Washington dc

This is a public service announcement from Cockburn: the mask mandates have got to go — for everyone’s health. Even America’s most progressive cities have lifted their face mask restrictions after the cresting of the first Omicron wave — but some of their denizens are hooked on the taste of government boot, and are going mad at the prospect of being weaned off it. Cockburn was sent a video by his nephew earlier this week showcasing this phenomenon: a masked Washington local cussing out unmasked teens at a DC Metro station. Masks are, for some unscientific reason, still required on public transport in the nation’s capital — despite not being needed in schools, gyms, stores, bars, restaurants…you get the picture.

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky is flying high. The contrast between Zelensky, who virtually addressed Congress this morning, and Russian president Vladimir Putin, who rarely appears publicly, becomes starker almost by the day. Putin believed that he could launch a Blitzkrieg attack that would topple Zelensky but the very opposite has occurred. It is Putin who is cornered while Zelensky basks in the world’s spotlight. In his address, it was shrewd of Zelensky to fold Ukraine’s struggle for independence into the American saga. Essentially, he appealed to the New World to redress the balance of the Old World.

The nation’s capital is finally dropping its vaccine and mask mandates…mostly. DC mayor Muriel Bowser reluctantly followed the science and ended the vaccine requirement for the district’s businesses effective Tuesday — rendering the city’s “get the vax to see the acts” campaign null and void. The decision to require proof of vaccination now falls to individual businesses in the city — a civil rights victory, surely, given that just under a quarter of DC’s black residents remain unvaccinated. Bowser’s move comes after a lengthy battle with venues such as The Big Board on H Street, which had its license suspended by the ABC Board earlier this month for refusing to enforce the mandate.

I believe that Maximinus Thrax, whose brief reign ran from 235 to 238 AD, was the first Roman emperor never to have set foot in Rome. The Thracian brute started a trend. As the years went by, more and more Roman emperors gave the city a miss. Diocletian (284-305), who brought the crisis of the third century to an end, hated the city. Some later emperors settled on Ravenna as the seat of power for the Western empire. Constantinople emerged as HQ for the East. Rome retained a certain ceremonial significance but was increasingly irrelevant to the business of empire. The turn away from Rome happened for many reasons.

"I am vaccinated — two Moderna shots, then boosted with a Pfizer booster," Fox News's Geraldo Rivera said as he announced he tested positive for Covid two weeks ago. "I thought for sure that I was immune...I ate some humble pie." The View's Whoopi Goldberg expressed similar surprise when she caught the virus, saying, "It was a shock, because I'm triple vaxxed, I haven't been anywhere, I haven't done anything." "It's one of those things where you think, I've done everything I was supposed to do... Yeah, it doesn't stop Omicron," she added. There have been scores of high-profile people admitting over the past month that you can "do everything right" and still catch Covid-19.

How long will the Democrats weep for the death of their transformational agenda this week? It's anyone’s guess. Everyone handles grief differently. Senator Chuck Schumer’s decision to hold a vote on a filibuster carveout seems like less of a Hail Mary effort and more like an attempt to virtue-signal toward the progressives in his party. If someday he is forced to go toe-to-toe in a Senate primary with Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, at least he can tell the pitch-fork waving socialists that he tried to change the filibuster. That should save him, right Chuck? Despite President Biden’s opinion, that he “probably outperformed what anybody thought would happen”, the general consensus after his first year is that things aren’t going great.

At least since the 2016 election, one of my favorites politicians — one of the few I could stomach at all — was Ted Cruz. He is certainly one of the smartest and most articulate members of Congress — not, I know, a high bar, but Ted really is someone with deep rhetorical gifts, an illuminating grasp of constitutional principles and a steely eyed appreciation of political realities. After a very brief flirtation with Scott Walker, my favored candidate for president in 2016 was Ted Cruz. I endorsed him publicly and even labored on the outskirts of his campaign for a couple of months. But it was not to be. His announcement that, should he win the Republican nomination, he would pick the egregious Carly Fiorina as a running mate made me raise an eyebrow.

Cockburn realized this January 6 commemoration stuff was serious when he saw that even Lin-Manuel Miranda found time in his schedule to put in an appearance at the Capitol today. Actually, who knows if he was free? Miranda, the creator of Hamilton and high priest of Obama-era cringe, delivered a pre-recorded message to the American people and performed, with other cast members from the show that made him famous, the song “Dear Theodosia.” You might be wondering whether this struck the right tone for what was Cockburn was told was going to be a somber commemoration of one of the darkest days in American history.

The idea that what happened at the Capitol of January 6 was an “insurrection” was always a ridiculous and malevolent exaggeration. The passage of time has exposed that politically motivated lie and sent the rats scurrying for alternative explanations. Right on cue, we find a hobbyhorse leftist taking to the pages of the Washington Post — Jeff Bezos’s onshore publicity organ for the Democratic Party — to warn us against calling the protest at the Capitol an “insurrection.” The memo to Scribes and Pharisees has gone out. It’s no longer an “insurrection.” It’s been rebaptized a “sinister” act of “vigilantism.

John Eastman, a former member of Donald Trump’s legal team, has just declined, through his attorney, to cooperate with the congressional inquiry into the events of January 6, 2021 at the Capitol. I think he was right to do so, for several reasons. In the first place, the congressional inquiry would be better named a congressional vendetta. Its composition is heavily weighted towards Democrats. The committee includes no “ranking members” of the opposition as the rules stipulate, hence the frequent invocation of the “Star Chamber” in descriptions of the inquiry. It is less an investigation than an inquisition.

It might come as a surprise, but Cockburn is a big advocate of public transportation. Most days, his rigorous whiskey-and-ginger schedule leaves him unfit for the wheel of a car. You're more likely to find him in the back of a cab or pedaling around on a Capital Bikeshare bicycle, his tie fluttering in the wind. So it's been much to Cockburn's dismay that the Metro, Washington's subway system, has lately ground to a halt. It began last month when a single train managed to derail at least three times in one day thanks to what was later found to be a faulty wheel axle. The National Transportation Safety Board, the regulatory agency tasked with overseeing Metro, swooped in, and was aghast at what they found.

Cockburn’s invite to the Met Gala must have gotten lost in the mail — so instead he spent Monday night in Washington at the 2021 Bradley Prizes. Well-heeled guests sauntered into the National Building Museum, a rare building in downtown DC that has yet to be ceded to the homeless, or worse, the federal government. The night’s honorees were Federalist senior editor and Fox News mainstay Mollie Ziegler Hemingway, Roger R. Ream, chairman of The Fund for American Studies, and the author Amity Schales. The Bradley Foundation is a Milwaukee-based conservative foundation that, according to its website, 'envisions a nation invigorated by the principles and institutions that uphold our unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness'.

Masks and COVID tests are here to stay for kids returning to school in LA. On Thursday, the Los Angeles School District announced it would require all students and employees returning for in-person instruction to wear a mask while on the premises and participate in weekly COVID testing. These terms will apply to vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals alike. At the height of the pandemic, Los Angeles County had the highest concentration of COVID deaths and hospitalizations in the state despite strict mask mandates. At the time of writing, Gov. Gavin Newsom has not reissued these requirements despite new worry from the CDC over the Delta variant. His recall election is just weeks away, and a recent poll indicates the race is tightening.