Archive for 2021
January 21, 2021
DNC-MSM CONTINUING TO ENJOY FOUR YEAR SLUMBER: Hey, Remember When Executive Orders Were Controversial? Not Anymore!
I THINK THE EXPERTS HAVE HIT THE NAIL ON THE HEAD HERE: Collaboration Between Government and Big Tech Giving Rise to Totalitarianism, Experts Warn.
THE NEW CIVIL LIBERTIES ALLIANCE, ON WHOSE BOARD I SERVE, argued before the 5th Circuit in Michelle Cochran v. U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. You can listen to the oral argument here.
NEW PRESIDENT, NEW SENATE, NEW ANTITRUST BALLGAME:
U.S. antitrust enforcement may be due for a shot in the arm as Joe Biden takes office, backed by Democratic majorities in both chambers of Congress and led by lawmakers who have vowed to increase funding for competition enforcement and push other reforms.
Even before Democrats retook the Senate with victories in Georgia’s runoff elections on Jan. 5, Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota had been confident Congress would get more aggressive on antitrust enforcement.
Regardless of whether she would continue as ranking Democrat on the Senate antitrust subcommittee in a GOP-controlled chamber or ascend to the chair if her party took over, Klobuchar said in November she would push for reforms she has introduced over the years, including bills making it easier to contest mergers.
“This was never a partisan issue,” Klobuchar said at the time, arguing antitrust concerns, especially about increasing market concentration, are not limited to the major technology companies that are currently facing scrutiny.
The head of the House antitrust subcommittee, Rep. David Cicilline, D-R.I., said in separate remarks around the same time that he would be working on competition legislation in the coming weeks.
Of the various reforms currently circulating, Cicilline said those with the most bipartisan support include calls for more funding for the U.S. Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission, as well as prohibitions against platforms favoring their own products and excluding competitors.
The Trump Administration was more friendly to antitrust than traditional Republican administrations, so this isn’t as big a shift as it might be.
MORE LIKE THIS, PLEASE: Megyn Kelly Cheers Formation Of Legal Group Fighting Critical Race Theory. “Today, President Biden doubled-down on critical race theory in the federal government. In response, I am announcing a new coalition of legal foundations and private attorneys that will wage relentless legal warfare against race theory in America’s institutions. The fight is on.”
ROGER SIMON: An Inauguration in the United States of North Korea.
I tried not to break the pledge of my previous columns to avoid the inaugural, but you couldn’t escape some of the images of the event out of the corner of your eye as you went about your day.
And what I caught glimpses of more than anything else was a massive display of guard troops, not quite what you would see marching through Pyongyang to commemorate Dear Leader’s birthday, but enough to make you wonder what kind of state you were in, democratic or autocratic.
The putative excuse was to avoid violence and a repetition of the occurrences of Jan. 6, but a hundred troops or so would have been more than sufficient to have blocked entry to the Capitol that day, had they been so empowered.
For the inauguration we had twenty to twenty-five thousand troops, an army of greater size than Lincoln employed to prevent the invasion of Washington during the Civil War.
All this with no known threats, at least none reported. (The actual “insurrection” at the Capitol was far less than your average weeknight tussle in Portland for the last six months.)
The attendance estimates at the inaugural were around two thousand, less than many high school basketball games.
What was the purpose then of all this saber rattling on a day that was supposed to be a celebration of the peaceful transfer of power in a democratic republic other than an ominous show of force, a reminder to the unruly masses that “stability” had returned and you had better accept it?
The Uniparty was back or, as they would put it in North Korea, Juche!
At least for the moment, Americans can still mock Fearless Leader:
Related: Comments ‘Turned Off’ On Biden White House YouTube Video.
ZHEY AREN’T WASTING ANY TIME: Just like that … The White House website’s contact form now asks for your pronouns.
FINALLY: At last, America has a gaffe-prone president again.
‘Folks, I can tell you, I’ve known eight presidents, three of them intimately.’ So said then vice-president Joe Biden in 2012. A month earlier, he had assured a crowd in New York that President Barack Obama could, in Teddy Roosevelt’s famous words, ‘speak softly but carry a big stick’ when it came to international relations. ‘I promise you,’ he said. ‘The president has a big stick.’ The crowd started laughing at the double-entendre. Joe wasn’t joking. ‘I promise you,’ he repeated, gravely.
That is just Joe being Joe. The 46th president is someone who quite often has no idea what he is saying. Curiously, everybody seems relieved about that. We’re told Biden’s presidency will mark a ‘return to normalcy’. Really it will mark the triumphant return of the gaffe-prone president.
For decades, Biden’s verbal blundering has been the stuff of legend. His presidential campaign of 1988 died because he plagiarized a Neil Kinnock speech. As a senator, he was called ‘the gaffe machine from Delaware’. Or as the Washington Post once put it: ‘Joe Biden isn’t a gaffe machine. He’s the Lamborghini of gaffes.’
Democratic Party loyalist Robin Williams certainly enjoyed dunking on Biden:
And Biden is so old, so did Johnny Carson during the 1988 campaign season:
YOU MAY NOT BE INTERESTED IN WAR, BUT WAR IS INTERESTED IN YOU: Deadly suicide attack rocks central Baghdad, first in three years.
SO WHAT? VIOLENCE DOESN’T MATTER WHEN IT’S NOT BY REPUBLICANS: Oregon’s Democratic Party offices vandalized amid post-inauguration protests.
Police arrested eight people on Wednesday after the Democratic Party headquarters in Portland, Oregon, was vandalized hours after President Joe Biden’s inauguration.
The building’s doors and windows were smashed, a small dumpster was lit on fire, and graffiti reading “Breonna Taylor deserves justice” and “F— Biden” was sprayed on the outside walls, according to videos filmed at the scene mid-afternoon by reporters for NBC Portland affiliate KGW.
Portland police said some of the group of about 150 people carried weapons “including Molotov cocktails, knives, batons, chemical spray and a crowbar.”
Some members of the crowd met in southeast Portland before heading to the Democratic Party offices dressed in black and carrying banners reading, “We don’t want Biden, we want revenge! For police murders, imperialist wars and fascist massacres,” and “We are ungovernable,” according to a photo published by The Oregonian.
Mostly peaceful.
MICHAEL YON: Washington, D.C. — Now Effectively Under Martial Law.
I am a war correspondent. Many years experience across the world. I am American.
Now, troops are everywhere. D.C. is locked down tighter than Beijing or Hong Kong. I got kicked out of Hong Kong last year, and greatly doubt China will let me back into Mainland, or back to Tibet without arrest.
D.C. and this mayor are like something from 1984. Which I decided to read again during pandemic 2020. Read it.
This is my first post on Rumble. I am targeted elsewhere.
How’s that return to normalcy thing workin’ out for ya?
CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: Professors donated heavily to Biden. Many now hold key admin posts.
GHOSTS OF MILLIONS OF ABORTED BABIES HAUNT U.S.: Indeed they do. Nathaniel Blake, writing in The Federalist, observes:
“Most people’s consciousnesses are not as seared as those of the zealots of ‘Shout Your Abortion’ and similar campaigns, so, for the majority of abortion supporters, any rhetorical dodge will do if it avoids invoking the violent reality of abortion. They prefer to cover abortion in the moral haze of a necessary evil in an imperfect world, and then not think about it.
“They justify abortion as the distasteful protector of the individual autonomy, personal achievement, material riches, and sexual satisfaction that our culture glorifies. But the effects of abortion are not so easily ignored. It is, of course, obvious how abortion has broken our politics.”
XI’S GOTTA HAVE IT! Earth to Joe Biden: Canceling Keystone XL Pipeline Is a Gift to China and Russia.
UPDATE: Biden Administration: Yes, We Are Following Through With a Fracking Ban.
ANOTHER UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Walter Russell Mead in 2017:
If Trump were the Manchurian candidate that people keep wanting to believe that he is, here are some of the things he’d be doing:
Limiting fracking as much as he possibly could
Blocking oil and gas pipelines
Opening negotiations for major nuclear arms reductions
Cutting U.S. military spending
Trying to tamp down tensions with Russia’s ally Iran.
Well.
WATCH: Joe Biden Violated His Mask Mandate Within Hours of Signing It.
Rules are for the little people.
DISPATCHES FROM THE MEMORY HOLE:
—The Washington Post, today.
Chaser:
On March 31, 1927, Cesar Estrada Chavez was born in Yuma, Ariz., to parents who had come north from Mexico as children in the 1890s. He went on to found the United Farm Workers union, and by his death in 1993 had become an icon for Hispanic activist groups and the Left in general.
And his views on border control would be a perfect fit in the Trump administration.
As a child working with his family in the California fields, Cesar quickly learned the reason farmworkers were paid so little and treated so poorly: As his biographer Miriam Pawel writes, “a surplus of labor enabled growers to treat workers as little more that interchangeable parts, cheaper and easier to replace than machines.”
Chavez acolytes today try to explain away his hawkish pro-border views as coming from a different historical context, applicable only to specific strikes and the strike-breakers that farmers tried to import. But this is false.
In fact, even before he started the union and fought against illegal immigration, he was opposed to the bracero program, which legally imported cheap, disposable labor from Mexico at the expense of American citizens (of Mexican and other origins) who had been working in the fields. Pawel quotes Chavez as saying, “It looks almost impossible to start some effective program to get these people their jobs back from the braceros.”
—“Hail Cesar!”, Mark Krikorian, NRO, March 31, 2017.
Hangover: The Jonestown-like madness of Chavez’s final days.
—The Atlantic, July/August 2011.
DON’T BE EVIL: There’s Still No Sign of Privacy Labels for Most Google iOS Apps.
Google has not updated its major apps like Gmail, Google Maps, Chrome, and YouTube since December 7 or before, and most Google apps have to date have not been updated with the Privacy Label feature.
The Google Translate, Google Authenticator, Motion Stills, Google Play Movies, and Google Classroom apps do include privacy labels even though they have not been updated recently, but Google’s search app, Google Maps, Chrome, Waze, YouTube, Google Drive, Google Photos, Google Home, Gmail, Google Docs, Google Assistant, Google Sheets, Google Calendar, Google Slides, Google One, Google Earth, YouTube Music, Hangouts, Google Tasks, Google Meet, Google Pay, PhotoScan, Google Voice, Google News, Gboard, Google Podcasts, and more do not display the information.
On January 5, Google told TechCrunch that the data would be added to its iOS apps “this week or the next week,” but both this week and the next week have come and gone with no update. It has now been well over a month since Google last updated its apps.
To lightly paraphrase former Google CEO Eric Schmidt: If your data harvesting is something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.
DOUBTFUL: Biden put on a show of ‘unity’ — will he stick to it?
Related: To move on, drop the Trump impeachment trial.
By the way, I don’t think you can impeach an ex-President anyway. The only remedies in impeachment are removal from office and disqualification to hold positions of “trust or profit.” The disqualification vote can’t take place until after the removal, and you can’t “remove” someone from an office they don’t hold. (Also, the offices from which disqualification disqualifies people aren’t elective offices, but appointed ones, something on which Josh Blackman and Seth Barrett Tillman have managed to change my mind).
SO NOW THEY’RE OFFERING TO HELP? Amazon offers to help the incoming Biden admin with COVID response.
WE HAD HERD IMMUNITY LONG BEFORE WE HAD VACCINES: We Will Get to Herd Immunity in 2021…One Way or Another. “Long before we reach herd immunity, however, the infection and death rates will fall.”
Plus, from the comments: “It might help if the CDC didn’t take federal holidays. If they take off President’s Day, we’ll know how serious they are. They didn’t bother to update their statistics page between the 16th (as of 6 a.m. on Friday) and Tuesday evening (as of 6 a.m. on Tuesday). Three day weekends don’t say ‘national emergency.'”
REMEMBER, “SPREADING MISINFORMATION” AND CONSPIRACY THEORIES IS BAD AND MUST BE RESTRAINED: Hillary Clinton: I would love to see if Trump ‘was talking to Putin the day that the insurgents invaded our Capitol.’