[guest post by JVW]

David French over at National Review Online has all the details.

As someone who supports same-sex civil marriage but fears that religious institutions are going to be browbeaten into compliance, I have two thoughts about this:

(1) Perhaps religious institutions are going to have to retrench and stop interacting with people from outside their faith. Catholic high schools, for example, would have to suddenly announce that they are letting go all non-Catholic teachers and staff, and will no longer accept students from non-Catholic families. This would place a burden on them to find enough students to fill up their classes, and some Catholic schools would no doubt close with the public schools systems likely being forced to pick up the slack. This would also undermine the Catholic Church’s belief in diversity and in ministering to people outside the faith, but perhaps there is no other way. This is not a desirable situation in any regard, but it may be the only way for an institution to protect themselves from this type of state bullying.

(2) This ruling was issued by a state court, so it likely will start to wind its way through the appellate process. Can we just short-circuit all that and ask Justice Anthony Kennedy for his ruling already?

– JVW

It’s already a non-story, but it’s instructive on how Big Media and establishment Republicans operate. Here’s the type of story we were seeing over the last couple of days:

A Republican senator is investigating whether Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz released classified information while discussing the National Security Agency during Tuesday night’s debate.

“I’m having my staff look at the transcripts of the debate right now,” Senator Richard Burr, chairman of the Intelligence Committee, told reporters, according to The Hill, a political website. “Any time you deal with numbers… the question is, ‘Is that classified or not?’ or is there an open source reference to it?”

Guess what? A Jeb Bush PAC gave Richard Burr the maximum contribution.

Now it turns out there were will be no investigation — because Cruz didn’t do it. Everything he said had already been reported in Big Media. That’s why they’re not investigating. He didn’t do it.

No matter. There were still about a hundred million stories in Big Media asking whether Cruz released classified information.

And that was always the goal.

Now, many low-info voters will go into the booth thinking: wasn’t there something about Cruz releasing classified information?

And that’s what they want.

By the way, remember how awful it was when Cruz said McConnell lied? Here’s Jeff Sessions saying leadership misrepresented the contents of the horrible omnibus bill that just passed the House.

[guest post by Dana]

This was in the New York Times – and then it wasn’t:

In his meeting with the columnists, Mr. Obama indicated that he did not see enough cable television to fully appreciate the anxiety after the attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, and made clear that he plans to step up his public arguments. Republicans were telling Americans that he is not doing anything when he is doing a lot, he said.

Sadly, business as usual: President Obama once again admits he gets his news from TV (and that he needs it explained to him why Americans might be a tad upset at his lackluster response to the recent terrorist attack on American soil…), and the NYT dishonestly trying to make him look less the fool than he is.

–Dana