Culture critic: Post-Trump ‘SNL’ Soars
Saturday Night Live’s “current season,” Bill Carter cheers at CNN, “can be legitimately ranked . . . as a genuine comeback story” on par with those like Will Farrell’s first and Tina Fey joining the Weekend Update desk. The show had sunk in recent years, as expectations that it “jump on every egregious event coming out of Washington” wound up “forcing creative decisions.” That is, “In the last few years of Trump-centric news, ‘SNL’ seemed to exhaust itself in search of a fresh comic take, something other than how ridiculous or menacing Trump could be.” Even the new version of Trump “is more character than caricature . . . capturing the Trump voice and mannerisms as they really are, not as a cartoonish performance.” And guests from Kim Kardashian to Billy Eilish have “excelled.” Weekend Update? “After some seasons where the jokes felt flat, they have been sharp and more frequently laugh-out-loud.”
Libertarian: The Futility of Abortion Bans
“Mail-order abortion pills, now officially authorized by the FDA, pose an insoluble problem for legislators who want to ban the procedure,” concludes Reason’s Jacob Sullum. The Food and Drug Administration “originally required that mifepristone” — also known as RU-486 — “be dispensed in person by a medical provider.” It relaxed that rule amid the pandemic, “allowing women to receive it by mail after a telemedicine session,” and just made the policy permanent. So if “the Supreme Court allows states to ban or severely restrict surgical abortions, as seems likely,” such “local limits will be even easier to evade.” The FDA’s decision amounts to “an insurmountable challenge to legislators who hope to eliminate most abortions by force of law.”
Pandemic watch: Team Biden Wakes Up
“Long after it would do any good, the Biden administration realizes that public discussion of the Covid-19 pandemic should not be focusing on the total number of cases and instead should be focused on severe infections and hospitalizations,” Jim Geraghty writes at National Review. Took ’em long enough: “Week after week, month after month, the administration, certain national, state, and local health officials, members of the media, and Covid obsessives have pointed to increases in the number of cases as an indicator of the worsening severity of the pandemic. And week after week, I’ve argued that the more relevant measuring sticks are hospitalizations and deaths.” The Omicron variant will see cases means “explode,” but it’s less virulent, so that “doesn’t necessarily mean the number of hospitalizations and deaths” will.
From the left: Joe Delivered Chaos, Not Order
“His agenda undermined by a member of his own party and a pandemic once again raging out of control, President Joe Biden heads into his second year in office with the central premise of his presidency in peril,” declares Politico’s Jonathan Lemire. Sen. Joe Manchin’s “stunning decision” Sunday to oppose the Build Back Better bill “handed the president a stinging defeat.” And Biden’s struggling on multiple fronts: “Soaring Covid case numbers, long lines at testing places, stubbornly high prices on the shelves” have all “hampered the president’s primary pitch to voters.” Biden was supposed to bring normalcy to the White House and get COVID under control, “to bring order to the chaos of D.C. But chaos is prevailing.”
Conservative: Supremes’ School-Choice Chance
“Supporters of school freedom can take comfort in the fact that Supreme Court justices are pushing back on state efforts to exclude families who want to use school choice to send their children to religious schools,” observes David McIntosh for Fox News. The case Carson v. Makin “pits Maine parents who want to use the state’s voucher program to send their children to religious schools against a 1980 decision by Maine’s attorney general denying families that option.” Grilling the state’s counsel, Justice Brett Kavanaugh slammed Maine for “discrimination on the basis of religion” at the neighborhood level. “A ruling for the parents would be a huge victory for the parental school choice movement.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board
