EVS AND THE YUGOS OF THE 21ST CENTURY: Being a car guy and having covered the auto industry for the bigger part of my journalism career (1985 to 2010), I remember all too well when Yugos were imported into the U.S. They rapidly became jokes and disappeared from these shores because they so poorly designed and built.

Today, Issues & Insights explains why EVs are present era’s Yugos:

“Fast forward to today, and a new class of cars has a similar problem. A minor accident can cause a total loss, even if the car’s been driven only a few miles. The only difference is that these cars aren’t cheap imports from some godforsaken socialist state. These are state-of-art electric vehicles that come with an average sticker price of $55,000.

“Why are insurance companies totaling low-mileage EVs that have been in a fender bender? For the same reason you could total a new Yugo when backing out of a parking spot. The cost of repair is exorbitant.

“As Reuters reported recently, ‘For many electric vehicles, there is no way to repair or assess even slightly damaged battery packs after accidents,’ which means the only viable option is to replace the battery, which represents about half the cost of the car.”

More evidence for why, as I’ve said before, they will only be able to take my internal combustion-powered vehicle away from me when they pry my cold dead fingers off the steering wheel.

MCCARTHY’S 11TH COMMANDMENT: The Speaker of the House is not happy with former President Donald Trump’s blunt attacks on Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.), according to the Daily Wire’s Ryan Saavedra (does this guy ever sleep?). The silence of the Waco crowd during Trump’s attack on DeSantis just might be something The Donald should not ignore.

IS RON JOHNSON THE MOST COMMON-SENSE MAN IN CONGRESS? – You won’t have to watch this “American Thought Leaders” interview on Epoch TV with the Wisconsin Republican for very long before that thought will cross your mind.

He’s blunt, direct and compelling on all of the major issues of the day. He’s also utterly single-minded about getting to the truth about Anthony Fauci and the origin of COVID-19.

WOOD WIDE WEB? Everybody knows about “Al Gore’s Amazing Information Superhighway,” as WMAL’s Chris Plante puts it, but how about the “Wood Wide Web.” No matter your take on its origin, this WWW gives new meaning to the amazing part.

HAS EVERYTHING BECOME RACIST? Great and relevant question and The Lid’s Jeff Dunetz has the answer (Hint – Wokesters won’t like it).

EASTER HOAX OR HISTORY: Easter is right around the corner (April 9, to be exact) and that means people are going to be talking about/debating the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. Instapundit regulars know where I stand, but I doubt many realize just how richly detailed and compelling the evidence actually is.

Today, HillFaith has a handy intro to the discussion of one of the familiar points of discussion, the claim of skeptics that the disciples stole Jesus’ body and faked the resurrection. Also included are links to several helpful resources for those interested in a deeper dive.

A VICTORY BUT GOING WHICH WAY? It’s true, transparency prompted public pressure that forced Pentagon to blow-up one of its Woke programs, but is it a win heralding bigger victories to come or covering a continued retreat from the military virtues?

PAUL, ROY PROPOSE TO BUST-UP FAUCI’S FORMER EMPIRE: Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas), taking a page from the J. Edgar Hoover epic, have introduced legislation to divide the National Institutes for Allergies and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) within the National Institutes for Health (NIH) into three separate new institutes.

Each of the new institutes would be overseen by a presidentially appointed, Senate-confirmed Director who would only be eligible to serve no more than two consecutive five-year terms. Dr. Anthony Fauci was never confirmed by the Senate during his nearly four decades at the helm of NIAID.

SHOULD BIDEN WHITE HOUSE BE GROUNDED FROM SOCIAL MEDIA? Well, even as TikTok’s president was being roasted to a fare thee well by Republicans and Democrats on the Hill Thursday, the White House issued an Instagram post using CapCut, another intrusive app owned by TikTok’s Chinese owner, ByteDance.

“While CapCut has received far less scrutiny than TikTok, its links to ByteDance have caused concern that China could scoop up data on users of the app. A technology think tank funded by a former Google CEO says CapCut poses national security ‘challenges,’ particularly ‘with respect to data harvesting, data exploitation, and—possibly—covert influence,'” reports the Washington Free Beacon.

DOJ WATCHDOG WANTS MORE TEETH: Department of Justice Inspector-General Michael Horowitz is asking Congress to give him authority to investigate professional misconduct by DOJ lawyers, including federal prosecutors. House leaders have favored such a move for a long time, but not the Senate. Curious, very curious.

‘WOKE, WEAPONIZED, WASTEFUL:’ That’s the description of federal spending that House Republicans are targeting in their coming showdown with the Biden White House on raising the debt ceiling, according to Rep. Josh Brecheen (R-Okla.), a member of the House Budget Committee.

It’s part of the “Social Security/Medicare off the table” strategy sired by former Trump OMB Director Russ Vought. He says GOP going for cuts in the big entitlements up front leaves them dead in the water, so why not instead go after the hundreds of billions in Diversity-Equity-Inclusion/Social Justice/Food Stamp Nation programs?

BIDENS AIDED CHINESE ENERGY EXEC IN FLEEING FBI: An Israeli think tank executive claims he told the FBI how unnamed Biden family members warned a Chinese energy executive that he was an object of an FBI probe just in time for the executive to get out of town, according to Washington Free Beacon’s Chuck Ross.

BET YOU DIDN’T KNOW THIS: Philadelphia Flyers hockey star Ivan Proporov made headlines recently when he refused to wear a jersey paying tribute to the LGBQT Woke agenda. That decision earned him some bench-time and a wave of critical headlines.

You likely heard about all of that, but Issues & Insights today informs us of a key fact that you won’t hear reported by the Mainstream Media – Sales of Proporov’s jersey skyrocketed as news of his decision spread. And a couple of other NHL teams decided not to don the jersey, as did San Jose Sharks goalie James Reimer did the same thing. Reimer got a royal reaming in the media as his reward.

Observes I&I:

“Imagine, though, the uproar from the political left if players wore warmup jerseys with Christian and Jewish symbols, or Joseph Smith Church of the Latter Day Saints jerseys. It’s a minor miracle that Antifa and other violent extremists haven’t crashed teams’ military appreciation nights.

“Western culture has come to be dominated by bullies who are ever eager to force conformity on others and to validate their status as ‘the elite.’ They get a sick thrill from being free to intimidate anyone who doesn’t agree with their narrative to the point they control them. This is not the foundation of healthy culture but a sign of declining civilization. We are becoming a grotesque monster with little resemblance to a free society.”

REVISITING MACHEN’S ‘CHRISTIANITY VS LIBERALISM:’ It was a century ago this year that Professor J. Gresham Macen of Princeton Seminary wrote what in many respects remains the most authoritative explanation for how and why orthodox Christianity and modern liberal theology have a lot of words in common but very little in the way of principled faith. Over at PJ Media today, Chris Queen notes how much of Machen’s work reads as if it was just composed yesterday.

“One of the most powerful points in the book is when Machen points out how liberal Christians cherry-pick certain things from the Bible to hold up as examples of how to live while ignoring others. The phenomenon of the ‘Red-Letter Christians’ who say we should only live by the direct quotes of Jesus and then twist those words to fit a leftist agenda, is a prime modern example,” Queen writes.

And as one of many examples of Machen’s prescience, Queen cites this paragraph:

“Place the lives of children in their formative years, despite the convictions of their parents, under the intimate control of experts appointed by the state, force them to attend schools where the higher aspirations of humanity are crushed out, and where the mind is filled with the materialism of the day, and it is difficult to see how even the remnants of liberty can subsist.” Queen’s excellent analysis of Machen’s classic will hopefully help spark a renewal of reading of and appreciation for a man who foresaw so many of the destructive consequences of the continuing power of the theology of liberalism.

AMAZING INTERVIEW WITH ST. PATRICK: Ok, shake off that headache from last night’s celebration and check out this exclusive interview by Babylon Bee of the Irish saint.

IN OKLAHOMA? What the devil is going on in the Sooner state, long one of the last preserves of political normalcy in this country? Bills now moving in the state legislature would grant illegal aliens the opportunity to get driver licenses, according to The Epoch Times’ Michael Clements.

Gov. Kevin Stitt, a conservative Republican who won re-election last November, appears to be backing this proposal. Clements quotes Don Spencer, head of the Oklahoma Second Amendment Association as saying, “Giving Illegal aliens a driver’s license is beyond absurd” because today, driver licenses, tomorrow voting rights.

LEFT’S WAR ON CHILDREN: How many times have we all heard some lefty defend another proposed expansion of federal bureaucratic power as needed because “it’s for the children”?

But an editorial today in Issues & Insights suggests that, between the Pandemic, masking, virtual classrooms, incessant indoctrination about racism and sexuality, and transgenderism, it’s becoming clear to everyone that the Left is waging ideological war on the children.

“According to ​​an online medical journal, the University of Calgary has determined there was a spike ‘in emergency department visits for attempted suicide and suicide ideation among children and adolescents’ during the period of ‘social isolation’ that coincides with the pandemic lockdowns. The university conducted a meta-analysis of 42 studies representing more than 11 million pediatric emergency department visits in 18 countries, and compared ‘the data on visits prior to the pandemic with those that took place during the pandemic, up to July 2021.’

“Researchers found ‘a 22 percent increase in children and adolescents going to emergency departments for suicide attempts, and an 8 percent increase in visits for suicide ideation,’ even though there was ‘a 32 percent reduction in pediatric emergency department visits for any health-related reasons during the pandemic.’”

And that’s just on the negative effects of the Pandemic! This piece, by the way, is yet another great illustration of the superb commentary and analyses published daily by the folks at Issues & Insights. It is a too-little appreciated gem among Right media efforts.

AND THEY WONDER WHY CRIME IS EXPLODING: Not to worry too much if you happen to be arrested in the District of Columbia. Data compiled by the U.S. Attorney’s Office shows two out of three arrests are not followed by charges being filed.

DOBBS WAS BIG BUT SO WAS SHURTLEFF: It’s not every day that the nation’s highest court tosses the Lemon Test in the trash. My latest PJ Media column compares the significance of Dobbs and Shurtleff.

LOCAL CALIFORNIA OFFICIALS A TARGET-RICH ENVIRONMENT FOR CCP: First, there was then-Councilman-turned-Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.), then the big bucks donated to former LA Mayor Eric Garcetti’s “Mayor’s Fund” by two guys with ties to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

And now it’s reported by Chuck Ross of the Washington Free Beacon that Garcetti’s successor in the Mayor’s office, former Rep. Karen Bass (D-Calif.), recently met with a key figure in China’s influence operations in the U.S.

PRIMER ON WHO IS ACTUALLY ANTI-RACISM: Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in a 2007 opinion striking down race-based quotas in public schools that “the way to stop discriminating on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

More recently, Critical Race Theory (CRT) huckster Ibram X. Kendi wrote in his 2019 book “the only remedy to racist discrimination is anti-racist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.”

Rather stark, no? Those contrasting quotes are included in this superb Freedom Matters video from the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) in connection with the legal defense foundation’s representation of five parents challenging CRT-based policies in the Albemarle County (Va.) public schools.

Josue Sierra, the articulate young Hispanic narrator of that video, has recently made the big jump to form his own marketing firm. Very smart guy who wants to make more videos like that for important freedom-loving causes. Our side needs to cultivate and encourage such talent.

JUDGES IGNORE CHILD ABUSE EVIDENCE, KIDS DIE: That’s the summary of an investigation by The Epoch Times’ Alice Giordano, who found that more than 900 kids have been murdered by a parent since 2008. And the killer is typically the father, as was the case in all but four of the 53 cases in 2022.

A too-common element in these cases, according to Giordano, is judges who ignore evidence of patterns of child abuse that preceded the murders. This is the kind of investigative news reporting that is heart-breaking but absolutely essential in a civil society.

IMAGINE BIDEN STANDING NEXT TO AN ELEPHANT: He’s pointing at it and insisting “that is NOT an elephant.” Would you believe him? Joseph Simonson and Thaleigha Rampersad of the Washington Free Beacon report that almost nobody is believing Biden when he claims ‘that is NOT a bailout” regarding SVB and Signature Bank.

Not even The Washington Post, New York Times, Vox or NPR are buying Biden’s insistence that he’s not using federal tax dollars to bailout two huge banks that just happen to number among their investors, board members and depositors hordes of Democratic donors. You ain’t flyin’ when Post/Times/Vox/NPR ain’t buy-in’ is the bottom line here.

NO TOLERANCE HERE: A new survey for the Alliance Defending Freedom’s (ADF) Viewpoint Diversity Score Index finds three of every five Americans keep their religious and political views to themselves for fear of suffering negative consequences in the workplace.

“Many employees, the survey indicates, worry about workplace repercussions for expressing deeply held views both at work and even while off the clock. For example, 3 out of 5 respondents say that respectfully expressing religious or political viewpoints would ‘likely or somewhat likely’ carry negative consequences at work, while 1 in 4 say they know someone who has experienced negative consequences for respectfully expressing their religious and political viewpoints,” ADF said.

Remember when Americans used to say “Hey, it’s a free country”?

AARP PUSHES ‘FAMILY FRIENDLY’ DRAG QUEEN HOURS: Not sure how promoting drag queen hours helps America’s largest seniors group, but AARP has been an integral part of the Left’s campaign to normalize sexualized cross-dressing displays, according to a report from AMAC.  That’s AMAC as in the Association of Mature American Citizens.