Politics

“If you didn’t vote for Biden, you ain’t black,” tweeted 2020 Florida Republican congressional candidate Lavern Spicer on Thursday, “I guess you’re a negro.” Spicer, who is black, was referring to President Joe Biden’s latest gaffe. Delivering his first Veterans Day address at Arlington National Cemetery to a nation reeling from the baleful effects of his failed presidency, and amid historically low approval ratings, Biden referred to the 1940s black baseball player Satchel Paige as “the great negro,” apparently because Paige could still competitively play at age 47. https://twitter.com/ForAmerica/status/1458851297378119684 Biden’s history with race is, at the risk of using a woke euphemism, troubled.

Go nuclear, Joe Across the Atlantic at COP26 (which, somehow, is still going on), politicians deliver a familiar, Malthusian script. It’s five minutes to midnight, it’s already too late, the stakes couldn’t be higher. You know the deal. And yet, for all the warnings of imminent apocalypse and wrangling over emissions targets, policymakers consistently fail to act as if they actually take their own words seriously. In fact, all this overblown rhetoric obscures solutions that do not require the “great reset” favored by the Davos crowd or the political and economic revolution argued for by cringey, crusty Greta Thunberg fans demonstrating their displeasure through the medium of performance art on the streets of Glasgow.

“Every man has two countries — his own and France.” A variation of this line, frequently misattributed to Thomas Jefferson, came to Cockburn as he saw the latest footage from Kamala Harris’s trip to Paris. Everyone, he realized, has two accents — his own and French. And so it is with Momala. On a Tuesday tour of the Pasteur Institute, the vice president opted for a very Fraaanch pronunciation in her conversation with zee scientistes. See for yourself: https://twitter.com/AmericaRising/status/1458489403513491460 Now, Cockburn readily admits that Harris’s Franglais (or should that be Framerican?) is a little more subtle than his own garbled intonation when asking for directions on the Riviera.

President Joe Biden during his 2020 campaign vowed not to raise taxes on anyone earning less than $400,000 a year. That promise recently hit an iceberg in the form of a new excise tax on nicotine. Kentucky Congressman John Yarmuth inserted the tax into the tome-like Build Back Better Plan bill last week. Yarmuth’s amendment appears to focus on e-cigarettes, vape juice, and other non-tobacco items by classifying them as extracted nicotine products with a max levy of over $50. That’s like the current tobacco tax. It’s unknown how much revenue Yarmuth hopes to raise, though the original Build Back Better Plan included $96 billion in tobacco and e-cigs taxes. Any nicotine tax will hit the lower and middle classes harder than anyone else.

Sometimes a thing can be two things at once, one good and one bad. That requires a choice. And in a free society, that choice is usually best made by the individual directly affected. If not, then by an open, democratic process. Yet that is not what's happening with Joe Biden's vaccine mandate and it's why the cure is worse than the disease. I am, by my choice, thrice vaccinated. I understand the COVID vaccine prevents me from getting sick, and it is only a day-by-day smaller population of unvaccinated people who are actually still at risk of dying. We each make a choice. Now the government wants to make that choice for us. Vax mandates are an unhealthy thing for our democracy and represent a willful effort by government to exert additional control over an already cowed population.

Visitors to New York tell me how surprised they are to see so few masked up people on the streets. But a sizable portion of the NYC population isn’t letting go of the disgusting, soggy, disease vectors strapped to their faces — and they never will. This set aren’t true-believers in the still-unproven effectiveness of masks; for them, it’s both an identity and psychological disorder. On the streets of any city, the forever-masked are broadcasting their allegiance to authoritarianism, letting you know they’re most comfortable somewhere on a hierarchy of coercion, whether among the hopelessly obedient, or tyrants themselves. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. You now have a visual cue letting you know exactly who you’re dealing with and who to avoid.

For months, Democratic negotiations over Joe Biden’s twin spending bills were stuck in a cycle of infighting that felt it would never end: the unstoppable force of progressive overexcitement up against the immovable object of moderate resistance. That deadlock was finally broken late on Friday night, when the House passed an infrastructure bill worth $550 billion in new spending. The breakthrough came after a head-spinning day on the Hill (a day that progressive congressman Mark Pocan described as a “clusterfuck”).