Archive for 2021

OUT OF HIS CENSUS:

Readers will search in vain for a passage in the Constitution establishing that illegal aliens are guaranteed representation in Congress, or a Federalist paper arguing that it is “foundational” to representative democracy for illegal aliens to be represented.

When did law-abiding American citizens consent to this view?

Biden claims “it reflects a sound policy judgment that the apportionment base be both clear and insulated against manipulation designed to affect the balance of power among the States.” This is rich in light of the shift in the balance of political power, and allocated federal funds, effectuated by the mere presence of foreigners on U.S. soil to the extent counted in the census.

Even more dumbfounding, President Biden argues that President Trump’s efforts to “exclude persons who are not in a lawful immigration status” from the census’s enumeration “conflicted with the principle of equal representation enshrined in our Constitution, census statutes, and historical tradition.”

Just like that, Joe Biden has sophistically reimagined “equal representation.” In fact, counting illegal aliens in the census count undermines the principle of “one man, one vote.” As the Department of Justice argues, obtaining an accurate count of the citizen voting-age population is essential to enforcing Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which protects citizens against discrimination such as vote-dilution through gerrymandering.

Flashback: Jared Bernstein, member of Biden’s Council of Economic Advisors: “One thing we learned in the 1990s was that a surefire way to reconnect the fortunes of working people at all skill levels, immigrant and native-born alike, to the growing economy is to let the job market tighten up. A tight job market pressures employers to boost wage offers to get and keep the workers they need. One equally surefire way to sort-circuit this useful dynamic is to turn on the immigrant spigot every time some group’s wages go up.”

Or to put it another way:

 

 

STACY MCCAIN: On Harry and Meghan: Inherited Rights and Inherited Duties: What should Americans learn from the decadence of British royalty?

What was perhaps most astonishing in all this was the Duchess of Sussex’s accusation that racism — “RAAAAACISM!” — tainted the royal family. Dear God in heaven, ma’am, exactly what do you think a hereditary monarchy represents? The Windsors, like the rest of what’s left of European royalty, are a product of many generations of inbreeding. How inbred are they? When World War I broke out, England’s King George V, Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II, and Russia’s Czar Nicholas II were all cousins. To marry royalty and then complain about “racism”? My dictionary contains no adjective strong enough to apply to this folly.

Plus: “Of the many absurd tendencies of liberal American women, nothing is more absurd than their obsession with the British royals. Having made a devotion to egalitarianism their political creed, liberal women are blind to the self-contradiction manifested by their fixation with affairs at Buckingham Palace.”

Also: “Meghan Markle could never hope to compete with Kate as the most popular of Britain’s royals, and losing that competition seems to have inspired her to lash out at her in-laws. Or at least that’s my analysis of the situation, as an American who tries to ignore all the gossip-column chatter about the House of Windsor.”

THE BIGGER SCANDAL BEHIND CUOMO’S NURSING HOME SCANDAL: Willis Krumholz and Robert Delahunty, writing in The Federalist, lay it out in stark detail:

“The real scandal is what lay behind the high nursing home deaths in New York and a handful of other states led by leftist governors such as Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer, Minnesota’s Tim Walz, and Pennsylvania’s Tom Wolf. It is the story of how grandpa and grandma got tossed aside for money.

“The high nursing home deaths were the direct result of policies that quickly discharged elderly or disabled COVID-19 patients from the hospital when they were still COVID-positive and then put them back in group or nursing homes. The hospital lobby directly engineered this approach, and these governors obliged.

“The stated reason for the policy was concern about hospital capacity, but these states kept the policy well after COVID hospitalizations peaked in April. In states like Minnesota, the policy remained in place even though the health-care system never faced the strain that was initially feared. What you don’t hear is that hospitals didn’t want to keep Medicare and Medicaid patients (especially Medicaid patients) in hospitals for too long, because longer stays with such patients are less profitable.”

And there is more.

“PABLO ESCOBEAR!” Who is Cocaine Bear? Kentucky legend is being made into a movie directed by Elizabeth Banks.

The bear was the victim of a fatal overdose that occurred when it ate a cache of cocaine that Andrew Thornton, a former Lexington narcotics officer turned drug smuggler, threw out over North Georgia.

Thornton was carrying $15 million in cocaine when he died parachuting out of a plane over Knoxville in September 1985. That saga is chronicled in Sally Denton’s 1989 book, “The Bluegrass Conspiracy.”

The 175-pound bear’s body was found several months after Thornton’s and preserved with taxidermy. It was passed among various owners until it eventually was acquired by the operators of Lexington-based retailer Kentucky for Kentucky.

A kooky television ad featuring the bear, which has been dubbed Pablo Escobear, made headlines five years ago.

And Escobear is still enjoying fame.

Banks has to work in a cameo of Miami Vice’s Elvis the Alligator alongside Cocaine Bear.

WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: The U.S. Military Has a New Master Plan to Use Lasers in a War. “Most weapons developers are aware of fast-moving laser weapons technology increasingly showing promise with new high-kilowatt transmission able to incinerate, destroy or disable a wide range of enemy targets, but what about using lasers for communication? Raytheon’s Intelligence and Space, Advanced Concepts and Technology unit is now deeply immersed in research, development and testing of new applications of laser communications technology potentially able to introduce new tactical warfare concepts.”

CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: New York needs answers now on Gov. Cuomo’s seven-figure book deal. “The Buffalo News filed a Freedom of Information Law request for those facts last August. For the last seven months, Cuomo’s office has stonewalled with absurd claims it can’t find the records and so on.”

HOVERING BLUE WATER: The photo shows a U.S. Navy test flight of a Blue Water Maritime Logistics Unmanned Aerial System (UAS). The aircraft delivered a package from a Navy maintenance center at Naval Station Norfolk, Virginia, to the aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford. The USN has been conducting similar supply delivery tests using unmanned aircraft. Here’s a photo of a UAS delivery a supply payload to the ballistic missile submarine USS Henry M. Jackson. The sub is surfaced near Hawaii. As the caption explains, the Navy sees unmanned aircraft as a superb system for delivering high-priority supplies to ships at sea — “underway replenishment.” A decade ago U.S. forces in Afghanistan began using small unmanned helicopters to deliver cargo and retrieve equipment. This Air Transportation update from 2012 discusses the Afghanistan operations. The Blue Water is a much more sophisticated UAS.