Democrats

Yesterday, in the US Senate, Democrats let their abortion extremism hang out. No more faking it about "safe, legal, and rare": the new standard is "I mean, do you feel like it?" After the leak of Justice Alito's draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade, it was inevitable that Chuck Schumer would introduce some kind of abortion legislation. Even if his bill couldn't hurdle over a filibuster, the Democrats could as least use it as a planted flag in the culture war to come. Their base has spent the last week running into traffic yodeling about right-wing fascism. And given that a majority of Americans support some kind of legal abortion, surely there was room to maneuver here. Instead, Schumer decided to tap into his party's dark id.

Cockburn finds Madison Cawthorn — the first-term Republican congressboy from North Carolina, defeated in a GOP primary last night — an interesting study. His behavior reminds Cockburn of a Capitol Hill freshman fraternity pledge who just can’t seem to get the rules of the house down. Cockburn never seems to see Cawthorn’s name in the headlines for anything but scandalous reasons: his past is riddled with sexual misconduct allegations, bizarre vacations that involved dressing in lingerie and taking seductive photos with white wine, and dubious claims surrounding his “derailed” career at the Naval Academy (where he wasn’t accepted) and about the aftermath of an accident that led to his paralysis (he’s seeking $30 million in a lawsuit related to the incident).

Authorities have finally done something about the aggressive, rabid critters that lurk around our nation’s capital and slink from their dens on the Hill to assault honest people for no good reason. Cockburn has encountered all sorts of such creatures on various Capitol Hill pub crawls, but the type the police just decided to address was neither a blundering elephant nor an indignant jackass. Neither was it a Blue Dog, one of those endangered porcupines that rarely appear in the Swamp, nor even a squawking chicken hawk. It was a red fox. A cute little lady fox with a majestically bushy tail, black-tipped ears and feet, white markings on her chest and muzzle, and shining black eyes. People first started posting images of the fox on Monday.

The Democratic Party is out of the office. Quite literally. Nancy Pelosi, who controls administrative policy in the House, this week extended the in-office moratorium and proxy voting through the middle of May. Pelosi says she based the policy on the recommendation of the sergeant-at-arms who wrote that there is still an ongoing “public health emergency due to the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 remains in effect.” Quite the contrast to the president’s message. Pelosi's extension follows reporting from the Washington Free Beacon last week that most Democratic offices in DC remain shut, citing Covid-19 pandemic and workplace restrictions as the reason.

By the middle of January, I’d read some version of the headline “Biden Can Still Rescue His Presidency” so many times that it seemed an algorithm had taken over from the editors. The New York Times placed it above a column by Bret Stephens, a prominent anti-Trump conservative and a member of the pundit pack that earnestly wished the president Godspeed when he entered the White House more than a year ago. Stephens, like most of his colleagues, argued that Biden was “flailing — and failing” — because of what the paper’s news pages have described as a “legislative agenda in shambles.

I’ve been thinking about where I was on the eve of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, and my memories of the event are quite depressing. What have we learned? As a research fellow at the Cato Institute at that time, I was working with other analysts preparing research, authoring commentaries, publishing op-ed articles and giving interviews to the broadcast media, warning about the consequences of the coming American military conquest in the Middle East. It's not polite to toot one’s own horn, but we were right.

Many of our political leaders are historically illiterate. This is especially concerning given that some of these politicians have been around since the dawn of time. They've lived through much of the history they now seem to know so little about. While heaping praise on Biden’s decision to nominate the first black woman to the Supreme Court, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer decided to spread misinformation. Luckily his misinformation was just a rant on the Senate floor and not on Spotify. Otherwise, Neil Young might have had some words for him. "Until 1981, this powerful body, the Supreme Court, was all white men. Imagine. America wasn't all white men in 1981, or ever.

“It’s time for us to do what we have been doing and that time is every day" was the much ridiculed answer from Vice President Kamala Harris in an interview with NBC News on Thursday. It has been lampooned in almost every corner of the media and memed all over the internet, and rightly so. Harris has been plagued her entire electoral career by a sense that she isn't prepared. This time the test is the pandemic, which is a major problem for her and Joe Biden almost a year into their administration. It's a term they were elected to almost exclusively on the promise of “shutting down the virus.” But viruses are a non-political problem, despite Biden's politicizing it during the 2020 election.

Was there an ayahuasca retreat for normie Democratic pundits last weekend that Cockburn didn’t get an invitation to? He asks because recent days have seen the proliferation of hot takes best explained by the ingestion of psychedelics. In particular, Cockburn is confused by a series of kooky suggestions as to who might make good Democratic presidential and vice-presidential candidates next time around. In the Wall Street Journal, Douglas E. Schoen and Andrew Stein say that Joe and Kamala have become too unpopular to run again and that it might be time for a “change” candidate: a tough broad who goes by the name of Hillary Clinton. Yes, that’s right: Hillary could be back.

A piece in Politico titled “Democrats fall flat with ‘Latinx’ language” dropped yesterday, and as is always the case with such stories, activists and pundits took to Twitter to decry or defend “Latinx.” What was interesting this time around, however, is that some big-name progressives came out against the term. Fernand Amandi, an MSNBC analyst and the principal at Bendixen & Amandi International, the polling outfit quoted in Politico, tweeted: https://twitter.com/AmandiOnAir/status/1467843020838080512?s=20 According to the poll, only 2 percent of Hispanics refer to themselves as Latinx; 68 percent prefer Hispanic and 21 percent identify as Latino/Latina.

President Joe Biden during his 2020 campaign vowed not to raise taxes on anyone earning less than $400,000 a year. That promise recently hit an iceberg in the form of a new excise tax on nicotine. Kentucky Congressman John Yarmuth inserted the tax into the tome-like Build Back Better Plan bill last week. Yarmuth’s amendment appears to focus on e-cigarettes, vape juice, and other non-tobacco items by classifying them as extracted nicotine products with a max levy of over $50. That’s like the current tobacco tax. It’s unknown how much revenue Yarmuth hopes to raise, though the original Build Back Better Plan included $96 billion in tobacco and e-cigs taxes. Any nicotine tax will hit the lower and middle classes harder than anyone else.

Top Democrats took a media victory lap last weekend, crowing about the $1 trillion infrastructure bill that finally cleared the House on Friday night after months of false starts and intra-party squabbling. The vote came only after Speaker Nancy Pelosi, in her latest Hail Mary, attempted to satisfy progressive lawmakers by also allowing a procedural vote on the massive social spending bill craved by liberals. Even then, Pelosi was forced to rely on a handful of Republicans to secure a majority. Predictably, the White House was eager to spin the bill’s passage as major win for the Biden agenda, claiming it would energize voters and pave the way for trillions more in government spending just in time for the holidays.