Upright

“I implore the Vatican press office to emphatically clarify that Pope Francis rightly calls abortion murder. It is time to denounce Biden’s fake Catholicism.” —Roman Catholic Bishop Joseph Strickland after Biden implied that Pope Francis did not object to taxpayer-funded abortions

For the Record

“Reparations are equitable only when they provide redress to victims who suffered unjustly. In 1988, for example, the US government paid reparations to more than 26,000 people of Japanese descent who were incarcerated in internment camps during World War II. In the 1970s, the federal government agreed to pay $10 million to the surviving patients of the notorious Tuskegee Syphilis Study, who were deliberately denied proper medical treatment by doctors working for the US Public Health Service. But there is nothing equitable about paying reparations in the 21st century for wrongs committed in the 18th and 19th centuries.” —Jeff Jacoby

“To date the War on Poverty has spent $25 trillion (not including Medicare), and whether those outlays ultimately helped or hurt Black Americans has been widely debated. But there is no disputing that they were intended, to a significant degree, to redress the harms caused by the racist policies of the past… That’s even truer of affirmative action in all its varieties — the decades of racial preferences by federal, state, and local governments, the minority set-asides, the de facto racial quotas in hiring and contracting. In short, there has been for years in America a considerable, well-funded attempt to make amends for the legacy of slavery and segregation. Those today who wish to argue that an outstanding debt is owed to Black America have an obligation to account for all that has been done, in good faith and at great expense, to pay down that debt.” —Jeff Jacoby

Belly Laugh of the Week

“I have seen a lot of 72-year-olds not as capable as this 80-year-old [Joe Biden].” —Congressman Jim Clyburn

The BIG Lies

“There have been so many accomplishments under this administration, it can be difficult to list them in a distilled way.” —Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg

“On average, American households are in a better position than they were when the pandemic hit.” —National Economic Council Director Brian Deese

And Last…

“The balloon should have been shot down before it crossed the continental United States, not after. We still don’t know what information was collected and where it was sent. This was a dereliction of Biden’s duty, and let’s hope the American people don’t pay a price.” —Senator Tim Scott