URLs du Jour

2022-09-02

[Amazon Link]
(paid link)
  • Good idea. Won't happen, but good idea. Charles C. W. Cooke Goes There: Impeach and Convict President Biden to Save Our Political System.

    If we keep doing what we’re doing, we’ll keep getting what we get. To avoid getting what we’re increasingly likely to get, Congress should impeach and convict President Biden.

    Evidently, Biden feels as if there are no consequences to violating his oath of office. Last August, Biden “double, triple, quadruple checked” whether he was allowed to order another moratorium on evictions without Congress, and he concluded that he was not. Then he did it anyway — on the outrageous grounds that the time it would take to litigate might allow him “to keep this going for a month, at least — I hope longer.” Last Wednesday, Biden pulled the same trick with student loans. That the president does not have the statutory power to “cancel” college loans has long been so obvious that even Nancy Pelosi has managed to acknowledge it. “The president can’t do it, that’s not even a discussion,” Pelosi said last year. “People think that the President of the United States has the power for debt forgiveness.” But, she confirmed: “He does not.” A week ago, Biden did it anyway — with the help of what might be the single most cynical and embarrassing legal memorandum in modern American history.

    While assuming powers not granted him by legislation, he proceeded to quack about the semi-fascism of his opponents.

    Is that irony? I can never tell.


  • High crime rates and good basketball. In the mind of Joe Biden they go together like convenience stores and Indian immigrants. Jim Geraghty investigates Why Joe Biden Gets Away with Making Offensive Statements.

    President Biden, speaking in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., yesterday:

    My deceased son, Beau, he was the Attorney General of the State of Delaware. And what he used to do is go down, in the east side, the — called the “Bucket” — highest crime rate in the country. It’s a place where I used to — I was the only white guy that worked as a lifeguard down in that area, on the east side.

    And you know where the — you could always tell where the best basketball in the state is or the best basketball in the city is: It’s where everybody shows up.

    The east side of Wilmington is indeed a primarily African-American neighborhood; earlier this year, Wilmington mayor Mike Purzycki described the East Side as “neglected for decades and decades” by city, county, and state leaders. Whether or not this neighborhood in Wilmington ever had the “highest crime rate in the country,” the area has been described as “Murder Town USA” in the not-too-distant past of 2014. And yes, this is the neighborhood with the swimming pool where Biden used to be a lifeguard (now renamed after the president) as well as Corn Pop’s old neighborhood.

    “You could always tell where the best basketball in the state is or the best basketball in the city is” is a yet another classic, cringe-inducing use of stereotypes by Biden. It’s not the most consequential thing that Biden did yesterday, but it fits in with his long history of using racial and ethnic stereotypes that make him look like an ass: “You cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent. I’m not joking”; “[Obama is the] first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy”; “gonna put y’all back in chains; “these Shylocks”; “Poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as white kids”; “Unlike the African-American community with notable exceptions, the Latino community is an incredibly diverse community”; “Are you a junkie?”; “You ain’t black”; and so on.

    Unfortunately, being a senile old fool is not an impeachable offense. But (as I've said before) I'm pretty sure Kamala and the cabinet officers all have easily-accessible copies of the Constitution with section four of the twenty-fifth amendment highlighted for easy reference. Maybe not on their desks, but in a convenient drawer.


  • None dare call it class warfare. Well, none except Veronique de Rugy. And everyone else who's paying attention. Here's Vero: Taking From the Working Class and Giving to the Laptop Class.

    If you had any doubts that those in power have dropped the pretense of fighting for the working class, you can dispense with them after the Biden administration's latest concessions to the laptop class. From student loan forgiveness to subsidies for people who drive pricey electric cars and profitable semiconductor company CEOs, this administration is working hard to shower its friends with handouts paid for by hardworking lower-wage Americans.

    We learned of the most outrageous handout of them all, of course, when Biden announced that he will — unilaterally, mind you, and for no apparent reason that I can see — extend the pause on student loan payments until the end of the year and forgive up to $10,000 for those persons making less than $125,000 a year. This generosity with other people's money extends up to $20,000 for Pell Grant recipients.

    As David Stockman, a former director of the Congressional Office of Management and Budget, reported recently, "Only 37% of Americans have a 4-year college degree, only 13% have graduate degrees and just 3% have a PhD or similar professional degree. Yet a full 56% of student loan debt is held by people who went to grad school and 20% is owed by the tiny 3% sliver with PhDs."

    The mystery here is why more people aren't irate.


  • [Amazon Link]
    (paid link)
    Mister, we got a man like Frankie Roosevelt again. At the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), Lawrence W. Reed delivers a history lesson: FDR Campaigned on Fiscal Restraint in 1932. He Delivered Just the Opposite.

    With Labor Day upon us, the summer of 2022 is ebbing as the campaign season kicks into high gear. On November 8, American voters will decide the composition of the next Congress based largely upon what they hear over the next two months. Sadly, what candidates say when running often doesn’t look like what they do later when elected.

    Such was the case 90 years ago in the year 1932, near the bottom of the Great Depression. All eyes focused on the presidential contest between incumbent Republican Herbert Hoover and Democrat challenger Franklin Roosevelt. When the smoke cleared, Roosevelt won in a landslide with 57.4 percent; Hoover trailed with 39.6 percent; Socialist Party nominee Norman Thomas came in third, drawing a scant 2.2 percent.

    If you were a socialist (or a modern “liberal” or “progressive”) in 1932, you faced an embarrassment of riches at the ballot box. You could go for Norman Thomas. Or perhaps Verne Reynolds of the Socialist Labor Party. Or William Foster of the Communist Party. Maybe Jacob Coxey of the Farmer-Labor Party or even William Upshaw of the Prohibition Party. You could have voted for Hoover who, after all, had delivered sky-high tax rates, big deficits, lots of debt, higher spending, and trade-choking tariffs in his four-year term. Roosevelt’s own running mate, John Nance Garner of Texas, declared that Republican Hoover was “taking the country down the path to socialism.”

    Reed heaps praise upon The Roosevelt Myth, a 1948 book from John T. Flynn. The cheapest version I could find at Amazon was $4.99 (Kindle), link at your right above. Consumer note: it's published by the Mises Institute, which many consider to be be kind of sketchy, especially recently. There are other editions available too.


  • Karoline, Ho. I was minding my own business, half-listening to the local TV news, when, as described at NHJournal'Hoe Bag' Attack Ad Drops Hits Leavitt on Age, Maturity. "Leavitt" is Karoline Leavitt, currently running for the GOP nomination to run against my CongressCritter, Chris Pappas, in November. It's pretty brutal. And unfortunately, I can't get it to embed properly. But the NHJournal folks have it.

    The ad, released by the Defending Main Street super PAC, takes direct aim at Leavitt’s age, showing a video clip of a Leavitt saying “Listen up, ho bag” into a camera phone, with the narrator adding, “She wants to bring her generation’s new vision to Congress. You know, mooching off her parents, [and] running up huge credit card debt.”

    The spot concludes with, “Woke, immature and irresponsible Karoline.”

    OK. I wasn't planning on voting for her anyway.

    (How old do you have to be to recognize my classic headline reference?)


Last Modified 2024-01-17 12:30 PM EDT