OPEN THREAD: I may hate myself in the morning.
Archive for 2022
April 11, 2022
JIM TREACHER: Fauci Says We’re on Our Own Now.
Dr. Anthony Fauci on Sunday appeared to throw in the towel on more government restrictions over COVID-19 — insisting it’s now up to Americans to make their own medical risk assessments.
“This is not going to be eradicated, and it’s not going to be eliminated,” Fauci told ABC’s “This Week.” “And what’s going to happen is that we’re going to see that each individual is going to have to make their calculation of the amount of risk that they want to take.”
Oh, now we get to do that, huh? Better 25 months late than never!
The pandemic is done. Half of Washington tested positive for COVID-19 last week, and nobody cares. Yes, some people are going to get a virus and die. No, that’s nothing new. People need to get back to their miserable lives already.
It’s over. Go Fauci yourself.
But there are still a lot of bureaucrats eager to party like it’s 2020:
● Philadelphia Reinstates Indoor Mask Mandate.
● Biden COVID czar: Sure, we may extend mask mandates on air travel.
Exit question: When will Fauci and liberal leaders apologize for the millions of lives damaged with pointless COVID restrictions?
GOODER AND HARDER, CALIFORNIA: USPS Cancels Mail Delivery in L.A. Neighborhood Amid Crime Spike.
Authorities have indicated they are familiar with the individual responsible for the January attack and have a record of “domestic” incidents with the suspect.
This is a recurring theme in California justice. A disturbed, violent individual severely injures (or worse) an innocent citizen and almost without exception it turns out that individual has a long history of interaction with law enforcement. They’ve simply been dumped back onto the streets by a feckless system that no longer has the teeth to hold and prosecute criminals or protect innocent taxpayers.
This suspension is not simply about one attack. It is a sign of a larger issue. “Defund the Police” initiatives, Prop 47, and a cold-hearted, ruling elite class have all combined to create a chaos that is nearly unbearable in the once great state of California.
Hence the Fresh Start States Welcome Wagon project.
TRANS WOMAN ON WHAT SHE WISHES SHE’D KNOWN BEFORE HAVING SURGERY AT 19: “I’m a little surprised to see this opinion piece appear in the Washington Post. The gist of the piece is that the author had sex reassignment surgery as a 19-year-old and while not exactly regretting that choice outright, does have enough perspective as an adult nearing retirement to say it was a choice made too soon with not enough thought over all that it would mean…There’s definitely a lot of arguing going on in the comments but I’m sure this will go to 11 on Twitter. Will there be calls to fire whichever editor allowed this to be published? It wouldn’t surprise me.”
VDH: The Nihilism of the Left.
The last 14 months have offered one of the rare occasions in recent American history when the hard Left has operated all the levers of federal government. The presidency, the House of Representatives, the Senate, and the permanent bureaucratic state are all in progressive hands. And the result is a disaster that is uniting Americans in their revulsion of elitists whose crazy ideas are tearing apart the fabric of the country.
For understandable reasons, socialists and leftists are usually kept out of the inner circles of the Democratic Party, and especially kept away from control of the country. A now resuscitated Bernie Sanders for most of his political career was an inert outlier. The brief flirtations with old-style hardcore liberals such as George McGovern in 1972 and Mike Dukakis in 1988 imploded the Democratic Party. Their crash-and-burn campaigns were followed by corrective nominees who actually won the presidency: Southern governors Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton.
Such was the nation’s innate distrust of the Left, and in particular the East Coast elite liberal. For nearly half a century between the elections of John F. Kennedy and Barack Obama, it was assumed that no Democratic presidential candidate could win the popular vote unless he had a reassuring Southern accent.
How did the extreme Left manage its rare takeover of the country between 2018 and 2020? Certainly, Obama’s election helped accelerate the woke movement and energized identity politics. One could also argue over the political opportunities in 2020 following the devastation of COVID-19.
In the long term, the medicine of lockdowns and quarantines probably proved more calamitous than the disease, and this crisis mode made doable what had once been unimaginable. State governors such as Gavin Newsom, Gretchen Whitmer, and Andrew Cuomo did not let the pandemic crisis go to waste. It was a rare occasion to leverage agendas that otherwise had no public support in ordinary times.
Read the whole thing.
QUESTION ASKED: Why Aren’t Democrats Dancing for Joy About Sky-High Gas Prices?
In the service of reducing carbon emissions, Democrats have long openly worked to raise the price of fossil fuel energy. They have done so by proposing carbon taxes, cap-and-trade schemes, higher leasing fees, and other measures to jack up costs so people burn less of it. This is why Barack Obama said, in answer to a related question about electricity, that his energy plan would make prices “necessarily skyrocket.” This is why Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna praised BP’s CEO less than six months ago for pledging to reduce oil and gas production by 40% by 2030. Reductions in oil production and rising gasoline prices are part of the Democrats’ agenda and the Paris climate agenda.
There’s even more to it than that. Over the past decade, the Democrats’ overt hostility toward fossil fuels has even driven companies in the industry to sideline production, purely for public relations purposes, while prioritizing meaningless, politically correct carbon emissions goals. How can Democrats suddenly feign outrage at their incredible success in influencing the industry?
Is it a mystery why Democrats aren’t doing a sack dance and celebrating the salvation of planet earth?
There’s the small matter of their political survival, of course. It would be unseemly — like doing a jig at an Irish funeral — to celebrate other people’s pain. And it would cost many Democrats who are secretly jubilant about high gas prices their political careers.
Instead, Democrats are pretending to look for a way to “ease consumers’ pain.”
Flashbacks:
In September of 2019, after CNN’s seven hour “climate change town hall,” Bryan Preston wrote, “Seriously, if you see all of the above — which is just a sample — and vote for any of these people for any office at any level, it’s on you. If you like Venezuela, voting for any of them will bring you a whole lot of Venezuela.”
And as Kate of Small Dead Animals wrote after the CNN horror show, “Don’t make the mistake of thinking they don’t mean it.”
● Aren’t California’s High Gas Prices What The Left Have Wanted?
● NBC, the Washington Post, and the New York Times in lockstep call for higher gas taxes.
● 2008 L.A. Times headline: “The joy of $8 gas.”
Exit quote: “Under my plan, energy costs will necessarily skyrocket…”
In other words, Obama administration retreads are following the same playbook as the original Obama administration: “We’re going to keep at it to ensure the American people are paying their fair share for gas,” is the perfect Kinsley Gaffe for an Obama administration retread like Biden: As Steven Chu, Obama’s then-incoming energy secretary, told the Wall Street Journal in the fall of 2008: “Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.”
So is it fair to ask if Biden is on the payroll of Putin? As Walter Russell Mead wrote in 2017:
If Trump were the Manchurian candidate that people keep wanting to believe that he is, here are some of the things he’d be doing:
Limiting fracking as much as he possibly could
Blocking oil and gas pipelines
Opening negotiations for major nuclear arms reductions
Cutting U.S. military spending
Trying to tamp down tensions with Russia’s ally Iran.
“Yep,” Glenn added in late 2019. “You know who did do these things? Obama. You know who supports these things now? Democrats.”
Related: Biden tormented by Republican guerrilla campaign and ‘I did it’ stickers.
Also: 100Pcs I Did That Biden Funny Car Stickers. #Resist #CommissionEarned
ALIENS: Temperatures on Neptune Are Mysteriously Fluctuating, And It Doesn’t Make Sense.
InstaPundit readers have a headstart on understanding what’s going on.
I’M CALLING THIS A WIN IN ITSELF: Distraught over orders to investigate trans kids, Texas child welfare workers are resigning. Public school teachers, DCS drones, they’re leaving in response to minor policy changes. I thought they’d be harder to get rid of than that.
STILL POPULAR: Reading Glasses 5 Pairs Quality Readers Spring Hinge Glasses for Reading. #CommissionEarned
FORMER COWBOYS EXECUTIVE GIL BRANDT BLASTED FOR INSENSITIVE DWAYNE HASKINS COMMENTS ON RADIO:
Brandt said that Haskins ignored the advice of NFL draft evaluators who told him to remain an extra year at Ohio State, allegedly telling him that he did not have the work ethic.
“It was always something. It was one of those, ‘I’m not offsides, but they keep calling me for offsides,’ ” Brandt said. “It’s a tragic thing. Anytime somebody dies it’s tragic, especially when you’re 24 years old and you’ve got your whole life ahead of you. Maybe if he’d have stayed in school an [extra] year, he wouldn’t do silly things.”
Brandt was known as a pioneering scout under GM Tex Schramm for upward of three decades with the Cowboys.
Brandt, 90, or whoever writes his Twitter account has since issued an apology, but there are many reasons why he’s the main antagonist in Skip Bayless’ first book, God’s Coach.
GOODER AND HARDER, PHILADELPHIA: Philadelphia Reinstates Indoor Mask Mandate.
EVERYTHING WRONG WITH JOURNALISM UNDER ONE ROOF:
The next day saw a discussion with Dispatch editor Jonah Goldberg, who also waved away the Hunter Biden laptop story, which he later stated on Twitter that he did not believe “on it’s face.” Goldberg’s flippant attitude and smug gatekeeping was a perfect example of how so many pundits and thinkers are now more interested in hearing what each other have to say and bathing in self-satisfied pontifications rather than in serving their audiences.
But the ultimate irony is that former President Barack Obama was a special guest, appearing onstage alongside Jeffrey Goldberg. Breitbart reporter Charlie Spiering later summed up his comments on Twitter: “At Atlantic forum, Obama defines ‘disinformation’ as ‘a systematic effort to either promote false information, to suppress true information, for the purpose of political gain, financial gain, enhancing power, suppressing others, targeting those you don’t like.’”
That’s true and it should have been a rare moment of self-introspection for the former president. Among Obama’s own disinformation campaigns were blaming the Benghazi terror attacks on a video and Politifact’s lie of the year that “if you like your plan you can keep your healthcare plan. If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.” Yet no one from the Atlantic, CNN, or the Dispatch saw the deep irony in appearing alongside Obama at a conference about the dangers of disinformation.
Just think of the media as Democratic Party operatives with bylines, and it all makes sense.
Evergreen:
SNOWFALLS ARE NOW JUST A THING OF THE PAST:
● Shot:
BERLIN (AP) — Temperatures on Earth will shoot past a key danger point unless greenhouse gas emissions fall faster than countries have committed, the world’s top body of climate scientists said Monday, warning of the consequences of inaction but also noting hopeful signs of progress.
U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said the report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change revealed “a litany of broken climate promises” by governments and corporations, accusing them of stoking global warming by clinging to harmful fossil fuels.
“It is a file of shame, cataloguing the empty pledges that put us firmly on track toward an unlivable world,” he said.
—“UN warns Earth ‘firmly on track toward an unlivable world,’” AP, last Monday.
● Chaser:
A leaked draft report from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change paints the starkest picture yet of the accelerating danger caused by human use of coal, oil, and gas. It warns of coming unlivable heat waves, widespread hunger and drought, rising sea levels and extinction. To understand the report’s warnings, William Brangham turns to atmospheric scientist Katharine Hayoe.
Judy Woodruff: A leaked draft report from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change paints the starkest picture yet of the real and accelerating danger caused by humans’ use of coal, oil, and gas.
William Brangham has the latest.
William Brangham: That’s right, Judy.
This is a draft report, so it may still change. And it was obtained by the AFP, the Agence France-Presse., even so, the report says the threat from climate change is real, it’s here, and it’s getting worse.
It lays out a myriad of impacts, unlivable heat waves, widespread hunger and drought, rising sea levels that will force millions from their homes, and the extinction of many species.
For a U.N. agency, the draft language is blunt, saying — quote — “The worst is yet to come, affecting our children’s and grandchildren’s lives much more than our own.”
—“A leaked UN report warns ‘worst is yet to come’ on climate change. Here’s how you can help,” NPR, June 23, 2021.
● Hangover:
In the late 1980s the U.N. was already claiming the world had only a decade to solve global warming or face the consequences.
The San Jose Mercury News reported on June 30, 1989 that a “senior environmental official at the United Nations, Noel Brown, says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the earth by rising sea levels if global warming is not reversed by the year 2000.”
That prediction didn’t come true 15 years ago, and the U.N. is sounding the same alarm today.
—“25 Years Of Predicting The Global Warming ‘Tipping Point,’” Michael Bastach, the Daily Caller, May 4, 2015.
(Classical reference in headline.)
BETTER THAN GETTING PROBED AT AREA 51: As classified B-21 bomber nears flight, secret facility sees more curious ‘probing.’ “Weird things keep happening at Air Force Plant 42. Drunk drivers ramming into barbed wire fences. A lost traveler looking for a gas station. Seemingly repetitive auto accidents. As the Air Force gets ready for first flight of the highly classified B-21 bomber, service officials told Breaking Defense the secretive facility where it is being built has seen a rising number of incursions — suspected snoopers hoping to sneak a peak at the latest secret project.”
INTERVIEW: Tim Tebow Has a Powerful Message for Young Men in ‘Mission Possible.’ “I want people to know that they’re able to live out their purpose, their calling, and to live out the mission that God has for their life, and to truly go create a life that counts”
PERSONALLY, I’D KEEP AN 8-GAUGE FOR HOME DEFENSE IF I COULD: Downsized Defense: If you’re thinking about a 20-gauge for home defense, here are some things you need to consider.
NICE SHIRT: Van Heusen mens Regular Fit Poplin Solid dress shirts, White. #CommissionEarned
GRANNY KILLER CUOMO UPDATE: What Cuomo Missed Deadline to Run as Dem for State Office Says About His Political Future. “Cuomo’s choice to not seek statewide office as the long-standing member of the state’s Democratic political party that he is lends support to our main hypothesis about his true ambitions as a man who has access to $16+ million in his political campaign’s bank account. We think his true aim is to use that resource to influence the potential pool of jurors who will decide the multiple court cases he faces.”
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Clarence Thomas Receives Invite To Celebration Of First Black Supreme Court Justice.
A MOON-SHATTERING KABOOM: Differences between the Moon’s near and far sides linked to colossal ancient impact.