URLs du Jour

2021-09-11

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  • It's that day again. All the more notable thanks to the roundness of the anniversary number. I gave my personal memoir thirteen years ago, and don't have anything to add.


  • All-purpose headline: "Joe Biden's incoherent, fear-mongering                      speech." John Podhoretz fills in the blank: Joe Biden's incoherent, fear-mongering COVID vaccine speech.

    Joe Biden’s speech on COVID was bizarrely incoherent.

    He told the American people without qualification that fully vaccinated people are at incredibly low risk: “Only 1 out of every 160,000 fully vaccinated Americans was hospitalized for COVID per day.”

    Then he promised to shield them against the evil people who are threatening their very lives: “We’re going to protect the vaccinated from unvaccinated co-workers.”

    But Joe, you just said the vaccinated were already protected!

    Memo to Biden speechwriters: try to avoid such obvious incoherence. I assume this blunder was due to you working much harder on the parts of the speech that said, in effect, "I've done a great job, and everything bad that's happened is somebody else's fault."


  • Not only incoherent, but also… Andrew McCarthy has a different criticism: Biden knows his vax mandates are unconstitutional — but just doesn’t care.

    Clearly, President Joe Biden is not chastened by the Supreme Court smackdown he got just a couple of weeks ago, when the justices invalidated the eviction moratorium that even administration officials acknowledge was patently lawless right before Biden reissued it.

    Quite the opposite.

    The administration is similarly well aware that the national vaccine mandate that the president is poised to issue is unlawful. White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain made the obvious explicit by retweeting a progressive commentator’s observation that the ploy of imposing the vaccine requirement as a workplace-safety rule under OSHA (the Occupational Safety and Health Administration) is the “ultimate work-around.”

    Translation: The president knows that an executive order mandating COVID vaccination would be shot down instantly, so he’s trying to camouflage it in a maze of Labor Department regulation.

    Biden, unfortunately, continues past-President precedents of ignoring Constitutional limits on executive power. And Democrats who were horrified of Trump's overreaches are cheering Biden's. Why, I bet… yup, thought so:


  • The unvaccinated are a dangerous menace. Oh, except for… The Free Beacon reports that some are still allowed to spread Covid if they want: Postal Service Unions Spent Big on Biden. Now They’re Exempted From the Federal Vaccine Mandate.

    President Joe Biden's COVID-19 vaccine mandate for federal workers will exempt United States Postal Service (USPS) employees who pumped millions of dollars into the 2020 election campaign.

    A USPS spokesman told the Washington Free Beacon that Biden's mandate, announced Thursday, will not apply to the nearly 500,000 workers who deliver mail to American residents each day. The postal service's status as an independent agency frees it from the purview of the executive order. The exempted workers happen to be members of two of the most influential government workers unions in the country.

    Note: the government appears confused on whether USPS employees will be required to get vaccinated or merely "strongly encouraged".

    Um, they weren't being "strongly encouraged" up to now?


  • But the FDA is still killing people. Ronald Bailey is a little frustrated by business as usual: Why the Hell Has the FDA Not Approved Cheap Rapid COVID-19 Self-Tests Yet?. (Click through for the photos he mentions.)

    Above is a photograph of my stash of five at-home COVID-19 tests. After participating a conference in South Dakota in July where a lot of folks were ostentatiously unvaccinated, I used one so that if I tested positive I could quarantine myself to prevent infecting other people. Since I have been fully vaccinated since early March, I hoped that the results would be negative. Fortunately, they were. The cost of my test stockpile is $149.95.

    Below is a photo showing a bin of at-home rapid Flowflex COVID-19 tests for sale for about $3.50 apiece at a supermarket in the Netherlands. The test is manufactured by a company headquartered in the U.S., but the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has not approved it for sale here. In the bin below the Flowflex test, you'll see another COVID-19 self-test offered by Roche. You can buy it in the Netherlands for about $5.90 per test. It too is not approved by the FDA.

    Cato's latest Human Freedom Index ranks the Netherlands as the 14th freest country in the world. The US comes in at number 17.


Last Modified 2024-01-20 5:01 AM EDT