Politics

William P. Barr is out. Joe Biden is in. And Donald Trump has a few more weeks left to bemoan his fate and lash out at his subordinates now that the Electoral College vote has taken place. Poor Trump! He wanted a no-holds-Barred assault on the election. But Barr, who was supposed to be Trump’s faithful janissary, has proved less than reliable in recent weeks, earning him the ultimate opprobrium of the President today, who declared that at least Robert Mueller, in contrast to Barr, would have set the record straight about Hunter Biden. Yup. Mueller. He would have 'set the record straight’, Trump claimed. So the author of the putative Russia witch-hunt is now being used to highlight the shortcomings of Barr?

It has been months since Congress passed the last COVID-19 relief package, and as DC hurtles toward its Christmas holiday, the prospect of another legislative effort is still bedeviling Capitol Hill.That we are here at all reflects a divergence from the lawmaking consensus that saw three phases of major COVID-19 legislation pass in March — including the $2.2 trillion CARES Act, which constitutes the largest economic response legislation passed in US history. At that time, there was general bipartisan agreement that it was necessary; that the lives of Americans were being consumed by a crisis not of their own making, and one that was putting the livelihoods of small businesses and families at risk. (That didn’t stop the bill from being stuffed with unrelated pork, however.

‘Disappointed but not surprised.’ I suppose that describes my initial feeling about the summary dismissal by the Supreme Court last night of the ‘audacious’ (the New York Times) lawsuit brought by the state of Texas against Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia and Michigan on December 8. In essence, Texas argued that those four states had trespassed on the civil rights of citizens by favoring some voters over others in violation of the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The amusing and perspicacious commentator known as Ace of Spades added a bit of hot sauce in his response to the news of the Court’s ruling. ‘The ultimate Friday Night News Dump,’ he wrote.

It’s hard to be the son of a powerful man. Just ask Saadi and Hannibal Gaddafi, Pier Berlusconi and Saudi Prince Majed al-Saud, or Prince Harry, Yair Netanyahu and Robert Mugabe Jr, Hunter Biden and Gerald Ford’s son Steven Ford, or Uday and Qusay Hussein. Spoiler alert: you can’t ask the last two because they’re dead. The list goes on. While high-born daughters from Ivanka Trump and Chelsea Clinton to Jenna Bush and Kim Yo-jong have tended to fare better, their male counterparts have often floundered. It’s time for you to meet the archetypal failson. Steven Ford is an alcoholic soap opera actor who dropped out of the 1978 movie Grease due to stage fright. Hunter Biden is a crack-smoking sex enthusiast.

Are the chickens coming home for Hunter Biden? It certainly seems so, though experts differ on the critical question of whether they are coming home to roost or roast. Wednesday’s news, splashed via an official communiqué from his father’s transition operation, that Hunter is being investigated by the US Attorney’s Office for possible tax fraud makes me want to bet for ‘roast’ not ‘roost’. Here’s Hunter’s statement from Wednesday, in full: ‘I learned yesterday for the first time that the US Attorney’s Office in Delaware advised my legal counsel, also yesterday, that they are investigating my tax affairs.

Does Joe Biden write his own speeches? Surely not. Yet his campaign says Biden was his own speechwriter for the address he made to the nation a week after the election, when he stressed his campaign theme: ‘We must restore the soul of America.’ The Soul of America is the title of a book by the historian Jon Meacham and the New York Times figured out that Meacham had helped with the speech. The campaign’s national press secretary, TJ Ducklo, was forced to concede that, yes, Biden had ‘consulted a number of important, and diverse, voices as part of his writing process, as he often does’.

‘Follow the numbers,’ Gov. Andrew Cuomo likes to say, as if the numbers made a run for it and we all gave chase. ‘Follow the numbers!’ as if data can also make decisions. Follow the numbers. But what numbers? On October 6, during one of his regular scraps with Mayor Bill de Blasio in which the mayor wanted to implement shutdowns by zip codes and the governor wanted to use a color-coding system, Cuomo made the following remark about why he was shutting down schools in areas with elevated COVID positive test rates: ‘The schools are important because you will very often see the schools be a place of transmission.’ Gov. Cuomo never lacks for confidence so this comment was uttered with his usual certainty. You will very often see schools be a place of transmission.

Governors across the country are deploying their unilateral power to institute draconian measures which close small businesses, mostly those in the service industry. They use outright Orwellian language to justify doing so, all in the name of the greater good of halting COVID-19 cases. But it’s not working anymore. Total cases are higher now than they’ve been since the spring and people are losing their livelihoods. No federal relief has come and there is a nationwide feeling that the dam is about to break. When people were told they had ‘15 days to slow the spread’, they listened. While they obliged, they watched crowds gather in protest of their personal causes and politicians ignore their own rules.

The winner of this year’s presidential election may be different than the last, but the struggles of the polling industry continue.Although, one lesser-known but historically successful poll appeared to have predicted the exact result: IBD/TIPP, headed by Raghavan Mayur, president and founder of TechnoMetrica. But Mayur, an immigrant from India with a strong Hindu faith, could care less. He’s too focused on his work to worry about the excuses of his competitors.‘At the end of the day, there’s an Indian saying: the dancer who doesn’t know how to dance will say the stage is crooked,’ Mayur told The Spectator.

It is two o’clock on an unusually mild December afternoon here in suburban Seattle, and I’m sitting on my back porch smoking marijuana.Passively smoking, I should add, lest I shock any reader by this lapse, but smoking nonetheless. Since 2012, when the voters of Washington State chose to decriminalize it, my part of town has been especially fragrant with the acrid smell of pot. A thick haze of the stuff lingers long in the air these quiet lockdown days.

Countless emergency 911 calls requesting aid for a mentally ill person behaving inappropriately are made every day. Recently, many cities and states have begun changing their protocols to answer these calls. Unfortunately, the injection of race into the discourse can unnecessarily create tensions and may weaken efforts.The latest inappropriate inclusion of race was an ABC story reporting on New York City’s proposed initiative to better respond to these 911 calls. Its misplaced focus is captured in its headline — ‘How Sending Mental Health Responders instead of Police Could Save Black Lives’.

For all the caterwauling on the left about one William P. Barr, he hasn’t really delivered for Donald Trump, apart from performing some fancy footwork on the release of the Mueller report. The latest affront arrived today when Barr declared that he has discovered nary a shred of evidence of voter fraud. Presumably, Barr searched high and low, like one of those fanatics you see using wearing headphones and deploying metal detectors to sweep a grassy era for precious metals or valuables. But he arrived at the conclusion that 'to date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have affected a different outcome in the election’.To be sure, Barr was careful to specify 'to date’, suggesting that perhaps something might yet emerged.