NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Case for Prosecuting Hunter Biden By Andrew C. McCarthy

Posted By on March 28th, 2021

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/03/the-case-for-prosecuting-hunter-biden/

 C harles C. W. Cooke had a post this week that said everything that ought to be said about why it would be fitting to prosecute Hunter Biden’s apparent making of a false statement on the required firearms application form. I want to add a few points about prosecutorial discretion, the potential of an additional gun crime, and our two-tiered justice system.

The Politico story Charlie cites stresses that prosecutions arising out of false statements on Form 4473 are rare. As Charlie rightly observes, that in itself is a problem (a point Kevin D. Williamson also made a few days ago). Still, it is worth widening the lens beyond the narrow false-statements provision in the gun laws because the government actually prosecutes false statements all the time.

There is a general false-statements statute (Section 1001 of the penal code) which can be applied any time someone makes a false statement, including a material omission, to some branch, department, or agency of the federal government. Then there are false statements charges that apply to particular subject-matter areas, such as firearms or taxes. Hence, we have Section 922(a)(6), which, as Charlie explained, applies to false statements made in connection with the acquisition or attempted acquisition of a firearm.

The fact that these narrowly tailored false-statements statutes are invoked more rarely should not be taken to mean that false-statements prosecutions are infrequent. They are not. And a good many false statements that result in indictments involve situations markedly less serious than lying to conceal a disqualification from firearms possession — especially under circumstances where, due to the lie, the disqualified person succeeded in obtaining a gun (and then was lax in safeguarding it).

In the Mueller investigation, for instance, Michael Flynn was prosecuted for misdescribing a conversation, indicative of no misconduct, of which the FBI had a recording and therefore no need to question him. George Papadopoulos and Alex van der Zwaan were prosecuted for false statements about the dates of meetings, and in neither situation was an investigation impeded — much less were the prevaricators, thereby, able to acquire dangerous weapons.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Do Greens Want the World to Be Like the ‘Blackout State?’ By Wesley J. Smith

Posted By on March 28th, 2021

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/do-greens-want-the-world-to-be-like-the-blackout-state/?utm_source=

Electricity is essential to modernity. Prosperity depends on it. So does longevity and health. If you doubt that, ask those in impoverished nations who still don’t have access to reliable electrical power! Indeed, if we could create a continental power grid in Africa — regardless of the means — it would ameliorate so much human misery.

So, why are the world’s cities turning their lights off this weekend — as if electrification is a bad thing? To mark “Earth Hour,” of course. From the Yahoo News story:

Cities around the world were turning off their lights Saturday for Earth Hour, with this year’s event highlighting the link between the destruction of nature and increasing outbreaks of diseases like Covid-19.

Starting off the event, at 8:30 pm the skylines of Asian metropolises from Singapore to Hong Kong went dark, as did landmarks including Sydney Opera House.

The annual event calls for action on climate change and the environment, and this year, organisers said they want to highlight the link between the destruction of the natural world and the increasing incidence of diseases — such as Covid-19 — making the leap from animals to humans.

Good grief, what nonsense. Last year, California went through the wrenching experience of enforced blackouts, in part, because of the formerly Golden State’s stupid environmental policies. Do we really want more of that? Moreover, there is no proof that climate change had anything whatsoever to do with COVID.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

US must prepare for cold war with China By Lawrence J. Haas

Posted By on March 28th, 2021

https://thehill.com/opinion/international/545215-us-must-prepare-for-cold-war-with-china

The United States and China show growing signs of entering a long-term cold war, strikingly similar to the U.S.-Soviet cold war of decades past and demanding the same dogged determination that Washington displayed during that earlier conflict to protect its interests and defend its allies.

Like the U.S.-Soviet conflict, the Sino-American one is rooted in competition between alternative political and economic systems — one free and democratic, the other unfree and authoritarian — for influence around the world, with enormous implications for the well-being of billions of people.

Also like the U.S.-Soviet conflict, Washington will need a comprehensive strategy to “contain” Beijing’s expansionist impulses. While (hopefully) avoiding a military confrontation with Beijing, Washington will need to maintain an unchallenged military capacity to protect its presence in Asia and other regions as China seeks to dislodge or overshadow it, and to use public diplomacy effectively as the two nations compete for the loyalty of grassroots populations around the world.

The signs of long-term U.S.-Sino conflict are unmistakable, and similarities to the cold war of yesteryear are uncanny.

During the cold war, Soviet leaders boldly predicted an inevitable victory, as the United States presided over what they considered a decaying capitalist structure. Speaking to the United Nations in late 1960, for instance, Nikita Khrushchev mused that “socialism is replacing capitalism” across the developing world.

CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB, IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Gallup CEO Warns Biden: 42 Million Migrants Want Entry to U.S. Catherine Smith

Posted By on March 28th, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/03/26/gallup-ceo-warns-biden-42-million-migrants-want-entry-to-u-s/

The CEO of Gallup has publicly warned President Joe Biden that approximately 42 million people south of Texas want to migrate into the United States.

In a blog post published on Wednesday, Jim Clifton, the chairman and CEO of the Gallup polling company, warned Biden as he and his administration struggle to deal with the surge of migration at the border:

Here are questions every leader should be able to answer regardless of their politics: How many more people are coming to the southern border? And what is the plan?

There are 33 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean. Roughly 450 million adults live in the region. Gallup asked them if they would like to move to another country permanently if they could.

A whopping 27% said “yes.” This means roughly 120 million would like to migrate somewhere.

Gallup then asked them where they would like to move. Of those who want to leave their country permanently, 35% — or 42 million — said they want to go to the United States.

Seekers of citizenship or asylum are watching to determine exactly when and how is the best time to make their move.

In addition to finding a solution for the thousands of migrants currently at the border, let’s include the bigger, harder question — what about all of those who would like to come? What is the message to them?

What is the 10-year plan?

330 million U.S. citizens are wondering. So are 42 million Latin Americans.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

A River of Doubt Runs Through Mail Voting in Montana

Posted By on March 28th, 2021

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2021/03/24/a_river_of_doubt_runs_through_mail_voting_in_big_sky_country_769321.html

MISSOULA COUNTY, Mont.—A mountainous, 2,600-square-mile region with a population of approximately 119,600 does not seem like your prototypical setting for machine politics. Yet a recent audit of mail-in ballots cast there found irregularities characteristic of larger urban centers—on a level that could have easily swung local elections in 2020, and statewide elections in cycles past.

The Biden administration, the Democrat-controlled Congress, and the Democratic National Committee are collectively pressing to both nationalize, and make permanent, many of the extraordinary pandemic-driven voting measures implemented during the 2020 election—particularly mass mail-in voting.

Political leaders and prominent media outlets have dismissed concerns raised by critics that such measures invite voter fraud. But could the election in small-county Missoula call all that into question?

The story at hand begins during the pandemic summer of 2020, when the then-governor, Democrat Steve Bullock, issued a directive permitting counties to conduct the general election fully by mail.  In the run-up to the election, a court also struck down Montana’s law aimed at preventing ballot harvesting.

Missoula, Montana’s second most populous county and one of its most heavily Democratic, opted in to the universal vote-by-mail regime.

In response, in October 2020, several county residents with experience targeting election integrity issues formed a group to ensure the legitimacy of the 2020 vote. The members contended that Missoula County had shown anomalies in elections past.

In November, the group approached state Rep. Brad Tschida, a Republican, to formally take up the issue. Tschida hired a lawyer involved in the group, Quentin Rhoades, to represent him in corresponding with Missoula County Elections Administrator Bradley Seaman, a Democratic appointee and a longtime supporter of progressive causes.

Seaman’s office complied with Tschida’s request for access to all of the county’s ballot envelopes, and on Jan. 4 a team of volunteers, overseen by Rhoades, conducted an audit with the assistance of the Missoula County Elections Office. The audit consisted of both a count and review of all ballot envelopes and comparing that to the number of officially recorded votes during the Nov. 3, 2020, general election.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

D.C. Drive For Statehood Reminds Us Of What’s Gone Wrong With Our Country

Posted By on March 28th, 2021

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/03/25/d-c-drive-for-statehood-reminds-us-of-whats-gone-wrong-with-our-country/

The campaign for Washington, D.C., statehood has come up yet again. If nothing else, this shows how far out of control the federal government has become.

The drive to make D.C. America’s 51st state isn’t new. But, with a Democratic president and a Democratic majority in Congress, the ruling class is in a mood to consolidate its power, and with the Democrat-media industrial complex demanding that everything must be seen through the lens of race, it’s now an overheated topic.

For decades the pro-statehood forces have complained about being subject to taxation without representation. (We’ll have more to say on this later.) Today’s argument is centered on race. It is “a historically black city,” according to the district government, with 47% of residents black, 41% white.

“This is not about politics. It’s about a fundamental voting and civil rights issue,” says House Oversight Chair Carolyn Maloney, who is of course a Democrat, the party that’s pushing hard for H.R. 51, which “provides for admission into the United States of the state of Washington, Douglass Commonwealth.” (We’ll have more about the party’s power grab later, too.)

To hear David Litt, a speechwriter for Barack Obama, tell it, “the D.C. statehood fight is part of an ugly effort to disenfranchise black and brown people.” Opposing views, he says, “echo the last gasps of the Jim Crow era.”

While the Democrats and the media put everything they have into dividing the country, allow us to shine a light on what many are missing: When Washington, D.C., was established as the nation’s capital, the founders didn’t foresee it being a city of permanent residents and the base for an intrusive leviathan command center. It was to be merely the seat of the federal government.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Nuclear Energy Is a Reliable Source That Also Shrinks Emissions . By Luke Hogg

Posted By on March 28th, 2021

https://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2021/03/21/nuclear_energy_is_a_reliable_source_that_also_shrinks_emissions_769131.html

If the near total collapse of the Texas energy grid on the morning of February 15th demonstrates anything, it proves the importance of reliable energy production. In short, federal and statepolicies that pick winners and losers among clean energy sources steered both public funding and private investment away from reliable sources. Hopefully, policymakers will learn their lesson from the events in Texas and wake up to the reality that energy security requires a diversity of reliable sources; chief among them is nuclear power.

While the cold snap froze wind turbines and forced many thermal plants offline, nuclear energy production remained remarkably reliable. In fact, reports show that only one half of a single two-reactor facility was forced offline by the cold. What’s more, this outage was an oddity among nuclear plants and was the direct result of bad management and lack of preparation. The outage at the South Texas Nuclear Power Station — one of Texas’ four nuclear plants — accounted for a mere 1,280 of the nearly 30,000 lost megawatts of production that left the state less than five minutes from a catastrophic failure.

While issues of management, preparation, and weatherization are ultimately to blame for the disaster, had the State of Texas invested more heavily in nuclear energy, the impact of the freezing temperatures may very well have been less devastating. 

Nuclear power is particularly well situated to become even more important in the coming decades. The Biden administration’s push for a “carbon pollution-free electricity sector no later than 2035,” practically necessitates increased investment in nuclear energy if we are to maintain a secure, reliable energy grid. The International Atomic Energy Agency explained it best:

“As they can operate at full capacity nearly uninterrupted, nuclear power plants can provide a continuous and reliable supply of energy. This is in contrast to variable renewable energy sources, such as solar and wind, which require back-up power during their output gaps, such as when the sun sets or the wind stops blowing. Nuclear power plants can also operate flexibly to meet fluctuations in energy demand and provide stability to electrical grids, particularly those with high shares of variable renewable sources.”

HISTORY, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Taxation with Representation A fair and reasonable alternative to D.C. statehood John Steele Gordon

Posted By on March 28th, 2021

https://www.city-journal.org/an-alternative-to-dc-statehood

Though Democrats haven’t made any formal moves on the idea yet, statehood for the District of Columbia is very much on their wish list. Ostensibly, it would cure a constitutional anomaly that gives the residents of the District no voice in Congress other than a nonvoting delegate in the House. In a country born under the slogan, “No taxation without representation,” it’s more than a bit embarrassing that citizens of that country’s capital city are taxed without representation.

Yet everyone realizes that the real reason behind the move is to create two new Senate seats that would be held by Democrats for the foreseeable future. How certain are we of this? Consider that in 1984, voters reelected Ronald Reagan in one of the greatest landslides in American political history. He carried 49 states and only missed the 50th by a mere 3,761 votes, yet in the District of Columbia he captured just under 14 percent of the vote.

The Framers of the Constitution didn’t want the capital to be located in a state, fearing that the state would have too much influence as a result. So they authorized the creation of a “District (not exceeding ten Miles square) as may, by Cession of particular States, and by the Acceptance of Congress, become the Seat of the Government of the United States.” In Article I, Section 8, the Constitution gives Congress the power “To exercise exclusive Legislation in all Cases whatsoever, over such District.”

Maryland ceded 63 square miles and Virginia 37 to create the ten-miles-square district. In 1846, Congress agreed to retrocede the Virginia portion back to that state, which is why the Pentagon is in Arlington, Virginia, not the District of Columbia.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The disgrace that was the Biden press conference Joe Concha,

Posted By on March 28th, 2021

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/the-disgrace-that-was-the-biden-press-conference/ar-BB1eZV0j?li=BBnb7Kz

President Biden called on 10 reporters to answer 30-some questions during his long-awaited first formal press conference on Thursday. But the hour-plus event was a disgrace for some in the press and a dubious performance by the president.

The questions for the president were meek and vague, failing to extract any specific information about policies or solutions to the myriad problems faced by the administration. Take, for example, this activism disguised as a question from PBS’s Yamiche Alcindor on why the president needs to abolish the filibuster in the name of racial equality while combating evil Republicans in their efforts to prevent minorities from voting. Or something like that.

“When it comes to the filibuster, immigration is a big issue, of course, related to the filibuster, but there’s also Republicans who are passing bill after bill trying to restrict voting rights. [Senate Majority Leader] Chuck Schumer’s calling it in an existential threat to democracy,” Alcindor, who plays an objective journalist on TV, said to the president after being the second reporter chosen by Biden’s handlers for him to call upon. “Why not back a filibuster rule that at least gets around issues, including voting rights or immigration? [South Carolina Congressman] Jim Clyburn, someone, of course, who you know very well, has backed the idea of a filibuster rule when it comes to civil rights and voting rights.”

That’s not even bias in broad daylight. That’s outright activism in pressing the president on national television to move forward with abolishing the filibuster to advance an agenda she supports. Alcindor also failed to quote Biden’s own words back to him from a speech he called, at the time, one of the most important of his career: “It is not only a bad idea, it upsets the constitutional design and it disservices the country,” Biden argued in 2005 against eliminating the Senate filibuster. “No longer would the Senate be that ‘different kind of legislative body’ that the Founders intended. No longer would the Senate be the ‘saucer’ to cool the passions of the immediate majority.”

P.C.-CULTURE Comments turned off

The Hymn to Him Michael Kile

Posted By on March 27th, 2021

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2021/03/the-hymn-to-him/

As the gender storms rain down on Capital Hill and feminist rage spreads across the land, another Higgins has escaped the attention of our vigilant media: the phonetics professor in My Fair Lady (MFL) and that song. For some people, MFL is still jolly good fun: an Edwardian comedy of manners kept alive in the last half century by a few memorable songs, thanks to the 1964 American musical drama film, itself an adaptation from Lerner and Loewe’s 1956 Broadway and London stage musical.

Wouldn’t it be loverly if everyone felt that way about it? They certainly did in the 1960s. The 1964 film, with Audrey Hepburn as Eliza Doolittle and Rex Harrison as Henry Higgins, was a critical and commercial success. The second-highest grossing film that year, it won eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Actor and Best Director. The American Film Institute in 1998 named it the 91st greatest American film. It was ranked eighth in the AFI’s 2006 Greatest Movie Musicals list.

MFL’s popularity, however, is on life-support. More and more folk are determined to see it as another example of the patriarchy in action. For them, Henry Higgins and Colonel Pickering, two older upper-class males exploit Eliza, a young Cockney Covent Garden flower-seller. They bet, for God’s sake, on whether stern elocution lessons and tuition in manners could change her into a  lady. With a Little Bit of Luck, it does, but how dare they try to improve her chances in life’s lottery!

MFL is all about transformation. Yet how many remember that both musicals, and a 1938 film, were based on a 1913 stage play, George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion; or that Shaw’s inspiration was an ancient Greek myth in book ten of Ovid’s Metamorphoses?  The Roman poet’s first sentence: “My purpose is to tell of bodies which have been transformed into shapes of a different kind.”  In this case, the dramatic shape depends on directors and actors, as much as on writers and copyright law.

Shaw spent more than two decades trying to rescue his play from chaps determined to romanticise it, as explained in this video. He must have fumed when he saw the 1938 Metro Goldwyn Mayer billboard: “He [Higgins] took a girl off the street and made a lady of her in an amazing experiment to trick society. A thrilling, wise, witty and romantic photo-play.” Yet it was his most popular and financially successful work.

The before and after photos of Eliza had this caption: “Any girl can do it. You need a guy and a trunkful of clothes!” A speech bubble has Wendy Hiller saying to Leslie Howard (below): “Swear at me … even black my eye … but when you’ve made a girl love you … don’t you dare ignore her!” It is probably on the syllabus of a coercive-control workshop.