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April 2022

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Feckless in Seattle In the Pacific Northwest hub, Amazon is moving employees out, city police are demoralized, and political leadership is in short supply. Thomas Hogan

By on April 5th, 2022

https://www.city-journal.org/feckless-in-seattle

Citing persistent violence, including a homicide directly in front of its main building, Amazon recently announced that it was temporarily relocating its Seattle staff to a new location. The quirky but beautiful Pacific Northwest city—boasting houseboats, good coffee, and great jazz—is following a familiar formula for urban decline.

The first step in that process is to elect a mayor who cares less about the nuts and bolts of governing a city than about an ideological agenda. The last Seattle mayor who paid attention to details and had a vision for improving everyday life was Paul Schell, who served from 1998 to 2002. Under Schell’s no-nonsense leadership, Seattle built a new City Hall and several libraries, parks, and community centers, while rebuilding its opera house and symphony hall.

Then the city drifted into progressive fantasy. Greg Nickels, mayor from 2002 to 2009, decided that he should lead the charge in environmental activism but couldn’t manage the city’s own environment—a 2008 snowstorm hurt his reelection bid, while homeless tent cities (derisively named “Nickelsvilles”) cropped up downtown. Self-proclaimed progressive outsider Mike McGinn, who served as mayor from 2010 to 2013, demanded higher taxes and marijuana legalization while making clear, amid violent riots, that Seattle had no place for police officers who did not share his views on social justice. Ed Murray, Seattle’s first openly gay mayor, began his term in 2014, but resigned in disgrace in 2017 following multiple allegations of child sex abuse. In 2017, the city elected Jenny Durkan, who distinguished herself mainly by criticizing Donald Trump and allowing the formation of the lawless Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ) in downtown Seattle in June 2020. (Asked how long the occupation could last, Durkan said: “I don’t know. We could have another Summer of Love!”) Following a series of political blunders and recall efforts, Durkan and Seattle decided that one term was enough. Residents can only hope that newly elected mayor Bruce Harrell, who bluntly stated that he “inherited a mess,” will break the streak of ineffective leadership.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Here’s Some Of The Garbage Democrats Funded As ‘Covid Relief’ By: Christopher Jacobs

By on April 5th, 2022

https://thefederalist.com/2022/04/04/heres-some-of-the-garbage-democrats-funded-as-covid-relief/

Now, his administration continues to deliver on his 2009 promise. As the nation’s debt has passed $30 trillion and inflation continues to skyrocket, federal funds are being used to fund…four-star hotels and bailouts for deadbeat dads.

An Associated Press investigation discovered that the $1.9 trillion “Covid relief” package Democrats rammed through Congress last March has resulted in all manner of pork-barrel and wasteful spending programs—most of which have very little to do with the coronavirus, and all of which should outrage taxpayers forced to fund this nonsense.

Your Tax Dollars at Work

The spending spree Democrats passed in March 2021 included more than $500 billion in bailouts to state and local governments—on top of more than $400 billion in funds distributed to states in prior spending packages during 2020. These additional bailout funds, many of which have yet to get disbursed, came even though state and local government coffers were already flush by last spring, as lockdowns ended and the stock market boomed.

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MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

Woke Medicine’s Got a Tricky Operation Coming Up: Grafting ‘Systemic Racism’ Onto Hard Science By John Murawski

By on April 5th, 2022

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2022/04/05/woke_medicines_got_a_tricky_operation_coming_up_grafting_systemic_racism_onto_hard_science_824726.html

Just a few years ago, concepts such as “white supremacy,” “systemic racism,” and “structural intersectionality” were not the standard fare of prestigious medical journals. These are now the guiding ideas in a February special issue of “Health Affairs” that focuses on medicine and race.

Featuring nearly two dozen articles with titles such as “Racism Runs Through It” and “Sick and Tired of Being Excluded,” as well as a poem called “Identity,” the Washington, D.C.-based, peer-reviewed journal analyzes racial health disparities not through biology, behavior, or culture, but through the lens of  “whiteness,” along with concepts such as power, systems of oppression, state-sanctioned violence, and critical race praxis – a sampling of terms that come up in the February issue.

Health Affairs, dubbed by a Washington Post columnist as “the bible of health policy,” represents something much more ambitious than woke virtue signaling. Its February issue reflects the effort of newly empowered “anti-racist” scholars to transform concepts that are still considered speculative and controversial – and some say unprovable – into scientific fact. This growing effort to document, measure, and quantify racism is being advanced by other high-profile publications, including The New England Journal of Medicine, The Journal of the American Medical Association, and Scientific American, which last year ran articles entitled “Modern Mathematics Confronts Its White, Patriarchal Past” and “Denial of Evolution Is a Form of White Supremacy.”

But this scientific aspiration faces major challenges. Science demands verification, testability, and replicability, whereas race is a social construct that can be difficult to separate from factors like class or culture, and explaining the data often remains dependent on academic theories about systemic racism. The articles in Health Affairs indicate that elevating the concept of systemic racism from moral certitude to scientific fact will require developing new tools and methods – and even more theories – in the face of skepticism and resistance from dissenters who view this direction in research as unscientific and ideological.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

New Variant of the “CRT-virus”: “Social-Emotional Learning” Shane Harris

By on April 5th, 2022

https://amac.us/new-variant-of-the-crt-virus-social-emotional-learning/

Amid the national backlash over Critical Race Theory, gender theory, and other radical political and social doctrines being peddled in K-12 classrooms, parents are sounding the alarm over a new “variant” of left-wing instructional dogma: “social-emotional learning,” or SEL. While the term sounds innocuous enough, mounting evidence suggests that SEL curriculum is often simply a rebranding of the same dangerous and divisive ideologies that have dominated education headlines in recent months.

If you ask proponents of the concept, they’ll tell you that SEL is all about helping students grow into well-rounded adults who can manage their emotions and interpersonal relationships. Casel, one of the leading organizations that sells SEL programming to schools, defines it as “the process through which all young people and adults acquire and apply the knowledge, skills, and attitudes to develop healthy identities, manage emotions and achieve personal and collective goals, feel and show empathy for others, establish and maintain supportive relationships, and make responsible and caring decisions.”

Much of the terminology that advocates of the doctrine use to promote SEL is drawn from the mental health field. The assertion is that when students are confident in themselves and their identities, they perform better in the classroom. As the Washington Post explained in a recent feature piece on SEL, “social-emotional learning seeks to treat children as human beings with feelings, life goals and even traumas, not just students learning to write essays and solve math problems.”

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Will the U.S. Lead or Continue to ‘Lose Ground’? by Pete Hoekstra

By on April 5th, 2022

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18398/us-lead-lose-ground

Today, Russia in Ukraine is the focus, but the aspirations of China and Iran must not be ignored.

The US must — in the best interests of the United States — immediately deliver the weapons Ukraine needs to forestall future predators such as China, Iran and North Korea. What happens in Ukraine does not stay in Ukraine.

The longer the US shilly-shallies, the longer urgently needed weapons fail to reach Ukraine, the more it invites other predators.

Ukraine must have — now – not only the weapons it needs to combat Russia’s carnage, weapons to “close the skies,” …such as S-300s and S-400s and Migs that the Ukrainians could pull over the border; it must also have heavy weapons — planes, tanks and long-range anti-ship munitions — that Zelenskyy is requesting to repel Russia’s assault to sever Ukraine from the Black Sea, and landlocking the country to suffocate all means of commerce.

One wonders, as Kasparov suggests, if the Biden administration secretly wants Putin, “the devil you know,” to win.

“Everything I hear from other NATO members is that the U.S. has become the obstacle, and an explanation is required. Allowing Mr. Putin to keep an inch of Ukrainian soil after bombing civilians should be unimaginable. Conceding large areas of eastern Ukraine to the invader in exchange for a cease-fire would only give Mr. Putin time to consolidate and rearm for next time—and there will always be a next time.” – Garry Kasparov, Wall Street Journal, April 4, 2022

Kazakhstan, too, had an inspirational leader, Serikzhan Bilash, willing to fight for freedom. Many in the media and the Biden administration have completely ignored him and the struggle of the people of Kazakstan.

Another rising voice of freedom is that of Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, the leader of the opposition in Belarus, who is fighting to keep her country on the side of freedom. She, along with Zelenskyy, and Bilash represent the dreams and aspirations of thousands, likely millions, of people within their homelands. They are risking everything for the ideals that America and the West claim to hold dear.

[S]upporting those leaders who are out front should be easy. Why is America not supporting them further? Why are Russia’s generals and military leaders not being threatened? Why are America’s attempts at sanctioning Russian energy and all of Russia’s oligarchs, their families and their businesses so incomplete and half-hearted?

There is no diplomatic way out of this war.

The U.S. not only needs to recognize the power of these defiant leaders, but do more—much, much more — to help them. That is what is in the strategic interests of the United States.

The world is seeing Vladimir Putin’s clear plan to reestablish the Russian Empire. It also is hearing rumblings from Asia about restoration of a Chinese dynasty, and in the Middle East, a return to when Persia — now an extremely different Iran — dominated the region.

For any of these empires to expand, they need to take control of other states or groups of people. Those states can either be overrun and annexed, or they can be controlled and remain smaller, more manageable political units. Today, Russia in Ukraine is the focus, but the aspirations of China and Iran must not be ignored.

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MY SAY: Comments turned off

MY SAY: THE AMERICAN LEFT AND ORBAN’S VICTORY

By on April 5th, 2022

Hungarians have voted in an election that is, by every account, untainted but the American Left has its knickers in a knot over Orban’s “authoritarian” policies.   Hungary’s borders are protected. Parental rights are upheld. Anti-Semitic and xenophobic parties have lost. I take up no cudgels for Orban or his policies, but on the foregoing issues, our “progressives” live in glass houses..rsk

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Hungary is illiberal within the normal illiberal standards of modern Europe.By David Harsanyi

By on April 5th, 2022

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/04/hungary-is-isnt-the-best-worst-place-on-earth/

Hungary held an election yesterday — which probably came as a surprise to a number Americans who’ve been convinced that the small Central European nation functions as a totalitarian state. The bugbear of the American Left, and false savior of nationalist conservatives, Viktor Orbán, won his fourth consecutive term. Fidesz, his party, won two-thirds of Parliament against a cluster of center-Left, socialist, environmentalist, and hard-right-wing nationalist parties (Jobbik has only recently moderated from its xenophobic and antisemitic stances, allegedly).

Trying to decipher European parliamentary elections through the prism of American politics is a waste of time. Orbán ran on a traditionalist, socially conservative platform. A referendum on a law limiting the teaching of gay and transgender issues in schools passed; the EU opposes such limits. He leaned into anti-war rhetoric as well as anti-Brussels sentiment, though Fidesz has no plans to leave the EU. It recently instituted a significant minimum-wage increase, and its economic positions have as much in common with statist progressivism as mainstream conservatism.

The truth is, Hungary is illiberal within the normal illiberal standards of modern Europe. And that’s bad enough. Hungary is singled out for ridicule mainly because it declines to share the cultural values of the European Union or the progressive Left, especially pertaining to social policies and to the flow of Middle Eastern migrants into the European Union, which Fidesz aims to block. These positions, in the parlance of modern debate, are “anti-democratic.”

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

JULIE KELLY: A.G. MERRICK GARLAND FEELS THE HEAT

By on April 5th, 2022

https://amgreatness.com/2022/04/04/garland-feels-the-heat/

If Hunter Biden is in handcuffs before Donald Trump, the attorney general, who will turn 70 later this year, will wish he had opted for retirement.

Attorney General Merrick Garland’s swan song, we can presume, isn’t exactly turning out how he had hoped.

Appointed attorney general in 2021 as some sort of retaliation against Republicans for refusing to seat him on the Supreme Court in 2016, Garland, though largely a figurehead, is getting heat from members of both political parties—including the man who nominated him to serve as the nation’s top lawyer.

According to the New York Times, Joe Biden is displeased that Garland hasn’t yet charged the former president for crimes related to the Capitol protest on January 6, 2021. “[While] the president has never communicated his frustrations directly to Mr. Garland, he has said privately that he wanted Mr. Garland to act less like a ponderous judge and more like a prosecutor who is willing to take decisive action over the events of Jan. 6.,” the Times reported over the weekend. 

Although the Times attempted to portray Biden as hands-off when it comes to the business of his Justice Department, that is simply untrue. By repeatedly describing January 6 as an act of terror and comparing the protest, which resulted only in the deaths of Trump supporters, to 9/11 and other atrocities, Biden has signaled how he expects the Justice Department to proceed. His desire to see everyone from Indiana grandmothers to Donald Trump and his family behind bars hasn’t exactly been a secret.

As the chaos was still unfolding on the afternoon of January 6, Biden addressed the nation, blaming Trump for inciting “an insurrection” that “borders on sedition” while promising his administration would restore “the rule of law.”

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EDUCATION, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Left Attacks Florida’s New Parental Rights in Education Law Opponents spread misinformation about a common-sense law. Joseph Klein

By on April 5th, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/04/left-attacks-floridas-new-parental-rights-joseph-klein/

Governor Ron DeSantis last week signed a common-sense law that protects school children from having to undergo sexualized classroom instruction at an impressionable age. The law also protects parents’ rights in deciding how their children are raised and educated. But the progressive Left believes that it is imperative to brainwash children early in LGBTQI+ dogma at school even if it means running roughshod over parental prerogatives.

“They support injecting woke gender ideology into second-grade classrooms,” Governor DeSantis said. “They support enabling schools to ‘transition’ students to a ‘different gender’ without the knowledge of the parent.”

The Parental Rights in Education law states: “Classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur in kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.”

The law also requires, among other protections for parents, “school districts to adopt procedures for notifying parents if there is a change in services from the school regarding a child’s mental, emotional or physical health or well-being.”

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Biden’s Budget Lies Claiming “fiscal responsibility” while racking up astronomical debt.Terrence P. Jeffrey

By on April 5th, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/04/bidens-budget-lies-terrence-p-jeffrey/

“Show me your budget, and I’ll tell you what you value.”

When releasing his fiscal 2023 budget proposal on Monday, President Joe Biden said this was something his father had told him.

He then made a claim about a “value” his budget proposal purportedly advances.

“The first value is fiscal responsibility,” Biden said.

That is a lie.

In his speech, Biden elaborated on this lie.

“The previous administration, as you all know, ran up record budget deficits. In fact, the deficit went up every year under my predecessor,” he said.

“My administration is turning that around,” Biden continued.

“Last year,” he said, “we cut the deficit by more than $350 billion. This year, we’re on track to cut the deficit by more than $1.3 trillion. $1.3 trillion. That would be the largest one-year reduction in the deficit in U.S. history.”

But what do the Treasury’s official numbers actually tell us about the recent history of federal spending and deficits?

In the first three years of the Trump administration, the deficit grew — but never exceeded $1 trillion. In fiscal 2017, it was $665,826,000,000. In fiscal 2018, it was $778,996,000,000. In fiscal 2019, it was $984,388,000,000.

To be sure, these were very high deficits. But they were less than what Biden has planned for post-COVID America.

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