Archive for 2022

QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED: Do They Think the White House Is a Bank?

Tell me how the pandemic justified a $5 million disbursement to Boston’s Edward M. Kennedy Institute. What public health emergency necessitated renovating Colorado Springs’ golf course irrigation systems? Did Seattle need to devote over $28 million to downtown apartments for the city’s homeless population, or was that one of the city’s esoteric “priorities?” Has anyone strapped on green eyeshades and audited L.A. County’s $5 million “creative works” jobs program for the city’s moribund “artists?”

Beyond the fact that cash is fungible (another elementary concept we apparently need to review), these are not the unintended consequences of the Covid relief bill. The various relief bills were designed to be oversized, subject to minimal oversight, and nimble enough to plug unanticipated holes wherever they appeared. The lack of interest from the press in the abject waste this program produced would be conspicuous enough. That we’re seeing fiscal prudence now, and only when it may damage a top-tier Republican political prospect, is beyond suspect.

The White House’s allies in media may just be echoing a form of ignorance the White House itself has deployed. President Biden’s political operation seems to have genuinely convinced itself that it could rebut criticism of his lawless transition of private student loan debt onto taxpayers’ shoulders by noting that some of them had taken advantage of Covid relief funding themselves. Some Republicans, they noted, received forgivable Paycheck Protection Program Act loans even as they criticize the president for stealing unappropriated funds from the Treasury to pad the pockets of a favored Democratic constituency. Gotcha!

And somehow, “unexpectedly,” as a result of all of that spending: National debt tops $31 trillion, up from $27.7 trillion when Biden took office.

BIDEN LEMON MOODRING:

Like Chevy Chase’s Peter Lemon Moodring parody from the earlier, funnier days of Saturday Night Live, Joe Biden is all things to all Dems.

HMM: Study: Decreased proteins, not amyloid plaques, are tied to Alzheimer’s disease.

Well, the amyloid-plaque theory has issues: “A now-seminal study published in 2006 provided evidence that the toxic accumulation of a protein called beta-amyloid in the brain was tied to the development of Alzheimer’s disease. Recently, an assistant professor from Vanderbilt University suggested that some of the images in this study were manipulated by the authors.”

BONFIRE OF THE DNC-MSM VANITIES: Mark Steyn once told Hugh Hewitt, “I think the American newspaper is over-unionized. It’s basically like some lame liberal college, where you’ve got tenured people in jobs for lives at a lot of newspapers in America. So I support him on that. At the same time, Fleet Street was a great place, because the whole culture of British journalism was these kind of hard-drinking, scurrilous, unrespectable hacks. And compared to the kind of pompous, ascetic, clean-living blowhards of today’s mainstream media in the United States, I’d rather have all those grubby Fleet Street guys.”

QED: “One of the most fascinating things about the modern age we live in is the population of journalists almost exclusively being from mega rich families and the fact they have done such a good job of hiding it from the internet.”

Read the whole thing.