Politics

Even in the quick-as-a-wink world of democratic politics, where calculations change at slot-machine speed, you can feel major moments growling and growing. You don’t know precisely where things and events are going. You just know they are going. We're in one of those moments now, with Texas and its 29 million people poised to move out of the heavy shadow of government control over their lives and movements as we head towards what we must hope is the late stages of this so-called 'war' against COVID-19. On Tuesday March 2 — otherwise known as Texas Independence Day, when Lone Star flags decorate staves everywhere, honoring Texas’ successful struggle in 1836 for freedom from Mexico — Gov. Greg Abbott announced he was letting life return to normal.

It’s hard to keep them all straight, but among the many diktats emitted by the Biden administration during its first days in office, one deserves special commendation for its brazen mendacity. I mean the ‘Executive Order On Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government’. The key word, as we’ve heard over and over again these last few weeks, is ‘equity’. The diktat (a more accurate term for what is happening than ‘Executive Order’) promises ‘a comprehensive approach to advancing equity for all’ by ‘affirmatively advancing,’ well, ‘equity’. If you think you discern a little whiff of tautology, you’re right. You are also right if, on second sniff, you catch the acrid scent of contradiction.

‘I wonder if you might do a “notebook” on living in Chicago at the moment,’ my London-based editor inquired via email. ‘The latest crime figures are quite shocking.’ I asked which shocking crime figures he had in mind. We have quite a selection. More than 4,000 people were shot in Chicago in 2020 and a few dozen short of 800 were murdered — an increase of more than 50 percent on 2019’s tally. For the past few years almost as many people have been slain in Chicago as in New York and Los Angeles combined, although those cities taken together have four times the population. Then again, perhaps my editor was thinking of carjackings, up 283 percent in January compared to a year ago.

Donald Trump was over an hour late for his first speech since leaving the White House at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando, Florida. The former president finally emerged at 4:47 p.m., kissing the American flag as the PA system blasted Lee Greenwood’s ‘God Bless the USA’. He waited, applauding the crowd for the duration of the song before beginning his prepared remarks at 4:50 p.m. ‘Hello CPAC — do you miss me yet?’ he asked the crowd. Trump quickly laid to rest some of the stories that have swirled since his departure from office. ’We’re not starting new parties,’ Trump said. ‘We have the Republican party…that was fake news.’ He then launched into the issue everyone expected him to tackle: immigration.

The Conservative Political Action Conference is in full swing. The ACU has upped sticks and thrown its annual shindig in Orlando rather than its usual home in National Harbor, Maryland. Former president Donald Trump is to give his first speech since leaving office tomorrow and the leading lights of the Republican party — Ron DeSantis, Kristi Noem, Ted Cruz, Mike Pompeo — have been making their cases to be 2024 nominee (or Trump’s VP) on the main stage. But you know all that. You’ve seen it on Twitter. That’s not what you read Cockburn for. You want to hear about the cocktails, the ruckus, the maskless flirting, all the unbridled diesel-strength freedom the great state of Florida has to offer.

I still believe we are in an emergency and that the pandemic requires attention now. But it seems President Biden and congressional Democrats are having a difficult time understanding what ‘emergency’ means. If they did, they surely would not have pushed legislation that spends almost half of the funds after this fiscal year and 10 percent of it three years from now. The legislation proposed by President Biden is a sleight of hand, pretending to fund the critical components of our recovery — vaccine production and distribution — while doling out taxpayer dollars to groups, industries and special interests that are still sitting on funding from last year’s coronavirus relief bills.

What will the conservative movement look like post-Trump? Establishment Republicans seem eager to shake former President Donald Trump's influence on the party and the new right would like him to be a kingmaker for years to come. But while pundits opine and politicians dream, three young conservatives are building. American Moment, a new nonprofit organization founded by Saurabh Sharma, Nick Solheim and Jake Mercier launched Wednesday. The organization is dedicated to reshaping the political class to reflect populist priorities. Sharma is the former Chairman of Young Conservatives of Texas, Solheim the founder of The Wallace Institute for Arctic Security and Mercier an independent writer and editor.

Why is Neera Tanden, Joe Biden's nominee to head up the Office of Management and Budgets, stumbling where his other cabinet picks have sailed through confirmation? The senators who say they won't vote for her see her as an obstruction to Biden's efforts to govern in a bipartisan manner. 'Neera Tanden has neither the experience nor the temperament to lead this critical agency,' Sen. Susan Collins of Maine said yesterday. 'Her past actions have demonstrated exactly the kind of animosity that President Biden has pledged to transcend.

Immigration, a top issue before and during the Trump presidency, has become much less of a concern for Americans over the past year due to the primacy of the pandemic and the ensuing economic shutdown. That, combined with the press's lackadaisical approach to covering the Biden administration, means there hasn't been enough media scrutiny of Biden's incoherent border policy. Frequently the Biden administration's words do not match its actions, primarily because it does not seem to understand that policies have real-world consequences. For example, after Biden campaigned on loosening Trump's stricter enforcement of immigration law, thousands of Honduran migrants formed a caravan to come to the US in hopes of gaining entry. The Biden team tried to put the genie back in the bottle.