Latest from Coffee House

Latest from Coffee House

All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories

Home is where the racism is

My sophomore year of college, I studied abroad in Ireland. I had pretty high expectations: my mother’s side of the family is almost entirely of Irish descent, and I suppose in some inchoate way I yearned to “go home,” as it were, even though the last of my Irish ancestors had arrived on American soil more than 150 years ago. Still, the Emerald Isle seemed to call to me (admittedly I was listening to a lot of The Chieftains). Boy, was I disappointed. It wasn’t that the Irish aren’t welcoming (they are), or that the adult beverages weren't delicious (they are). It was that Ireland was definitely not my home — not culturally, culinarily, or familialy.

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biden ukraine

The Ukraine debacle showcases Joe Biden’s many failures

Snap quiz: who was president when Vladimir Putin gobbled up Crimea? If you said Barack Obama, go to the head of the class. What countries did Putin invade while Donald Trump was president? If you said “None,” you get to stay at the head of the class. This is a harder one: who was president when Putin once again violated Ukraine’s borders, sending in Russian troops to two breakaway regions in Eastern Ukraine? I say that this is harder because the obvious answer — “Joe Biden” — is not really, or not wholly, correct. Joe Biden is an empty shell. On good days, he looks like a mannequin. Really, though, he is a puppet, a creature controlled by others. I have called those others “The Committee.

The truckers are coming to Washington!

The Canadian truckers might have been driven out of Ottawa, but a copycat protest is brewing in the United States. Cockburn hears that police are preparing for demonstrations that could gridlock the DC area, and they could start as soon as Wednesday. Honk honk! The truckers are coming to Washington — just in time for President Biden's State of the Union address next week. Cockburn has been a fan of truckers ever since he decided to see whether he could hitchhike across America using only Jim Beam trucks (he could, as it turns out). But in this case, the big riggers may be in need of a friendly correction.

West Wing life imitates art

The lesson from Biden-Trump comparisons on Ukraine Would Donald Trump have handled the Ukraine crisis better than Joe Biden? “He would have never done during the Trump administration what he is doing now,” said the former president in a radio interview yesterday. Writing for the site today, Freddy Gray thinks there is something to Trump’s claim: “Putin, as a slightly comic alpha male authoritarian, saw in Trump something he recognized — an unstable, unpredictable yet potentially decisive actor on the world stage. Rightly or wrongly, he saw in Trump strength whereas in the Democratic leadership he sees only weakness and folly.” National Review editor Rich Lowry also offered a variant of Richard Nixon’s madman theory, applied to Trump.

U.S. President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin (Getty Images)

Biden exploits the Russia conflict for political gain

President Joe Biden is preparing to buck responsibility no matter the outcome of the brewing conflict between Russia and Ukraine. Biden's statements about Russia have been anything but cohesive. One day he is giving up the game by stating publicly that he has no appetite for war and would allow a "minor incursion"; the next he's focusing exclusively on diplomatic channels; the next he's warning of force if Putin makes another move. All the while, White House officials have planted news stories and touted vague "intelligence" warning of an imminent Russian invasion. The message is this: war with Russia is inevitable, unless it isn't, in which case Biden gets all the credit. So who gets the blame if Putin does invade Ukraine and the US responds with military force?

Connecting the dots between Russiagate and Hillary

Let's connect the dots between John Durham, Russiagate, the FBI, and Hillary Clinton. They strongly suggest the Clinton campaign ran a sophisticated, multi-prong coordinated intelligence operation against Trump with either the active or tacit support of the FBI. In the case of prong one, the dossier, the Clinton campaign hired MI6 intelligence officer Christopher Steele. The hiring was through its law firm, Perkins Coie, which hired Fusion GPS, which hired Steele to hide the funding source. The use of the law firm as a cutout allowed Hillary to deny that she'd funded the dossier, and the media to claim for a year or more that it was actually the Republicans themselves who paid for it.

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Why a post-Covid world might not be so bad

No one need ask why the strict public health regime to manage Covid — masks, mandates, quarantines, and required inoculations — has begun to collapse. Between angry truckers, unfavorable polling for continued lockdowns, the perception of a Wuhan coverup, changing reports of vaccine effectiveness, and declining hospitalizations, even President Biden and blue state governors realize they have but two options: pretend to be leading a return to normalcy or face an unpredictable grassroots rebellion. The interesting question for Americans is not why the sudden prospect of a return to normalcy but what “returning to normalcy” really means.

Democracy and economic freedom are in decline

The first report cards on democracy and economic freedom for 2021 are out and the results are not good. Economic Intelligence Unit, the sister company of The Economist magazine, found that last year’s Democracy Index had fallen by almost a tenth of a percent. That’s the biggest drop in the index’s 15-year history. The Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom, meanwhile, saw a similar albeit larger decline of 1.6 points out of 100. Heritage looked at economic policies and conditions in 177 countries while the Democracy Index looked at 167 countries. Both reports blame government-enforced COVID restrictions for the declines.

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How will Biden respond to Putin?

How will Biden respond to Putin? “Invasion.” The Biden administration used that all-important I-word this morning to describe the actions of the Russian military in Eastern Ukraine after Vladimir Putin’s extraordinary rant justifying Russian recognition of the separatist regions of Donetsk and Luhansk as independent republics on Monday afternoon. “We think this is, yes, the beginning of an invasion, Russia’s latest invasion into Ukraine,” said deputy national security advisor Jon Finer on CNN this morning. The I-word matters because invasion has been the closest thing to a red line that the Biden administration has drawn during the crisis: the action that would trigger a harsh response from Washington.

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Against the Covid ‘new normal’

During the entire past two years of Covid hysteria I never stopped traveling. “Work from home” wasn’t a privilege awarded to me. My love of logic and language was perpetually bothered by a frequent airline announcement: “Federal law requires” mask mandates, a statement most untruthful. There is no law. Congress passed no new legislation; there is only regulation, the demon spawn of power-hungry politicians and a bloated bureaucracy. For those who can’t be bothered with the democratic process of elected officials proposing bills and deliberating, voting and enacting legislation, the immeasurable, and not enumerated, power of the bureaucratic state is an attractive work-around.

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Diplomacy is Ukraine’s last hope

Amid a pile of Russian disinformation, a mass evacuation of civilians from the self-proclaimed separatist republic and reports that Russian commanders are preparing to execute an invasion order, diplomacy (or at least the hope of it) reared its beautiful head late Sunday night. After a frantic series of calls orchestrated by French president Emmanuel Macron, the White House released a statement confirming President Biden’s openness to a direct meeting with Russian president Vladimir Putin. Whether or not the leader-to-leader discussions happen, however, won’t be fully up to Biden or Macron. It takes two to tango, as the hackneyed phrase goes. And right now, Moscow has been habitually cryptic about its intentions.

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Joy Behar’s strange mask religion

Joy Behar made a predictable announcement last week on ABC’s The View. While discussing how the CDC may ease mask guidance in the near future, she explained the depths of her neurosis to her co-hosts. "So if I go on the subway, if I go in a bus, if I go into the theater... a crowded place, I would wear a mask, and I might do that indefinitely," she added. "Why do I need the flu or a cold even? And so I'm listening to myself right now. I don't think it's 100 percent safe yet.” A few hours later, a photo emerged on Twitter of Behar sitting in a booth with two friends at a restaurant. She was sans mask. Worse yet, journalist Libby Emmons, who posted the photos, added, “I hear that she also walked out of the restaurant unmasked, though her companions dutifully donned theirs.

Time to retire the ‘Munich’ analogy?

The Ukraine crisis signaled to Western officials and pundits to once again begin recycling the historical analogy of the 1938 Munich Agreement, which handed Nazi Germany parts of Czechoslovakia in a failed bid to head off major conflict in Europe. This was expected. Such comparisons are usually followed by the predictable warnings about the danger of Western “appeasement.” Hence British defense secretary Ben Wallace has recently compared Western diplomatic efforts to head off a Russian invasion of Ukraine to the appeasement of Nazi Germany ahead of World War Two, suggesting that unnamed Western countries were not being tough enough with Moscow.

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Biden spent billions messing up rapid test distribution

What happens when a government thinks it can distribute a consumer product more efficiently than normal retail channels? Boondoggle and failure come to mind. Two months ago, President Biden announced plans to buy 500 million at-home Covid test kits and mail them to anyone who wanted one. The Department of Defense put in orders for $1.275 billion of tests from iHealth, $340 million from Roche and $306 million from Abbott. How many tests those eye-popping figures bought from each company has never been disclosed, but Abbott, the largest test manufacturer, has a reported production capacity of 50 to 70 million tests. It is safe to assume that the quantities involved commanded an enormous portion of total manufacturing capacity.

Say hello to Trans Jesus

It’s been said that the Christian right is more “right” than Christian. And there’s probably some truth to that. But, seriously, have you seen the Christian left? Back in 2020, we had the saga of White Jesus. An ex-pastor named Shaun King urged Black Lives Matter activists to destroy images that made Jesus look European rather than Palestinian. The trouble is that ancient Jews actually did look Mediterranean, because…well, they were. The big blue thing to the west of Palestine? That’s the Med. Mr. King was probably thinking of the Arab Muslims who now live in Palestine. But they only showed up around the year 640, when the Rashidun Caliphate invaded the Levant and killed most of the Jews and Christians around Jerusalem. Awkward. Anyway, White Jesus is out.

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Biden’s never-ending infrastructure week

Biden’s never-ending infrastructure week During the Trump years, “infrastructure week” became a lame Washington in-joke. “It’s infrastructure week!” someone would tweet sarcastically to underscore the administration’s ongoing failure to deliver the bipartisan infrastructure package that Trump promised early in his presidency. Biden has reversed the Beltway gag. The joke in Trump’s Washington was that it was that the president’s failure to deliver the bill meant that, Groundhog Day-style, it was always infrastructure week. In Biden’s Washington, it’s always infrastructure week because the president has failed to deliver on anything other than a bipartisan infrastructure package.

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Sorry, Freedom Convoy — fundraisers are only for left-wing criminals

It seems to be harder to donate money to the Canadian truckers protesting their country's vaccine mandate than it is to keep Hunter Biden out of a strip club. After GoFundMe seized millions of dollars raised on its platform for the Freedom Convoy, Christian crowdfunding site GiveSendGo stepped in and enabled donors to give nearly $10 million. GiveSendGo was promptly hacked and the personal information of 93,000 donors to the Freedom Convoy released to the public. The media — who largely resisted touching the Hunter Biden laptop story because it allegedly contained "hacked" information — jumped on the opportunity to shame and harass private citizens for donating to causes of which they don't approve.

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Freedom isn’t ‘white’

An op-ed in the Washington Post about the Canadian truckers’ protest tells us that the idea of freedom is “White” with a capital W and that the truckers’ belief in freedom is “a key component of White supremacy.” This is about as sensible as saying that the idea of gravity is “English” or that the Post reports the news. True, Newton’s apple fell in England and the Post looks like a newspaper, but gravity is universal. The same goes for stupidity, though that takes many forms, and for the impulse to be free, though that too takes many forms, some of them stupid. Taylor Dysart, the author of this insult to reason, is a white PhD student at private Ivy League university. Color me shocked.

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The Clinton campaign’s plot to politically assassinate Trump

There is a word for secretly collecting information about enemies or competitors to use against them. According to the latest court filing by Special Counsel John Durham, the Hillary Clinton campaign surreptitiously and likely illegally reached into protected White House and Trump communications data to try and show some link between Trump and Russia. The Clinton campaign during the election hid from FBI, CIA and the media that it was the source of the information gathered. Durham doesn't use the word "spy," but that in no way changes what happened. The recent filing relates to Durham’s September indictment of Michael Sussmann, an attorney who represented the Clinton campaign while at the Perkins Coie law firm.

The meaning of the truckers

What Canada’s truckers reveal about America’s realignment Every now and then, you can see the political realignment happening before your eyes: impossible-to-ignore examples of shifting voter coalitions and ideological sympathies that render old rules and assumptions redundant. And so it is seems with the Canadian trucker protests — and our reaction to them south of the border. The truckers’ proximate grievance is a Canadian mandate that would mean unvaccinated truckers would have to quarantine for two weeks every time they returned from the United States. But it’s about more than that too, of course: broader frustration at a whole regime of Covid rules.

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Welcome to body-camera democracy

The introduction of body cameras as a staple of the police uniform has been a transformative piece of tech. After just eight years of their use, it’s hard to argue against the impact of body cams in stemming police misconduct. According to a recent study by the University of Chicago’s Crime Lab and the Council on Criminal Justice’s Task Force on Policing, civilian complaints about police misconduct are down 17 percent since the introduction of body cams. Physical encounters, whether fatal or non-fatal, are down 10 percent. It was a struggle to get here. Many cops said that complaint statistics did not justify the indignity of policing the police taping every interaction they have with the public. A vocal minority countered: “If everything is so cool, we will see it.

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‘Xi Jinping Thought’ is taking over China’s classrooms

From last fall, in an extension of a personality cult not seen since Mao Zedong, “Xi Jinping Thought” is being incorporated into China’s national curriculum. School textbooks are emblazoned with Xi’s smiling face, together with heartwarming slogans telling readers as young as six that their leader is watching over them. “Grandpa Xi Jinping is very busy with work, but no matter how busy he is, he still joins in our activities and cares about our growth,” reads one. “Xi Jinping Thought” must be taught at all levels of education, from elementary school to graduate programs, and there is special emphasis on capturing the minds of the youngest children.

The art of the Covid protest song

On February 14, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau issued an edict granting himself emergency powers to rule Canada by martial law with the intent of making all those trucks back up. He wants to confiscate them along with freezing truckers’ bank accounts. His soldiery is not altogether with him. Ottawa’s chief of police, Peter Sloly, abruptly resigned. Things aren’t looking bright for North America’s newest autocracy. But, OK.  Let’s back up. On December 18, 2020 a French musician known as HK (Kaddour Hadadi) and his group the Saltimbanks released on video a song titled “Danser encore” (“Dancing Again”).

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Biden’s looming energy crunch

Oil and gas prices have soared since Joe Biden took office and skyrocketed further as Russian troops surround Ukraine. Prices will get worse — much worse — if Putin invades. President Biden has promised “swift, sharp sanctions” on Russia and an end to the Nord Stream II pipeline, which will supply Germany with much-needed Russian natural gas when it’s completed. The German chancellor has said little about ending the pipeline but has not publicly contradicted Biden’s threat to stop it. European analysts are confident Germany will go along with American energy sanctions, including those on Nord Stream II. In any case, the US can stop the pipeline, if it chooses.

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No, the Democrats’ problem isn’t their messaging

Why ‘correcting the record’ won’t save the Democrats Leaked documents from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee warn that Republican attacks have proved “alarmingly potent” in battleground districts. The memo warns that voters see Democrats as “preachy,” “judgmental” and “focused on culture wars.” Politico reports that the document is used by the DCCC to encourage incumbents not to ignore or deflect from what it calls GOP “culture war” attacks but to respond more directly. On a range of subjects from critical race theory to defunding the police, operatives argue that candidates should “correct the record” because “changing the subject risked confirming suspicions.

Prince Andrew coughs up

Court documents filed on Tuesday morning by counsel for Virginia (Roberts) Giuffre revealed she had settled her high-profile human trafficking case against Prince Andrew. Although the documents omit both an admission of guilt by Andrew and a disclosure of the settlement sum, the Telegraph asserts that the beleaguered prince will pay Giuffre an estimated £12 million ($16 million) to resolve her case under New York’s Child Victims Act, and that the money will come from his mother, Queen Elizabeth II. The parties informed the court that they had reached a “settlement in principle” and anticipated filing a stipulation of dismissal of the case within the next month.

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Little Justin and the secession of the plebs

Justin Trudeau, still the prime minister of Canada, is the first person in history to invoke the Emergencies Act, a law enacted in the 1980s to allow the government to take special, temporary action to deal with an “urgent and critical situation” that “seriously endangers the lives, health or safety of Canadians.” Little Justin is embarrassed by the thousands of truckers in Canada who are protesting, first of all, the country’s vaccine mandate but, more to the point, the government’s intrusion into the lives and livelihoods of the people. Justin is embarrassed. That’s the real national emergency. In response, Trudeau is transforming Canada into a police state. People with tow trucks, he said, will be “coerced” into moving the rigs of recalcitrant truckers.

As with Iraq, so with Russia

Against the backdrop of the Ukraine crisis, we have been bombarded with many historical analogies. Leading the list are the 1961 Berlin standoff and the 1962 Cuban Missile crisis. And then there is that all-time favorite, the 1938 Munich Agreement. Those crises should certainly not be regarded as ancient history. But then why go back 60 or 80 years when you can walk down memory lane? Like, say, when an American president was trying to rally the public and mobilize international support in the name of using military force against an alleged bloodthirsty dictator who was supposedly threatening Western geostrategic interests and challenging its liberal democratic values?

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How crony capitalism makes tax season hell

For most Americans, tax season is accompanied by a soundtrack of wailing and gnashing of teeth. According to Pew Research Center, 56 percent of Americans hate or dislike doing their taxes, and 31 percent of those respondents say the process is too complicated. Filing your taxes is expensive, in both time and money: ProPublica reported in 2019 that "Americans spend an estimated 1.7 billion hours and $31 billion doing their taxes each year." When you're elbow-deep in documents and receipts, poring over tiny boxes filled with numbers and second-guessing whether you did, in fact, get married last year, you might ask yourself: does it really have to be this hard? The answer is no. Many other countries, like Germany, Japan, New Zealand and the United Kingdom, have "exact-withholding" systems.

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WATCH: Does AOC want to ‘euthanize the hell’ out of Texas?

Cockburn is a great admirer of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. In an age when even stand-up comics allow themselves to be intimidated by the woke scolds of the left, AOC is a one-woman Alamo, fearlessly defending her right to talk absolute gibberish. Republicans like to think that Democrats don’t know the country outside their blue-state cities, but AOC isn’t afraid to slum it in red America. In January, when her constituents in the Bronx were enduring the double blow of a New York winter and Covid checks before they could get indoors, AOC went clubbing in Florida, the magic kingdom of Ron DeSantis, went maskless in a drag bar and picked up a case of Covid as a souvenir.