THERE GOES ANOTHER TRILLION: Senators Iron Out Infrastructure Disagreements, May Advance Bill As Soon As Tonight.
Archive for 2021
July 28, 2021
IF IT’S NOT CLOSE, THEY CAN’T CHEAT: Politico: Georgia Democrats Say ‘We’re F***ed’ With Voter ID Required, a ‘Turnout Catastrophe.’
Gov. Abrams hardest hit.
(Classical reference in headline.)
TO BE FAIR, THEY’RE BRIBING OUR LEADERSHIP TO ALLOW IT: China Will Win Only if America Allows It.
And our leadership is largely happy to be bribed.
A TALE OF TWO BIDENS: The Most Devastating Video on the Internet.
SCIENCE!! Study calls for end to ‘rough fish’ pejorative and the paradigm that created it. “From art to religion to land use, much of what is deemed valuable in the United States was shaped centuries ago by the white male perspective. Fish, it turns out, are no exception. A study published in Fisheries Magazine, a journal of the American Fisheries Society, explores how colonialist attitudes toward native fishes were rooted in elements of racism and sexism.”
PRIVILEGE: Aurora officials wave magic wand to invalidate city charter provision.
Someone has quietly decided that a convicted felon who is suing the City of Aurora because its founding charter prohibits her from running for municipal office will be allowed to serve anyway should she actually get elected.
The city clerk assured potential city council candidate Candace Bailey in a letter that the City of Aurora will not enforce that portion of the city code.
The city is not putting the question to the voters to revoke the provision, they just promised to turn a blind eye to the law voters enacted in 1961.
Bailey is black and claims the charter is racist.
QUESTION ASKED: Does the White House Believe Vaccines Work or Not?
Jen Psaki’s response is a lot of things: snide, condescending, arrogant, uniquely irritating in the way that only a lifelong political parasite can be. However, it is not an answer to Peter Doocy’s question.
Either the vaccines work or they don’t. If they work, why do vaccinated people need to wear masks?
Millions of Americans are asking that question today. Millions more are afraid to ask that question because a Democrat will scream at them. And this White House will not tell us.
It’s panic. They’re panicking and they don’t know what to do. “Quick, put on masks! Wear a mask even when you’re in the shower! No, it doesn’t matter if you’re vaccinated! Forget everything we told you just yesterday because WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE!!!!”
Earlier: The Pressure Campaign to Restore Pandemic Restrictions Is Succeeding.
It’s hard to avoid the impression that we’re witnessing a pressure campaign designed to compel the CDC to reimpose COVID mitigation restrictions on the public. There’s more where this came from. The World Health Organization advises all adults to continue masking even if they’re fully vaccinated. Donald Trump’s surgeon general, Dr. Jerome Adams, insists that the CDC was “premature” to abandon its masking guidance. Ubiquitous public health advocate Dr. Leana Wen advises all parents of children under 12 to continue to avoid public indoor settings like restaurants even with a mask. But if you must go inside, masking should be mandatory. “With coronavirus infections climbing throughout the country and the pandemic worsening once more,” she wrote, “the Biden administration needs to strongly urge a return of covid-19 restrictions.” After all, the United States is on a much “different trajectory” than it was in May (when she also opposed the lifting of mask mandates).
To judge from the media landscape, the activists who favor a return of pandemic-related restrictions even despite the nation’s enviable immunization rate are winning the argument. Polling—an industry whose own professionals confess is hopelessly broken—suggests that the public overwhelmingly favors the reimposition of onerous mid-pandemic restrictions on social and economic life. It seems like a safe bet that the Biden administration will eventually agree with the loudest voices in the room—sacrificing its claim to have broken the pandemic and scuttling much of the progress toward a full economic recovery in the process.
It’s not at all clear what effect restoring mask mandates will have on localized rates of COVID infection. If, however, the Biden administration accepts the premise that the pandemic is back in full force despite all the sacrifices the public has already made over the last 18 months, the political consequences are far easier to predict.
As Glenn wrote this morning, “There’s a lot of opportunity in being the anti-Lockdown, anti-Karen party.”
THE PROBLEM ISN’T SALESMANSHIP, IT’S A LOSS OF TRUST, AND A REACTION TO BULLYING: Emphasize personal health benefits of COVID-19 vaccination, researchers say. Especially the bullying.
Related:
CHRISTIAN TOTO: NAACP Won’t Accept Morgan Wallen’s Repeated Apologies.
THIS ISN’T EVEN A FIRST-WORLD PROBLEM, SINCE IT’S NOT ACTUALLY A PROBLEM AT ALL: Positive portrayals of vaping common on TikTok, researchers say.
JUSTICE: Democratic Megadonor Ed Buck Convicted Of All Charges. “Democratic Party megadonor Ed Buck, the perverted creep who lured young black men to his home to administer frequently fatal methamphetamine overdoses to them, has been convicted of all nine charges.”
BRYAN PRESTON: Afghanistan Retreat: Is Biden Merely Losing the Great Powers Game or Is He Deliberately Throwing It All Away? “Afghanistan has an estimated trillion dollars worth of rare earth minerals under its soil. Thanks in no small part to the country’s endemic instability, those rare earth minerals are still there. The United States could have used its 20 years battling to stabilize the country as cover to extract those minerals but chose not to. China controls an estimated 85 to 95% of the world’s rare earth mineral extraction right now.”
The United States has substantial rare earth mineral deposits, but doesn’t exploit them either.
IN AN OVERREGULATED SOCIETY, THERE IS ALWAYS A REGULATION: Judge Overturns SF School Board Decision To Cover Up Controversial Mural.. “The rationale: The Board violated the California Environmental Quality Act, which requires Environmental Impact Reports before actions that affect the environment or objects of historical significance.”
UNEXPECTEDLY: Anti-anti-crime policies are ruining American cities.
Let’s get the myths out of the way: COVID-19 wasn’t the main driver behind the recent crime surge. In Gotham, murders were up by nearly 50 percent in 2020 and had risen by an additional 17 percent by the first five months of 2021.Yet as the Manhattan Institute’s Nicole Gelinas noted in a typically astute column for the New York Post, murder trended down in other global cities, in some cases precipitously: London saw a 16 percent decline in the murder rate during the pandemic year; Italy, 14 percent; France, 2 percent. Japan, meanwhile, hit its lowest murder rate since World War Two in the year of COVID, while even cartel-plagued Mexico witnessed its first decline in six years.
Nor can a better safety net account for the difference. As Gelinas wrote, ‘the United States, with supplemental jobless insurance ranging from $300 to $600 a week for the past 15 months, and with anti-eviction and anti-foreclosure orders in place, acted faster and far more aggressively to curtail individual economic pain.’ Only illegal immigrants saw an income drop uncompensated by government assistance. London, too, has a huge population of jobless illegal migrants, and ‘people just aren’t stabbing each other because they’re desperate for something to eat’.
What about the Second Amendment to the US Constitution, which guarantees an individual’s right to bear arms? America’s gun culture is Democratic leaders’ culprit of choice when it comes to explaining, and trying to reverse, crime waves. Most recently, President Joe Biden framed the national bloodbath as a Second Amendment problem, and New York’s Gov. Andrew Cuomo says he wants to create a private right to sue manufacturers for gun violence.
You might believe, as I do, that America’s gun culture is more than a bit nutty, and there is no doubt that the ready availability of semi-military-grade weapons explains the much higher incidence of incel lunatics going on rampages in schools and workplaces in America, compared with other civilized nations. But the fact is that America’s gun culture and massive private armories have been around for a very long time: a relatively constant factor like that can’t explain a wild upswing in a trend. Another explanation is needed.
That explanation is, without a doubt, the anti-anti-crime policies pursued by progressives and dutifully implemented by liberal politicians. Perhaps a large metropolitan area could withstand any one of these ‘reforms’. But no city could have endured their combined force, amplified by the general anti-police mentality that took hold of urban elites in the aftermath of the George Floyd incident in Minneapolis. New York’s case is instructive, because many of its reforms predate the COVID lockdowns. Consider some of these changes, in order of enactment:
QED: How has the Seattle mayor’s ‘call in a social worker’ approach to policing worked out? Just guess…: “Seattle mayor Jenny Durkan: ‘This past weekend serves as a reminder: there are many times and types of 911 calls that require a traditional sworn police officer to respond.’ Took over a year for that ‘reminder’ to take hold.”
OOPS: Cleveland Indians’ new name already taken. “The Cleveland Guardians is a roller derby team.”
Okay, roller derby isn’t a top-shelf sport, but you’d think someone would have known this.
DON LEMON BLASTS MAN WHO HARASSED TUCKER CARLSON IN VIRAL VIDEO:
CNN anchor Don Lemon ripped the man who accosted Tucker Carlson in a Montana fly fishing shop, saying he had no right to invade the Fox News host’s “personal space.”
The liberal Lemon offered his surprising take during his CNN program “Don Lemon Tonight” Monday evening, when he devoted an entire segment to addressing the weekend encounter, which he said put him in a position “to maybe somehow have to defend Tucker Carlson.”
“Let me tell you this: I don’t like it. I don’t like it when people do that because I would not want it to happen to me,” Lemon began after showing a snippet of the video, going on to caution, “I have mixed emotions because Tucker has done this to people before. Tucker said some really nasty and silly things about me, and the next day there’s paparazzi in front of my house, hiding, taking pictures.”
As Jim Treacher wrote earlier this week: “This Montana incident also shows a big difference between Fox News and CNN. At CNN, the roles are reversed. It’s the employees who out of their way to call out the regular Americans who are just minding their own business. But Tucker doesn’t need to resort to that sort of behavior because he isn’t desperate for ratings.”
THE CANCER HAS BEEN GROWING FOR A LONG TIME: RealClearInvestigations: The Moment in 1986 When Critical Race Theory Ousted the Civil Rights Movement.
Back when I was in law school, Chief Justice Richard Neely of the West Virginia Supreme Court — probably the most famous state Supreme Court judge of that era — asked me to explain Critical Legal Studies, from which Critical Race Theory grew. When I did, he responded “I thought that shit died with Marcuse.” If only!
THE GREAT GAME: China and the Taliban Begin Their Romance. “China is quietly attempting to secure its interests in post-U.S. Afghanistan. Beijing has reportedly been actively engaging with Kabul on construction of the Peshawar-Kabul motorway, which would connect Pakistan to Afghanistan and make Kabul a participant in China’s massive infrastructure and investment plan, the Belt and Road Initiative. Up until now, Kabul has resisted participation in the initiative to avoid getting on the wrong side of Washington. Beijing is also building a major road through the Wakhan Corridor—a slim strip of mountainous territory connecting China’s westernmost province of Xinjiang to Afghanistan—and onward to Pakistan and Central Asia, complementing its existing road network through the region. Once completed, these new thoroughfares should enable Beijing to pursue its goals of increased trade with the region and natural resource extraction in Afghanistan. According to a 2014 report, Afghanistan may possess nearly a trillion dollars’ worth of extractable rare-earth metals locked within its mountains.”
LAST NIGHT, THE ORANGE COUNTY BOARD OF EDUCATION HELD A FORUM ON THE BARKING MAD, CRT-BASED, ETHNIC STUDIES CURRICULA BEING OFFERED TO THEIR CHILDREN: Parents concerned about indoctrination flooded the room. Here’s the written version of the testimony given by my friend and colleague Professor Maimon Schwarzschild at the event.
The level of grassroots activism against CRT is truly impressive–not just in Orange County, but all across the country. There’s still some life in America.