THIS COULDN’T HAVE HAPPENED BEFORE SEVEN FAILED VOTES? Backroom Dealing May Save McCarthy’s Bid for Speaker.
Archive for 2023
January 5, 2023
GOOD IDEA: Safety experts urge community defibrillators, CPR training for cardiac emergencies. My gym and my law school both have these, and Helen and I have been trained in CPR and in how to use AEDs.
There are home models, too, but they’re not cheap.
DEBBIE STABENOW ANNOUNCES RETIREMENT IN 2024 — AHEAD OF BRUTAL DEM CYCLE: “The Senate session has only just opened, and Democrats have their first retirement already…In 2024, Democrats have to defend eleven more seats than Republicans, and Michigan wasn’t even one of the tougher seats to hold. Seats in red states like Montana, Ohio, West Virginia, and maybe even Nevada, Arizona, and Wisconsin would be tougher to defend with current incumbents than Michigan. Stabenow’s retirement will mean a significant shift of resources to hold that seat, especially with an unpopular president like Biden topping the ticket.”
THE WAR ON HEALTH: Whistleblower Exposes Coke’s Efforts to Paint Opponents of Sugary Drinks as Racists. “Means also alleges that the FDA funneled money to universities, as well as conservative and liberal think tanks, to claim that soda did not cause obesity. He also states that soda manufacturers have been ‘deeply embedded’ in the U.S. Department of Agriculture, of all places, which led to the concept that there was no such thing as “bad foods” only ‘bad diets.’ It also meant that in 2007, soda was kept in the SNAP government nutrition program.”
60 MINUTES PROMOTES PAUL EHRLICH’S FAILED DOOMSAYING ONE MORE TIME:
Stanford University biologist and perennially wrong doomster Paul Ehrlich appeared on CBS 60 Minutes on Sunday where he once again declared, “I and the vast majority of my colleagues think we’ve had it; that the next few decades will be the end of the kind of civilization we’re used to.”
Ehrlich made himself (in)famous when he in his 1968 bestseller The Population Bomb: predicted that “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970’s the world will undergo famines-hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.” Instead of rising as Ehrlich predicted, the global crude death per 1,000 people has fallen from 12.5 in 1968 to 7 in 2019 before ticking up to 8 in the pandemic year of 2020.
At least CBS correspondent Scott Pelley acknowledged, “The alarm Ehrlich sounded in ’68 warned that overpopulation would trigger widespread famine. He was wrong about that. The green revolution fed the world.” Nevertheless, Pelley credulously reports Ehrlich’s assertion that the world is undergoing a Sixth Mass Extinction owing to humanity’s rising population and consumption. Paleontologists have identified five previous mass extinction events during the past 450 million years in which something like three-quarters of species disappeared due to events like supervolcano eruptions and asteroid strikes.
How wrong was Ehrlich back then? This wrong: (Video) Paul Ehrlich in 1970: “The FCC should see to it that large families are always treated in negative light on television.”
REVOKE HAMLINE’S ACCREDITATION: Hamline President Keeps Digging: In email to campus Hamline University president reemphasizes that academic freedom does not exist there. “Usually university presidents try not to be so explicit about what they are doing when they ride roughshod over academic freedom. But Hamline’s president tells you how things are.”
If you don’t have academic freedom, you’re not a university. If you’re not a university, you shouldn’t be accredited as one, and you shouldn’t get 501(c)(3) treatment as one.
IN WHICH I AM BALDER THAN DR. PHIL. Dr. Phil’s show yesterday was called “You Can’t Post That” and featured FIRE First Amendment plaintiff Kim Diei, who was nearly expelled for a tweet, with me in a supporting role. (They didn’t post her part online, so you get me instead. Sorry!) It was fun to do the show at Paramount in Hollywood–I was told it was the same sound stage as The Wizard of Oz.
RECONSIDERING MOSHE DAYAN: Israel’s National Security Minister, Itamar Ben Gvir, is getting grief from many, including Joe Biden, as a result of his stroll through the Temple Mount in the Old City of Jerusalem. Gvir isn’t the culprit, though, according to Jeff Dunetz at The Lid. That would be Moshe Dayan, hero of the Six Day War in 1967.
Previously: Testosterone: Going… Going… Gone! “More reliably, other researchers have implicated estrogen-mimicking chemicals, which leach into the environment from plastics (BPA). . . . It is very possible, even likely, that the feminization of society over the past 20 to 30 years is changing males, body and mind. It is very possible that the subliminal stress involved in sublimating one’s essential nature is producing less manly men.”
REVISITING A STAN EVANS RULE: There is a particular relevance these days to M. Stanton Evans’ Law of Inadequate Paranoia – No matter how bad you think things are, if you look closer, you’ll inevitably find it’s worse.” Issues & Insights picks it up from there with regard those Twitters Files and much else.
NEW YEAR DEAL: 12 Inch Shower Head Combo,High Pressure Rain Shower Head. #CommissionEarned
NOT NEARLY GOOD ENOUGH: Alena Buyx, chair of the German Ethics Council, warns against assigning blame for pandemic failures, would prefer instead “honest retrospection” & “learning” because that sounds much nicer.
Among the failures serving on the Ethics Council is its chairwoman, a medical ethicist and professor named Alena Buyx. Like Emily Oster, Buyx is an archetypal Head Girl – highly conscientious, deeply conformist, mildly intelligent, and totally bereft of all originality and independence of thought.
Also like Emily Oster, Buyx has decided that it would be better not to blame anyone for the hell that the Corona brigade has put all of us through. Her most pointed remarks to this effect come in a long and otherwise unremarkable New Years interview she gave to Die Zeit.
People aren’t generally in a forgiving mood about the biggest power and money grab in world history, nor should they be.
THE HOUSE GOP, THE DEBT CEILING AND BIDEN: Daniel Oliver was Chairman of the Federal Trade Commission during the Reagan years and has been a thoughtful and wise editor and columnist in the years since. His current piece in American Greatness is entitled “Courage Time in the House of Representatives.”
Oliver points to the Twitter Files revelations as making clear the 2020 election was manipulated (not the same thing as “stolen,” though not unrelated) by agents of the government on behalf of a corrupt president and his family and associates. That is the essence of an illegitimate presidency.
But what to do about it now? Impeachment, Oliver notes, is not going to happen, but the Founders did not leave us without recourse in such a profoundly serious situation:
“There is another possible solution. It would require bravery — almost always in short supply. But maybe not this time. This is a time for reckoning. This is a time for choosing. Another time for choosing.
“Here’s how the problem could be solved:
“Because the U.S. government doesn’t live within its means (it spends far more than it collects in taxes), it has to borrow money. Congress has to authorize how much money the government can borrow. The maximum amount the government can borrow, legislated by Congress, is called the ‘debt ceiling.’
“At some point this year, the government will reach that maximum amount. Failure to raise that amount would lead (at least in theory) to the government defaulting on its obligations.
“What would happen then? No one knows. It could create chaos in the United States and the global economy. Nevertheless, that situation presents an opportunity to the Republicans to rectify the theft of the presidential election in 2020.
“After the new Congress convenes this week, the Republicans should ….” Click here for the rest of the story. Be assured it will be worth your while.
SO STOP SENDING SO MANY SQUISHES TO WASHINGTON: A Significant Majority of Republican Voters Agree With the GOP Rebels.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: In pursuit of “equity,” company tells applicants not to list colleges on resumes.
When you’re selling a prestige degree, and people aren’t allowed to talk about it, what are you selling, exactly?
GARBAGE PERSON, GARBAGE TAKE: Cori Bush says black House Speaker nominee Byron Donalds is a ‘prop’ ‘upholding and perpetuating white supremacy.’ “The comments from Bush come as, for the first time, 2 black people were nominated for Speaker of the House, with House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries being the other. Republicans who oppose nominee Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) nominated Donalds (R-Fla) as their candidate.”
NEW YEAR SALE in kitchen items. #CommissionEarned
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Biden Is Kicking Off 2023 by Pretending to Care About the Border. “It feels like Biden’s handlers are angling for a photo op to pimp amnesty under the guise of — stop me if you’ve heard this one before — ‘comprehensive immigration reform.'”
WELL, YES: Former FBI exec: Bureau has become completely political. “Ex-FBI Assistant Director Chris Swecker on Tuesday became the latest law enforcement or political figure to support creating an independent commission modeled after the U.S. Senate’s 1970s Church Committee to investigate the FBI’s practices and impose reforms on the storied law enforcement agency.”
Related: Majority see FBI as Biden’s ‘personal Gestapo’ after Trump raid.
EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: Mortgage demand falls in December to the lowest level since 1996. “Mortgage rates have haunted the housing market into 2023. With rates above 6%, buyers continue to find homeownership unaffordable.”
When government spending and regulation are so out of control that the only way to goose economic growth is with easy money, it’s no puzzle what happens when inflation makes the easy money policy impossible to sustain.
What we need are deep and sustained cuts in both regulation and spending, but that’s at least two years off, if ever.