Friday roundup

 The title of Dorian Linskey's recent essay at UnHerd, "Why We Love To Hate 'Imagine,'" certainly grabbed my attention since I've hated that song since it came out in 1971 and have had to strive not to let it ruin my perspective on the incredible body of work John Lennon, as a co-writer with Paul McCartney, created from 1958 to 1969. Linskey's essay concludes on a generous note, borne of his own yearning for a world at least somewhat less challenging to live in than this one. Still, one senses that he understands why the song is repugnant to the non-starry-eyed. 

The most valuable part of the piece is the context he provides for the song's creation:

It is annoying that Imagine has been used to caricature a painfully complicated man as a gentle saint, so it’s essential to understand where Lennon’s head was at when he recorded the song in his home studio in Tittenhurst Park, Berkshire in May 1971. His experience of Arthur Janov’s primal scream therapy had enabled him to let go of the “father-figure trip”, he said. “Facing up to reality instead of always looking for some kind of heaven.” At the same time, Lennon and his wife Yoko Ono were in the throes of political radicalisation.

In 1968, he had written the Beatles’ Revolution, which told the counterculture to steady on there and drop the pictures of Mao. By the end of 1970, he was telling Rolling Stone: “I really thought that love will save us all. But now I’m wearing a Chairman Mao badge, that’s where it’s at.” Shortly after an interview with Tariq Ali and Robin Blackburn for the Trotskyist magazine Red Mole in January 1971, he wrote a new song based on their conversation. Combining socialism and feminism with a Black Panther slogan, Power to the People flipped the ambivalent opening line of Revolution into a call to arms: “Say you want a revolution/ We better get on right away.” The US New Left magazine Ramparts republished the interview under the headline “The Working Class Hero Turns Red”.

Lennon saw Imagine as a different kind of revolution. The black comedian and activist Dick Gregory had given him a book of positive prayer, which Lennon explained to Playboy in 1980 like so: “If you can imagine a world at peace, with no denominations of religion — not without religion but without this my-God-is-bigger-than-your-God thing — then it can be true.” Imagine, therefore, is protest rewritten as a secular prayer. The idea chimed with Ono’s “instruction paintings”, collected in her 1964 book Grapefruit, each of which began “Imagine…” Lennon later said that Imagine should have been credited to Lennon/Ono because “it was right out of Grapefruit” and her name was finally added in 2017.

The Yoko factor turns a lot of people off. While a song like Working Class Hero draws its political power from Lennon’s distinctive flinty sarcasm, Imagine is driven by Ono’s utopian whimsicality. It’s of a piece with the couple’s subsequent billboard campaign, “War is over! If you want it.” The idea that you can simply will a better world into being can seem like impotent New Age guff but the New Left’s philosopher-in-chief Herbert Marcuse was then arguing that imagining radical change was the essential first step towards realising it. The critic Robert Christgau acutely observed that Imagine was “both a hymn for the Movement and a love song for his wife, celebrating a Yokoism and a Marcusianism simultaneously”.

David Hein, writing at The Imaginative Conservative, makes a compelling case for conferring the same status as an English-language impact maker upon the 1928 Book of Common Prayer as the Bible and the works of Shakespeare.

At Law & Liberty, Mark Pulliam offers "An Elegy for the Boy Scouts."

He invites the reader to appreciate the scope with which Scouting founder Baden-Powell was viewing the need for his movement:

Lord Baden-Powell did not write Scouting for Boys in 1908—the foundational text for the worldwide scouting movement—to increase social capital, but to improve the character of Britain’s male youth, which he found wanting.

Baden-Powell, a career military officer in imperial Britain and a hero of the Second Boer War (1899-1902), became concerned that British youth were succumbing to the vices of an industrial and urban society: passivity, sloth, smoking, drinking, poor hygiene, and a general decline in what he felt were essential masculine qualities. So, he began the scouting program to “save boys from the ills of modern life.”  A century later, Baden-Powell’s concerns are as vital as ever.

Baden-Powell felt that learning outdoor skills would make boys “strong and plucky,” and that self-reliance was essential to character building. Thus, his fascination for knot-tying, navigation, fire-building, camping, cooking, first aid, physical fitness, and surviving the wilderness—practical, quasi-military skills that are still a staple of the scouting program. All of this was in aid of improving boys’ character—making them productive citizens. Some of Baden-Powell’s concepts seem dated more than a century later, but many of them are timeless, including the motto he coined: Be prepared.

Like so many cultural institutions, the BSA felt the need to become market-driven in order to reach generations that followed in the wake of the 1960s upheaval:

The Boy Scout Law—with its embrace of religious faith (“reverence”) and heterosexuality (“morally straight”)—faced hostile headwinds in an increasingly secular and “tolerant” society. And, to be honest, in a youth culture increasingly sensitive to what is fashionable—a norm rigidly and relentlessly enforced by social media through the omnipresent smartphone—the Boy Scouts in recent decades was regarded as unacceptably “uncool.” In the 1950s and 1960s, peer pressure went in the opposite direction, reinforcing the attractiveness of scouting. Norman Rockwell’s cover illustration for the February 1965 issue of Boys’ Life depicts two parents proudly watching as their clean-cut son—standing at attention in a crisply-pressed uniform—receives his Eagle medal. Alas, times change. As the BSA’s membership began to decline, the national organization tried to remain “relevant,” adapting to America’s abrupt cultural and demographic shifts with responses that were sometimes clumsy and even counter-productive.

After decades of litigation brought by atheists and homosexuals regarding the BSA’s exclusionary membership requirements—which were upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in the landmark case Boy Scouts of America v. Dale (2000) as the exercise of the BSA’s First Amendment rights—the BSA reversed itself by allowing gay youths full participation in 2014 and allowing openly gay adults as leaders in 2015. Instead of stemming BSA’s membership decline, the national leadership’s acquiescence to atheists and homosexuals—some believe due to pressure from major corporations whose financial patronage had become indispensable to the organization’s operation—only accelerated it.

He discusses the ill will between the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts stemming from the BSA's opening its membership to girls, as well as the BSA hiring a diversity officer.

How does the BSA come back from a decline from a 1972 peak membership of 6.5 million to  present figure of 762,000?

Jonathan Kay, writing at Quilette, says that belief that there is systemic racism in 2021 America amounts to a faith that looks in many ways like religious faith. Toward the end, he coins a great term, "plurality of the unwell," to examine how this spread has so permeated national life:

But then there is the Plurality of the Unwell. Those who are the loudest and most desperate and dangerous. Those behind the new discourse. Those who corner or lobby the people who make the decisions—the CEOs, university presidents, studio chiefs and so on—to pretend that there is a ghost in the machine. That we are being orchestrated by an unverifiable hate. That it is their role, their mandate, to overthrow the veil of false consciousness and lead us to the light. These people, one suspects, are true believers. Their faith is real, but they do not realize it is faith. They would deny vehemently that it is anything of the kind. They believe that they simply know what the old, the dumb, the wicked cannot know. That we cannot make any meaningful distinction between Jim Crow America and America right now. That all of the so-called progress of the past half-century is a distraction and a farce. That we are trapped inside a vast web of manipulations that must be decimated, loudly and with an unbelievable fervor.

At American Purpose, Frank J. DiStefano says that history can be a great guide regarding how those truly motivated could start a new political party with the viability that the Republicans and Democrats once had. 

For a read that will scare the pants off ya, check out Damon Linker's essay in The Week entitled"The Intellectual Right Contemplates an 'American Caesar.'" Actual conservatives who have succeeded in staying away from what is depicted here will get a fresh sense of the wilderness they inhabit. People with nutty, dangerous, and unConstitutional ideas have vastly more influence at the moment.

Rod Dreher is not the first observer to ask "'What Is Happening To America?'" but his contribution to the conversation is important. 

Nicole Russell at the Washington Examiner lays out just what's in the infrastructure bill:

Some of us have been reading the bill. It’s a shining example of government spending gone wrong. A friend who tweets anonymously — and who isn’t in politics or journalism but has made a habit of poring over these bills — has been raising the alarm. Turns out, the bill is chock-full of pork, “equity” oriented grants, and millions of dollars of “hard” infrastructure that seems neither necessary nor similar to infrastructure.

Here are a few more examples of things in the infrastructure bill:

• $50 million for Central Utah Project Completion
• $5 billion for low/zero emissions school buses
• $2.5 billion for a carbon storage commercialization program
• $21.5 billion for clean energy demonstrations
• $75 million for the Denali commission
• $14.2 billion for the Federal Communications Commission
• $3.4 billion for the Federal Buildings Fund
• $3.5 billion for Indian Health Service

The descriptions of these payouts — I mean, grants — are ludicrous: $250 million for reducing truck emissions at ports. A $500 million grant for the Healthy Streets Program allows cities to "provide funding to deploy cool and porous pavements and expand tree cover to mitigate urban heat islands, improve air quality, and reduce flood risks.”

The bill includes $75 million for the Open Challenge and Research Proposal pilot program, which provides grants for proposals to “research needs or challenges identified or determined as important by the Secretary.” And it proposes a “federal system funding alternative advisory board” that must appoint “advocacy groups focused on equity,” among other things.

Quinnipiac poll has some really ugly stats for Andrew Cuomo.  

 

  

 

Andrew Cuomo

  Maybe there's a way for him to skate past his current troubles. He seems determined to do so. I'd say the smart money, however, is on preparations for the most graceful resignation he can pull off - followed by an avalanche of legal woes.

Before we get to the litany of misdeeds causing his present difficulties, let's put them in a broader context.

He's been instrumental in pushing the Democrat party leftward his entire career. He spent considerable time at the Department of Housing and Urban Development - a cabinet-level body that has done much to foment federal intrusion into American life in its unnecessary 55-year existence - first as assistant secretary for "community planning and development" and then as overall head.

As governor, he spearheaded New York's enactment of a law that made the state the sixth in the nation to completely upend the definition of marriage commonly recognized by the entire human race for thousands of years. He signed the most stringent gun control law in the nation, expanded Medicaid under the "Affordable" Care Act and increased the minimum wage to $15 an hour. 

In his personal life, he was married to a daughter of Bobby and Ethel Kennedy for 15 years and then had a "domestic partner" until 2019.

Is it gratuitous of me to make a point of setting the table with his leftie bona fides? After all, there have been right-leaning elected officials who have landed in hot water.

I think not. Cuomo's whole career has been built on virtue signaling. He's cared, doncha know, about the homeless, those in shoddy public housing, people with exotic sex lives who want to be legally recognized as spouse and spouse, those with concurrent health and financial issues, victims of gun violence and generally anybody who qualifies as beleaguered by life's vicissitudes. 

And it's tempting to permit oneself to be inured to his being beset by sexual-harassment charges. After all, we've seen everybody from Harvey Weinstein to Charley Rose to Garrison Keillor, for goodness sake - along with a slew of guys at Fox News, right up to the late Roger Ailes - fall hard when their ugly ways have come to light. 

But he is a sitting governor with a loud mouth and an air of self-righteousness.

And three women who are pretty adamant that he harassed them have come forward. There's photographic documentation of the wedding-reception situation. (Check out Ms. Ruch's facial expression.) 

What Charlotte Bennett had to say to CBS anchor Norah O'Donnell is pretty detailed and in a pretty damn sordid way:

"He is a textbook abuser. He lets his temper and his anger rule the office, but he was very sweet to me for a year in the hope that maybe one day when he came onto me I would think we were friends or that it was appropriate or that it was okay," Bennett said.

Bennett said their professional relationship took a turn on May 15 when she alleges the governor started asking her about her love life and became fixated, repeating over and over again her history as a sexual assault survivor. 

"I think it's really strategic. I think abusers look for vulnerabilities, previous traumas, the idea that maybe I'm more willing to accept behavior because I have a history of sexual violence. Perhaps I'm not as confident in myself because of my history," she said.

Bennett said she thinks Cuomo was grooming her and says he crossed a line on June 5. 

"He wanted a girlfriend. When he said he was lonely, I mentioned that his daughters had been around. And he also rejected that and said, "Yeah, I love my-- I love my daughters, but that's-- I want a girlfriend.'" Bennett said.

She said he asked whether she'd ever been with an older man. These questions made Bennett feel deeply uncomfortable.

"I thought he's trying to sleep with me. The governor's trying to sleep with me. And I'm deeply uncomfortable and I have to get out of this room as soon as possible," Bennett said.

"And to be clear, what made you think that he was trying to sleep with you?" O'Donnell asked.

"Without explicitly saying it, he implied to me that I was old enough for him and he was lonely," Bennett replied.

Bennett said that as she left work on June 5, she was trying not to cry and assumed she could no longer work for him.

"I'm not doing that again. I'm not engaging in that conversation or any other conversation. I'm not putting myself in a position where he physically comes onto me. It stops here. That's it," she said.

But Bennett said she was called back into the office on Saturday, June 6 and never talked publicly about the event. She said at one point on that Saturday she was the only employee working with the governor in his private office.

"I was terrified. I was shaking. I thought any moment something can happen and I have no power here," she said.

"And what happens when you're with the governor?"  O'Donnell asked.

"He asked me a few questions about how to use his iPhone and then sends me back to wait and then finally, he calls me in and he asks if I found him a girlfriend yet," Bennett said. 

"He asks you again?" O'Donnell said. "Yes. I say, 'Not yet.' I said I was working on it," Bennett replied.

His public statement about this is pretty damn lame:

"At work sometimes I think I am being playful and make jokes that I think are funny. I do, on occasion, tease people in what I think is a good-natured way. I do it in public and in private. You have seen me do it at briefings hundreds of times," he said. "I have teased people about their personal lives, their relationships, about getting married or not getting married. I mean no offense and only attempt to add some levity and banter to what is a very serious business."

Now, at least as serious as the sum total of this is, there's the recent further substantiation that his administration cooked the numbers for nursing-home COVID deaths:

Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s health department confirmed reports late Thursday that members of his COVID-19 task force altered a state Health Department report to omit the full number of nursing home patients killed by the coronavirus, but insisted the changes were made because of concerns about the data’s accuracy.

The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, citing documents and people with knowledge of the administration’s internal discussions, reported that aides including secretary to the governor Melissa DeRosa pushed state health officials to edit the July report so it counted only residents who died inside long-term care facilities, and not those who became ill there and later died at a hospital.

Both the WSJ and the Times put the decision-making onus on officials just below the governor's level of authority, but - come on.

It's made the Dems in the state legislature skittish enough that they've scaled back his emergency powers considerably:

The New York State Senate passed a bill to repeal Gov. Andrew Cuomo's expanded emergency executive powers Friday. 

The vote split straight down the party lines, with all 20 Republican senators saying the bill does not go far enough to curtail Cuomo's power and voting against it. 

"Today, under this new legislation the governor will no longer be able to issue any new directives, period," said Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins. "In light of recent events, however, it is clear that we need to move toward a system of increased oversight, review and verification between the Legislature and the executive branch, and also limit the powers granted to the governor."

The State Assembly is still in session and is expected to pass the same bill later Friday.

One more bit of context: The governor has a track record, substantiated by the claims of both Democrats and Republicans as a screaming hothead.  

My sense is that his career is close to flatlining. 

 

 

 

Unforced errors and political implosions

 The fact of the matter is that post-America's current state of polarization is not just a tug of war between left and right, or even a three-way struggle, behind left, right and Trumpism. The more basic plight of human beings generally - the inability to get out of their own way - is an element that's had a lot of influence on events lately.

The currently popular way of framing the Republican party's role in this scenario is that it is weakened in such a tug of war by the fact that, while Trumpism is decidedly ascendant within the GOP, an opposition, represented by the likes of Ben Sasse, Adam Kinzinger, Peter Meijer, Liz Cheney and Larry Hogan, refuses to concede any kind of finality regarding the outcome of the standoff. It's a largely accurate depiction, but one more factor has to be considered: jaw-droppingly stupid decisions by various Trumpists that are immediately recognized as horrible optics by the general public. The antics of Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor-Greene certainly qualify, but this week Senator Ted Cruz of Texas blew their doors off.

His Cancun fiasco was such an egregious unforced error as to be surreal. The Texas Senator is not a stupid man. He was recognized by faculty and fellow students alike at Harvard Law School as a formidable intellect. His command of the Constitution is widely recognized. While his attempts eight or nine years ago to overturn the Affordable Care Act were arguably quixotic to the point of being ill-advised, they were based on the principle that the free market and not government should address glitches in the production and consumption of health care. The list he put forth when running for president in 2016 of departments and agencies he'd target for dismantling was likewise bold to the point of improbability, but it was born of principle. 

Like many a Republican politician, he's displayed a character-level deterioration during the Trump years. Still, nothing could have prepared anyone for the stunning lapse of basic judgement he exhibited this week. Every aspect of it - not sticking around his home state to coordinate relief efforts and engage in other concrete manifestations of compassion, leaving the country during a pandemic, blaming his daughters for the decision to take off for Cancun, the fancy resort that was his destination, and leaving his pet poodle alone in a freezing house - was a public-relations nightmare. 

It mystifies. 

Then again, so does the entire cooking-the-nursing-home-numbers scandal in which New York governor Andrew Cuomo is embroiled. It has opened a floodgate of revelations about his personal conduct while in office that will be daunting, to say the least, to recover from. It brings out into the harsh light of day the mutual animosity between him and New York City mayor Bill DeBlasio:

Threatening Queens Assemblymember Ron Kim (D) sounds like something New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) would do, according to New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio (D).

The New York mayor spoke to MSNBC's Morning Joe on Thursday after Kim alleged that Cuomo called him to "threaten my career" amid a growing scandal involving the state's handling of information on COVID-19 deaths in nursing homes. De Blasio, who has often clashed with Cuomo, expressed support for Kim on MSNBC.

"That's classic Andrew Cuomo," de Blasio said. "A lot of people in New York State have received those phone calls. The bullying is nothing new."

And it's a long-standing modus operandi:

Such is life on the wrong side of Cuomo, whose credo for those who stand in his path was coined early in his first term by one of their own: “We operate on two speeds here: Get along, and kill," Steve Cohen, then Cuomo’s top aide, said in an exchange first reported by the Connecticut Post in 2011.

The characterization, which came during a contentious discussion with former Connecticut Gov. Dan Malloy’s team, has come to define the Queens native’s modus operandi to the point of becoming a cliché in New York political circles. (POLITICO on Thursday confirmed the 2011 exchange with multiple people around Malloy at the time.)

The proverb has even become something akin to a badge of honor for some Cuomo staffers in the years since, cocksure in their belief of their boss' singular ability to bend the state government apparatus to fulfill his vision of Democratic politics.

 On the other side of the continent, California governor Gavin Newsom has done his best to contend for the prize of Most Astoundingly Foolish Move By A Democrat With A Formerly Promising Future, with last November's maskless lunch at The French Laundry, a Napa Valley restaurant that is as upscale as it gets. It has resulted in a recall effort that has a real chance of succeeding.

It's probably best advised not to be too hasty about using commonalities among these situations to draw conclusions, but it does seem that ambition is clearly at play in all of them. The brass ring in politics must have the power to skew one's judgement in a particularly powerful way. 

How the moves on the part of all these figures could have been avoided will haunt them and their supporters in that distinctive way that anyone living with deep regret knows all about. One more five-minute pause before acting, one more conversation with a trusted confidant who is permitted to offer an opposing viewpoint, could well have changed the trajectory of personal fate and, indeed, history. 

We see, once again, that fallibility is baked into who we are as human creatures. Resisting its predominance in our psyches is no easy task, and probably cannot be done without reliance on a presence wholly other than ourselves, or any person around us. 

These people probably know that in the core of their beings and would give anything to turn back the clock and give that quiet presence its proper heed. 

 

The Pfizer vaccine

 First of all, it's excellent news:

Pfizer Inc. said Monday that its COVID-19 vaccine may be a remarkable 90% effective, based on early and incomplete test results that nevertheless brought a big burst of optimism to a world desperate for the means to finally bring the catastrophic outbreak under control.

The announcement came less than a week after an election seen as a referendum on President Donald Trump’s handling of the scourge, which has killed more than 1.2 million people worldwide, including almost a quarter-million in the United States alone.

“We’re in a position potentially to be able to offer some hope,” Dr. Bill Gruber, Pfizer’s senior vice president of clinical development, told The Associated Press. “We’re very encouraged.”

Pfizer, which is developing the vaccine with its German partner BioNTech, now is on track to apply later this month for emergency-use approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, once it has the necessary safety information in hand. 

Even if all goes well, authorities have stressed it is unlikely any vaccine will arrive much before the end of the year, and the limited initial supplies will be rationed.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the U.S. government’s top infectious-disease expert, said the results suggesting 90% effectiveness are “just extraordinary,” adding: “Not very many people expected it would be as high as that.”

Health care advisor to the British government Sir John Bell floats a wonderful scenario:

In comments that will come as a massive relief amid the coronavirus crisis, Sir John Bell said that other vaccines were now likely to become available in the near future. ‘I am really delighted with this result – it shows that you can make a vaccine against this little critter. 90% is an amazing level of efficacy,’ he told BBC Radio 4’s The World at One. Asked if people could look forward to a return to normal life by the spring, Sir John, who advises the government, replied: ‘Yes, yes, yes. I am probably the first guy to say that but I will say that with some confidence.

Cheerleading for the Very Stable Genius all the way to the bitter end, Vice President Pence tries to glom on to Pfizer's achievement:

Conversation

Mike Pence

@Mike_Pence

HUGE NEWS: Thanks to the public-private partnership forged by President 

@realDonaldTrump

, 

@pfizer

 announced its Coronavirus Vaccine trial is EFFECTIVE, preventing infection in 90% of its volunteers.

Only problem: Pfizer wasn't part of Operation Warp Speed. The company developed the vaccine on its own:

“We were never part of the Warp Speed. We have never taken any money from the U.S. government, or from anyone,” Kathrin Jansen, the company’s vice president for vaccine research, told the Times.

Pfizer did ink a deal with the feds for large-scale production and nationwide delivery of 100 million doses once it had a vaccine, but that's a different critter. 

On the other hand, New York governor Andrew Cuomo has to be a you-know-what about the news because - horror of horrors - the plan is for the private sector (gasp!) to handle the distribution. He also has to cast aspersions on the FDA and CDC just because it's still the Trump era: 

“The good news is the Pfizer tests look good and we’ll have a vaccine shortly. The bad news is that it’s about two months before Joe Biden takes over and that means this administration is going to be implementing a vaccine plan,” Cuomo told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos on Good Morning America. “The Trump Administration is rolling out the vaccination plan and I believe it’s flawed. I believe it learns nothing from the past.”

According to the governor, the administration’s plan will be ineffective because it will be implemented through the private sector.

“They’re going to take this vaccine and they’re going to go through the private mechanism. Through hospitals, through drug market chains, et cetera. That’s going to be slow and that’s going to bypass the communities that we call health care deserts,” Cuomo said. “If you don’t have a Rite Aid or a CVS then you’re in trouble and that’s what happened the first time with Covid.”

Cuomo has previously stated he would be skeptical of a vaccine approved by the Food and Drug Administration during Trump’s tenure.

“What I said I’m going to do in New York is we’re going to put together our own group of doctors and medical experts to review the vaccine and the efficacy and the protocol, and if they say it’s safe, I’ll go to the people of New York and I will say it’s safe with that credibility,” Cuomo said in mid-October. “But I believe, all across the country, you are going to need someone other than this FDA and this CDC saying it’s safe.”

Listen up, everybody: researchers at Pfizer and BioNtech came up with this vaccine. Knock off the vulgar attempts to make your tribe the hero of the story. 

 

 

 

The VSG and and Governor Cuomo each say some stupid things that pit municipalities and the federal government against each other

 The Very Stable Genius can perhaps provide us with a legal definition of "anarchist jurisdictions":

President Trump is ordering the federal government to begin the process of defunding New York City and three other cities where officials allowed “lawless” protests and cut police budgets amid rising violent crime, The Post can exclusively reveal.

Trump on Wednesday signed a five-page memo ordering all federal agencies to send reports to the White House Office of Management and Budget that detail funds that can be redirected.

New York City, Washington, DC, Seattle and Portland are initial targets as Trump makes “law and order” a centerpiece of his re-election campaign after months of unrest and violence following the May killing of George Floyd by Minnesota police.

“My Administration will not allow Federal tax dollars to fund cities that allow themselves to deteriorate into lawless zones,” Trump says in the memo, which twice mentions New York Mayor Bill de Blasio by name.

“To ensure that Federal funds are neither unduly wasted nor spent in a manner that directly violates our Government’s promise to protect life, liberty, and property, it is imperative that the Federal Government review the use of Federal funds by jurisdictions that permit anarchy, violence, and destruction in America’s cities.”

Federal agencies must detail “all Federal funds provided to Seattle, Portland, New York City, Washington, D.C.” Also, within 14 days, Attorney General Bill Barr must develop a list of “anarchist jurisdictions” that “permitted violence and the destruction of property to persist and have refused to undertake reasonable measures” to restore order. The memo does not require Barr to include the four cities, possibly for legal reasons.

The memo instructs White House budget director Russ Vought to issue guidance in 30 days from Wednesday “to the heads of agencies on restricting eligibility of or otherwise disfavoring, to the maximum extent permitted by law, anarchist jurisdictions in the receipt of Federal grants.”

New York governor Andrew Cuomo decided to go one level lower in response:

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo on Wednesday all but threatened President Trump’s safety if he returns to New York City in a rant responding to an exclusive story by The Post that Trump is looking to pull federal funds from “lawless” cities including New York.

Cuomo called an emergency press briefing within a half-hour on Wednesday night to tear into Trump for the order, which cites New York’s rising murder rate and defunding of the NYPD.

“He better have an army if he thinks he’s gonna walk down the street in New York. New Yorkers don’t want to have anything to do with him,” the Democrat said, all but threatening the commander-in-chief.

But Cuomo — who, like Trump, hails from Queens — wasn’t done. “He can’t have enough bodyguards to walk through New York City, people don’t want to have anything to do with him.”

We're not getting any closer to unicorns, rainbows, tofu and sprouts out there in post-America as the long, hot summer of 2020 prepares to give way to the chill of autumn.