Latest from Coffee House

Latest from Coffee House

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

French Hill: Congress should conduct ‘full oversight’ of WHO funding

Rep. French Hill is on board with President Trump's threat to withhold funding from the World Health Organization because of its collusion with China's initial coverup of the seriousness of the novel coronavirus. 'I support the president's indication,' the Arkansas congressman told The Spectator during a Thursday phone interview. 'I think it sends a message to the world that these global, multinational, multilateral organizations tend to be inadequately accountable to those who fund them.' 'I would urge our committees of jurisdiction in the House and Senate to conduct a full oversight on America's contribution to the WHO and what the World Health Organization did or did not do vis-a-vis this particular pandemic crisis,' Hill asserted.

Rep. French Hill who

Will coronavirus kill the eurozone?

The familiar should be a consolation amid the terrible novelties of COVID-19, but the pandemic’s effects on the European Union threaten to turn familiar fiasco into dangerous novelty. As a weakened Angela Merkel faces Germany’s crisis of economic responsibility, and France floats the idea of issuing its own ‘corona bond’, the EU and its currency face what Emmanuel Macron would probably not want to call its Waterloo.Henry Kissinger’s remark — ‘Who do I call if I want to speak to Europe?’ — has never seemed more true. Britain is leaving.

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The case for reopening the country now

More and more people, I suspect, are padding about muttering lines from Psalm 13: 'How long, O Lord,...How long must I take counsel in my soul/ and have sorrow in my heart all the day? How long shall my enemy be exalted over me?' These are good questions. As of April 9, 2020, however, we do not have a reliable answer. You might think that the reason we don’t have an answer to these questions is because we don’t really know the insidious strength of the enemy, the new coronavirus that, with the help of the Chinese back in December and January, has made its way around the world, sickening hundreds of thousands, from Prime Minister Boris Johnson on down. I think that is only part of the answer.

New York Post and Washington Examiner fall for Tom Brady Twitter hoax

Cockburn doesn't pay all much attention to football, but he was surprised to read on Wednesday that former New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady said he was 'tired' of people criticizing Donald Trump. 'The guy is doing his best to help the country. I'd like to see his critics try to do better in his position,' Brady supposedly said, according to reports in the New York Post and Washington Examiner. Cockburn saw several MAGA people sharing the quote victoriously on Twitter, but is at pains to inform them that it is a spoof. Brady, who is headed to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in the upcoming NFL season (whenever that is), did give a candid interview about Trump to Howard Stern this morning.

Tom Brady
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Plagues at Passover

The dust has been expunged and disowned, the bread bin stands forlorn and empty, there is half a ton of matzah in the pantry, yet the Passover of 5780 is different from any other. We are to conduct a festival of liberation under lockdown. The seder, an expansive time for family and friends when the unexpected guest is prized and a cup set out for Elijah, has contracted into the pressure-cooker of the nuclear family or, hardest of all, a solitary vigil, its isolation as likely to be worsened as — excuse the language — leavened by a Zoom session.On Passover, a rabble becomes a people.

bernie sanders

Bernie lost because he’d already won

So — it turns out there are no socialists in pandemic elections. Bernie Sanders has suspended his campaign, which in normal times would be major news. Amid the panic of the coronavirus crisis, however, most people won’t be that interested. The still incomplete Democratic primary already feels like ancient history, a relic of the BC (Before COVID-19) time. Nevertheless, Sanders’s decision is significant. It means that one of the most consequential American politicians of the 21st century will never be president. Sanders has arguably had as great an impact on American politics as Donald Trump. He didn’t ultimately succeed, but his revolution is unstoppable. It was harder for Bernie to win on a tide of economic anger in 2020 than it was in 2016.

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Trump’s safari into the wilderness of the deep state

Grin and bear it. Teddy bears are popping up across America in living room windows as families seek to entertain children out for a stroll who are supposed to go on a bear hunt. There’s even a central database, citybearhunt.com, where you can enter your address to assist in the search for the ursine creatures. If Donald Trump wants to project a cuddlier image, he might consider placing one in the Oval Office window.Judging by Trump’s latest moves, though, he is hardly in an emollient mood. Rather, he’s embarked upon his own safari into the wilderness of the deep state. Trump is claiming fresh pelts by the day.

bernie sanders

Bernie Sanders suspends campaign

And then there was one. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont suspended his campaign this morning, setting up a head-to-head between Joe Biden and Donald Trump for the presidency. In a livestream on his website, Sanders said 'few would deny that over the past five years, our movement has won the ideological struggle. 'The future of this country is with our ideas.' Sanders will remain on the ballot during all remaining primaries and continue to gather delegates in order to influence the Democratic policy platform. Biden will now be uncontested at the Democratic National Convention, which has been pushed back a month to August. That's if it happens at all.

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Senators don’t make good presidents

The quadrennial Super Bowl of the race for what is always the ‘most important election ever’ is now a mere seven months away. All eyes not glued to Donald Trump turn to the presumptive Joe Biden. Presumptive in many ways and years, Joe raises the knotty issue of whether a senator can, or rather, should be elected president. Only three have gone from ‘sitting’ during a single term in the Senate to sitting in the White House: Warren G. Harding, John F. Kennedy and Barack Obama. The truth is, senators don’t make good presidents. Most of them don’t even make good senators. Warren Harding was not of the modern, post-World War Two era. He did once hold an important if mostly ceremonial seat as lieutenant governor of Ohio.

Perplexed by the Fauci fetish? You shouldn’t be

It is a time of airless boredom and mooted catastrophe. A time of robot graduations and Zoom funerals. Statesmen fall ill; serviceable lungs are envied; a sense of being in the wrong place at the wrong time has been globalized. Striding gallantly into the breach, fresh from the hygienic world of Science and Facts, is Dr Anthony Fauci. Lean and owlish, sage and institutionalized, Fauci does not stand to offer a desperate nation much it doesn’t already know — wash your hands everyone. Rather, as the subject of intensifying ribaldry, Dr Fauci may join heroes of a simpler time: Elba, Beckham, Hemsworth, The Rock.Dr Fauci (born 1940) is the subject of a petition to be crowned sexiest man alive for People magazine’s 2020 issue.

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south china sea

Geopolitical jockeying in a time of pandemic

You might think a global pandemic and the worst crisis since World War Two would lead to a welcome, if temporary tamping down of military activity in already tense and contested environments. Yet even as the novel coronavirus ravages the world, old fashioned geopolitical jousting continues in Asia, reminding us that the passing phase of COVID-19 will simply return much of the world to the status quo ante of great power competition. In a strange way, the ongoing military activities and geopolitical jockeying of China and the United States in Asia’s vital waterways is almost comforting.

Witch fight! The naked hypocrisy of Alyssa Milano

Alyssa Milano has rebranded herself as a Twitter activist and Democratic party booster since her acting career peaked with the late 90s TV hit Charmed. Thanks in part no doubt to her husband’s powerful connections in the entertainment industry (he’s a managing partner at CAA, a top-tier rep agency in Los Angeles) she’s leveraged her voice onto cable news, podcasts and into political campaigns. She is the celebrity perhaps most responsible for the mainstreaming the #MeToo movement. Her zenith as an activist came in 2018, during the Brett Kavanaugh hearings. Milano was the most recognizable face behind the justice during the controversial confirmation hearings in which he faced thinly-sourced and circumstantial sexual assault allegations.

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The coronavirus class divide

Tone-deaf media elites and celebrities demand we all just stay home just as they do, self-isolating in their multi-million-dollar LA mansions or NYC brownstones. Journalists who don’t care to educate themselves about rural America — even after wildly misunderstanding the rise of Trump in 2016 — now lecture us country bumpkins, because we’re too stupid to understand how to quarantine ourselves. The architect of this condescending union of the fatuous and the famous was the New York Times.

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Who is Dominic Raab?

On Monday evening, Britain’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson, diagnosed 11 days’ earlier with COVID-19 and taken to hospital for ‘tests’ on Sunday afternoon after showing ‘persistent’ symptoms, was moved into an Intensive Care Unit at St Thomas’s Hospital in London. A brief statement from 10, Downing Street described Johnson’s ‘worsened’ condition and confirmed that Johnson, who had continued working in isolation throughout his illness, had asked foreign secretary Dominic Raab to ‘deputize for him where necessary’.Forty-six-year-old Raab is also the first secretary of state, the most senior member of Johnson’s cabinet.

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Beware the COVID-19 nannies!

COVID-19 has suddenly made much of the western public health establishment effectively redundant. Unused to dealing with infectious disease, we have a legion of epidemiologists who have never studied an epidemic and a horde of public health professionals who are more comfortable discussing soda taxes than virology.If you’ve spent your career believing that drinking, smoking and obesity are the real epidemics, a potentially fatal virus forcing billions of people into hiding could make you question your priorities. But if the nanny state lobby was disoriented at first, it has quickly learnt to adapt. The public are temporarily willing to sacrifice a bit of liberty for safety and the lifestyle regulators sense fresh opportunities.

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What happens if Trump gets the coronavirus?

The White House has announced that everyone coming into range of President Trump will be tested for COVID-19. Trump, meanwhile, insists that he won’t wear a mask when meeting other leaders — or, as he put it in order of reverse dignity, ‘presidents, prime ministers, dictators, kings, queens’.Unfortunately the worst-case scenario — that a 73-year-old might catch a dose and get seriously ill — no longer seems outlandish. On Sunday night, Britain’s prime minister Boris Johnson was hospitalized after falling sick 10 days ago. Today he went into critical care. What if someone sneezes and Trump catches a cold?Welcome to the nasty, brutish and short Pence presidency.

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The problem is a lot bigger than Trump

It’s incredibly easy to blame President Trump for the coronavirus hell we're all living in. The president doesn’t help himself when he babbles for an hour and a half every single day behind the White House podium, about how smooth the federal government’s disaster management response has been, how superior his leadership. But the truth is much more complicated, troubling, and systemic. America wasn't prepared — and there is plenty of blame to go around. How the hell could the most powerful country in the world be so short-staffed in its hospitals?

Privacy or death — the final triumph of Big Tech

‘During that time it seemed no easy thing to see any man on the streets of Byzantium, but all who had the good fortune to be in health were sitting in their houses, either attending the sick or mourning the dead… and work of every description ceased, and all the trades were abandoned by the artisans, and all other work as well, such as each had in hand.’ That’s a passage from Procopius’s History of the Wars, describing the way the bubonic plague ravaged Byzantium in 541 AD. If you want to feel historical time collapse, and the distance of centuries evaporate, it is worth reading the whole account.

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In defense of Andrew Yang

Tone-deaf. White people-pleasing. Bumbling pineapple bun. These are just some of the choice epithets that have been hurled at Andrew Yang after he shared his thoughts about the Asian American experience in the age of coronavirus. Calling the growing reports of racist and xenophobic attacks against Asian Americans across the country a ‘heartbreaking phenomenon', Yang opened his op-ed with a soliloquy about a recent experience at a grocery store where, for the first time since growing up as one of the few children of East-Asian descent in a New York suburb, he felt the searing tinge of race-consciousness and anxiety about his place in America.

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Sen. Tom Cotton coronavirus

Questioning coronavirus origins is not a conspiracy

The exact origins of COVID-19, the novel coronavirus, remain unknown. We know only that it began in the Wuhan province in China, but the Chinese Communist party has gone to great lengths to obfuscate the full picture of its initial spread. Journalists should be clamoring for this information. ​But, for a large section of the American media, who have engaged in China apologia over the course of the past few months, challenging China or by proxy the World Health Organization is completely off limits. ​Last week, Sen. Tom Cotton told Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo that 'we need to get to the bottom' of where the virus came from.

Chinese President Xi Jinping

Italy gave China PPE to help with coronavirus — then China made them buy it back

China has tried to restore its image after lying to the world about the seriousness of its coronavirus outbreak, but its attempts at humanitarianism have turned out to be as slippery as its wet markets. After COVID-19 made its way to Italy, decimating the country's significant elderly population, China told the world it would donate Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) to help Italy stop its spread. Reports later indicated that China had actually sold, not donated, the PPE to Italy. A senior Trump administration official tells The Spectator that it is much worse than that: China forced Italy to buy back the PPE supply that it gave to China during the initial coronavirus outbreak.

Coronavirus could hasten secession

Americans enjoyed a tremendous sense of solidarity in the days following 9/11. People gathered on street corners, at subway stops, holding small candles, and for a time we quite forgot about politics. I had expected something like this to happen now, during the corona pandemic. But it hasn’t, and this has made me think that the country’s breakup is even more likely than I had thought when my book, American Secession, was published in January. One difference, of course, is that we’re not supposed to be together during an pandemic. We’re supposed to be six feet apart, the length of a hockey stick. We don’t do group hugs anymore. If you’re a misanthrope, these are the glory days.

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Life and death in New York City

No matter where in the apartment I am, if I sit very still, I hear a siren. Over the 18 days I’ve spent in quarantine here, they’ve grown more frequent. I worked late yesterday and finished up at about 1:30 this morning. I pulled my headphones out and listened. There was the briefest moment of calm, before I heard the familiar squall. From what I could make out, it sounded like a convoy of ambulances, careering towards the hospital about a mile from me. Woodhull Medical Center is a block of brutalist concrete planted imposingly at the junction of Broadway and Marcus Garvey Boulevard. A tent outside is my closest COVID-19 testing site.

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joe biden

How delaying the DNC helps Biden

Joe Biden keeps getting more unconventional. It started when he delivered short speeches and one-word answers like 'yes' or 'no'. Now he and the Democrats are becoming even friskier, declaring that they want to push off their grand jamboree, the big enchilada, the Democratic National Convention in Milwaukee to August, a week before Trump holds his own shindig in Florida. Smart move on a number of fronts. For one thing, the original mid-July date simply allowed too much time to elapse between the Democratic and Republican conventions. Trump would have pummeled Biden relentlessly during those weeks. A let-down after Milwaukee would have been inevitable. Trump would have reveled in the build-up to his own convention.

Dem AGs demand abortion drugs be delivered to doorsteps

We must be the first generation of Americans to respond to a mass plague by ensuring we can keep killing our babies. Normal human instincts would command we replace our dying elderly population though reproduction, but amid the prospect of hundreds of thousands of mostly older Americans dying of COVID-19, the left’s fight for on-demand abortion access has only intensified. A group of 21 Democratic attorneys general wrote to HHS and the FDA on Wednesday demanding women have easier access to chemically induced abortions, meaning that pregnant women who wish to abort could be prescribed abortion pills via telehealth services.

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Biden lets Trump write his own political epitaph

It’s time to take stock of Congress. Georgia Sen. Kelly Loeffler’s new financial disclosures indicate that in recent months she hastily divested herself of even more stocks than was previously apparent. A riveting new report from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution has the goods: it indicates that even as Loeffler — reputed to be worth about $500 million together with her husband Jeff Sprecher who, incidentally, is the chairman of the New York Stock Exchange — was issuing panegyrics to Trump for his visionary leadership, she was dumping millions, including $18.7 of Intercontinental Exchange stock and investments in T.J. Maxx and Lululemon, in late February and early March. She also invested in a company producing coronavirus protective wear.

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Will the Democrats dare to junk Joe?

Joe Biden is the presumptive Democratic nominee. Yet many Democrats have 'buyers’ remorse' as the COVID virus has driven Biden off centerstage and into a hastily-built basement studio in his Delaware home. Biden has tried to remain relevant to the public through TV broadcasts, but those appearances have been gaffe-prone and interspersed with lapses in lucidity. Last Friday, he announced on CNN that 'I speak to all five of my grandkids,' which must make his very much alive sixth grandchild feel a little neglected. Dave Catanese of McClatchy found his interview last Monday painful to watch: 'Joe Biden struggled mightily at the top of his MSNBC interview where he looked to be reading from notes to answer a question.' Democrats openly worry about the lack of enthusiasm for Biden.

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Will American workers see enough of the $58 billion airline bailout?

The recently passed coronavirus stimulus bill offers $58 billion in aid to the airline industry to survive the massive decrease in travel caused by the COVID-19 outbreak, but workers are already concerned that airlines are taking advantage of taxpayer money while failing to live up to promises to their employees and customers. The Treasury Department on Tuesday issued its guidelines for the $29 billion loan and $29 billion grant programs, reiterating that companies who apply for money must agree not to layoff or furlough their employees until after September 2020. Treasury also required recipients of grant money, which is earmarked for payroll assistance, to only use that money for American workers.

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Frightened people love their leaders

‘The Trump presidency is over’, said Peter Wehner, in the Atlantic. The great wizards of liberal punditry stroked their beards and agreed. These are suddenly serious times and the president is a joke. He cannot survive, surely.‘The coronavirus is quite likely to be the Trump presidency’s inflection point,' wrote Wehner, 'when everything changed, when the bluster and ignorance and shallowness of America’s 45th president became undeniable, an empirical reality, as indisputable as the laws of science or a mathematical equation.’Run that paragraph back through the journalistic ego-filter and it translates as: ‘I told you so! Why didn’t everyone listen to me?’The trouble is, Peter, the public still won’t listen.

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The best message the State Department could send Beijing and the WHO

A troubling pattern has emerged at the World Health Organization. In the wake of this global pandemic, it appears China has been misdirecting and misleading the rest of us about confirmed cases in their own country, with the help of their close financial partner, the WHO.As the WHO and parts of the American media laud China’s response to the pandemic, with NBC News even hailing them as a global leader as the US falls behind, several countries reported massive problems with faulty equipment and supplies.Shortly after China expelled American journalists from its borders, they stopped reporting new cases of COVID-19 altogether, despite Wuhan once again closing down its movie theaters.

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andrew cuomo

Bursting the Cuomo bubble

Andrew Cuomo is having a moment. He enjoys ubiquitous coverage. His press conferences attract viewership second only to the president’s. In media quarters, some whisper his name as a possible Democratic nominee should Joe Biden’s limited and lackluster candidacy finally falter. Democrats are understandably nervous about their all-but-official nominee. Biden’s appearances are uneven at best. He mumbles, loses his train of thought, and frequently mispronounces or downright mis-names, people and things in common use. A recent Washington Post/ABC poll found that only 24 percent of Democratic voters are highly enthusiastic about supporting Biden — the lowest number in the poll’s two-decade history.Furthermore, Cuomo has earned a fair share of praise.

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The next American revolution will be televised

Is America becoming a developing country? We’re seeing increasing evidence of reverse convergence. We used to think that the developing world would in time become like America, but it now seems that the United States has developed an emulation complex of its own. What has not been explained are the reasons. In some fundamental areas America does resemble a traditional society, with its belief in transcendence and its quaint ways of enforcing justice and delivering public goods. The US executes prisoners on a scale matched only by China, Iran and Saudi Arabia. Guns are more readily available than in Pakistan and more than half of Americans pray every single day. No other state spends so much money on health care, yet Americans’ life expectancy keeps falling.