RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/senate-dems-fail-to-pass-voting-rights-legislation/

Senate Democrats on Wednesday evening failed to pass both their “voting rights” legislation and a rules change to the filibuster. 

The motion to end debate on and advance to a vote the Democrats’ “voting rights” bill failed in the Senate along party lines. Forty-nine senators voted in the affirmative, and 51 senators, including moderate Democratic senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, voted against. The Democrats needed to have 60 votes to overcome the GOP filibuster. Democratic Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer changed his vote to “no” at the last minute so that he could put the item back on the table later.

“This party-line push has never been about securing citizens’ rights,” said Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell on the chamber floor. “It’s about expanding politicians’ power.”

With all Republicans and the two centrists opposed, the Senate voted 52-48 to keep the current filibuster rules. The Senate had debated a rules change to exempt the voting package from the 60-vote hurdle, an unlikely prospect given insufficient votes.

“The only way to achieve our goal of passing voter rights, ending dark money, and ending partisan gerrymandering is by changing the rules. Because our colleagues from the other side of the aisle don’t want to join us in these noble endeavors,” Schumer said.

It was all-but-certain that the votes would fail in the 50–50 Senate given opposition from Republicans and the two moderate Democrats.

Despite the long odds, Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) chose to push forward a vote on the elections package, which joined together two bills that Republicans blocked last year: the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act.

https://nypost.com/2022/01/19/dear-joe-your-first-years-been-a-total-disaster/

Dear Joe,

Happy Anniversary.Can we get a divorce?

Sorry if this isn’t the most effusive of messages as you celebrate your first year in office as president of the United States.

But I fear it’s exactly what many disillusioned Americans, including some who voted for you, are now thinking.

I don’t like to sugar-coat things, so let me be blunt: You’ve been a disaster.

In fact, it’s hard to think of a more insipid, less inspiring, fiasco-ridden opening 12 months to a presidency.

Nor one that has so spectacularly failed to deliver on the promises made at an inauguration ceremony.

You were going to reunite a bitterly fractured country by ending “the anger and harsh rhetoric,” remember?

You’ve failed. Your enraged, spiteful, Republican-bashing speeches at the start of this year were just as divisive as anything Donald Trump ever spewed. 

You were going to “defeat” COVID, remember?

You’ve failed. More Americans have died from coronavirus on your watch than under President Trump, the Omicron variant is surging out of control all over the country, your testing system has been disastrously slow, and you’ve still only persuaded 63% of US citizens to be vaccinated.

You were going to fix the economy, remember?

https://christopherrufo.com/?mc_cid=92e93b20bd&mc_eid=9bde3e8efb

Images from the Jim Crow era in America are seared into the minds of those who lived through it, and of anyone who attended an American history class after the victory of the civil rights movement: side-by-side drinking fountains with signs reading “white” and “colored”; parks and recreation facilities separated into racial enclaves; small-town main streets with whites-only theaters, restaurants, grocers, and amenities.

Fortunately, all that ended by the mid-1960s—or so we had thought. In recent years, segregation has been resurrected, but this time under the guise of “racial equity.” As I reported in late 2020, government agencies in Seattle, Washington, including the King County Library, King County Prosecutor’s Office, and the Veterans Administration, began segregating employees by race for diversity training programs, so that whites could “accept responsibility for their own racism” and minorities could be insulated from “any potential harming [that] might arise from a cross-racial conversation.”

This year, the new segregation has extended itself into new domains: public education and public-health policy. In Denver, Centennial Elementary School launched a racially exclusive “Families of Color Playground Night” as part of its racial equity programming. In Chicago, Downs Grove South High School held a racially exclusive “Students of Color Field Trip” as part of its own equity initiatives. In the words of Denver Public Schools officials, the administrators implemented the segregated program to “create a space of belonging,” which, they said, without a hint of irony, is “about uniting us, not dividing us.”

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/crossing-omicron-rubicon-covid/

We volunteered to serve in the biggest medical experiment in human history. We accepted the biggest peacetime suspension of civil liberties in American history. And we agreed not to ask difficult questions about the origins of the virus.

Now it’s time we recovered our freedom — and exercised the responsibility that sustains it.

The Omicron variant isn’t the end of the world. It looks more like the beginning of the end. The case numbers are rising even faster than the rate of inflation, but the ICUs aren’t overflowing and the death rate remains low. Covid-19 seems to be becoming endemic, like all the other bugs we might catch in a normal winter. If you’re elderly or obese, or if you have another co-morbidity, then you have a way to go yet. But if you’re not, then it’s time to boldly go into the new reality.

We are crossing the Omicron Rubicon. The president, having ridden Covid outrage into office, has now washed his hands and left Covid policy to the states. Or, rather, half the states, because the red states never got onboard with his dubious mandates anyway. And now the Supreme Court has dismissed his mandatory vaccination order too.

Even the other two branches of government, the CNN and the CDC, have finally got it right. After all the CDC’s faux-scientific injunctions to “follow the science,” its director Rochelle Walensky has reduced its recommendations to the Covid-positive to “You should probably not visit grandma.”

It’s time for the teachers’ union to send their members back to work. It’s time to stop the mask theater in bars and restaurants and schools and planes. If you feel you should wear a mask, or if you don’t feel comfortable eating indoors — and I’ll admit, I’m not yet comfortable with it — then take responsibility for your own risk. Wear a mask if you feel you need to. Avoid the situations you don’t feel safe in. Pull the kids from school if you think it best. But take responsibility for yourself.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/restoring-america/courage-strength-optimism/how-eric-adams-can-make-nyc-great-again

The honeymoon period for Eric Adams, New York City’s newly elected mayor, is an opportunity to propose a transformational economic growth plan in his February budget. During the campaign, Adams made remarks such as “New York will no longer be anti-business” — an about-face from former Mayor Bill de Blasio’s eight-year record.

Mayor Adams’s remarks are welcome, and he has already proposed cutting red tape, cutting waste, and increasing worker training. These are good first steps, but New York is at one of its lowest economic points ever — as shown by the 9% unemployment rate.  The mayor needs more specifics if he is to restore the city’s national economic leadership and create jobs. 

Some of this can be achieved by being vocally pro-business. Tone matters. The upbeat mayor is a natural cheerleader who wants to be known as the “GSD mayor,” one who will “get stuff done.”  Ambitious targets help amplify the message.  A worthy goal would be to bring back 400,000 jobs to regain the pre-pandemic level and begin a cycle of bond rating upgrades, not downgrades.

The city lost nearly 615,000 jobs over the course of the pandemic and has brought back only 213,000 of these jobs, according to the New York City Independent Budget Office. Why the sluggish recovery? For decades, New York has been at the bottom of rankings for having the worst tax, regulatory, and business environment in the country.  Businesses are leaving in record numbers for low-tax states such as Florida and Texas and taking their tax revenue and workers with them. Making all these problems more complex is that economic growth is closely linked with quality-of-life concerns such as crime and sanitation, which also need turning around.