That confirmation took the form of a cable-news chyron broadcast on MSNBC’s All In with Chris Hayes: “The Right’s Fixation with Race.”

This textbook example of the left’s ego defending its increasingly ill-favored subconscious impulses by attributing them to their adversaries occurred during a segment in which NBC News reporter Brandy Zadrozny outlined the ways in which well-heeled interests are funding the effort to stop schools from teaching this philosophy. An NBC News report co-authored by Zadrozny backs up this claim and details the extent to which conservative political activists are financing the backlash against CRT. Complimenting this report, Media Matters for America identified a number of CRT critics who appeared recently on Fox News where they were billed only as “teacher” or “mother” when they were also conservative political activists.

All this contributes to the clearly welcome impression that the reaction against CRT is entirely inorganic, mere “Astroturf,” in the parlance of liberals who tried to convince themselves the Tea Party was the artificial creation of the Koch Brothers and not something that would sweep them out of office in record numbers. Once again, we’re witnessing the left cope with discomfiting events by creating an alternate reality for themselves. And, hopefully, they’re getting the most out of it because it’s hard to imagine that a neutral observer would be swayed by this sort of manipulation.

My youngest turned 18 a few weeks ago, which meant that in addition to collecting his high school diploma and starting a summer job, his to-do list this month included registering for the draft with the Selective Service System. The United States doesn’t actually have a military draft — conscription was scrapped in 1973 — but registering for it is still mandated by law. Failure to do so is a felony that can be punished, at least in theory, by a fine of up to $250,000 and five years in prison.

Granted, it has been a long time since anyone was actually indicted for not complying with that law. But more than 1 million Americans have been denied various government benefits, including student loans, a federal job, or even a driver’s license, because they didn’t register. So I explained to my son that filling out the short Selective Service form was not only a legal obligation but also in his best interest.

The media have spent the Joe Biden presidency thus far pressuring moderate Democrats to join the left’s efforts to destroy the filibuster. One way they do this is by cobbling together revisionist histories that cast Republicans as uniquely obstructionist and undemocratic.

CNN’s White House correspondent John Harwood lays out that history in broad strokes: “For Clinton’s 1993 deficit-reduction plan: 0 Republican votes. For Obama’s 2010 national health-care plan: 0 Republican votes. For Biden’s 2021 COVID-relief plan: 0 Republican votes. The modern GOP response to Democratic governance is total resistance.”

What he fails to mention is that under President Bill Clinton, the GOP, often in significant numbers, voted for a slew of big policy reforms: 16 Senate Republicans voted for the Family and Medical Leave Act; a telecommunications reform passed 81-18; the welfare-reform compromise passed 78-21; the Brady Act gun-control bill only passed because of Republican support; the North American Free Trade Agreement passed 73-26; Biden’s crime bill passed 95-4.