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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION

50 STATES AND DC, CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT

Shameless, delusional Cuomo brothers continue to play the role of victims By Maureen Callahan

https://nypost.com/2022/03/17/shameless-delusional-cuomo-brothers-continue-to-play-the-role-of-victims/

Cockroaches.

Keith Richards.

The Cuomo brothers.

Yes, Andrew and Chris, those heroes-to-zeroes, have officially earned their place among the rare life forms sure to survive Armageddon.

Nothing can exterminate these two from public life, because nothing Andrew or Chris has ever done is their fault.

Actually, scratch that. The problem, you see (and can’t you just hear Andrew’s pedantic, patronizing voice saying this, lowering down into that slow, conspiratorial whisper?) is ev-er-y-bo-dy else.

And really, the Cuomo brothers believe this. Two delusional, power-hungry, disloyal narcissists, determined to bully weary voters and viewers into submission. It’s all so very dignified and statesman-like.

On Thursday morning, just seven months shy of resigning in disgrace, Andrew gave a lengthy speech explaining what’s gone wrong with the modern Democratic party.

Answer: They pushed him out of it.

This Photo Should End the Transgender-Athlete Debate By Judson Berger

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/this-photo-should-end-the-transgender-athlete-debate/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=first

On a most basic level, everyone knows that the decision to allow Lia Thomas to compete against women at the collegiate level is wrong. The decision has been rationalized to death with rhetoric concerning the transgender swimmer’s “authentic self,” as if the female swimmers competing under a new glass ceiling had any quarrel with that.

But the photo above should end that debate. In a tolerant and reasonable society that values fairness — fairness for women, which understandably has been an animating issue for progressives and was the motivation for the first bill Barack Obama signed as president — the jarring image of Thomas towering over the defeated women at the 500-yard freestyle yesterday is unassailable evidence of how wrong this charade is.

The Democrats Are Building Themselves a Suicide Machine By Charles C. W. Cooke

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/03/the-democrats-are-building-themselves-a-suicide-machine/

The party has gone along with the American media in advancing a bizarro-world ideology that few support.

T he Democrats are in political trouble, and the media bear much of the blame.

This is not because the media have ceased to be horribly biased in the Democrats’ favor. They remain that, and hopelessly so. Rather, it’s because the media have become more crazy, more self-confident, and less respected than ever, and because this shift has rendered their bias less useful than it once was.

For reasons that remain alien to me, almost the entirety of the American press — as well as much of academia and the entertainment industry — has spent the last five years assiduously adopting an exceptionally weird race-and gender-essentialist ideology that pretty much everyone outside of those institutions absolutely loathes. And, in its infinite wisdom, the Democratic Party has followed suit. The result has been the creation of a narrow, extremely peculiar feedback loop, within which the institutional Democratic Party and its friends in the press have concocted — and then adopted — a set of bizarro-world ideas that are met with confusion and horror once they are released into the general population. Bit by bit, piece by piece, tweet by tweet, the wagon to which the Democrats have hitched themselves is becoming a suicide machine.

Another sign the Dem establishment fears DeSantis more than Trump By Thomas Lifson

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/03/another_sign_the_dem_establishment_fears_desantis_more_than_trump.html

It would be hard to find a person who better represents the liberal media establishment than Thomas B. Edsall, whose career includes the Washington Post, New York Times, and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. In his latest column for the Times, he attempts to slam Ron DeSantis, letting the world know that the Democrats fear him more than Donald Trump at the top of the 2024 presidential ticket.  But in the process of doing so, far from damaging the Florida governor with the GOP electorate and middle-of-the-road voters, he awards DeSantis badges of honor.

Consider:

DeSantis relishes using the state to enforce his aggressive social agenda and has consistently plotted a hard-right course on issues from critical race theory to transgender rights.

For example, DeSantis sponsored and pushed through the legislature the “Stop the Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees (W.O.K.E.) Act” — or the Stop Woke Act for short — which now awaits his signature.

The legislation, Florida H.B. 7, bans teaching critical race theory that suggests that

A person, by virtue of his or her race, color, national origin, or sex is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously.

Cringe: Biden tells St. Patrick’s Day group, ‘I may be Irish, but I’m not stupid By Monica Showalter

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/03/biden_tells_st_patricks_day_group_i_may_be_irish_but_im_not_stupid.html

Is there anything that senile Joe Biden touches that doesn’t turn to something awful?

Here’s a report from the London Daily Telegraph:

Joe Biden opened a St Patrick’s Day speech at the White House by saying: “I may be Irish, but I’m not stupid.”

While some interpreted his remark as a self-deprecating joke, others suggested it could be seen as offensive to Ireland.

Mr Biden began his speech by saying: “Father, before I begin. Bless me, Father, for I’m about to sin. I, well, I just want you to know, I may be Irish, but I’m not stupid. I married Dominic Giacoppa’s daughter.”

The joke was greeted with laughter in the room, and there was no reaction from Irish officials.

The Telegraph also noted:

It was at least the third time Mr Biden has used the phrase.

The Critical Mass of My Righteous Fury James Allan

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/opinion-post/the-critical-mass-of-my-righteous-fury/

The West right now seems absorbed in pushing such idiocies as the finer intricacies of transgender and critical race theories, the claim that defunding the police will help poor blacks (yep, really), a sort of zero-risk, precautionary principle on steroids approach to life and to governing citizens, and the notion that indirect quotas are a good idea as long as you dress them up in the insidiously seductive language of ‘equity’ and ‘diversity’. That means you find some desirable jobs and educational opportunities and then insist there be a near 1:1 correlation between (1) the numbers in the wider society with particular reproductive organs or types of skin pigmentation or preferences in bed, and (2) the numbers from such groups filling these jobs or university places etc – so basically it’s a type of Marxist equality-of-outcome outlook dominating not just universities and the public service but now all big corporations too. 

Moreover, it’s an outlook that indirectly lowers diversity of viewpoint, because conservatives make autonomy and individual choice key. And because they don’t want to play the identity-politics game, they largely don’t get these jobs or places or promotions.  The result over time is a monolithic orthodoxy of outlook, on campus, in the boardroom — heck, even in the Liberal partyroom.  This destructive, navel-gazing wankery in the West is very depressing.  Of course, the rest of the world is busy showing us that the great British philosopher Thomas Hobbes was right.  Humans have, do and always will live in a dangerous world, one chock full of bullies, thugs, religious zealots and hard men who know only the lessons of the schoolyard (by which I mean the schoolyard when I was a kid at a pretty tough state school in Toronto, where bullying meant being beaten up, not today’s schoolyard where ‘bullying’ has been emptied of all content and appears to mean someone has said something that might reduce self-esteem a few points on the ‘might I possibly be offended?’ scale).

Will the Next J6 Trial Expose Another Justice Department Lie? Lies related to the whereabouts of Vice President Kamala Harris and former Vice President Mike Pence on January 6 are coming to the fore. By Julie Kelly

https://amgreatness.com/2022/03/17/will-the-next-j6-trial-expose-another-justice-department-lie/

Federal prosecutors last week scored a big victory after a Washington, D.C., jury took less than three hours to find Guy Reffitt, the first January 6 defendant to stand trial, guilty on all counts.

The Justice Department’s winning streak might be short-lived, however. Prosecutors will have a tougher task with the trial starting Monday for Couy Griffin, the “Cowboys for Trump” leader arrested for his minor and nonviolent involvement in the Capitol protest on January 6.

Griffin was the subject of my very first article over a year ago on the Justice Department’s abusive prosecution of January 6 protesters in which, coincidentally, I asked the rhetorical question, “Where is the outrage over America’s political prisoners?” as official Washington was in a tizzy over Russian President Vladimir Putin’s imprisonment of his country’s star dissident.

After the government charged Griffin on January 19, 2021 with two low-level trespassing misdemeanors, acting U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Michael Sherwin asked the court to keep Griffin detained pending trial. Sherwin, recall, bragged about a “shock and awe campaign” of January 6 arrests prior to Joe Biden’s inauguration. 

Relying mostly on remarks Griffin made during and after the protest, Sherwin claimed that the New Mexico county commissioner, who never entered the Capitol, was a danger to the community. “[The] defendant is an inflammatory provocateur and fabulist who engages in racist invective and propounds baseless conspiracy theories, including that Communist China stole the 2020 Presidential Election,” Sherwin’s office wrote in a motion seeking Griffin’s imprisonment. “He denies the lawful election of the president and as [sic] stated repeatedly that Biden will never be president.”

The Disturbing Details About Biden’s SCOTUS Pick Just Keep on Coming By Matt Margolis

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2022/03/17/the-disturbing-details-about-bidens-scotus-pick-just-keep-on-coming-n1567263

Joe Biden’s Supreme Court nominee, Ketanji Brown Jackson, was briefly hailed (by some) as a consensus nominee that even some Republicans could support.

I’m starting to think that Republican support will be much harder to get than Biden had hoped.

Last month, we learned that in 1996, Jackson wrote a “Note” for the Harvard Law Review arguing that convicted sex offenders were treated “unfairly” in the courts. Earlier this week, her past work advocating on behalf of Guantánamo Bay terrorists also became an issue that will undoubtedly come up during her confirmation hearings.

Completing the trifecta of disturbing aspects of Ketanji Brown Jackson’s radical record is her repeated embracing of champions of Critical Race Theory (CRT) in lectures and speeches and her belief that “microaggressions” are real.

If confirmed, Jackson won’t alter the court’s ideological balance, but that’s no reason for Republicans not to stand up for American values and vote “nay” on her confirmation.

According to the Daily Wire, “A review of a handful of Jackson’s lectures and speeches from the past seven years shows that the nominee has a strong appreciation for leading proponents of CRT, a progressive idea that holds in part: ‘racism is endemic to, rather than a deviation from, American norms,’ legal scholar Kimberle Crenshaw, who coined the term, wrote in 1989. While Jackson has avoided openly championing CRT, she has complimented its advocates and suggested that the progressive theory informs her legal analysis.”

Is Anyone Actually Fooled by Lia Thomas? By Charles C. W. Cooke *****

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/is-anyone-actually-fooled-by-lia-thomas/

At Swimming World magazine, John Lohn neatly sums up the farce:

“No, this title-winning effort in the 500-yard freestyle should be met with nothing less than a head shake, an eye roll or a shrug of the shoulders. Why? Because Lia Thomas’ victory is an insult to the biological women who raced against her. Against those who fought for Title IX and equal opportunities for female athletes. Against science, and the unmistakable physiological differences between the male and female sexes.”

From the Times:

ATLANTA — Lia Thomas, the transgender woman whose record-threatening times on the University of Pennsylvania’s swim team made her a star of college athletics and a symbol of the debate over sports and gender identity, won an N.C.A.A. championship in the 500-yard freestyle on Thursday.

Thomas, a fifth-year senior who arrived for the swimming championships in Atlanta as the top seed in the 500 and 200 freestyle races, completed the race in 4 minutes, 33.24 seconds, more than a second ahead of the runner-up.

I would like to know who is fooled by this. My suspicion is that almost nobody is fooled by this, but that almost everybody is scared to admit that in public.

However “Lia Thomas” might self-identify, he has the body of a man. This matters, because he is competing in a women’s sports league, and because there are profound biological differences between men and women in that sport, as in almost every other. The Times reports that Thomas “that left opponents far behind and put some collegiate records under new pressure.” Well, yeah. This is because Thomas is a man, and because Thomas’s “opponents” — two of whom were Olympians — are not.

Liz Peek: Manchin Turns Out To Be the Only Adult in the Room

https://www.nysun.com/article/manchin-turns-out-to-be-the-only-adult-in-the-room

Markets rose after Jay Powell finally emerged from his politically-induced coma and announced the Federal Reserve would raise interest rates by 25 basis points, with several more hikes to follow. He also told investors he would likely begin shrinking the Fed’s $9 trillion balance sheet as early as May.

Traders, it seems, welcomed certainty over the muddle that has been Fed policy for many months. Yet, most would agree that the central bank is entering a perilous phase; no one can remember a time when the Fed succeeded in pulling off a “soft landing.”

The yield curve is flattening, sentiment souring and forecasts of growth — including from the Fed — heading south. Many expect a recession in 2023. How did we get here? How did inflation deflate a healthy recovery?

President Biden has blamed Covid-induced worker shortages, supply chain issues, greedy companies, and Vladimir Putin for spiraling prices that are eating into Americans’ paychecks and trashing his approval ratings. Voters blame Mr. Biden, and investors point the finger at Chairman Powell.