Displaying posts published in

February 2021

Why is Neera Tanden so important that Democrats would smear Joe Manchin to save her doomed nomination?

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/why-is-neera-tanden-so-important-that-democrats-would-smear-joe-manchin-to-save-her-doomed-nomination

“Tanden is a violent and vitriolic hack without the chops for running the entire federal budget. But sure, sexism and racism … or something.”

It’s a bold move to smear your own party’s most important senator as a racist and sexist. But evidently, the Biden administration believes that ramming through a professional Twitter troll as the director of the Office of Management and Budget is worth it. 

Nine of President Biden’s nominees earned bipartisan support and, with the exception of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, majority support even among Republicans. But now, the president of the liberal Center for American Progress is set to be voted down by every Republican in the Senate plus West Virginia Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin. Manchin, the crucial swing vote of the 50-50 Senate, has announced his opposition to Tanden’s confirmation. 

The case against Tanden is simple enough: She lacks both the resume qualifying her for such a vital position and the civil temperament to work across the aisle. 

Revolutionary Discovery That Two Plus Two Equals White Supremacy By Stephen Green

https://pjmedia.com/vodkapundit/2021/02/25/insanity-wrap-154-revolutionary-discovery-that-two-plus-two-equals-white-supremacy-n1428026

Insanity Wrap needs to know: What do you call it when you find out that minority kids are being taught that wrong answers are just fine in math class?

Answer: A very public education.

Two Plus Two Equals White Supremacy

Every problem had exactly one correct answer and an infinite number of incorrect answers. It doesn’t take a math whiz to understand that ∞:1 is not good odds.

Everybody (Almost) Has a Last Stand By David P. Goldman

https://pjmedia.com/spengler/2021/02/25/everybody-almost-has-a-last-stand-n1428214

There’s an old joke about the housewife who calls her husband on his cell phone during the evening commute. “Be careful, Dear,” she says. “The news says there’s a wrong-way driver on the Beltway.” “A wrong-way driver?” the husband shouts. “There are thousands of them!”

This came to mind while enjoying Michael Walsh’s superb book Last Stands: Why Soldiers Fight When All Is Lost. Freedom-loving men will fight to the death for all they hold sacred, and Michael’s book is adorned by a moving memoir of his father, a Marine officer during the terrible American retreat from the Chosin Reservoir. The book is enormously popular, and deservedly so.

But I should like to add a footnote to the story: Everybody (almost) eventually fights to the death. As Franz Rosenzweig noted in The Star of Redemption, every tribe sends its young men out to fight for its survival until one day they are defeated and the tribe is extinguished. That’s why nearly 150,000 languages have been spoken on Planet Earth since the dawn of man, and only a couple of thousand are left. Extinction is the norm.

Small neolithic peoples who encounter modernity are dying today. The BBC reported earlier this week:

The last male member of the Juma indigenous group in the Brazilian Amazon has died after falling ill with Covid-19.

Aruká’s death last week is the latest blow to the group whose numbers were reduced from around 15,000 in the early 20th Century to only six people in the 1990s.

Aruká was the last surviving male of the group, but as BBC News Brazil’s Juliana Gragnani reports, his grandchildren have taken an unusual step to ensure his legacy is preserved.

Aruká’s exact age is not known but he was estimated to be between 86 and 90 years old. During his life, Aruká witnessed the decline of the thousands-strong Juma community which once fished, hunted and planted lands in the southern region of Amazonas state.

Following a series of massacres carried out by rubber tappers and the spread of deadly diseases, the Juma’s numbers dwindled until Aruká’s family was the only one left.

Rand Paul TORCHES Biden’s Trans HHS Nominee for Supporting the Chemical Castration of Kids By Megan Fox,

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/megan-fox/2021/02/25/rand-paul-roasts-rachel-levine-for-supporting-the-chemical-castration-of-kids-n1428413

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) delivered a harsh rebuke of the philosophy that minor children should be allowed to use off-label hormone blockers to delay puberty for the purpose of “transitioning” due to gender dysphoria. He exposed the moral insanity of this idea during assistant health secretary nominee Rachel Levine’s Senate confirmation hearing on Thursday. Levine is transgender and advocates for the chemical altering of children with gender dysphoria.

Rand Paul, like many medical professionals, is concerned about the unknown long-term effects of puberty blockers, an off-label treatment that has not been sufficiently studied. There are many young people who have used hormones and puberty blockers and are now having difficulty de-transitioning. Paul asked Levine a question the doctor refused to answer.

Should minors be making these momentous decisions? For most of the history of medicine, we wouldn’t let you have a cut sewn up in the ER but you’re willing to let a minor take things to prevent their puberty and you think they’ll get that back?

Paul went on to destroy the Left’s double standard, noting that many leftists screamed like hyenas that off-label use of medication was the end of the world when it came to hydroxychloroquine use for COVID-19.

I find it ironic that the Left that went nuts over hydroxychloroquine being used possibly for COVID are not alarmed that these hormones are being used off-label. There’re no long-term studies. We don’t know what happens to them. We do know there are dozens and dozens of people who have been through this who regret that this happened. And a permanent change happened to them. If you’ve ever been around children, 14-year-olds can’t make this decision…we should be outraged that someone is talking to a three-year-old about changing their sex.

Stanford Lefties Must Swallow Their Hoover Hate — for Now By Jack Fowler

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/02/stanford-lefties-must-swallow-their-hoover-hate-for-now/

The woke faculty have it in for these fellows. But it’s not going so well for them.

I t gnaws away at Stanford University’s woke faculty: Harbored in their midst is that nominally conservative outfit, the Hoover Institution, which more than a few professors hold as an infestation of the liberal citadel. It is, after all, named after a Republican president — never mind being home to the likes of Thomas Sowell and Victor Davis Hanson and H. R. McMaster (and yes, plenty of establishment GOP types, and even a lefty or two). And there’s this: The campus is visually dominated by the striking eleven-story Hoover Tower, which scrapes the Palo Alto sky like some right-hand middle finger. Housing vast and important archives (much of the contents are about the evils of Marxist-Leninism), the tower is crowned by a 48-bell carillon that no doubt triggers faculty and students with the occasional auditory reminder of Hoover’s confounding and unwelcome presence.

Who will rid us of this troublesome think tank and its more Trumpy fellows?

There is no paucity of willing hitmen amongst Stanford’s more fevered and Hoover-obsessed faculty, who of late have mounted a campaign to diminish Hoover’s standing and to bully the institution’s more important and controversial (meaning, from their perspective, notorious) fellows. Of particular focus are the aforementioned Professor Hanson, known well in NR’s precincts and the author of The Case for Trump (word is he also has a weekly podcast); Scott Atlas, a prominent member of former President Trump’s COVID task force (his nondoctrinaire, wrong-partisan stands prompted a hundred-plus of his former colleagues to publish an open letter last September that berated him as a threat to public health); and historian Niall Ferguson, who was accused (projection warning) of suppressing the free-speech rights of students in 2018.

Under the cover of COVID, not wanting to let this crisis go to waste, the plotters plotted. Led by the uber-leftist comparative-lit professor and Twitter junkie, David Palumbo-Liu, over 100 Stanford faculty corralled in late September 2020 to sign an open letter (does anyone at Stanford write closed letters?) attacking the Hoover-Stanford relationship and insisting the Faculty Senate take very public steps:

A closely connected concern which needs to be addressed by the Senate is our relation to an Institute that has a narrow focus and a pre-determined point of view which it is committed to retain and reinforce in all its research. This is not conjecture, it is manifested in the Hoover’s mission statement. . . . This commitment to producing knowledge that constantly validates a specific belief makes the Hoover distinct and is troubling when we find Stanford linked to this kind of guided research. It is antithetical to the open scientific inquiry that drives all research universities.

Once-secret FBI informant reports reveal wider-ranging operation to spy on Trump campaign Goal was to find “anyone” inside GOP campaign tied to Russia who could get dirt “damaging” to Clinton, newly declassified memos reveal. John Solomon

https://justthenews.com/accountability/russia-and-ukraine-scandals/once-secret-fbi-informant-reports-reveal-wide-ranging

Once-secret reports show the FBI effort to spy on the Trump campaign was far wider than previously disclosed, as agents directed an undercover informant to make secret recordings, pressed for intelligence on numerous GOP figures, and sought to find “anyone in the Trump campaign” with ties to Russia who could acquire dirt “damaging to Hillary Clinton.”

The now-declassified operational handling reports for FBI confidential human source Stefan Halper — codenamed “Mitch” — provide an unprecedented window both into the tactics used by the bureau to probe the Trump campaign and the wide dragnet that was cast to target numerous high-level officials inside the GOP campaign just weeks before Americans chose their next president in the November 2016 election.

 Among the revelations, the memos make clear that:

Almost immediately after the FBI opened a Russia collusion probe on July 31, 2016 narrowly focused on the foreign lobbying of a single Trump campaign aide named George Papadopoulos, agents pressed Halper for information on more than a half dozen other figures, including future Attorney General Jeff Sessions, foreign policy adviser Sam Clovis, campaign chairman Paul Manafort, economic adviser Peter Navarro, future National Security Adviser Michael Flynn and campaign adviser Carter Page.
Halper provided significant exculpatory evidence to the FBI — including transcripts of conversations he recorded of targeted Trump advisers providing statements of innocence — that was never disclosed to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that approved a year of surveillance targeting the Trump campaign, and specifically Page.
While current FBI Director Chris Wray has insisted the bureau did not engage in spying on the Trump campaign, Halper’s taskings include many of the tradecraft tactics of espionage, including the creation of a fake cover story (he wanted a job at the Trump campaign), secret recordings, providing background on targets, suggested questions to ask and even contact information for potential targets.

But the memos’ most explosive revelations are the sheer breadth of the FBI’s insufficiently predicated dragnet targeting the Trump campaign, and the agents’ clearly stated purpose of thwarting any Trump campaign effort to get dirt from Russia that could hurt his Democratic rival.

McConnell slams House Dems’ election reform bill as ‘wrong response’ to lack of faith in elections All House Democrats support H.R. 1, the For the People Act

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/mcconnell-house-democrats-election-bill-senate-speech

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell on Thursday slammed House Democrats’ sweeping election reform bill as “exactly the wrong response” to what he called the “distressing lack of faith in our elections,” saying Democrats want to use their “temporary power” to “try to ensure they’ll never have to relinquish it.”

All House Democrats on Monday signed onto the bill — H.R. 1, the For the People Act of 2021 —  which they claim will expand voting rights and “clean up corruption” in politics.

From the Senate floor Thursday, McConnell, R-Ky., hit Democrats for trying to “recycle failed legislation” that would have Washington Democrats “grab unprecedented power over how America conducts its elections and how American citizens can engage in political speech.”

“For several years now, we’ve seen the political left grow less interested in having normal policy debates within our governing institutions, and more interested in attacking the institutions themselves to tilt the playing field in their side’s favor,” McConnell said. “When their side loses a presidential election, it’s not Democrats’ fault, but the Electoral College’s. When they don’t like a Supreme Court decision, it’s time to threaten the Justices or pack the Court. When long-standing Senate rules threaten to frustrate far-left proposals, it’s the Senate rules they want to change.”

McConnell added that “no – they want to try to use their slim majorities to unilaterally rewrite and nationalize election law itself,” he said, adding that Democrats want “to use the temporary power the voters have granted them to try to ensure they’ll never have to relinquish it.”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi previously pushed the bill in the last Congress.

A Monopoly On Stupid Derek Hunter

https://townhall.com/columnists/derekhunter/2021/02/25/a-monopoly-on-stupid-n2585256

If you thought 2020 was the dumbest year on record (and I’m as guilty of that as anyone), 2021 just demanded we hold its beer…

Less than two months in and the level of stupid coming from the left has been ramped up to 11. If there were an Olympic event for insanity, Democrats would hold a tighter grip on all three spots on the podium than they hold on power over the cities their policies have singlehandedly destroyed. It’s an amazing feat of manipulation, if nothing else.

As far as bringing people together goes, that was never the Democrats’ objective. Their goal was to get just enough support to seize power. Holding power, no matter how tenuously, is always the left’s objective. Exercising it is almost an afterthought, though they do it with vigor.

To get power, leftists have employed an endless string of demonization and lies. Unbound by reality and unhindered by being held accountable, the Democratic Party has set out to make as many people as possible into victims. Of what doesn’t matter, the important thing was to make them feel oppressed, somehow, by someone.

Why this works on so many is a combination of many things. First, some people desire to be absolved of responsibility for their failures. A simple fact of life is that everyone’s life is the culmination of consequences of their decisions. If you’ve made good decisions, studied and worked hard, the odds of you having a good life are very high. Conversely, if you spent more time skipping school, getting high and stealing beers from someone’s garage than studying or working hard, you probably won’t find yourself being a titan of industry anytime soon. Most people function somewhere in between, quite happily.

The same goes for morally good choices. There’s a fine line between living a good life and living a moral one. Democrats want to change what both of those mean, and have deployed every tool at their disposal to build a wall between them.

That can only be done through distraction. If people think, the plan falls apart. If people are paying attention to stupid “outrages of the moment,” they can begin to live from one outrage to another.

PALESTINIAN LIES, AMERICAN DELUSIONS By RUTHIE BLUM

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/palestinian-lies-american-delusions-on-solving-the-conflict-opinion-660258

The capacity of peace-process addicts to delude themselves about the Palestinian war against Israel is as bottomless as it is peculiar. It is they, after all, whose repeated attempts at solving the conflict have failed.

The only real shift in perception and action on this issue came from former president Donald Trump. 

As a businessman with no political or diplomatic background, he refused to follow in the footsteps of his predecessors in many areas, key among them the Middle East.

His approach, based on rewarding America’s allies and rejecting the appeasement of enemies, was working. His replacement in November by US President Joe Biden signaled a backslide to the tired, old, false paradigms relating to the Middle East.

Palestinian Authority leaders heaved a sigh of relief. For them, dealing with Democrats in the White House, State Department and Capitol Hill is as second nature as manipulating the European Union and United Nations.

Their satisfaction at the outcome of the US presidential election only increased with Biden’s appointment of Hady Amr – a foreign-policy wonk with a history of hostility to Israel and sympathy for Hamas – as deputy assistant secretary of state for Israeli and Palestinian affairs. Due to his role in the new administration in Washington, Amr was handed an official letter sent to the White House last Saturday by the PA.

Math: The Latest Battleground in the War Against Truth By Janet Levy

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/02/math_the_latest_battleground_in_the_war_against_truth.html

In George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, set in the superstate of Oceania, the government propagates the absurd equation 2 + 2 = 5. Through steady indoctrination, and under the ever-watchful Thought Police, the citizens accept it as an unquestionable truth. The equation symbolizes the extinction of free thought in repressive totalitarian societies: facts, truths and objective reality are subordinated to political will and twisted to serve the authoritarian goals of the Party and its leader, Big Brother.

Something similar is happening in many American schools. An eerie Orwellian shadow is being cast over math instruction. The focus is insidiously shifting from arithmetic, geometry, and algebra to critical race theory, ethnic studies, and intersectionality. Ridiculous as it may sound, an objective field of knowledge is being thrust into the realm of social experimentation. Students are being taught not how to think but what to think. Instead of developing critical thinking skills, today’s math classes stipulate that students hold particular views about the world and instruct them on how they must extinguish what is posited as “wrongthink.”

Across America, math teaching practices that were considered essential are suddenly being condemned as racist, requiring students to display the steps in solving a problem is now deemed white supremacist; teachers’ corrections, and even the concept of a correct answer, are considered suspect or undesirable; polite interaction, raising hands before commenting or asking questions, and maintaining order in the classroom are viewed as reinforcing paternalism and condemned as “power hoarding.”

This idiocy has swept, among others, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the fruit of the worst practices of monopolistic capitalism but now quick to align itself with left-liberal, pseudo-egalitarian causes. The foundation is providing more than $140 million to ‘A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction,’ an organization of 25 educational institutions that contend that math is synonymous with white supremacy and upholds “capitalist, imperialistic and racist” views. Pathway offers a five-part toolkit and videoconferences to make educators “reflect on their own biases” and commit to advance math “equity” by understanding that students of color use math differently than do white students.