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50 STATES AND DC, CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT

Our Use Of Nuclear Weapons 76 Years Ago Was A Moral And Strategic Imperative Henry I. Miller

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/08/06/our-use-of-nuclear-weapons-76-years-ago-was-a-moral-and-strategic-imperative/

Americans are no strangers to times that “try men’s souls,” to borrow a phrase from Thomas Paine. By mid-1945, we had been at war for three-and-a-half years, enduring the draft, mounting numbers of casualties, and rationing, with no end in sight. Many Americans were weary, not unlike our feelings now, after a year-and-a-half a year of privations and anguish related to the COVID-19 pandemic. 

That sense of anxiety got me thinking about how WWII was suddenly – and to many, unexpectedly – resolved. Today marks one of the United States’ most important anniversaries, memorable not only for what happened on this date in 1945 but for what did not happen.

What did happen was that the Enola Gay, an American B-29 Superfortress bomber, dropped Little Boy, a uranium-based atomic bomb, on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. That historic act hastened the end of World War II, which concluded within a week, after the Aug. 9 detonation of Fat Man, a plutonium-based bomb, over Nagasaki. These were the only two nuclear weapons ever used in warfare.

I have two peripheral connections to those events. The first is that when Little Boy was dropped on Hiroshima, my father, a sergeant in the U.S. Army infantry who had fought in the Italian campaigns of WWII, was on a troopship, expecting to be deployed to the Pacific theater of operations. Neither he nor his fellow soldiers relished the prospect of participating in the impending invasion of the Japanese main islands. When the Japanese surrendered (on Aug. 14), the ship headed, instead, for Virginia, where the division was disbanded. (I was born two years later.)

My second connection was that during the 1960s, three of my M.I.T. physics professors had participated several decades earlier in the Manhattan Project, the military research program which developed the atomic bombs during the war. In class, one of these professors recalled that, after the first test explosion (code-named Trinity), he was assigned to drive Maj. Gen. Leslie Groves, the director of the project, to view the result. They arrived to find a crater 1,000 feet in diameter, and six feet deep, with the desert sand inside turned into glass by the intense heat. Groves’ response? “Is that all?”

KENDI AND DIANGELO DON’T DEBATE PEOPLE LIKE ME .. and they shouldn’t! It’s time to let up on dissing them for not “debating.” John McWhorter

https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p/kendi-and-diangelo-dont-debate-people?token=

If social media is any indication, many people seem to be of the opinion that people like Ibram Kendi and Robin DiAngelo should want to “debate” people like me and Glenn Loury. These people are roasted endlessly on social media for not engaging in “debate.”

It isn’t fair. I completely understand why they don’t.

I get the feeling people are moved by debates between people like William F. Buckley and Gore Vidal (this documentary likely helps stoke this) or the famous one between Buckley and James Baldwin.

But given the way people like me or Glenn Loury have discussed people like Kendi and DiAngelo on line and in print, how reasonable is it to expect them to “debate” us? I wasn’t nice to White Fragility last year and meant it, as that review needed to be written – but fully get why DiAngelo thereafter did not want to appear with me on Morning Joe. I didn’t write that review expecting DiAngelo to put on the gloves and “debate” me – I knew full well it meant that sometime in the future we’d be in a talk show green room carefully avoiding eye contact. Glenn has called Kendi an “empty suit” in our conversations and it has gotten around; I guarantee that I would never appear on the show of someone who called me that.

Some may be thinking that people like that are responsible for defending themselves in public competition, that this is the burden of the public intellectual. But the question is why they are supposed to do this in a live, back-and-forth sparring match.

Life is short. Why should someone spend even an hour or two of their time engaging with someone who has given all indication that they heartily disapprove of their work and even find them off-putting personally? Whether it was about winning or losing, who does this?

* * *

I have been on the other side of this sort of thing now and then. A long time ago, a certain black commentator I will not name asked me to guest on his radio show. I agreed to do it because we had gotten along fine in the past. But then I happened to catch on Twitter that he was planning to roast me, with his fans all salivating at the prospect of seeing evil race traitor me getting what I deserved. I pulled out. For a little while after, the fans and the host accused me of refusing to debate.

Nah. I can debate quite comfortably when necessary, thank you very much, when there are rules and everybody has to behave – I think of here and here. But it never occurred to me that I was at all unusual in skipping being professionally ridiculed. It wasn’t that I think of myself as beyond debate, and it sure as hell wasn’t that I thought I couldn’t defend my views against (whoops, can’t say who he was!).

No, a Vaccine Mandate Is Not Like Requiring Seat Belts By Wesley J. Smith

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/no-a-vaccine-mandate-is-not-like-requiring-seat-belts/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=right-rail&utm_content=corner&utm_term=second

Mainstream bioethics thinking is growing increasingly authoritarian. Princeton’s notorious utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer now joins Ezekiel “Mandate” Emanuel in an internationally syndicated column urging that everyone be legally required to take the COVID jab.

Singer justifies this imposition by comparing the proposal to laws that require people to wear seat belts in cars. From, “Why Vaccination Should be Compulsory:”

We are now hearing demands for the freedom to be unvaccinated against the virus that causes COVID-19. Brady Ellison, a member of the United States Olympic archery team, says his decision not to get vaccinated was “one hundred percent a personal choice,” insisting that “anyone that says otherwise is taking away people’s freedoms.”

The oddity, here, is that laws requiring us to wear seat belts really are quite straightforwardly infringing on freedom, whereas laws requiring people to be vaccinated if they are going to be in places where they could infect other people are restricting one kind of freedom in order to protect the freedom of others to go about their business safely.

Good grief. There is a huge difference between a law that requires wrapping a cloth belt around one’s body while in a moving car and injecting chemicals into one’s system. Yes, both acts involve attempts to promote public safety. But the former’s interference with liberty is de minimus, while the latter is one of the most potentially portentous that can be asked of people.

In free societies, legal mandates must be reasonable. A national vaccination mandate — which would be unprecedented — fails that test.

Democrats’ Hypocrisy Is Now Impossible To Ignore Shouting from the rooftop while privately contradicting everything someone says publicly is neither virtuous nor proper; it is immoral and laughable. By Josh Hammer

https://amgreatness.com/2021/08/05/democrats-hypocrisy-is-now-impossible-to-ignore/

Earlier this week, New York State Attorney General Letitia James, a partisan Democrat, released a bombshell 165-page report that another partisan Democrat, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, previously sexually harassed at least 11 women in the workplace. According to the report, Cuomo engaged in nonconsensual touching, groping and kissing, in addition to making generally inappropriate comments toward numerous women. What’s more, in James’ words from a press conference earlier this week, “in doing so,” Cuomo “violated federal and state law” and created a “toxic workplace environment.”

Cuomo has nonetheless denied the allegations and thus far refused to resign. He has done so notwithstanding a direct plea from President Joe Biden—a man similarly known for decades, perhaps an entire political career’s worth, of inappropriate touching of women— for him to do precisely that, as well as a strongly worded statement from New York State Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins (another fellow Democrat) that Cuomo “can no longer serve as governor.” In a galling display of a lack of self-awareness, a May 2013 Cuomo tweet was also recently unearthed for all to see: “There should be a zero tolerance policy when it comes to sexual harassment & must send a clear message that this behavior is not tolerated.” Apparently #BelieveAllWomen, the Left’s preferred hashtag during the 2018 Justice Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court confirmation saga—and a deeply discomfiting mantra, at that, for all who claim to care about basic norms of fairness—only applies to Republicans, and not Democrats, accused of serial sexual misconduct. Uncle Joe would certainly know all about that. Does anyone in Washington even remember Tara Reade?

Democratic hypocrisy does not stop, of course, at personal sexual misconduct. On Thursday, Rep. Cori Bush, D-Mo., the newest addition to the socialist, America-bashing House “Squad,” recorded a wild interview on CBS in which she advocated for defunding the police while conceding that she, a sitting U.S. congresswoman and thus nothing if not profoundly privileged, maintains a private security detail. “I’m going to make sure that I have security because … I have had attempts on my life,” Bush argued. She then artfully added, roughly 20 seconds later: “So suck it up, and defunding the police has to happen. We need to defund the police and put that money into social safety nets.”

Huh?

Why Won’t the Government Release Officer Fanone’s Bodycam Video? The government used a little trick to prevent video from being formally entered into the judicial record. Federal judges played along. By Julie Kelly

https://amgreatness.com/2021/08/05/why-wont-the-government-release-officer-fanones-bodycam-video/

At least one federal judge handling several Capitol protest criminal cases is paying attention to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s show trial about the events of January 6.

Judge Thomas Hogan, 83, who has served on the D.C. District Court for nearly 40 years, referred to public testimony given last week by four law enforcement officers while he scolded a husband and wife over their involvement in the protest. 

“[H]e begins by talking about the violence, and makes clear he listened to the police officers who testified before Congress last week about their experience, and notes the recent suicide of [a Metropolitan Police Department] officer,” Zoe Tillman, a reporter for BuzzFeed, live-tweeted during the couple’s sentencing hearing on Wednesday.

Set aside for a moment how the inflammatory and unsubstantiated accounts by those officers will taint an already highly biased jury pool in Washington, D.C. when trials begin next year; it’s clear the January 6 select committee already is influencing court proceedings. Judge Hogan, and presumably others, will take witness testimony at face value and use it as proof that Capitol defendants, even the nonviolent ones, contributed to “violence” that day.

Which is why, as we have argued repeatedly at American Greatness, the government and U.S. Capitol Police should agree to release more than 14,000 hours of surveillance video captured by security cameras on January 6. If the four-hour melee indeed compares to the worst terrorist attacks against Americans, and ranks among the worst days in U.S. history, the public deserves to see what happened, minute-by-minute, inside and outside the building.

But it’s not just Capitol complex security video that the government is trying to conceal from the public. In a recent filing, Joe Biden’s Justice Department argued against the release of footage recorded by officer Michael Fanone’s bodycam on January 6. The D.C. Metropolitan Police narcotics officer was one of the four cops who testified last week. 

Fanone, 40, said he was not supposed to be on Capitol Hill that day but that he put on an official, unworn uniform—including a body camera—for the first time in 10 years to help assist his colleagues control the chaos. Fanone also testified he was afraid he would be killed that day—either shot with his own gun or torn limb from limb by Trump fanatics. In one outburst, Fanone called insurrection deniers in Congress “disgraceful” and claimed they were “betraying their oath of office.”

Fanone is working hard to become a household name. He’s been on a part-pity, part-publicity tour for the past seven months, detailing his harrowing experience and stalking Republican members of Congress. He’s become a regular on CNN; following his testimony last Tuesday, Fanone headed to the CNN studio for an interview with Don Lemon. The two ended the segment with an embrace and expressions of love for each other.

A grandiose Rep. Cori Bush (D-Wokeistan) says the quiet part out loud By Andrea Widburg

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/08/a_grandiose_rep_cori_bush_says_the_quiet_part_out_loud.html

Rep. Cori Bush (D. Wokeistan) is an honest politician. She’s also narcissistic, histrionic, manic, intellectually corrupt, and has delusions of grandeur but, darn, if she isn’t honest. And the great thing about her honesty is that, when it comes to every Democrat, Progressive, and leftist politician, she says the quiet part out loud. We’ve all known about this quiet part: It’s the one that says that high-level leftists, the ones who want to take our cars, air conditioners, heating, health care, travel rights, and money, do not have to abide by their own rules. Rules are for the little people and, when it comes to Bush’s need for personal security guards while she’s defunding your police, Bush is happy to explain why she’s special.

I have a question for you: Have you ever seen a tax-the-rich, “at a certain point you’ve made enough money” leftist when he or she comes into money, redistribute a single penny of that wealth? I can’t think of a single one.

When Bernie Sanders, who yearns for Cuban socialism, started raking in money for his bucks, he bought a sports car and now owns three houses.

When Al Gore, who insisted that we must give up our cars, and heated-and-air-conditioned homes to save the world, made $330 million selling carbon offsets and unloading his Current TV channel to Al-Jazeera, which the oil-producing, slave-owning Qataris fund, he went big on big real estate. He didn’t redistribute a penny.

When Barack Obama (the one who said “at a certain point you’ve made enough money”) quickly escalated his net worth to more than $70 million dollars thanks to Netflix and book deals, he, like Gore, went on a real estate buying binge, including an oceanfront home right where the climate change is supposed to happen. He also didn’t redistribute his money.

Nina Turner, Cori Bush and the price of progressivism Far-left members of the Democratic party are ignoring what their voters tell them

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/nina-turner-cori-bush-cost-progressivism/

In victory or defeat, the progressives are consistently hurting the Democratic party.

Rep. Cori Bush of Missouri, who lay on the stairs of the US Capitol in a sleeping bag to protest the end of the eviction moratorium, is a perfect case study. Both she and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez hammed it up for the cameras this week. Ocasio-Cortez was even cynical enough to throw her mask back on when she realized press photos of their heroic protest were being taken. She wouldn’t want the Twitter trolls to turn on her for going maskless outdoors — the horror!

Luckily for Bush and AOC, the protest worked! President Biden, true to form, caved to their demands. The miserable whiners outside the Capitol managed to crack a smile for a few minutes. Bush was applauded by her army of activists and she grinned from ear to ear while holding a bouquet of roses in her arms. It was a victory! Small landlords across America might never get paid again thanks to these courageous advocates.

But the costs of these pyrrhic socialist victories are growing for the rest of the Democratic party. After all, Biden had to very publicly cave to the pie-in-the-sky progressives. After admitting to reporters that extending the eviction moratorium wasn’t in the cards — or the Constitution — Joe flip-flopped and decided to try it anyway.

One CNN headline read, ‘President Biden shows he’s ready to make drastic moves in the COVID-19 fight — even if he’s not sure they’re legal.’ Au contraire — Biden is very sure that these moves are not legal. Earlier this week, when discussing extending the moratorium he said that the ‘bulk of constitutional scholars say…it’s not likely to pass constitutional muster’. Then again, if it stops the Bernie brats from throwing a tantrum on Twitter, then who cares about ‘norms’ — or the millions of small landlords prattling on about contractual obligations and the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment?

Most of those financially hard-pressed property owners probably voted for Trump, right? Who cares about the moderate Democrats who only backed Biden because they thought he would restore a bit of middle ground to the political landscape?

Now consider how on Tuesday night, former Ohio state lawmaker Nina Turner lost her bid for the state’s 11th congressional district to Cuyahoga County Council member Shontel Brown. Turner’s candidacy was supported by Sen. Bernie Sanders and Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar. Brown was backed by old-school Democrats like Hillary Clinton and House majority whip James Clyburn.

Dems See the Endless Possibilities of the ‘Illegal but Good’ Agenda By David Harsanyi

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/dems-see-the-endless-possibilities-of-the-illegal-but-good-agenda/

“With eviction victory in hand,” a Washington Post headline informs us, “congressional Democrats turn attention to student loans”:

A torrent of Congressional Democrats is calling on the White House to extend a soon-expiring pause on federal student loan payments, emboldened by their success in pressuring the Biden administration to approve a new eviction moratorium.

It wasn’t “congressional Democrats” who procured this “victory.” It was a “torrent” of activists who happen to be in Congress who were successful. As Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez noted yesterday, they took “direct action” and pressured the president of the United States to nullify property rights while ignoring Congress and SCOTUS. Congress did nothing but abdicate its responsibilities.

It’s true that Democrats celebrating this week’s eviction moratorium see the delegitimizing of courts and circumvention of Congress as a “victory.” Why wouldn’t they expect their agenda to be unilaterally implemented via the executive branch? What limiting principle stops Biden from ripping up student-loan agreements? Or mortgages, for that matter? What limiting principle stops the CDC from dropping a national vaccine mandate — with penalties, including jail time — or instituting national vaccine passports? It might be illegal, but if it saves lives, right? And why only the CDC? Why not other federal agencies? Democrats will, of course, whine when President Ron DeSantis or Donald Trump 2.0 governs via similar diktats. But Democrats will have set the precedent: If the president deems his actions “good,” it’s kosher now.

Andrew Cuomo And The Perils Of Politicized Prosecution Francis Menton

https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084c5&id=8d27aee23c

Here in New York, the news today is dominated by one big story: a supposedly “independent” investigative report issued by the Attorney General has apparently validated allegations of a pattern of sexual harassment committed by our Governor, Andrew Cuomo. From CBS News, August 3:

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo sexually harassed multiple current and former staffers as well as women who did not work for his administration, the state’s attorney general Letitia James said Tuesday during a press conference summarizing the findings of an independent investigation.

Suddenly, a guy who had been riding high on a wave of (ridiculously) favorable publicity for his (disastrous) handling of the Covid-19 crisis now faces calls from all over the place — even from President Biden! — to resign. How could this all have gone so wrong so quickly?

The New York Post today has an 8-page special section that starts off on page 4 with the headline “AG: Governor Is A Groper.” Here’s the lead paragraph:

Gov. Cuomo was exposed in a blockbuster investigative report made public Tuesday as a dirty old man who used his powerful position to sexually harass female underlings less than half his age — including by touching their “intimate body parts” without consent.

Here’s the cover from today’s Post:

What has occurred is that lawyers working under the authority of Attorney General Letitia James have spent the past several months looking into allegations of sexual harassment by various women against Cuomo. Yesterday, the investigators issued their 165 page Report. The Report considers claims by some eleven women, with the allegations ranging from inappropriate touching to groping to lewd comments. (Unlike with, say, Bill Clinton, there do not appear to be any allegations of actual unwanted sexual intercourse.). The investigators find the claims to be credible, and the conduct of the Governor to be in violation of state law.

It Doesn’t Take Censorship to Fight a Pandemic Daniel Greenfield

https://www.danielgreenfield.org/2021/08/it-doesnt-take-censorship-to-fight.html

After Biden’s spokeswoman boasted that the administration was ordering Facebook to censor some people’s speech, Fauci joined the campaign by appearing on CNN to warn about the dangers of letting anyone say whatever they think. “We probably would still have polio in this country if we had the kind of false information that’s being spread now,” he falsely claimed.

Fauci as usual is wrong. The polio vaccine was the subject of numerous controversies which played out in public.

There were anti-vaccine campaigns long before Facebook. The most bracing of these took on the polio vaccine with the headline, “Little White Coffins” declaring, “Only God above will know how many thousands of little white coffins will be used to bury the victims of Salk’s heinous, fraudulent vaccine.” Walter Winchell, who at his peak reached over 50 million people, warned that one particular version of the vaccine, which contained a live virus, was a “killer”.

Contrary to Fauci’s fantasies (aided and abetted by a media eager to find a pretext for censoring any open marketplace of ideas), the fifties were not a totalitarian dystopia in which free speech did not exist. Many of the same controversies as today, from socialism to science, played out to large audiences across a bewildering array of national and local newspapers, radio stations, mailings, books and magazines in a country where the media had not yet been consolidated.

Today, much of the newspaper, radio, and television markets, not to mention publishing, are controlled in one way or another by a handful of giant companies. While the fifties had their massive chains and networks, they were far more intellectually diverse, and had plenty of different owners and perspectives in the mix. The American cultural environment today would strike people from that era as Communist because it resembles the tight centralized control of the Soviet Union. America has never had as little free and open debate as it does now because never have the means of debate been clutched in as few hands as is now the case..

There was aggressive promotion of the polio vaccine by the government, by local authorities, and by non-profit advocacy groups, but there was also vigorous opposition by a variety of people, some credible and some not, and the scientific debates over the vaccine, most notably between the live virus and the inactive virus, played out in public with ordinary people following the back and forth between Salk and Sabin. When Salk’s inactive vaccine was replaced with Sabin’s live virus, the vaccine researcher turned to attacking it as unsafe and dangerous.

Americans not only survived a vigorous public debate over the polio vaccine, but managed to stop polio because the debate over the vaccine between advocates and opponents, and between scientists, played out in public creating a sense of transparency and trust.