KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Biden Is An Increasingly Toxic Combo of Addled and Untruthful. “To be a fly on the wall in places that Democrats are hanging out these days. Even the most die-hard partisans couldn’t possibly still be pretending that things are going well or that they will soon be better. Beltway Dems are probably bringing in Prilosec and Xanax by the trainload now. I can almost smell their flop sweat all the way out here in Arizona.”
Archive for 2021
September 29, 2021
I’M HOPING FOR PERSONAL LIABILITY ON THE PART OF THE UCLA ADMINISTRATORS IN THIS ONE: UCLA Professor Sues After Being Suspended for Refusing Preferential Exam Treatment for Black Students. This was one of the worst (if not the worse) of the cancel culture episodes on campuses in 2020. Such idiocy.
DEMS TO PUT $100 BILLION TAX BURDEN ON THE POOR: Patrick Hauf, reporting for the Washington Free Beacon, points to a provision of His Fraudulency’s $3.5 trillion “Build Back Better” spending plan and notes it includes a huge hike in the cigarette tax.
Vaping would also be taxed for the first time if the provision becomes law. Why is this a tax burden on the poor? Because they smoke at three times the rate of the rest of the population. One wonders if this proposal will light up lower income voters to vote for Republicans who promise to repeal Biden’s tobacco tax.
GET USED TO SEEING THESE: Supply Chain Disruption Update. “I didn’t expect to do another supply chain disruption update just two days after the last one, but there’s a lot more news popping up.”
ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: Dem Senator’s Assessment of Biden Admin’s Senate Testimony Is Searing: ‘No One in Charge.’ “But maybe no Democrat lit up the Biden team for their failures more than Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT). I have to say, he has, at least on this incident, seemed like a different person. Normally he’s a partisan hack, all in for the Democrats, no matter the truth. He has his own past history of not being exactly truthful about his service, for which he acquired the nickname ‘Da Nang Dick.’ So if you’ve lost him, you know that it’s bad. He seems to have been personally touched and outraged by how Americans and our Afghan allies were stranded by Biden. He was involved in trying to help get stranded citizens out of Afghanistan and faced all kinds of roadblocks from the Biden team in the effort. He also focused on what should be for everyone the most important thing at this point — helping extract the people still stranded. Blumenthal’s assessment today of the Biden administration was searing. There was ‘no one in charge’ he said.”
OH, TO BE IN ENGLAND: UK Labour party internally divided on whether or not only women have cervixes.
WELL, HE DID CREATE IT: Barack Obama Says Nobody Understands the Border Crisis Better Than ‘Big-Hearted’ Joe Biden.
Eric Adams, the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York, vowed recently that he would “create an environment for growth”—starting with public safety. “The prerequisite to prosperity is safety,” Adams declared. This week, he rolled out a plan to convert hotels to housing in order to tackle the city’s cost-of-living and homelessness crises.
With these moves, Adams follows the preferences of those he seeks to represent. New Yorkers are deeply concerned about the cost of living and crime, according to a new survey of America’s 20 fastest-growing metros conducted by the Manhattan Institute and Echelon Insights. Roughly three in four New Yorkers say that they are concerned about the cost of housing, high taxes, and public safety and crime rates. Homelessness was not far behind, with 71 percent expressing concern. These proportions exceed those for concern about Covid-19, jobs, schooling, or traffic—though New Yorkers are worried about those, too—and far surpassed the level of concern in other cities, especially those in the Sun Belt.
New Yorkers were more concerned about taxes than were residents of any other city. This past year, New York City earned the distinction of having the highest state and local top income-tax rates in the country. Jobs are also a larger concern in New York than they are in the rest of the country. The city’s labor market has fallen harder and recovered slower than nearly anywhere else in America. If New York City’s recovery had kept pace with the country’s, New York would have 375,000 more jobs than it has today. Unsurprisingly, nearly half of city adults say good jobs are hard to find, and two-thirds cite future job prospects as a key factor in deciding whether they want to stay put.
Housing costs remain a major concern in Gotham. Large majorities of New Yorkers support making it easier to build more homes to keep up with demand, including with faster permitting, more transit-oriented development, and more backyard apartments. Notably, not everyone views more housing as a driver of more affordable housing; if asked to choose, more people support an approach that subsidizes new housing rather than removes barriers to building it, though many expressed uncertainty.
More than half of New Yorkers are concerned about the quality of their local schools and school curricula—again, a bigger share than in any other city we surveyed. Sixty-two percent support encouraging more charter schools, with even more (72 percent) favoring greater choice in schooling. A majority (58 percent) also supports removing lessons based on critical race theory from public school curricula, a hot-button topic that has sparked tensions between school administrators and parents.
While 41 percent of New Yorkers rate their own quality of life as “good,” 34 percent say it’s just average—and New York lags on that measure relative to other cities, particularly those in the Sun Belt. When asked about quality-of-life issues in the broader city—such as graffiti, littering, and public urination—nearly three-quarters of New Yorkers support empowering the New York City Police Department to be more responsive to these issues. Similar shares want cops to remove homeless encampments if the homeless are offered services and shelter.
Our New York City survey respondents, half of them Democrats, were generally united in prioritizing public safety. While they were split on the question of defunding the police, most want a larger police presence in their area—only 12 percent say they want to shrink the number of cops on their beat. More than seven in ten support recruiting more police officers with college degrees, and even more favor greater community policing. This reinforces the results of our earlier polls conducted during the mayoral race, which showed that nearly two in five New Yorkers who say they support defunding the police want an increased police presence in their own neighborhood.
“New Yorkers want to be safe,” said Eric Adams recently. “They want their children educated; they want [jobs]. . . . They could care less if you call them left or right.” Our survey comes to the same conclusion.
It’s not at all surprising that citizens want prosperity and safety. It’s surprising that we’ve somehow created a governing class devoted to depriving them of those things.
September 28, 2021
STRAIGHT OUTTA COMPTON, Oktoberfest Edition.
HANNAH COX: Healthcare Provisions in the Budget Reconciliation Bill Aren’t Meant to Add Up. “Here’s the reality. Democrats want a single-payer system, and they aren’t going to stop until they get it. A single-payer system is just a better word for a government monopoly over healthcare.”
Nothing that’s happened with this pandemic has made me want the government to play a bigger role in health care.
OPEN THREAD: I once owned that exact The Loop shirt. Journey to the stars, rock & roll guitars.
WATCH: THIS HAS ALWAYS BEEN THE END GOAL OF “ANTI-RACISM:” “‘The United States of America needs to cease to exist.’ You’ll notice she has the same crazy-eyed glee as all the other woke disciples when talking about stuff like this.”
UNPRODUCTIVE PARASITE HAS VIEWS: UN secretary-general criticizes “billionaires joyriding to space.”
If you’re actually worried about people losing trust in governments and institutions, the source of the problem is much closer to home.
Plus, note the views of an Earth Sciences professor who cares so much about the planet he flew all the way to France to tell us:
Another panelist was also critical. “If it was up to me, I would use all the financial resources they’re spending for other purposes,” said Drew Shindell, professor of earth science at Duke University who does research in climate science. “I don’t think it’s a particularly valuable use of time and effort. It does help drive the market for access to space, so not entirely a bad thing.”
“I would be happy if those people also, say, donated the equivalent price of a ticket to space, to something about the environment, for example,” he added, appearing in person on the panel in Toulouse, France.
I would be happy if people like Drew Shindell vowed to do all conference by Zoom from now on, using the financial resources saved to save the planet.
UPDATE: From the comments: “When the finger points to the stars, the idiot looks at the finger.”
“YOU CAN AVOID REALITY, BUT YOU CANNOT AVOID THE CONSEQUENCES OF AVOIDING REALITY:” White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki Refuses to Acknowledge Economic Reality Because She Thinks It’s Mean.
PORT OF LOS ANGELES DEMANDS MORE FEDERAL FUNDING AS CARGO BACKLOG LOOMS: “No sooner did we write about the fact that the ports of LA and Long Beach still won’t work round-the-clock shifts despite a massive backlog than the Port of Los Angeles is said to have asked for more federal funding.”
FASTER, PLEASE: Power of stem cells harnessed to create cartilage tissue.
TWO BIDEN ADMINISTRATIONS IN ONE! Are we in a pandemic or not?
No one has done more to undermine the Biden administration’s vaccination strategy than Joe Biden. From his confusion over when to wear a mask and when not to wear a mask, to the lack of press conferences, on through the Delta variant, we arrive at Biden’s biggest optics crisis yet: 15,000 migrants flooding the southern border under a Del Rio, Texas, bridge in temperatures reaching 100 degrees.
Homeland Security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas confirmed last week that his department’s border officials did not test the some 12,000 to 15,000 migrants for COVID. He did say that some had fallen ill, but would not elaborate further. While appearing on Fox News Sunday, he told Chris Wallace that at least 12,000 of those same migrants were released into the country with a notice to appear in court, which is sure to be ignored by the majority of them, if history is any guide.
So to recap, thousands of migrants, who were not tested for COVID, and not vaccinated to anyone’s knowledge, were just released into the US and are most likely destined for urban city environments. This has been met with sympathetic shrugs from reporters, who have also made a point of highlighting when every mother or father of three who rejects the vaccine dies from COVID.
The public is catching on to the schizophrenic Biden Covid response: Axios Poll: Majority of Public Now Distrusts Biden to Provide Accurate Information on Covid, Too. “Covid had been the one area where Biden still had positive job approval.”
WHO COULD HAVE SEEN THIS COMING? FBI: Violent Crime Increased 5.2% in 2020, the First Increase in Four Years.
THAT’S ENTERTAINMENT? Establishment Tries to Hide Likelihood That Cringe Fauci Film Has Been a Complete Flop. “Despite the documentary being released in major cities such as New York, San Francisco, D.C., and New Orleans on September 10, the likes of RottenTomatoes.com, Boxoffice Pro, IMDB.com, and BoxOfficeMojo.com have published no information about ticket sales or earnings data.”
ARE YOU THERE, GOD? IT’S ME, KATHY: Hochul’s New Religion: God Gave Us the Vaccines, and He Wants Us to Be Vaccinated.