Conservative: KBJ’s ‘Woman’ Problem

When Biden Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson refused to offer a definition for the word “woman” to Sen. Martha Blackburn, “it was an amazing moment, and a terrible one for Jackson,” declares The Washington Examiner’s Byron York. “You have to be a biologist to know what a woman is? Who would say that? Perhaps Jackson could see, in the seconds she had to consider the question, that the whole topic was a minefield for a nominee backed by the progressive legal community.” Though Jackson’s hearings are over, “the exchange will resonate.” Wokeism has become a big issue for voters, “and the fact that President Joe Biden’s nominee would not answer Blackburn’s straightforward questions will be difficult for Democrats to defend in this year’s midterm elections.”

Media watch: Why Hunter Laptop Stories Matter

“The real Hunter Biden laptop scandal is not the laptop itself,” writes Brendan O’Neill at Spiked. “It’s the fact that America’s media elites studiously ignored the whole damn thing and even flat-out censored it,” to the point that “social-media oligarchs even prevented people from sharing” The Post’s stories about it. It adds up to an “extraordinary moment”: A “free-thinking daily newspaper published a fascinating report on . . . the then vice-president’s son” and was “shamed, blocked and defamed” for doing so — “a terrifying assault on media freedom, the right to dissent and truth itself.” And while “Hunter’s laptop is an embarrassment” and “raises questions that must be answered,” “the ruthless war on the laptop story . . . should be seen as a very loud warning sign.”

Albany beat: Cuomo’s Creepy COVID Nostalgia

“In his effort to engineer a political comeback,” notes Noah Rothman at Commentary, ex-Gov. Andrew Cuomo “is reveling in what was for most of us the purest misery” — tweeting “a screengrab from one of [his] daily mid-pandemic press briefings.” Why would Cuomo “relive the bleakest days of the pandemic?” Certainly “not because of his dubious record managing COVID-19.” Rather, amid pandemic trauma “his core supporters formed an unbreakable emotional attachment” to him. Only “personal gratification” can explain his “otherwise inexplicable dredging up of his disastrous final year in office.” He’s “dwelling on what for him must have been one of the best times of his life”; that it was “the very worst of times for the rest of us” has “escaped him.”

Libertarian: Bidenites Aim To Hike Prices More

Despite inflation at a 40-year high, Team Biden is pushing to hike wages for federal contractors, undoing a Reagan-era policy meant to curb price increases, warns Reason’s Eric Boehm. The change would restore the “30% rule,” which based federal contractor rates “on the highest wages” paid to at least 30% of workers in a given area. Labor scrapped the rule in 1982 after a federal report found it fueled inflation and bloated construction costs. Restoring it now would spur prices to shoot up even further and limit the number of infrastructure projects that can get done. Yet Team Biden dismisses such concerns. Of course, this wouldn’t be the first time it “ignored warnings about possible inflation in order to accomplish political objectives.”

Foreign desk: China Owes Its Rise to the West

“In the last decades, China has lifted nearly 800 million people from poverty,” Steve Kelman points out at the Hill — not thanks to communism but to capitalism. Back when China’s economy “was a largely state-run version of the Soviet model,” it experienced “fits-and-starts economic growth, traumatic famines and periodic economic crises.” But “this dramatically changed, first tentatively with the announcement of ‘reform and opening up’ in China in 1978 and then for real after 1992 when Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping unleashed private enterprise.” Now, the private sector “accounts for 87 percent of urban employment in China, compared with 18 percent in 1995.” So “let’s not bash or diminish China” — but let’s also understand that these achievements have their roots in “the West.”

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board