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What’s up with Chuck? The first six weeks of 2022 haven’t gone especially well for senior Democrats in Washington. But has anyone had a worse start to the year than Chuck Schumer? First, there was the doomed election legislation push. Neither the White House nor Schumer got remotely close to persuading Democratic holdouts of the need to amend the filibuster, while the Senate majority leader’s strategy, in which he insisted on a vote on the bill without debate or amendments, only made things worse. Then there’s the awkward silence on Build Back Better — or whatever is going to take its place. At the end of last year, a frustrated Schumer promised an up-or-down vote on the bill’s provisions “earlier in the new year.

I’d like to state for the record that I’m officially sick of Donald Trump. Last Wednesday, Corey Lewandowski took to the airwaves with a bizarre announcement: Donald Trump is looking for someone to primary New Hampshire governor Chris Sununu. Lewandowski, who briefly ran Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, was speaking to Boston radio host Howie Carr. “The president is very unhappy with the chief executive of the state of New Hampshire, Chris Sununu,” said Mr. Lewandowski. “And Sununu, in the president’s estimation, is someone who’s never been loyal to him. And the president said it would be really great if somebody would run against him.” First of all, Sununu has always been fiercely loyal to Trump — much to the Eastern Establishment’s dismay.

While President Trump was in office, White House staff periodically discovered wads of printed paper clogging a toilet and came to believe the president had personally flushed documents. So reports the New York Times' Maggie Haberman, based on anonymous sources. Why should a literate media consumer think the story is garbage? Read it like an intelligence officer. Start by applying some of the same tests intelligence officers do to help them evaluate their own sources. Thinking backwards from the information to who could be the source is a good start when evaluating credibility. For example, is a source in a position to know what they say they know, what intelligence officers call spotting?

For a party that claims it wants to move on, the Republicans are doing a remarkable job of turning the national spotlight back onto one of the worst days in their history. Last week, the GOP returned to its circular firing squad, issuing a statement that censured Representatives Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney, the only two Republicans serving on the House January 6 Committee. At the same time, it suggested that the actions of rioters who stormed into the Capitol constituted “legitimate political discourse.” Such a statement from a national political party is unusual. Almost as unusual as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell issuing a rebuke of his own party apparatus.

The die against conservatives opposed to the Iraq war was cast by David Frum in a now-infamous essay for National Review back in 2003. Not only were the right's antiwar sorts unpatriotic, Frum charged, they were defeatist and conspiratorialist appeasers. “They have made common cause with the left-wing and Islamist antiwar movements in this country and in Europe,” he wrote. As one can imagine, this made it quite difficult for this small but active faction of the conservative movement (which included the American Conservative magazine and libertarians like Texas Congressman Ron Paul) to penetrate the mainstream, or build trust with their compatriots across the aisle.

Today’s school-aged students are in grave danger. A murderous virus is ripping through the population, leaving a tragic body count in its wake. We need aggressive preventative measures. Classes need to go online, indefinitely if necessary. The experts must be heeded. The science must be followed. This epidemic is simply too dangerous; we cannot afford to play games with our children's lives. I’m talking, of course, about the preeminent public health crisis of our time: lawnmower deaths. The threat that lawnmowers pose to our nation is no joke. According to the Consumer Product Safety Commission’s National Electronic Injury Surveillance system, 90 Americans die every year from lawnmower accidents. Over the past decade, 3.

A new Johns Hopkins systematic review cuts in two the narrative that government-imposed mandates meaningfully prevent coronavirus deaths. The review looked at 34 different studies analyzing business and school closings, shelter-in-place orders, and international travel bans. It included data from US and European Covid mitigation efforts, along with endeavors in India, South Africa and China. Almost two dozen of these studies were peer-reviewed, while the other 12 were working papers. The results of this meta-analysis are striking. Lockdowns reduced Covid mortality by an average of only .02 percent. Shelter-in-place orders were slightly better at a 2.9 percent average, but nothing worth crowing about.