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Friday, October 29, 2021

Fifteen years ago (or so), I dubbed Lindsey Graham “the Arlen Specter of the South.” Graham wasn’t then, and isn’t now, as bad as Specter in terms of giving aid and comfort to the left. But Graham represents South Carolina, one of the most conservative states in the Union. Therefore, he deserves to be graded on a curve.

So graded, Graham’s conduct, especially when it comes to judicial nominees, resembled Specter’s. Hence, the moniker.

Graham was at it again this week. Ed Whelan reports:

Senator Dianne Feinstein was absent from the Senate yesterday, so Senate Republicans had the votes to defeat the cloture motion on controversial Second Circuit nominee Myrna Perez, director of the left-wing Brennan Center for Justice. Had Republicans stuck together, they would have defeated the motion by a vote of 50 to 49.
Instead, Senators Lindsey Graham and Lisa Murkowski voted for cloture, giving Perez a 51-48 margin and paving the way for her confirmation.

Perez is a hardcore leftist. The Brennan Center she directs is a Soros-funded operation devoted, in Perez’s words, to championing a “living Constitution” capable of “meet[ing] whatever moment is with us.” In other words, capable of being stretched to accommodate the left-wing policy preference du jour.

Perez has focused in particular on undermining election integrity. According to Carrie Severino:

A major focus of the organization has been advocating for less freedom of speech in connection with elections while simultaneously attacking the most basic measures to ensure the integrity of elections. That includes any and all voter-ID measures, as well as efforts to update voter rolls. As director of the center’s Voting Rights and Election Program, Pérez has been at the forefront of the Brennan Center’s efforts in this regard.
She has not hesitated to wage her attacks in demagogic terms. She attributed what she calls “major backlashes against the expansion of the rights to vote” following President Obama’s election to “people having anxiety over the browning of America” and called recent voting regulations including voter ID and limitations on early voting “the biggest rollback of the right to vote since the Jim Crow era.”
She has taken the losing side of the Supreme Court’s voting-rights decisions in Shelby County v. Holder (2013) and the just-decided Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee. In the latter case, which involved a challenge to Arizona’s out-of-precinct policy and ban on ballot harvesting, she argued for an interpretation of Section Two of the Voting Rights Act that would have wreaked havoc on the nation’s election laws, but she argued that the contrary interpretation “would permit states to return to . . . Jim Crow-era restrictions.” She also invoked the goal of “alleviating Jim Crow efforts, past and present,” in her argument for restoring voting rights to ex-felons.
She seems comfortable hurling the ugly specter of Jim Crow at anyone with a different view of election laws — a category broad enough to include six justices of the Supreme Court.

None of this would have bothered Arlen Specter and none of it bothers Lindsey Graham.

Indeed, almost nothing about Joe Biden’s attempt to radicalize the federal bench seems to bother Graham. Whelan says, “I’m reliably informed that Graham has not voted against cloture or against final confirmation of a single Biden judicial nominee.”

Graham hasn’t always been this deferential to judicial nominees. He helped sink the nomination of Jim Haynes, George Bush’s nominee to the Fourth Circuit, for no good reason. But when the opportunity to sink the nomination of George Soros’ hard-left instrument, Graham demurred.

Arlen Specter would have been proud.

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/10/lindsey-graham-the-arlen-specter-of-the-south-strikes-again.php

Thursday, October 28, 2021

BIDEN’S SECRET FLIGHTS

BIDEN’S SECRET FLIGHTS

BY SCOTT JOHNSON IN BIDEN ADMINISTRATION, ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION, MEDIA
Miranda Devine and a raft of reporters have the New York Post cover story Biden secretly flying underage migrants into NY in dead of night.” The story opens:

Planeloads of underage migrants are being flown secretly into suburban New York in an effort by President Biden’s administration to quietly resettle them across the region, The Post has learned.
The charter flights originate in Texas, where the ongoing border crisis has overwhelmed local immigration officials, and have been underway since at least August, according to sources familiar with the matter.
Last week, The Post saw two planes land at the Westchester County Airport, where most of the passengers who got off appeared to be children and teens, with a small portion appearing to be men in their 20s.
Westchester County cops stood by as the passengers — whose flights arrived at 10:49 p.m. Wednesday and 9:52 p.m. Friday — got off and piled into buses.
Some of them were later seen meeting up with relatives or sponsors in New Jersey, or being dropped off at a residential facility on Long Island.

The Post has much more, including a note that secret flights are also landing in Florida. Looking for comments on the secrecy involved here, I see that a spokesman Governor DeSantis responded to the Post: “If the Biden Administration is so confident that their open-border policy is good for our country, why the secrecy? Why is the Biden Administration refusing to share even the most basic information about illegal alien resettlement in communities throughout our state and the entire country? Washington DC sets immigration policies that do not affect them, and states — that lack information about migrant resettlement and do not have the authority to change federal immigration policy — are expected to bear the brunt of Biden’s reckless open-borders agenda.”

At the bottom of the story the Post quotes a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services: “It is our legal responsibility to safely care for unaccompanied children until they can be swiftly unified with a parent or a vetted sponsor. Our Office of Refugee Resettlement facilitates travel for the children in its custody to their family or sponsors across the country. In recent weeks, unaccompanied children passed through the Westchester airport en route to their final destination to be unified with their parents or vetted sponsor.”

The HHS spokesman offers no explanation of the secrecy. The Post figures it out in the companion editorial.

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/10/bidens-secret-flights.php

Empty Shelves and Shortages Were Common In The Communist Bloc

Empty Shelves and Shortages Were Common In The Communist Bloc

BY JOHN SCHROEDER

A friend of mine came back from a visit to communist Poland in the 1980’s telling a story about soda water. Soda water was a treat sold by street vendors. Traditionally it came with a squirt of flavoring of some sort in it. However, during the communist era shortages grew so intense and pervasive that the street vendors took, rather tongue-in-cheek, to selling it “without lemon” or “without strawberry.” One day a customer, trying to join the fun and the lighthearted protest asked the street vendor if he could have his soda water “without cherry.” Not missing a beat, the vendor responded, “I’m sorry sir, but that is not available today.”

Haven’t thought about that joke in a couple of decades – that is until I walked into the grocery store here in California yesterday. I am just returned from my Tennessee home where some things are hard to get (had a furniture order that has been pending for five months pushed back another four) but generally store shelves were full. Not so here in the People’s Republic of California. While things are not quite as bad as during the early days of the pandemic, there were entire very naked sections of the store. I was reminded of my own visit to the Soviet Union where I witnessed people queued up for blocks because the store had socks available for the first time in a couple of years.

If you are paying attention you will note that there are all sorts of explanations for the shortages we are experiencing – unions, pandemic rules, truck rules, labor shortage…. They all seem to play a role. Let’s take one step back and try to look at a bigger picture.

We’ve all fiddled with a stress ball, you know, it looks like a rubber ball until you pick it up and squeeze a little, then it just seems to ooze out all sorts of cracks and crevices. Have you ever tried to apply pressure evenly around the ball to compress it but make it retain is spherical shape? Well, I’m just science geeky enough that I have and I am here to tell you, it’s impossible. Human hands do not have enough control points on the system to apply the pressure evenly. Not to mention the ball is filled with a malleable, but not compressible, material. Even if you could apply pressure evenly it will not compress because of the nature of the filling – it’ll explode first. The only way the ball will hold its shape is to cease to apply pressure.

Economies are like that. The more you try to control them, the more they deform. That’s why the communist bloc suffered from shortages all the time – it was the ultimate controlled economy and the more they tried to control it, the more out of shape it got and the worse the shortages became. They responded with more control, not less, which eventually made that economy explode and communism fell. The pandemic has been an exercise in economic control and now we are seeing the same problems that arose in the communist bloc. The smart play here is to back off of control, not try to control our way out of the crisis. Yesterday I analogized our efforts to control the pandemic to socialism. Here is more evidence that my analogy is sound.

We are in one heck of a mess economically, in the public health arena, in the education arena. We have applied pressure at all sorts of points trying to deal with an incredibly difficult problem and in so doing we have deformed these systems significantly. Here’s the thing. The longer they stay deformed, the more difficult it will be, and the longer it will take, for them to return to their natural shape. Any additional pressure applied in rules, regulations and policies will only add to the deformation. We simply have to let go – erase all the rules, regulations and policies that have been enacted since March 2020. The result will appear chaotic, but it will be very short lived and soon things will quickly return to normal.

The alternative is that a disease we have already conquered will still win the day because we have beaten ourselves. I for one do not wish to have to leave work and stand in line because word has hit the street that socks are in. I’ve seen it first hand – it is an awful way to live.

https://hughhewitt.com/empty-shelves-and-shortages-were-common-in-the-communist-bloc/

TO THE LEFT OF PUTIN [UPDATED]

TO THE LEFT OF PUTIN [UPDATED]

BY JOHN HINDERAKER IN LEFTISM, LIBERALS

It isn’t easy to make Vladimir Putin look good, but the Democrats are giving it their best shot. Somehow, they have managed to get to Putin’s left. The Telegraph reports:

Vladimir Putin said the anti-racism agenda in the West was dividing society as he compared cancel culture warriors in liberal democracies to the Bolsheviks of Russia’s 1917 Revolution.
“The incessant emphasis on race pushes people further apart whereas the true fighters for civic rights tried to eliminate those differences,” the Russian president said.
***
He said: “Fighting racism is a necessary and noble thing but the new cancel culture turns it into reverse descrimination, reverse racism.”

That’s true.

In a speech at the Valdai Discussion club in the Black Sea resort of Sochi, he lashed also lashed out transgender rights, accusing the West of being “monstrous” to children.
***
“People who dare to say men and women still exist as a biological fact are almost ostracised,” he said.
“Not to mention the simply monstrous fact that children today are taught from a young age that a boy can easily become a girl and the other way round.”

That’s true too. But this goes too far:

Mr Putin went as far as to compare Western activists pushing for a progressive agenda to Bolsheviks of Russia’s 1917 Revolution “who were also utterly intolerant of opinions different from their own.”

I think it is true that progressives are as intolerant as the Bolsheviks, but their methods have not advanced so far. Yet.

You know things have reached a nadir when Vladimir Putin sounds like a voice of sanity.

UPDATE: A friend adds some sensible comments:

I saw the Putin post, I had exactly the same reaction and am mentioning it in a post. He is absolutely right, but what is ironic and I am sure to him pretty funny, is that the Russian troll farms undoubtedly help fan this conflict in the US like they do everything else. They have been remarkably successful at degrading culture in the US.

All true. Putin is, in part, responsible for the insanity in our country that he now ridicules. Putin is no kind of genius, but is a hell of a lot smarter than the people who staff the Biden administration and the rest of our leftist apparatchik, down to the local school board and teachers’ union level.

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/10/to-the-left-of-putin.php

Wednesday, October 27, 2021

OBAMA WISHES CULTURE WAR ISSUES WOULD JUST GO AWAY

OBAMA WISHES CULTURE WAR ISSUES WOULD JUST GO AWAY

BY PAUL MIRENGOFF IN BARACK OBAMA, CULTURE WARS, DEMOCRATS, WOKENESS

Campaigning in Virginia for Terry McAuliffe this weekend, Barack Obama said this to supporters:

We don’t have time to be wasted on these phony trumped-up culture wars, this fake outrage, the right-wing media’s pedals to juice their ratings. And the fact that [Glenn Youngkin is] willing to go along with it instead of talking about serious problems that actually affect serious people? That’s a shame.
That’s not what this election’s about. That’s not what you need, Virginia. Instead of forcing our communities to cut back at a time when we’re just starting to recover, we should be doing more to support people who are educating our kids, and keeping our communities safe.

What does Obama mean when he says “we don’t have time to be wasted on these phony trumped-up culture wars”? Obviously, he’s saying he doesn’t take the culture war issues — boys using girls’ bathrooms, teachers inculcating Critical Race Theory, etc. — seriously. But when he talks about not wasting time on them, is he telling Democrats to ignore them, in other words not to respond to Republicans who raise them in the campaign?

That would be bad advice. Youngkin’s poll numbers have improved markedly as he has leveled “culture war” attacks on McAuliffe. The Dems can’t let these attacks go unanswered. They have to say something, and that “something” should be more than calling the issues phony, which is really just a way of saying nothing.

I don’t take Obama to be advising Virginia Dems to ignore culture war attacks. I think he’s just criticizing Youngkin for raising the issues Obama believes, or pretends to believe, are “phony.” I’m not sure what he accomplishes by this, but it’s probably what he’s doing.

There is, though, an important sense in which an admonition to Democrats not to waste time on culture war issues would be valuable. Democrats would be well served if they didn’t push the envelope so aggressively on such issues — if they didn’t insist, for example, on the “right” of boys to use girls’ bathrooms and didn’t advocate teaching children that they are inherently racist simply because of their skin color.

As I discussed in this post, polling shows these issues to be clear losers for Democrats. Furthermore, an admonition against wasting their time fighting these kinds of culture wars issues would be consistent with (1) traditional Democratic liberalism, (2) traditional socialism, and (3) Obama’s own presidency, to some degree.

Until recently, liberal Democrats didn’t waste time on cutting-edge cultural issues. They focused on lunch-bucket matters — issues related to wages, jobs, and entitlements.

They also talked about abortion — “a woman’s right to choose.” But that made sense because their position on it is about as popular as it is unpopular.

Otherwise, the Dems steered largely clear of controversial social issues. They generally followed Bill Clinton’s admonition to “focus like a lazer” on the economy.

Traditional socialists are, if anything, even less interested in novel social/culture issues. For them, as for Karl Marx, it’s all about the economy. This was the unrelenting focus of Bernie Sanders’ two presidential campaigns, for example.

Even Obama tried to steer of highly-charged culture war issues during his first term as president. His focus was almost entirely on expanding health insurance coverage and spending money to stimulate the economy. Even on immigration — a mixed economic-cultural issue — Obama did not take extreme positions during the first term.

That was then. Now, the Democrats are wholly committed to a woke agenda, and I don’t read Obama’s comment in Virginia this weekend as advocating that Dems reverse that course. It’s not going to happen, and Obama knows it.

I do wonder, though, whether a part of Obama — two parts actually, the old socialist and the pragmatist — regrets his party’s strong commitment to wokeism, and whether there is whiff of that regret in what he told Virginians at the rally this weekend.

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/10/obama-wishes-culture-war-issues-would-just-go-away.php

Dems’ vaccine mandates for police are bound to backfire

Dems’ vaccine mandates for police are bound to backfire

NYPD — The most determined resistance to vaccine mandates comes from police.Shutterstock

In the media narrative, those resisting the vaccine mandates are all Trump-supporting snake handlers from Appalachia, or something like that. But real life, as happens so often, doesn’t track the media narrative.

In fact, much of the resistance comes from people like airline pilots, health professionals and air-traffic controllers, none of whom can fit the stereotype of uneducated rubes.

But perhaps the most interesting and determined resistance to vaccine mandates comes from those who are usually tasked with enforcing government mandates: police. Across the country, officers are refusing the shot and daring their bosses to make them take it. There are several lessons in this, about class, about democracy and about the authorities’ competence.

First, class: As Bridget Phetasy writes: “These days, the men and women who worked through the whole pandemic are being shamed and patronized by the very people whose cushy existences they facilitated for a year and a half. The liberal elites who holed up in the Hamptons and didn’t have contact with the outside world for a year are ready to get back to their SoulCycle classes, even if it means firing a few people they once called ‘frontline heroes.’ . . . Apparently, it’s difficult to comprehend that the people who never stopped working while you were in your bubble, who bore the greatest risk throughout the whole pandemic, are making their own calculated decisions about getting a vaccine.”

And in many cases, their decision is to skip it. Perhaps they’ve already had COVID, as was the case with huge numbers of police and health-care workers before the vaccine was available, and consider the vaccine not worth taking on top of the robust natural immunity that COVID infection provides. Perhaps they’ve had bad experiences with other immunizations. Or perhaps they just don’t like being pushed around.

Regardless, they’re pushing back. In Chicago, Fraternal Order of Police president John Catanzara told his members not to fill out the vaccination statements demanded by the city. “I do not believe the city has the authority to mandate that to anybody — let alone that information about your medical history.”

New York Police Department officers in masks stand during a service at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York to honor 46 colleagues who have died due to COVID-19 related illness — New York City will require police officers, firefighters and other municipal workers to be vaccinated against COVID-19 or be placed on unpaid leave, Mayor Bill de Blasio said Wednesday, Oct. 20, 2021.

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot called this an “insurrection,” but if so, it’s one she’ll have trouble putting down. Chicago, already a hotbed of crime and murder, can’t afford to lose 50 percent or more of its police force, which is what’s expected to happen if she suspends all the officers who won’t share their vaccination status.

There are similar rumbles from other police departments around the country, leading Foreign Policy columnist Steven A. Cook to warn darkly that “unvaccinated police officers could become America’s own insurgents.” Citing extensive mandate resistance in Chicago, Seattle, Las Vegas and Washington, DC, Cook warns that plans to fire officers might backfire. When the United States dissolved the Iraqi Army in 2003, he notes, it left thousands of military-trained individuals without the ability to support themselves and their families, contributing to a dangerous wave of violence and insurgency.

I think Cook’s fears are greatly exaggerated. Most likely, the fired officers would simply become private security guards, protecting businesses from the crime wave that would result from a massive shrinkage in police forces. The result would be that private businesses and upscale communities would be protected, but poor and working-class neighborhoods would face even worse crime waves. That’s tragic, but hardly on a par with what happened in Iraq.

Chicago police officers patrol downtown as the city celebrates the Chicago Sky's WNBA title on October 19, 2021 in Chicago, Illinois — Chicago has started to place police officers on unpaid leave for refusing to comply with the city’s requirements that they report their COVID-19 vaccination status.

It’s also likely that these police would start to vote more Republican — or at least for more sensible Democrats than the likes of Lightfoot. That seems a poor outcome for the Democrats, too.

And whatever you think of vaccine mandates, there’s another lesson. Distributed power helps constrain big governments. (This is why communists always shut down or seize control of rival power centers, like churches and community groups.) The relative autonomy of police forces may reduce accountability for bad officers, but it also creates obstacles to efforts at sweeping control: If the police won’t go along, it won’t happen.

And finally, this reassuring note: Many people are convinced that Democrats want to create a police state, and some Democratic rhetoric has supported that worry. But one of the first things you do when creating a police state is get in good with the police. After spending the last several years crapping all over law enforcement, the Democrats aren’t making any progress there. Good.

https://nypost.com/2021/10/21/dems-vaccine-mandates-for-police-are-bound-to-backfire/

Democrats aim to make anyone who disagrees with them an enemy of the state

Democrats aim to make anyone who disagrees with them an enemy of the state

Rep. Jerry Nadler compared parents protesting at school board meetings to the rioters who stormed the Capitol building on Jan. 6.

Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-The Moon) made the Democratic position clear Thursday: If you’re not with us, you’re terrorists.

During his opening statement for the Attorney General Merrick Garland hearing, Nadler said there was no difference between the rioters who stormed the Capitol on January 6 and parents who are angry about what is being taught in schools.

“This growth in extremist ideology is echoed in an epidemic of violence and intimidation directed at our health care professionals, teachers, essential workers, school board members and election workers,” Nadler said.

Nadler, a partisan loon who spent the past four years stirring up every conspiracy theory against President Trump, claimed there was a “broader pattern” here, including “the growing threats of violence against public servants.”

Yes, it is terrible when a sitting senator is harassed and followed into a bathroom . . . Oh he wasn’t talking about Krysten Sinema? The incident President Biden said was just “part of the process”? Huh.

Rep. Jerry Nadler compared parents protesting at school board meetings to the rioters who stormed the Capitol building. — Rep. Jerry Nadler said there’s been a growing “extremist ideology” in the US.

We’re sure he was inspired by the climate change activists who stormed the Department of the Interior last Thursday, breaking down the front door and attempting to occupy the building. He was calling on AOC and others to denounce them. No?

How about the fact that the letter the National School Boards Association sent to Garland asking for the FBI for help, as reported by columnist Christopher Rufo, “cites only a single example of actual violence against a school official.” That the letter is in fact hyperventilating bunk, describing shouting as “violence” and people who disagree with school boards as “domestic terrorists.”

Turns out the White House knew about the letter before it was made public. Did the president order Garland to get the FBI involved?

It seems like the Biden administration is guilty of what they always accuse Republicans of: Politicizing the Department of Justice, and stifling free speech through intimidation.

Actually, we are sure Nadler is aware of all this. But he’s a dishonest, devious oaf who leverages lies into political gain. It’s the Democratic Party platform now. They see an opportunity to harness the outrage over January 6 as a brush to suppress all their opponents.

Nadler and other Democrat lawmakers seek to paint anyone who speaks out against them as an enemy.

Disturbingly, the Dems and their social media cronies repeatedly and casually abuse their power to enforce their ideology, rather than realize that perhaps the upswell of parental anger at teaching in schools is not the result of QAnon conspiracists but in fact is born of genuine concern and a sense of disempowerment over the future of their most precious charges.

Don’t like teachers telling all white kids that they are oppressors just because of the color of their skin? You’re an insurrectionist. Think maybe we need to start lifting COVID restrictions because you’re vaccinated? You’re a white supremacist. Oppose Build Back Better? You’re an obstructionist, a fascist.

Don’t vote for Democrats? You’re an enemy of the state.

https://nypost.com/2021/10/21/democrats-aim-to-make-anyone-who-disagrees-with-them-an-enemy-of-the-state/