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. 

 

 

 

Biden's pandemic-relief / economic stimulus bill: an opening gambit that indicates how Democrats intend to jump into this next era

 $1.9 trillion. Whew! That's s lot of addition to the debt and deficit.

Is all of it really related to to addressing the virus and attendant economic fallout?

Well, certainly the parts having to do with vaccination, testing and contract tracing self-evidently are.

An argument can be made for aid to state and local governments. States and municipalities generally are obligated by law to keep their governments in the black, and in this past year, that's resulted in a lot of layoffs and curtailing of services.

Tax credit for children? Again, a case can be made. 

Another big check - $1400 per person - to everybody that has received a $600 check recently? Now we get a little questionable. It's another band-aid at best. It does nothing on the structural level, which is where resources need to be applied. 

But then we get into the stuff that has the strong odor of wanting to permanently impose a new degree of statism on the nation under the guise of doing something about the current crisis. Expansion of child-care subsidies and family-leave benefits look primarily to be ways to double down on social engineering. The Left has long wanted to use the heavy hand of government to lessen the primacy of the family unit in our society and get the kiddies out of the home at the earliest possible age. And child-care subsidies amount to making Citizen A foot the bill for Citizen B's choices in life. 

Of course, the retort to that is, and has been for some time, "But families can't make it on one income anymore!" Is that universally true? It seems to me to be laden with assumptions about how much leeway a husband and wife don't have about setting household budget priorities. 

And family-leave policy is, at its root, using the coercive power of government to make private organizations conduct operations in a manner not necessarily of their own choosing. Certainly, any business that has a great staff member who turns up with a work-home balance challenge engendered by the arrival of a new family member (or the illness of a family member) is going to be motivated accommodate that in order to retain that person's contribution to the company. But that ought to be thought out and agreed upon between the business and the employee.

Which gets us to the most egregious item in Biden's grab-bag of goodies: an increase in the federal minimum wage to $15 / hour.

Longtime LITD readers know that the minimum wage is a major burr in my saddle.

To reiterate, there are at least three reasons it's bad and wrong:

1. It is government telling a private organization how to conduct its operations.
2. It distorts the market value of an hour's worth of labor
3. It elbows the most economically vulnerably among us - minority youth - out of the labor market. 

You can always find some wiseacre who will cite certain sectors in certain cities in which a hike in the minimum wage has not had a big detrimental effect. Debating such folks can take one down a rabbit hole. Various studies come to different conclusions, and often hedge at that, given all the variables involved. 

Plus, anecdotal evidence of restaurant, coffee shop and bookstore owners in progressive areas who had to lay off staff and/or cut hours and/or close abounds.

The CBO has chimed in on the big picture of what kind of effect such a hike would have:

 The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that even gradually raising the minimum wage to $15 by 2025 in a growing economy would likely kill 1.3 million jobs, and perhaps as many as 3.7 million. Imposing a drastic minimum wage increase on small businesses that are already struggling to stay afloat during a recession is especially absurd. Moreover, forcing restaurants, which are failing at record rates, to raise their own tipped minimum wage by 600 percent is economic malpractice. Perhaps high-cost cities like New York City and San Francisco can afford a much higher minimum wage, but other parts of America with lower incomes and prices will not be able to absorb this policy. It has no business in a relief package.

So we can begin to see the broad contours of how confident Dems are that they can at least float a pretty aggressively leftist initiative right out of the gate.

The Senate, tied as it is, is not going to sign on to this in its present form.

But be prepared for howls about heartlessness when conservatives object to the statist stuff. 

One favorable aspect of the scenario is that, with Trump out of the way, Congressional righties can articulate the case for their position in a coherent manner, based on principles and not on good or bad "deals."

Let's hope they're up to it.

The COVID relief bill has lots of silly stuff in it, and precious little actual relief

 This is what we get for waiting months and months for Capitol Hill knuckleheads to respond in real time to a pandemic that has wreaked economic havoc on the nation.

Government reacts to straightforward, elegantly simple moves the way a vampire reacts to garlic. 

What Pelosi, Mcconnell et al have come up with is 5,593 pages long. 

Here are the provisions dealing with what the damn thing is supposed to deal with:

The bill contains $600 stimulus checks for most Americans with another $600 per child, a $300 weekly unemployment supplement and $284.4 billion in forgivable small-business Paycheck Protection Program loans.

The stimulus checks are means-tested, with people earning more than $75,000 — or $150,000 per married couple filing jointly — getting less money, and people earning over $95,000 getting nothing.

It could have been considerably shorter and less expensive had they not included funds for a museum to offer programming about women, a section dealing with administering painkillers to race horses, "gender programs" in Pakistan, assistance for Tibetan refugees, new penalties for unauthorized streaming of copyrighted content, creating a commission that will educated consumers about proper storage of fuels, and $440 million for the operation, maintenance and security of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. 

Now, the two most recent posts here at LITD have had to do with how the Democrats are once again, with renewed vigor, putting climate stuff front and center among their areas of policy focus. 

That crud shows up in this behemoth plenteously: 

Chief among some of the massive bits of hot garbage that are completely unrelated to the pandemic were a raft of provisions dealing with climate change. Yes… I know. The Associated Press highlights some of these new laws that were never mentioned in public while the bill was being negotiated but were somehow crammed down everyone’s throats in the interest of looking like they were doing something about pandemic relief. 

The energy and climate provisions, supported by lawmakers from both parties, were hailed as the most significant climate change law in at least a decade.

“Republicans and Democrats are working together to protect the environment through innovation,” said Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.

“This historic agreement includes three separate pieces of legislation that will significantly reduce greenhouse gases,″ Barrasso said, citing measures that promote technologies to “capture” and store carbon dioxide produced by power and manufacturing plants; reduce diesel emissions in buses and other vehicles; and authorize a 15-year reduction of hydrofluorocarbons, or HFCs, that are used in everything from cars to air conditioners. HFCs are considered a major driver of global warming and are being targeted worldwide.

You’re going to see the phrases “promoting technologies” and “creating jobs” quite often in that portion of the bill. The technologies in question involve carbon capture, emission reduction and replacements for the hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) used as coolants in air conditioning and refrigeration systems, among other things.

You see, that’s how they like to describe such “initiatives” to put a pleasant spin on them. A better translation of those passages would be to say that taxpayer money will be shoveled into “green energy” and carbon reduction companies who will ostensibly be working to achieve those goals while (just coincidentally) making a ton of money for a small number of people. A closer look into how those people donate to political campaigns and focus their job creation on the states represented by the politicians pushing these plans will no doubt be very instructive.

Cynical wisecracks about Congress being ineffectual and out of touch go back to Mark Twain. It was a staple of Will Rogers's material. 

But this strikes me as a new level of absence of seriousness. At a juncture like our present one in post-America, is it really that difficult for our national legislators to filter out concerns other than the public-health crisis gripping the nation and address it?

Both of the elected branches of our federal government are complete embarrassments. 

 

Saturday roundup

 Focus on the Family's Glenn T. Stanton, writing at Quillette, says, "Knock off the climate alarmism and start making more babies": 

How is the world going to end? Polls consistently show that most believe the cause will be environmental. “Climate anxiety” has reached such a fevered pitch among young people across the globe that the Lancet recently issued a special “call to action” to help with the problem. Clinicians have even created “climate anxiety scales” to measure the runaway angst spreading through our children, and the rest of us.

But what if the best, emerging science is actually telling us quite firmly that such fears are not only deeply misplaced, but that the most realistic cause of our collective human demise is likely the precise opposite of what most assume? This is the conclusion of a very interesting body of highly sophisticated and inter-disciplinary research. The greatest threat to humanity’s future is certainly not too many people consuming too many limited natural resources, but rather too few people giving birth to the new humans who will continue the creative work of making the world a better, more hospitable place through technological innovation. Data released this summer indicates the beginning of the end of humanity can be glimpsed from where we now stand. That end is a dramatic population bust that will nosedive toward an empty planet. New research places the beginning of that turn at about 30 years from today.

This means that Thomas Robert Malthus, and his many influential disciples, had it precisely wrong. More people are not only not the problem, but a growing population is the very answer to a more humane future in which more people are living better, healthier, longer lives than they ever have in our race’s tumultuously dynamic history.

Pop voices like those of Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Swedish teenage activist Greta Thunberg and countless Hollywood celebrities have warned that unless drastic action is taken at once, we face irrevocable global catastrophe. The Climate Clock in Manhattan’s Union Square pegs the start of the Earth’s deadline at a little more than seven years from today. But this is not science. The most sophisticated examination considering the Earth’s eco-deadline was just published in August in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution. Drawing upon 36 meta-analyses, involving more than 4,600 individual studies spanning the last 45 years, nine ecologists, working from universities in Germany, France, Ireland, and Finland, explain that the empirical data simply does not permit the determination of any kind of environmental dooms date, or “thresholds” as scientists call them.

These scholars state frankly: “We lack systematic quantitative evidence as to whether empirical data allow definition of such thresholds” and “our results thus question the pervasive presence of threshold concepts” found in environmental politics and policy today. They explain that natural bio-systems are so dynamic—ever evolving and adapting over the long-term—that determining longevity timeframes is impossible. Talk of a ticking eco-clock is simply dogma. 

The American Enterprise Institute's Frederic Hess, writing at The Hill, says contemporary public-school civics education needs more solid grounding in foundational principles and less wokeness:

Civic education today tends to focus on voting, protest, and the need to combat “injustice.” This is all to the good. But it leaves little room for stodgy notions of obligation, complexity, or the importance of respecting processes even when you don’t like the results.

Indeed, in a national survey of social studies teachers, the RAND Corporation found that barely half think it's essential that students understand concepts like federalism, separation of powers, and checks and balances, and a third don’t think it’s essential that students embrace civic responsibilities like voting and jury duty.

As a one-time high school civics teacher, I firmly believe that it’s vital to promote democratic participation. The past few weeks, though, have been a stark reminder that democratic government is about much more than who wins. It’s also about respect for rules, magnanimity, patience, and a bevy of other old-fashioned values.

There would be a lot of competition for the title of World's Most Ate-Up Trumpist, but Eric Metaxas would surely be a top contender. It gives Rod Dreher, writing at The American Conservative, no pleasure to say so, but he feels it's important to point it out:

Before I get started here, let me say clearly that Eric Metaxas has been a friend for over 20 years. He is a dear man, very kind and sincere, and loves God with all his heart. Nothing I say here should be interpreted as a personal attack upon him. I am criticizing his words and his opinions, which, as a Christian and as a conservative, alarm me greatly. The fact that Eric is not a cynic, that I have every confidence that he 100 percent believes what he says, only intensifies the tragedy. I would prefer not to write about Eric’s views, out of respect for our friendship. But I cannot stand to see what is happening to what is broadly my tribe, without saying something. He is influential, and he speaks not only to a lot of people, but for them as well.

To start, and for readers who haven’t been following me: I am an Orthodox Christian and a political conservative (registered as an Independent). I did not vote for Joe Biden, and have never associated myself with Never Trump. I have praised Trump when he has done things of which I have approved, and I have criticized him when I thought he deserved it. I don’t “hate” Donald Trump, nor do I hate people who voted for him. I dread the Biden presidency, but I believe the man won the race. I think it’s possible that there was election fraud in some places in this big country of ours, but based on Trump’s performance in court since election day, I don’t believe that it is provable, if it existed at all.

Metaxas was a guest on Charlie Kirk's podcast recently and Dreher found their conversation jaw-droppingly appalling:

In characterizing the election result, it is hard to be more lurid than Eric in this interview. He believes that Donald Trump won the election “by a landslide” (in fact, Biden won 7 million more votes than Trump, and even if Trump had won the Electoral College vote, it would have been close, not anything like a landslide).

“It’s like stealing the heart and soul of America. It’s like holding a rusty knife to the throat of Lady Liberty,” Eric says, of the election.”

“You might as well spit on the grave of George Washington,” he says.

“This is evil,” he says. And: “It’s like somebody has been raped or murdered. … This is like that times a thousand.”

This. Is. Hysterical. But there’s more.

“This is trying to kill the American people. This is everything.” And he says to believe otherwise is listening to “the voice of the Devil.”

Think about that. An Evangelical broadcaster is saying that Donald Trump’s election loss is a thousand times worse than rape and murder, equivalent to the murder of a nation. And if you don’t believe it? You are demonized.

 

It gets wilder:

Well, here’s news: Eric Metaxas doesn’t care what the courts have said. In a clip that starts right here, he says,

“So who cares what I can prove in the courts? This is right. This happened, and I am going to do anything I can to uncover this horror, this evil.”

Evidence, or the lack of it, does not matter. He is declaring as a matter of faith that Donald Trump won the election. How can you argue with that? You can’t. It is a statement of faith.

So, when he talks about doing “anything” he can to fight this thing that is a thousand times worse than rape and murder, what does he mean? Quote:

“We need to fight to the death, to the last drop of blood, because it’s worth it.”

There is no way around it, and it grieves me to say it: Eric Metaxas is calling for violent bloodshed to defend Donald Trump’s presidency, and he doesn’t care that Trump’s lawyers have not been able to prove in court that Trump had the election stolen from him. He told Charlie Kirk that he is willing to kill or be killed for a political cause for which there is not enough evidence to advance a court case, even among friendly judges.

This is fanaticism. But according to Eric, to disagree with him is to be under the sway of the Devil. Actual quotes:

“This is sacred. … Every American should say I really don’t care what it takes, we will not let this happen in America.”

“The fact that Republicans would shrug, it’s just despicable, it’s very clarifying, and I just believe God is in this, what can I say?”

“I still feel that those of us who know this is massive fraud, we have no choice but to fight.”

He knows because … he just knows, is all. God is in it, after all. It’s holy war. He says too:

“Everything’s at stake. America’s at stake.”

“If we don’t get our people in … we go over the cliff, and we don’t come back.”

If you really believed that, then of course you would be willing to kill and be killed for the cause. My God.

Eric says that America is God’s instrument, one that he has used to spread “liberty” around the globe. The Christians of Iraq could not be reached for comment, most of them dead or displaced as the result of America’s unjustified invasion of that country, but what are facts to a Christian nationalist who just knows things. He says “I believe it is God’s will that we would continue to do that, at an increased level, for a long time… .”  Manifest destiny, I guess.

At this point in the interview, Kirk asks Metaxas — who has, recall, just called for fighting to the death to defend Trump’s sacred case — where he thinks Trump’s legal strategy stands. Know what Eric says?

“I am thrilled to be too ignorant of the details to answer that question in any substantive way.” 

I’m not kidding. Click on that link to see and hear it for yourself. He says that the courts are irrelevant, that America is in the crucible, that we have a fight to the death on our hands, and that anybody who disagrees is no better than Germans who stood by and let Hitler come to power … but he cannot give even one detail of the actual court cases, and is “thrilled” to be ignorant of the cause for which he is urging people to shed blood and die! 

AOC did the righteous-indignation schtick after Senator Mike Lee explained why her proposal for demographics-based history museums is a toxic idea:

On Thursday Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) blocked a bill that would approve two proposed Smithsonian museums, the National Museum of the American Latino and the American Women’s History Museum. The bill, presented on a bipartisan basis by Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) and Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), already unanimously passed the House. But, Sen. Lee believes the museums would "further divide an already divided nation."

"My objection to the creation of a new Smithsonian museum or series of museums based on group identity, what Theodore Roosevelt called hyphenated Americanism, is not a matter of budgetary or legislative technicalities," Lee explained. "It is a matter of national unity and cultural inclusion.”

"The so-called critical theory undergirding this movement does not celebrate diversity; it weaponizes diversity," he continued. "I understand what my colleagues are trying to do and why. I respect what they're trying to do. I even share their interests in ensuring that these stories are told. But the last thing we need is to further divide an already divided nation with an array of segregated, separate-but-equal museums for hyphenated identity groups."

Sandy from Westchester's tweet:

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

@AOC

No movement on COVID in the Senate but good to know Utah Sen. Mike Lee is spending his time today giving speeches about why Latinos shouldn’t have a national history museum and oh, while we’re at it, why there shouldn’t be a women’s history museum either

For damn cogent reasons that you don' care to address, toots. 

 

At least a couple of Republican Senators, Susan Collins and John Cornyn, think such museums are a good idea which is really disappointing, but that kind of kow-towing to leftist firebrandery is the equivalent of 126 House Republicans endorsing that stupid Ken Paxton lawsuit that the SCOTUS gave the thumbs-down to last night. That's just where we are. Both of post-America's major political parties are garbage.

Politico's John Harris has a reassuring piece today called "Relax, A Trump Comeback in 2024 Is Not Going To Happen." He cites three reasons:

Most important are the abundant precedents suggesting Trump does not have another important act in national politics. The perception that Trump will remain relevant hinges on the possibility that he is a unique historical figure. Trump, however, is singular in one sense only: No politician of his stripe has ever achieved the presidency. In multiple other ways, he is a familiar American type, anticipated by such diverse figures as Joseph McCarthy, George Wallace, and Ross Perot.

Like Trump, they all possessed flamboyant, self-dramatizing personas. They tapped into genuine popular grievance toward elites, and had ascendant moments in which they caused the system to quake and intimidated conventional politicians of both parties. In every case, their movements decayed rapidly. Cults of personality in American politics are quite common. But they never live long, and Trump has offered no reason to suppose he will be an exception.

That’s the second reason Trump is not well-positioned to retain his hold on public attention: He has largely abandoned any pretense that he thinks about anything other than his personal resentments, or that he is trying to harness his movement to big ideas that will improve the lives of citizens. When he vaulted into presidential politics five years ago, Trump’s still-potent gifts — for channeling anger, for mockery, for conspiracy theory — were once channeled to an agenda that fellow Republicans were largely neglecting, over trade, immigration, globalization, and perceptions of national decline. These days, no one can follow Trump’s Twitter feed and believe that he cares more about the public’s problems than his own, and that is not a recipe for sustaining political power.

Here is the third reason to be bearish on Trump’s future: Politics never stands still, but Trump largely does. As he leaves the White House, Trump should be haunted by a stark reality — if he had any capacity for self-calibration, he wouldn’t be leaving the White House at all. He’s got one set of political tools. When things are going well, his instinct is to double down on those. When things are going poorly, his instinct is to double down on those. In political terms, the pandemic demanded modulation of Trump’s blame-casting brand of politics — but also would have lavishly rewarded him if he had done so.

Susan Wright has a great piece at Patheos called "Yes, It's Really Over." She speaks for me here:

Am I thrilled to have Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, along with whatever motley crew of liberal thinkers they surround themselves with in office?

I am not. I know there will be a lot to rail against, and I’m prepared to blast them on every point.

That being said, I am absolutely thrilled to see our system still works. 

Let's end on an uplifting note: 2.9 million doses of Pfizer's vaccine will be distributed in the US over the next week. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tuesday roundup

 I don't know how politically feasible this would be, but from a procedural standpoint, it would do the trick, it seems to me. Steve Milloy, writing at the Wall Street Journal, outlines the way the Senate - as currently composed - could keep the incoming Biden administration from re-imposong the Paris climate accord:

To prevent the Paris Climate Accord from taking on . . .  undue power [due to a Supreme Court decision similar to the way the rescinding of the DACA program was undone], Mr. Trump should submit it to the Senate, and Majority Leader Mitch McConnell should schedule a quick vote. It would certainly be rejected—ratification requires a two-thirds vote—and it is unlikely any court could subsequently resurrect a legislatively tossed treaty. Without the help of judges, Mr. Biden would need a winning ratification vote to make the accord binding, which he likely couldn’t get no matter how well Democrats do in Georgia’s January runoffs and the 2022 midterm elections. 

Mr. McConnell could also call a ratification vote after Mr. Biden’s inauguration, even if Mr. Trump does nothing. This would similarly elevate the treaty’s status and make it difficult for Mr. Biden to bind his successors to his executive actions.

I think there would be enough Senators with thinking at least somewhat along the lines of Joe Manchin that a Senate vote would yield the result depicted by Milloy: 

West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, a Democrat, hit back at Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez after being the subject of a viral tweet by the Democratic socialist last month, telling The New York Times that she’s “more active on Twitter than anything else.”

At the time, Manchin vowed to stand up against the radicals in his party, particularly on the subject of defunding the police.

“Defund the police? Defund, my butt,” he tweeted. “I'm a proud West Virginia Democrat. We are the party of working men and women. We want to protect Americans' jobs & healthcare. We do not have some crazy socialist agenda, and we do not believe in defunding the police.”

He elaborated:

The senator continued: “We’re not going to defund the police, we’re not for the new green deal. That’s not going to happen. We’re not for Medicare for All — we can’t even pay for Medicare for some.”

Mary Townsend, writing at Plough, explores the influence of Louisa May Alcott on French existentialist Simone de Beauvoir: 

Born in 1908, Beauvoir grew up in the thick emotive haze of leftover nineteenth-century French Catholicism, carried into pre-war France. She was educated in the same sort of immersive religiosity that provided plenty of opportunities for spiritual heroism from very young girls in particular, the same sort of upbringing that produced Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, the Little Flower, who aspired to sainthood from her very early youth and in her death in 1897. Beauvoir, who for several years aspired to be a nun, writes of the exquisite transports of confessional tears, imagining herself swooning in the arms of angels; she prided herself on inventing mortifications in her very few moments alone. But unlike Thérèse, Beauvoir found no lasting comfort within or even distantly alongside Christianity.

It was not by cutting herself off from transports of emotion or by abandoning the metaphysical all-or-nothing that she eventually found an image of adulthood she could live with; nor could the attractions of philosophy, which she first came across through the Thomism of her girls’ school, or the Catholic social justice group she volunteered for, do the trick. It was rather literature, as a kind of Art, and herself as Author, that managed to hold the strongest and most sustainable appeal as vocation. If you can believe it, the first non-saintly individual Beauvoir found really attractive was the fictional American Protestant, Jo March, one of the heroines of Louisa May Alcott’s wildly popular 1868 novel, Little Women. Beauvoir couldn’t quite escape the nineteenth century after all.

Like so many readers, the young Simone was passionately invested in the persona of Jo as a writer, taking up the genre of the short story to imitate her. Inevitably, she also had extremely strong opinions on the Laurie question, the wealthy neighbor who proposes to one and then another of the March sisters. Opening the second volume Good Wives by accident, she came upon Laurie and Amy’s engagement (without the help of Jo’s refusal for context), and her response was immediate and absolute: “I hated Louisa M. Alcott for it.” But the similarities between the Marches’ style of family life (fictionalized from Alcott’s own experience) and her own gave her pleasure: “they were taught, as I was, that a cultivated mind and moral righteousness was better than money.” This was something to hold on to, the more so because like the Marches, and like Alcott herself, Beauvoir’s family dealt with straitened means, the memory of better times, and the all-too-visible wealth and comfort of neighbors and relations. The reward of their virtue was to be found in the causes they took up: for Alcott, abolitionism and suffrage, and for Beauvoir, existentialism, Marxism, and her own variety of existentialist Marxist feminism. The necessity for strict social circumspection in the behavior of daughters was lost on Simone, Louisa, and Jo alike.

How did de Beauvoir wind up with the philosophical stance that she did?

I think Beauvoir settled on atheism because she was unable to imagine an intellectual Christianity. This was not because intellectualism was lacking from the Thomism or Catholic existentialism that she had come across, but because what she wanted was the freedom of a Christian, the freedom to understand God, truth, the Absolute on her own terms, and she was told that there was no way to do this. There’s an irony in her captivation with Sartre’s vision, which she found novel, of the freedom to will one’s own future – all too strangely reminiscent of the argument Luther made in 1520. For Beauvoir, the blind nationalism of the French Catholic church, its triumphal support of colonization, its unwillingness to call private property into question, failed to answer her desire for understanding a world in thrall to capitalism. One must think of Beauvoir as a rebel angel.

 

Matthew Continetti, writing at the American Enterprise Institute website, reminds us what a remarkable human being Natan Sharansky is:

Sharansky was born in 1948 in the Ukrainian city of Stalino. His given name was Anatoly. His parents were educated professionals who downplayed their Jewish identity. They did not want to risk political and social reprisal. “The only real Jewish experience I had was facing anti-Semitism,” he writes. The precocious youth spent his early years playing chess. He learned to navigate a Soviet system that maintained its rule through fear. He became captive to doublethink. He repeated official lies and myths not because it was the right thing to do, but because it was the safe thing to do.

Sharansky enrolled in the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. “I dived into the republic of science,” he writes. “This world seemed insulated from the doublethink I had mastered at home.” Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War prompted him to discover his heritage. “Realizing how little I knew about this country that so many people were now asking about made me hungry to learn more.”

Sharansky studied representations of Biblical scenes hanging from the walls of Moscow’s galleries. He came across a samizdat copy of Leon Uris’s Exodus, a potboiler historical fiction that describes Israel’s founding. “It drew me into Jewish history, and Israel’s history, through my Russian roots. It helped me see myself as part of the story.”

The following year the Soviet nuclear physicist Andrei Sakharov wrote his “Reflections on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom.” Sakharov argued for freedom of inquiry. He demanded the protection of human rights. “Sakharov was warning that life in a dictatorship offers two choices: either you overcome your fear and stand for truth, or you remain a slave to fear, no matter how fancy your titles, no matter how big your dacha,” Sharansky writes. “Ultimately, I couldn’t escape myself or my conscience.”

Inspired by Sakharov, Sharansky applied for a visa to immigrate to Israel in 1973. He was rejected. He was unable to leave the Soviet Union. That made him a refusenik. “My life as a doublethinker, which I had consciously begun at age five the day Stalin died, was over. The professional world I had built for myself, my castle of science, collapsed instantly. Now, I could say what I thought, do what I said, and say what I did.”

The twin concerns of Sharansky’s life—identity and freedom—became fused. “Democracy—a free life in a free society—is essential because it satisfies a human yearning to choose one’s path, to pursue one’s goals,” he wrote in Defending Identity. “It broadens possibilities and provides opportunity for self-advancement. Identity, a life of commitment, is essential because it satisfies a human longing to become part of something bigger than oneself. It adds layers of meaning to our lives and deepens the human experience.” Freedom offers choice. Identity provides direction.

It would be a while before Sharansky could enjoy his own freedom. By 1975, he was working with Sakharov. The next year he formed the Moscow Helsinki Group to pressure the Soviets to live up to the commitments they had made in basket three of the Helsinki Accords. The KGB arrested him in 1977. “I spent the next nine years in prison and labor camp,” he wrote in Fear No Evil, “mainly on a special disciplinary regime, including more than 400 days in punishment cells, and more than 200 days on hunger strikes.”

In prison he played chess games in his head. “I always won.” He would tease the guards with anti-Soviet jokes. He was not afraid. What could they do—put him in jail? He communicated with his fellow inmates through morse code. They would drain the toilets and speak to one another through pipes. He read Soviet propaganda esoterically, between the lines. He figured out what was actually going on by determining what the authorities had omitted.

Sharansky was in prison when he heard that President Ronald Reagan had called the Soviet Union the “Evil Empire.” The year was 1983. Reagan had uttered the famous—and controversial—words in a speech to the National Association of Evangelicals. “It was one of the most important, freedom-affirming declarations, and we all instantly knew it,” Sharansky said in a 2004 interview. “For us, that was the moment that really marked the end for them, and the beginning for us. The lie had been exposed and could never, ever be untold now. This was the end of Lenin’s ‘Great October Bolshevik Revolution’ and the beginning of a new revolution, a freedom revolution—Reagan’s Revolution.”

Sharansky and his wife Avital had been apart since her immigration to Israel the day after they married in 1974. Throughout his imprisonment she worked tirelessly on his behalf, and on behalf of other refuseniks and dissidents. She found an ally in Israel’s U.N. ambassador, Benjamin Netanyahu. She met with Reagan, who began asking Soviet leaders to release Sharansky. Gorbachev freed him on February 11, 1986. He was reunited with Avital in Frankfurt Airport. They flew to Israel. “‘It was just one long day,’ Avital sighed later that night, in our new home in Jerusalem. ‘I arrived in Israel in the morning. You arrived in the evening. It was just one very, very long day in between.’”

He became Natan. He entered Israeli politics. He helped resettle one million immigrants from the former Soviet Union. He opposed the Oslo peace accords. He resigned from Ariel Sharon’s government over the policy of unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. His work as an activist was devoted to building what Reagan had described as “the infrastructure of democracy.” Sharansky distinguished between free societies and fear societies. “The structural elements that enable democratic societies to respect human rights—independent courts, the rule of law, a free press, a freely elected government, meaningful opposition parties, not to mention human rights organizations—were all glaringly absent in fear societies,” he wrote in The Case for Democracy (2004).

This utterance from Joseph diGenova may be the most disturbing example of Trumpism denial of the election results yet:

On Monday President Trump’s campaign lawyer and former U.S. Attorney Joe diGenova said that fired Trump cybersecurity chief Chris Krebs should be executed for saying that the election was the “most secure in United States history.”

DiGenova, appearing on the Howie Carr show, which simulcasts on Newsmax, took aim at Krebs as an aside during a wheels-off segment full of false claims about how the United States election had been rigged.

“Anybody who thinks that this election went well, like that idiot Krebs who used to be the head of cybersecurity [for Trump]. That guy is a class A moron. He should be drawn and quartered. Taken out at dawn and shot,” diGenova said.

This is not just a random Parler troll trying to get attention. This is an attorney speaking on behalf of the President of the United States’ re-election campaign. And while it may read like a macabre joke, the direct nature of diGenova’s comments make it impossible to interpret as anything other than a real wish/threat against a public servant for offering truthful testimony.

Carr responded to the statement with an awkward pause and a laugh and then changed the subject. Some shit is so weird that it even makes Newsmax people uncomfortable.

Matt Walsh at Daily Wire on the absurdity of making Sarah Fuller's field goal attempt for Vanderbilt into a historic occasion:

 On Saturday, Sarah Fuller became the first woman to suit up and take the field for a Power-5 football team. The media has declared Fuller’s performance as Vanderbilt’s kicker a groundbreaking, glass ceiling shattering, historic moment. Many in media and the sports world echoed Hillary Clinton’s sentiment that Fuller proved “women and girls belong on every playing field—quite literally.” In a game of escalating hyperbole, ESPN eventually claimed victory by declaring that Fuller has achieved “immortality” through her play in Vanderbilt’s game against Missouri.

Admittedly, she was spectacular. Fuller went 5 for 5 on field goals, booted 3 touchbacks past the end zone, and even made a game saving tackle as the clock expired in regulation. Just kidding. Actually, she kicked one time, it went 30 yards, Vanderbilt lost 41 to zero, and the head coach was fired after the game. This is reality, not a movie. And in real life, women embarrass themselves when they try to play against male athletes.

Walsh says that a clear-eyed view of the situation reveals how insulting the adulation is for women:

All of this patronizing nonsense surrounding a bad kick from a woman whose ego perhaps exceeds her abilities on the football field is merely annoying for me as a man. For women, though, it is much worse than annoying. It is patronizing, degrading, and insulting.  Are women really so unimpressive and bereft of achievement that we have to treat them like we would a small child who draws a bunch of scribbles on a sheet of construction paper and claims that it’s a picture of a tree? We congratulate the small child for his bad drawing because we do not expect children to do any better than that, and because they are emotionally fragile and in need of constant positive affirmation. Is this the case for grown women? Must we stand and applaud and shout “great kick” when, in truth, it was a very bad kick? Are women so pathetic that we have to call even their failures achievements? Not just achievements — but historic achievements? Is that how sad and mediocre women are, that we must stoop to this?

Answer: no. That’s how sad and mediocre feminists think women are, and perhaps are themselves. But it’s not the reality, and it’s not what I think or what any rational person thinks. Women are capable of extraordinary things in many facets of life. They also are capable of extraordinary things in the realm of athletics. Simone Biles comes immediately to mind. But women cannot compete with men in sports designed by and for men. 

Samuel Goldman, writing at Law & Liberty, says that how we define liberty is going to determine how we can defend it:

 iberty is plural, not singular. Rather than a gross concept outside history, institutions, or social structures, it is a “relational claim involving agents, actions, legitimacy, and ends.” To speak coherently, we need to specify the freedom of whom, to do what, under which rules, and for what purposes. The freedom of Socrates to philosophize is not the same as the freedom of Atheniansto participate in ruling and being ruled. Neither bears much resemblance to the liberty of a Christian described by Martin Luther.

Which liberties require defense? In the spirit of unfashionable opinion, I want to suggest that the answer can be described as the liberties of the modern West.

Scott Atlas has resigned his position as special advisor to the president on the pandemic. 

 

 

 

 

Let the free market work its magic and get us coronavirus vaccines

 Sally Pipes of the Pacific Research Institute has an excellent op-ed at the Fox News website right now. It's about how wrongheaded the Very Stable Genius's approach to drug pricing is, and the implications for keeping America the most innovative nation in the world with regard to new life-saving pharmaceutical products. 

President Trump announced Friday that he will proceed with his plans to peg the prices of certain drugs prescribed largely at doctors’ offices under Medicare Part B to the lower prices that other developed nations pay for those drugs. That may sound good at first glance, but in reality, the move will slow the development of new drugs, consigning countless patients to needless suffering and premature death.

The president said he's trying to secure the best deal for American patients. But his move will deprive drug companies of billions of dollars in revenue, making it impossible for them to spend the money they no longer earn to develop new drugs

As Stephen J. Ubl, president of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, correctly pointed out in a statement after President Trump’s announcement: “It defies logic that the administration is blindly proceeding with a ‘most favored nation’ policy that gives foreign governments the upper hand in deciding the value of medicines in the United States. History proves that when governments take unilateral action to set prices, it disrupts patient access to treatments, discourages investment in new medicines and threatens jobs and economic growth.” 

And while the VSG is ostensibly doing this to burnish his populist bona fides, his touchy ego is definitely a factor. He thinks Big Pharma deliberately dissed him:

President Trump appears to have an ulterior motive regarding his move against drug companies. He claims — without providing any evidence— that the drug manufacturers working on coronavirus vaccines deliberately withheld the good news of vaccine progress to harm his chances of reelection.

“Pfizer and others even decided to not assess the results of their vaccine, in other words not come out with a vaccine, until just after the election,” the president told reporters Friday at the White House. “That’s because of what I did with ‘favored nations’ and these other elements — instead of their original plan to assess the data in October. So they waited and waited and waited, and they thought they’d come out with it a few days after the election.”

Pfizer Chairman and CEO Albert Bourla has denied that the election had any impact on his company’s announcement of a promising coronavirus vaccine. In an Oct. 16 open letter he wrote that his company was “operating at the speed of science.”

Accusing drug companies of delaying a vaccine to protect us from a disease that has killed more than 254,000 Americans and infected more than 11.9 million is an extraordinarily serious charge, and denigrates the work of everyone involved in development of experimental coronavirus vaccines that we all hope will become available in December.

Pipes then gives a ringing defense of the free market that ought to be shouted from the rooftops:

This ecosystem is the reason the United States creates more drugs than the rest of the world. It's defined by two key features.

The first is strong protections for intellectual property. Without patents and other intellectual safeguards, it would be beyond irrational to invest the nearly $3 billion required, on average, to develop just one successful drug.

It’s important to understand that for every drug that successfully comes to market, many more prove to be unsafe or ineffective — meaning the drug companies can never sell these drugs and never recover their substantial research and development costs. But without conducting expensive research, it’s impossible to know which drugs will be safe and effective. 

Robust intellectual property protections ensure that when a drug does make it to market competing firms can't steal a company's research and manufacture knock-off products with impunity.

The second feature is that the pharmaceutical sector is governed by market principles, for the most part. Unlike in many other developed countries, the U.S. government generally doesn't impose price controls on medicines. Drug firms have relative freedom to charge a price that the market will bear. So they have a better chance of recouping their substantial upfront research and development costs.

The relatively free market in the U.S. gives investors the confidence they need to take big risks funding a promising new cancer therapy, a potential Alzheimer's breakthrough, or, in the current case, a vaccine for COVID-19.

These basic components — property rights and free markets — are the two pillars of our capitalist system that has proven repeatedly to provide greater benefit to ordinary citizens than socialism or communism in countries around the world.

Preach it!

. . . a profit motive isn't incidental to America's superiority in drug innovation. It's an essential component — one that can't be abandoned without undermining progress towards much-needed treatments and cures.

Without the capitalist system that underpins America's drug industry, the world would have to wait much longer for the medical breakthroughs that will ultimately win the war against COVID-19 and help the millions of us stricken with other diseases every year.

This is what we need more of, not some attempt to keep Trumpism alive after its namesake standard-bearer's inevitable demise by saying that conservatism ought to abandon "free-market fundamentalism" and tailor itself to appeal to some notion of a "working class" that doesn't really clamor for protection.  

The world is going to keep changing, as will the definition of "working class." What conservatism brings to the table is a set of eternal verities - like free-market principles - that serve societies well at any time.