JOE ISN’T IN CHARGE HERE: On School Reopening, Biden Moves Behind the Sissy Pulpit. “That significant retreat moves the goalposts on reopening and shows the administration has far less ambitious expectations for schools this year. Given that Biden’s first 100 days end in April, Biden would count schools offering about 5 to 7 days of in-person instruction before the end of the school year as ‘open’.”
Teachers union tool.
VIRGINIA POSTREL: A California Coup? Gavin Newsom Has a Problem on His Hands.
After nearly a year under some of the nation’s — indeed, the world’s — toughest Covid-19 restrictions, Californians are increasingly frustrated. With little sympathy from elected officials, they’ve endured mass layoffs, wrecked businesses and lost schooling. They’ve even lost their Disneyland annual passes. Yet the virus has still devastated the state.
Now they’re taking out their frustrations on Governor Gavin Newsom, who for many epitomizes governmental high-handedness and dysfunction. It doesn’t help that the governor suffers from what could be called resting smug face. Or that he comes from San Francisco, which exemplifies the combination of scary vagrants, general disorder and sky-high housing prices that makes Californians wonder how their state got so broken. (Not to mention the school district is against George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.) . . .
Democratic officials are trying to stigmatize the recall movement as a collection of dangerous kooks. “This recall effort, which really ought to be called ‘the California coup,’ is being led by right-wing conspiracy theorists, white nationalists, anti-vaxxers and groups who encourage violence on our democratic institutions,” state party chair Rusty Hicks said in a January press conference. A few days later, the Los Angeles Times expanded his talking point into a major article titled “Far-right movements including QAnon, virus skeptics linked to Newsom recall.” . . .
The discontent isn’t just coming from Republicans or Trump supporters. Newsom’s numbers are on the skids among people who used to like him. Two recent polls show a significant decline. Among likely voters, the Public Policy Institute of California found a slight majority of 52% giving the governor a favorable rating — a drop from over 60% in the early days of the pandemic. . . .
Three specific offenses seem to catalyze the change. The most infamous was the birthday dinner with lobbyists at the upscale French Laundry restaurant in Napa Valley, held even as Newsom was telling Californians not to have family gatherings for Thanksgiving and Christmas. Faulconer was among the critics who immediately pounced on the governor’s inconsistencies, tweeting that “He can celebrate birthday parties. But you can’t.”
That was in November. By then discontent with Newsom had already been growing for months, probably beginning in July when he announced that schools wouldn’t reopen. As the reality of another year of homeschooling dawned on California parents, many blamed the governor for not working to reopen schools. Interest-group politics, not science, seemed to be driving policy.
To be fair, if you didn’t want to be governed by a corrupt party hack, you shouldn’t have elected him in the first place.
WE ARE BEING PATRONIZED BY OUR INFERIORS: Ann Althouse savages Andrea Mitchell’s literary ignorance. “If you really were a person who reads and understands literature, you would know that — in the world of novels — a character who corrects other people curtly in that pedantic ‘No, that’s Faulkner’ manner is an icky prig.”
Yep, that’s our Andrea. That she got it wrong is just the icing on the cake.
WHEN YOU’VE LOST THE BEEB…: BBC News banned in China, one week after CGTN’s license withdrawn in UK.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Iowa senator wants to end tenure at state universities.
WELL, FLORIDA VOTED FOR TRUMP: Biden Considering Stronger Travel Restrictions On Red States Than On Mexico.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Higher Ed Lost 650,000 Jobs Last Year — 13% Of The Workforce.
Hollywood is collapsing, Higher Ed is on the ropes, teachers’ unions are in disrepute. There are a lot of opportunities here for the right if it’s smart enough to take them.
JONATHAN TURLEY: After quickly impeaching Trump, the House sat around and did nothing about the trial. So, have they intentionally tanked the trial?
When it comes to football, tanking allegations arise when the inexplicable speeds along the inevitable. That point was reached this season when Pederson decided not to tie the game against Washington in the third quarter with a field goal and instead put Nate Sudfeld in the game over Jalen Hurts. The House may have reached that point when the managers seemed to be trying harder to make a better case for losing than winning. That was driven home by the selection of such managers as Rep. Eric Swalwell in the wake of his scandal with Chinese spy. Sending in Swalwell, who has also been accused of reckless political rhetoric, made the Sudfeld substitution look like sheer genius.
Read the whole thing.
ABOUT THAT IMPEACHMENT TRIAL: John Daniel Davidson points in The Federalist to a fundamental weakness in the Democrats’ case against Trump: To be guilty of incitement, Trump had to clearly and without a doubt instruct his supporters to go to the Capitol and riot.
And that in turn means there must be rioters who did so because they thought that’s exactly what Trump told them to do. But no rioters saying that were produced as witnesses during the House impeachment debate or the Senate trial so far, so the Democrats use carefully edited video to prompt emotional responses that cultivate the assumption that’s what they thought. Well, no, says Davidson:
“But here’s the thing: it doesn’t matter if they thought they were carrying out Trump’s orders. It’s not Trump’s fault these people are idiots. And unless Democrats can produce some evidence that Trump gave the rioters instructions to attack the Capitol, we’ll have to rely on what we know Trump said, which was to encourage the protesters to march ‘peacefully.’” Davidson’s entire critique is arguably devastating.
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Related: Ann Althouse: “The question I think should be at the core of the impeachment trial but is not: Did Trump intend that the crowd break into the Capitol and terrorize the members of Congress? . . . I want to be pointed to the part of the trial that addresses the question: Did Trump intend that the crowd break into the Capitol and terrorize the members of Congress?”
Well, they can’t point to that because he didn’t. That’s why they’re blowing smoke and peddling doctored videos for emotional impact.
I GUESS SHE’S OFF TO A SLOW START: Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) Introduces FIVE Useless Gun Control Bills.
ENABLING THE GLEICHSCHALTUNG: Biden Administration Suspends Rule Protecting Businesses from Banking Discrimination.
CALM DOWN, THEY’RE STEALING AS FAST AS THEY CAN: Biden administration sitting on $1 trillion in unspent COVID-19 relief funds.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Andrew Cuomo Should Be In Prison for His COVID-19 Lies. “It should be noted that while they were lying to the public because President Trump was turning it into a ‘political football,’ Cuomo was using his criminal lack of transparency as a political opportunity. He was regularly appearing on his brother’s CNN show to engage in an uncomfortable incestuous attention whore fest. He was hamming it up at his daily press conferences and lapping up the media attention he was undeservedly receiving.”
WHAT IF TRUMP SUPPORTERS SHUN ANYONE WHO WENT TO HARVARD? Students And Alumni Ask Harvard Law School To Shun Anyone Who Worked For The Trump Administration.
YOU DON’T SAY: Russia Defiant of White House’s Foreign Policy Agenda.
As Biden reduces American energy independence, Moscow will be able to afford that much more mischief — Tehran, too.
READER BOOK PLUG: From J.P. Mac, Death Honk: Nine Tales of the Macabre.
THE REPUBLICAN GOVERNORS ARE THE KEY TO RESISTANCE: Gov. Ron DeSantis will fight any attempt to restrict travel to and from Florida.
WHEN EZRA KLEIN HAS NOTICED. . . . California Is Making Liberals Squirm: If progressivism can’t work there, why should the country believe it can work anywhere else? “California, as the biggest state in the nation, and one where Democrats hold total control of the government, carries a special burden. If progressivism cannot work here, why should the country believe it can work anywhere else?”
Once you start looking for this pattern, you see it everywhere. California talks a big game on climate change, but even with billions of dollars in federal funding, it couldn’t build high-speed rail between Los Angeles and San Francisco. The project was choked by pricey consultants, private land negotiations, endless environmental reviews, county governments suing the state government. It has been shrunk to a line connecting the midsize cities of Bakersfield and Merced, and even that is horribly over budget and behind schedule. . . .
The vaccine rollout in California was marred by overly complex eligibility criteria that slowed the pace of vaccinations terribly in the early days. Those regulations were written with good intentions, as California politicians worried over how to balance speed and equity. The result, however, wasn’t fairness, but sluggishness, and California lagged behind the rest of the nation for the first weeks of the effort. Eventually, the state reversed course and simplified eligibility.
When you prize wokeness over results, you get wokeness over results.
FROM PAM UPHOFF: Destroyer.
Ice is back!
And back in trouble.
His mission–sabotage the Cyborg Empire–goes awry when the Cyborgs discover his dimensional gate, and Gior, the obnoxious young woman with the rare talent of being able to manipulate dimensional phenomena, is forced to close that gate moments before the Cyborgs capture her.
Now Ice is not just marooned in enemy territory, he needs to rescue Gior quickly, before they get a control chip into her brain.
NOW? THEY’LL GET WHAT THEY DESERVE: Hollywood Sold Its Soul to China … Now What?
The ridiculous assumption that SOMEHOW China’s market was their for the plucking was always a mirage. As it is for Nike, and all the other brands.
Stupidity should hurt. Heinlein said it was the only capital crime. They get what they deserve.
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