Scientists working with the Natural History Museum of Vienna may have uncovered the origin of the Venus of Willendorf, a 30,000-year-old figurine originally unearthed 114 years ago in Lower Austria near the Danube River.
Professor Gerhard W. Weber, head of the Department of Evolutionary Anthropology at the University of Vienna, and his colleagues detailed the discovery in a paper published Monday to the journal Scientific Reports.
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Six years ago, before Russia’s full-scale invasion of their country, the Ukrainians bet that a Hillary Clinton presidency would offer better protection from Russian President Vladimir Putin, even though he had invaded Crimea during the Obama-Biden administration, whose Russian policies Clinton vowed to continue.
Working with both the Obama administration and the Clinton campaign, Ukrainian government officials intervened in the 2016 race to help Clinton and hurt Trump in a sweeping and systematic foreign influence operation that’s been largely ignored by the press. The improper, if not illegal, operation was run chiefly out of the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington, where officials worked hand-in-glove with a Ukrainian-American activist and Clinton campaign operative to attack the Trump campaign. The Obama White House was also deeply involved in an effort to groom their own favored leader in Ukraine and then work with his government to dig up dirt on – and even investigate — their political rival.
Ukrainian and Democratic operatives also huddled with American journalists to spread damaging information on Trump and his advisers – including allegations of illicit Russian-tied payments that, though later proved false, forced the resignation of his campaign manager Paul Manafort. The embassy actually weighed a plan to get Congress to investigate Manafort and Trump and stage hearings in the run-up to the election.
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Des Moines this week suffered its first fatal school shooting – reigniting a controversy in the city after the district removed police officers from its schools last year.
Police say a group of teenagers in vehicles outside Des Moines’ East High School fired multiple rounds onto school property on Monday, killing a 15-year-old boy and critically wounding two female students who were bystanders. Six teenagers, some of them current Des Moines students, have been charged with first-degree murder.
The deadly drive-by shooting now hovers over the decision by Des Moines officials, along with about 30 districts across the country, to exile cops from schools. These moves were part of the “defund the police” movement that erupted after the murder of George Floyd in 2020. It’s a movement now reeling in the face of violent crime surging nationwide, punctuated by President Biden’s State of the Union vow last week to “fund the police.”
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Space is definitely the high ground when it comes to many military, scientific and economic activities. As the world becomes more information-intensive, the ability to move data rapidly, reliably, and cheaply will be of enormous advantage. Governments, private companies, and scientific organizations are rushing to build large satellite constellations to enhance surveillance of the Earth, explore space, and improve the movement of data. Nations able to deploy robust space-based laser communications systems will reap military, scientific and commercial benefits.
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Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine marks the end of the West’s Era of Illusions. It was an era in which Western elites obsessed about solving climate change because the climate crisis was far more dangerous than issues of war and peace and the stability of the international system. They even convinced themselves that climate change causes war, so climate change policy could double as national security policy; and, for many years, the annual round of kumbaya UN climate talks was the apogee of international relations.
In a BBC World Service interview, presidential climate envoy John Kerry expressed concern about the amount of greenhouse gas being emitted from the war in Ukraine. Kerry was just getting warmed up with a string of platitudes that show him as a deluded climate relic, unable to come to terms with the reality that Putin has imposed on the world. “Equally importantly,” Kerry complained, “you’re going to lose people’s focus,” as if the first invasion of a sovereign European country since the Second World War is an annoying distraction. Hopefully, Kerry continued, Putin would realize that Russia’s land is thawing, and the people of Russia are at risk.
Kerry concluded with an expression of pure self-deception, saying he hopes Putin “will help us to stay on track with respect to what we need to do for the climate.” Stay on track? Russia has never hidden its intention to avoid cutting its emissions. Russia’s second Nationally Determined Contribution, submitted in November 2020 under the Paris climate agreement, is to limit its 2030 emissions to “no more than 70% of 1990 levels.” The document is careful to avoid pledging to cut or reduce emissions. The 1990 baseline year was the last one before the collapse of the highly inefficient and heavily polluting centrally planned Soviet economy. Thus, the 70% limit actually enables Russia to increase its emissions by 34% – and that’s before taking account of any changes in forestry and land use that would allow Russia to claim credit for negative emissions.
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The warning signs are everywhere. We are stumbling toward an energy crisis that is likely to be far more severe and long-lasting than the upheavals of the 1970s. And no, this isn’t about Russia or Ukraine. This is about the perilous state of the U.S. electricity grid.
If action isn’t taken soon to address the unraveling reliability of the grid, the United States will face the specter of rolling blackouts, factory shutdowns, loss of jobs and soaring electricity bills. Our organization CASE recently released a policy brief highlighting just how dire the situation is.
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Rising inflation threatens the value of Americans’ retirement savings. Now the Biden administration is finalizing a rule to loosen safeguards under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (“ERISA”) that protect private retirement savings. The new rule, “Prudence and Loyalty in Selecting Plan Investments and Exercising Shareholder Rights,” stems from President Biden’s May 20, 2021, Executive Order on Climate-Related Financial Risk, which directed senior White House advisers to develop a strategy for financing the administration’s net-zero climate goals, including the use of private savings.
Predictably, Wall Street is cheering the prospect of undoing ERISA safeguards. According to one analysis, 97% of comment letters support the proposal. But as I show in my RealClear Foundation report The Biden Administration’s ERISA Work-Around, it’s the remaining three percent that should give the Department of Labor (DOL) cause to rethink its deeply flawed approach.
Under ERISA, retirement savings must be invested for the exclusive purpose of providing retirement benefits. The May 2021 executive order illustrates the very danger that ERISA’s exclusive-purpose rule is designed to guard against. To achieve the goals set out in the order, DOL is instructed to “suspend, revise or rescind” two Trump-era rules designed to uphold ERISA’s exclusive-purpose rule.
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On the 10th anniversary of Trayvon Martin’s death this week, the media is still rewriting history. He is being depicted as an innocent young victim minding his own business who wasn’t a threat to anyone in Sanford, Florida, when George Zimmerman shot him.
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Despite promises from President Biden and top health officials that COVID-19 vaccines would prevent severe illness, death, and perhaps even transmission of the virus, data indicate that thousands of Americans are dying from the illness even after having been vaccinated.
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The American K-12 education system has been failing too many students for too long. And the problem has only gotten worse amid pandemic-era school closures and remote learning.
Increasingly, parents are venting their frustration at local government bureaucracies and teachers’ unions that they believe have too often failed to put the interests of kids first — and some are voting with their feet.
Throughout Covid-19, traditional public school enrollment has dropped by 3.3% (1.45 million students) while charter school enrollment has increased by 7.1% year over year (237,000 students). Families are increasingly taking advantage of other non-traditional schooling options as well: according to the U.S. Census Bureau, the rate of homeschooling nationwide increased by 5.6 percentage points between April and October 2020.
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The night sky, in all its astral beauty, has ever been a source of wonder for the human race. But over a century ago, some astronomers looked up and saw a paradox.
Why, they wondered, if the Universe is infinite, with an infinite number of stars, is the night sky not white? Every direction we look, there should be a star whose light has traveled all the way to Earth. So the night sky should be a sea of sunlight!
This conundrum is commonly called Olbers’ paradox, named after the German astronomer Heinrich Wilhelm Olbers, who wrote about it in the early 1800s, though he was not the first, nor the only, thinker to ponder it.
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There is always a tweet, so says the online aphorism, developed during the chaotic Trump years, that now seems to hold true across administrations and perhaps even with increased significance after a Russian strongman decided to invade an eastern European neighbor over the holiday weekend.
The Russian in question is Vladimir Putin. The country invaded, Ukraine, or more specifically the so-called Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics that Russia recently recognized diplomatically. And the tweet, well, that came from Joe Biden.
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Woke ideology is proof that the world has gone Mad – as in Mad Magazine. What passes as penetrating insight on the left is just a newfangled version of the old fill-in-the-blanks word game Mad Libs. Try to guess what the Princeton University students are talking about here:
We aim to decolonize our practice of ____, even as ____ remains an imperialist, colonialist, and white supremacist art form. (Answer: ballet)
How would you complete this statement from Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau?
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In his Gettysburg Address at the height of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln pointed out that the United States was “conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” “Now,” he continued, “we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”
Thankfully, we are not in a civil war today – and, one hopes, never will be again. We are, however, in a battle for the soul of our country.
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All taxpayers are dealing with a disastrous filing season this year, with the IRS backed up on processing millions of returns and refunds from last year and communication from the agency nonexistent at best. But some taxpayers will have an added headache in the future as a result of an unnecessary new paperwork requirement that went into effect this year. Fortunately, however, legislation introduced by Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-TN) would address this issue by removing the burdensome new requirement.
Ever since IRS Commissioner Chuck Rettig claimed last year that the “tax gap,” or the gap between what the IRS collects and what it believes it is owed, could be as large as $1 trillion, politicians and legislators have been scrambling to propose ways to collect all that missing revenue. That’s despite the fact that more sober analyses show that the $1 trillion figure is probably wildly exaggerated, that it is functionally impossible to wholly prevent tax evasion, and that a far greater concern is the IRS’s inability to handle its taxpayer service responsibilities.
But as far as proposals to collect all this supposed “extra revenue” go, most of the focus has rightly been on schemes to drastically increase the IRS’s enforcement budget and allow the IRS to snoop on taxpayers’ financial accounts. But another more targeted change has already gone into effect, and is already causing problems.
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Within hours of taking office on January 20, 2021, President Joe Biden signed an executive order cancelling the cross-border permit for the Keystone XL pipeline as part of a plan to phase out natural gas and oil, eliminating thousands of family-sustaining jobs. At the same time, the Biden administration promised plenty of “good-paying” positions would be available in the renewable energy sector.
But the reality is that natural gas and oil jobs don’t easily transfer to the renewables sector, as a new analysis by Cicero, in coordination with North America’s Building Trades Unions (NABTU) and American Petroleum Institute (API), shows.
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Long before FBI computer contractor and Clinton operative Rodney L. Joffe allegedly trolled Internet traffic for dirt on President Trump, he mined direct-marketing contact lists for the names and addresses of unwitting Americans to target in a promotional scam involving a grandfather clock.
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This is a bad year to have paid the International Olympic Committee $100 million for the right to put its iconic rings on your soda cans or shampoo bottles. But this is what the rarefied air of being a top Olympic sponsor buys you in 2022: The Winter Games are being played in an authoritarian state with an atrocious human rights record, and none of its underwriters are eager to play up their association in the important American market.
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Drawing on research from a multimillion-dollar Mark Zuckerberg-linked initiative viewed as pivotal in the 2020 presidential election, 14 states carried by Joe Biden have appealed to him for billions of dollars more to secure elections for the next decade. But most of them have spent less than half their shares of previous federal funding to counter alleged Russian election meddling and other “threats” to election security.
The states’ letter to the president cites a report by the Election Infrastructure Initiative, a progressive nonprofit that estimates $53 billion in taxpayer money will be needed to ensure election security over the next decade.
The Election Infrastructure Initiative is an arm of the Center for Tech and Civic Life, which in 2020 distributed nearly $400 million in private grants – $350 million from Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan – to local election offices in 48 states and the District of Columbia for the pandemic-challenged presidential election.
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Recent images from the Los Angeles railyards of a sea of cardboard wreckage, the remnants of thousands of stolen packages, have made national headlines. Union Pacific railroad said criminal rail theft in LA has increased by more than 2.5 times since December 2020. Yet while most media coverage focuses on this third-world scene, little has been made of the consequences for the small business sellers ripped off by this grand theft.
Whether it comes in the form of widescale package theft by criminal enterprises or organized smash-and-grab robberies at brick and mortar stores, theft has become a big problem for small businesses. A new survey finds that nearly all small business owners experienced an increase in theft in 2021.
This isn’t the shoplifting of your parent’s generation. Elaborate criminal networks steal and resell goods at below-market rates on internet marketplaces such as Amazon, Facebook, eBay, and Alibaba. The cost of lost inventory and ensuing cut-rate online competition puts tremendous pressure on small business margins that are already strained by the highest inflation in 40 years and severe supply chain disruptions.
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Who among us hasn’t made $1.5 million for sitting on an advisory board for two years? Not you? Come to think of it, me neither. Such money comes only to the well connected.
And “connected” is a good word to use in regard to Sarah Bloom Raskin, nominated last month by President Joe Biden to be Vice Chair for Supervision at the Federal Reserve System. Previously, from 2010 to 2014, she served as a Governor of the Fed, and then, from 2014 to 2017, she worked as Barack Obama’s Deputy Secretary of the Treasury.
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Chaos. Disruption. Uncertainty.
The Chicago Teachers Union provides a real-world example of what happens when a government union has too much power.
CTU has gone on strike three times in three school years. In the latest work stoppage, over 330,000 schoolchildren missed five days of school. Parents were notified of the walkout after 11 p.m. on a school night, leaving them just hours to develop a back-up plan after the union decided not to show up.
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Perched about 325 feet (100 meters) up the slopes of the Prealps in southern France, a humble rock shelter looks out over the Rhône River Valley. It’s a strategic point on the landscape, as here the Rhône flows through a narrows between two mountain ranges. For millennia, inhabitants of the rock shelter would have had commanding views of herds of animals migrating between the Mediterranean region and the plains of northern Europe, today replaced by TGV trains and up to 180,000 vehicles per day on one of the busiest highways on the continent.
The site, recognized in the 1960s and named Grotte Mandrin after French folk hero Louis Mandrin, has been a valued location for over 100,000 years. The stone artifacts and animal bones left behind by ancient hunter-gatherers from the Paleolithic period were quickly covered by the glacial dust that blew from the north on the famous mistral winds, keeping the remains well preserved.
Since 1990, our research team has been carefully investigating the uppermost 10 feet (3 meters) of sediment on the cave floor. Based on artifacts and tooth fossils, we believe that Mandrin rewrites the consensus story about when modern humans first made their way to Europe.
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Many iconic U.S. newspapers sport slogans that seek to explain their mission – and self-image. “All the News That’s Fit to Print” has been called “the seven most famous words in American journalism.” “Democracy Dies in Darkness” was an overtly partisan call to arms. But the most telling section of a newspaper’s true values is its “Corrections” page. That’s where journalism distinguishes itself from just about every other profession, routinely and straightforwardly admitting its mistakes. Who else does that?
It is a soul-crushing enterprise. A single misspelled name is all it takes to ruin an otherwise stellar article. We reporters may forget the topic of the piece we wrote last week, while the error five years ago is seared into our memories. But it is also crucial: Reader trust is the lifeblood of journalism. If you can’t believe what you read, why bother?
And yet, we do get things wrong all the time. Despite the self-righteous claims of too many news outlets, journalists don’t print The Truth. The “first draft of history” is necessarily messy and incomplete. What journalists have long promised readers is that we will do our best to get the story right initially and then set the record straight when better information emerges. This isn’t solely a commitment to high-minded ethics. It is also transactional: Journalists can so readily acknowledge errors because readers honor and reward our honesty. They forgive us our trespasses because we acknowledge them.
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Two years after COVID burst on the American scene, leading to lockdowns, school closures, mask and vaccine mandates, and trillions of dollars in emergency government spending, the question on many minds is: When will the emergency end?
The answer to that question is not an easy one. An examination of past emergencies does not resolve it. Rather, it is clear that emergency situations, including this one, may be understood through various lenses, yielding different perspectives on what the endpoint will be.
Take, by way of comparison, World War II, an emergency that had at least four distinct endings because it had at least four distinct faces:
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After months of delay, the Department of Homeland Security replied late last month to a Congressional demand for information about the number of illegal migrants the department has flown from border towns to communities around the country. In 2021, it said, 71,617 were dropped off in nearly 20 cities including locales as far from the Mexican border as Atlanta, Chicago, New York and Philadelphia.
Immigration experts critical of the Biden administration’s permissive immigration policies believe those numbers are incomplete, especially regarding the most vulnerable migrants, those under 18, whom DHS classifies as “unaccompanied children.” The agency says some 40,000 of the total transported are such minors, but that number is only a fraction of the 147,000 “encounters” the agency reports having with unaccompanied migrant children at the southern border between January and October 2021.
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After leaving his victims with shattered dreams and millions in collective financial losses, the legendary con artist Charles Ponzi observed with casual cruelty, “Even if they never got anything for it, it was cheap at that price.”
There is something of that same unrepentant sentiment in the selective silence of previously voluble woke corporate boards and national media pundits. Their unwillingness to demand accountability and transparency of Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, a $90 million organization that publicly promised social justice to its millions of small donors and corporate benefactors – including Facebook, Google and Twitter – after George Floyd’s death, makes them aiders and abettors to BLMGNF’s questionable leadership and violations of law.
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Only a few years after “woke capitalism” was touted as the wave of the future, its supporters are getting a wakeup call of their own.
Just ask BlackRock CEO Larry Fink. The tone of his 2022 letter to CEOs is very different from his previous two, both of which pushed Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) investment criteria and “stakeholder capitalism” relentlessly. As far as Fink was concerned, ESG, “sustainability,” and the agenda for what we have termed “woke capital” would dominate the markets for years, while he and his $10 trillion asset management behemoth would, in turn, dominate them. Fink was to be king of the stakeholder world.
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Perhaps predictably, many public schools kicked off 2022 by switching back to remote learning — or canceling classes altogether — leaving frustrated parents across the country frantically searching for more consistent schooling options.
These past two school years of remote and hybrid learning, forced masking, and an intensified culture of unpredictability has pushed teachers, administrators, students, and parents to very edge. What began as a temporary interruption to student learning has become a vicious cycle of confusion, inconsistency and lost educational time.
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It’s no secret that local newspapers have been dying. Since 2004, the United States has lost a quarter of its newspapers — 70 dailies and over 2,000 weeklies. This has been devastating for communities across the country who depend on these newspapers to stay informed and engaged. There are many factors causing this decline, but one of the main culprits, especially as of late, has been Big Tech.
There’s a term to describe the actions of massive corporations manipulating the levers of state power to dominate their markets and pad their bottom lines at the expense of others. It’s crony capitalism. Under this system, crony capitalists flood Washington, DC with campaign contributions, pay-to-play experts, and legions of lobbyists to shape the laws and regulations that govern their industries.
Sound familiar? If you have observed Big Tech’s movements within the halls of power in our nation’s capital over the past decade, you know exactly what I’m talking about. It’s said that if you whisper “Section 230” to yourself three times while walking through the Capitol, a Big Tech-funded lobbyist will suddenly appear to explain why changing even one word in the arcane law might trigger the apocalypse.
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The faith, trust, and confidence in our election process has been in steep decline for decades. Concerns over hanging chads and dimpled ballots from 2000’s presidential election may now have been replaced with questions about photo ID and drop boxes – but the overall result is the same: The American people simply don’t trust the outcome of elections.
In fact, recent polls show only 57% of voters believe Joe Biden was legitimately elected in 2020. Similarly, just 61% of Americans believe Trump legitimately won in 2016.
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The federal government, like many private companies that have offices in different locations, has provisions to adjust employees’ pay based on their location. It’s called locality pay.
For example, an employee in San Francisco, Calif. has a significantly higher cost of living than an employee in Casper, Wyo. San Francisco’s locality adjustment is an additional 41.44% of base pay.
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The Washington Post has recused its new national editor, Matea Gold, from the news organization’s coverage of the FBI and Justice Department over a personal conflict of interest. A month before Gold was promoted, her husband, Jonathan Lenzner, was named FBI chief of staff.
A Post spokeswoman told RealClearInvestigations that the paper’s managing editor, Steven Ginsberg, will be overseeing coverage of the Justice Department and the FBI. Kristine Coratti Kelly, the paper’s chief communications officer, said the decision does not reflect on Gold’s objectivity or credibility.
“We have every confidence in Matea’s professionalism and high standards,” Kelly said. “She has recused herself from this area of coverage to avoid even the appearance of partiality.”
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The omicron variant may be nearing its peak in some states, but across the country it’s produced a dizzying array of conflicting signals on whether the nation should remain under a COVID national emergency or move on to an endemic “new normal.”
Comedian Bill Maher’s “I don’t want to live in your mask-paranoid world anymore” monologue went viral last week, just days after the Atlantic, the standard-bearer journal for the liberal intelligentsia, ran a story headlined: “COVID Parenting Has Passed the Point of Absurdity.” Accompanying the article was a black-and-white photo of a woman frozen in a more desperate and primal state of panic than the subject of Edvard Munch’s “The Scream.”
Omicron, for most people without co-morbidities, produces much milder symptoms than do the coronavirus’s previous variants, but it’s far more infectious, racing through schools, shutting down classrooms and forcing parents to consult their district’s ever-shifting COVID “decision trees” on a seemingly daily basis.
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As part of his Contract with America, House Speaker (and my former boss) Newt Gingrich helped first introduce the Child Tax Credit (CTC), passing it in 1997. Originally the idea of President Ronald Reagan, the CTC was founded on the conservative principles that raising children is God’s work, and parents should not be punished or held back for choosing family in a country that is always moving forward. President Trump continued this tradition by doubling the CTC in 2017. As Speaker Gingrich said during a 1995 speech, “We believe that parents ought to have the first claim on money to take care of their children rather than bureaucrats.”
Democrats reformed the CTC in 2021, as part of their wildly overdone American Rescue Plan. They’ve sought to continue their changes to the CTC in the even-more-overdone Build Back Better Act (BBB), a hulking Frankenstein of bad Democratic ideas. But the new version of the CTC may be an exception. It continues fulfilling Speaker Gingrich’s contract, empowering families to work and earn, and to raise their children with their own values. The spirit and core of that policy is even better reflected by flat, poverty-busting monthly disbursement of the credit. It’s the only salvageable ship in the sinking BBB fleet.
The CTC – in its 2021 form – does not stray too far from the $500-per-child tax cut that was initially passed in 1997. The payments, which provided eligible families with up to $300 per month for each qualifying child under age 6 and up to $250 per month for each qualifying child aged 6 to 17, stimulated regional economies, protected families from rising costs, provided direct cash relief, and removed bureaucratic hurdles.
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Lately, we keep hearing about this or that “threat to the republic,” ironically mostly involving something Republicans are doing or purporting to do, but I’m starting to think maybe (stop me if you’ve heard this before) the real threat is a cabal of powerful people who don’t want to give up power.
My recent column about the parallels between a science fiction novel and the Biden White House raised a couple of key questions: How much of what we know “for certain” is just a reflection of dubious assertions we have been told so often that we take them for granted? Assertions that, if not lies, are untested allegations and assumptions that fit a narrative we have been programmed to accept at face value?
In other words, how much of what we know for sure is just wishful thinking (ours, or someone else’s)? Are we living in some kind of mass psychosis that lets us forget about real and present dangers to our nation and our future while we focus on boogeymen?
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Judged by BlackRock CEO Larry Fink’s latest letter, January 2022 might turn out to be the highwater mark of woke capitalism. Stakeholder capitalism is not “woke,” Fink says, because capitalism is driven by mutually beneficial relationships between businesses and their stakeholders. He’s right. What Fink describes is capitalism pure and simple, the stakeholder modifier adding nothing to the uniqueness of capitalism in harnessing competition and innovation for the benefit of all.
Fink’s shift is more than rhetorical. Just three years ago, in his 2019 “Profit and Purpose” letter, Fink told CEOs that the $24 trillion of wealth Millennials expect to inherit from their Boomer parents meant that ESG (environment, social, governance) issues “will be increasingly material to corporate valuations.” Now Fink tells them that “long-term profitability” is the measure by which markets will determine their companies’ success, dumping the ESG valuation metrics he’d previously championed.
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Physical activity can do wonders for the body. Exercise can trim weight, chisel muscles, and strengthen the lower back, among many other benefits. Less overt, but no less consequential, physical activity can also buff up your brain. Science is increasingly revealing that the brains of those who regularly work out can look very different compared to the brains of people who don’t.
Changes can start to occur in adolescence. Reviewing the scientific literature in 2018, researchers from the University of Southern California found that for teens aged 15-18, regular exercisers tended to have larger hippocampal volumes as well as larger rostral middle frontal volumes compared to healthy matched control teenagers. The hippocampus is most commonly associated with memory and spatial navigation, while the rostral middle frontal gyrus has been linked to emotion regulation and working memory. Studies suggest that these structural changes translate to improved cognitive performance and better academic outcomes.
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Wednesday’s announcement by Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer that he would be retiring at the end of the court’s current session has raised the obvious question of how contentious the battle over his replacement will be.
One thing is almost certain to be true: No matter who is nominated by President Joe Biden, there will be no 87-9 favorable vote – the tally when Breyer was nominated by Bill Clinton in 1994. Though there were occasional exceptions in the decade prior to Breyer, his vote totals were not unusual in that era. Antonin Scalia was approved 98-0, Anthony Kennedy 97-0, and Ruther Bader Ginsburg 96-3. However, no Supreme Court nomination since Breyer’s has received fewer than 22 negative votes, the number against Chief Justice John Roberts in 2005.
That was the year Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer (now majority leader) urged that senators should vote explicitly on the basis of candidates’ ideology rather than simply their qualifications. In reality, ideology had been the primary driving factor behind the rejection of Robert Bork’s nomination in 1987 and the tough, though ultimately successful, fight over Clarence Thomas’ nomination in 1991, but most opposing senators had attempted to preserve the fiction that judicial temperament or scandals were behind their “no” votes. Schumer opened the door to unabashed ideological and partisan warfare, and subsequent votes on Supreme Court nominations have shown it.
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As indictments and new court filings indicate that Special Counsel John Durham is investigating Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign for feeding false reports to the FBI to incriminate Donald Trump and his advisers as Kremlin agents, Clinton’s role in the burgeoning scandal remains elusive. What did she know and when did she know it?
Top officials involved in her campaign have repeatedly claimed, some under oath, that they and the candidate were unaware of the foundation of their disinformation campaign: the 35-page collection of now debunked claims of Trump/Russia collusion known as the Steele dossier. Even though her campaign helped pay for the dossier, they claim she only read it after BuzzFeed News published it in 2017.
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In a press conference last week that lasted nearly two hours, President Biden expressed frustration with efforts by the opposition party to thwart the more ambitious aspects of his policy agenda.
“Think about this: What are Republicans for?” Biden said defiantly. “What are they for? Name me one thing they’re for.” For instance, the president then asked, “What do you think their position on human rights is?”
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The email from “Norton Protection” said I owed $999.99, which was “charged successfully and it will appear on your bank statement in 24 to 48 hours.” Although I have an account with a leading cybersecurity company, I’ve never paid that much for its products. To “cancel” the charge, I was instructed to call a number, conveniently highlighted in yellow.
All it took to bird-dog my fake debt email was a simple search-engine query of the invoice’s telephone number. It was based in Hawaii. Unfortunately, perhaps, for the real employees of Norton’s help desk, they are likely not stationed in the Aloha State.
In a nation swimming in real debt – with the average American owing an estimated $90,000 – it’s not surprising that “phantom debts” are one of the hottest scams.
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We are in the first month of 2022, and, from every sign, it appears my Democratic friends are determined to stick to their guns when it comes to both their agenda and how they intend to sell it. In other words, America has not heard the last of the Woke Police.
The 2021 elections, especially in Virginia, could have served as a wake-up call for Democrats. When Terry McAuliffe announced he thought parents should not be telling schools what to teach, the voters spoke loudly and clearly that they felt differently. Attempts to make Republican Glenn Youngkin into the Old Dominion’s version of Donald Trump fell flat as he scored a solid victory.
You might think that after the events of 2021, Democrats would be inclined to engage in some self-reflection. You would be wrong. How do we account for the largest increase in the inflation rate in a generation? President Biden has decided Sen. Elizabeth Warren has it right. Defying logic, gravity, and common sense, they have placed the blame on “meat conglomerates.” Why the cost of a steak would cause spikes in the cost of so many other items, including gasoline, is a carefully guarded secret. Why don’t Democrats in a position of leadership make clear they will not submit to viewpoints held by such a small percentage of the public?
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Toothbrushing is a mindless activity that most of us have on autopilot, but in infinitesimally rare circumstances, it can result in a medical emergency.
Late last week, Drs. Gary G. Ghahremani and Katherine M. Richman, both radiologists at the University of California-San Diego Medical Center, published a paper in the journal Emergency Radiology detailing eight different accounts of adults ingesting toothbrushes. These cases join about fifty others previously reported in the medical literature.
All of the instances Ghahremani and Richman describe occurred at the UC-San Diego Medical Center between 2002 and 2015. Five of the patients, all of them with psychological disorders, intentionally swallowed toothbrushes, while the other three patients accidentally did so. In two of the accidental instances, the toothbrush’s head snapped off as a result of overly vigorous brushing.
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On New Year’s Eve of 2019, revelers gathered around the globe to ring in a new decade. Many jubilantly attended “Roaring Twenties” parties, adorned in elegant evening wear, cloche and Panama hats, and knickerbockers, harkening back to an exciting, culturally vibrant era of economic prosperity. But whatever veiled hopes partygoers had for a booming future soon met jarring realities: a once-in-a-century pandemic, global lockdowns, an economic recession, and widespread civil unrest stemming from an incident of police brutality. The Roaring 2020s were not to be, it seemed.
Take heart: Mark P. Mills, a physicist, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, faculty fellow at Northwestern University, and a partner in Montrose Lane, an energy-tech venture fund, is out to rekindle our collectively dashed hopes. In his new book, The Cloud Revolution: How the Convergence of New Technologies Will Unleash the Next Economic Boom and a Roaring 2020s, Mills convincingly argues with verve, vitality, and – most importantly – evidence, that humanity is about to take a great step forward in the coming decade. And unlike the first Roaring Twenties, these won’t need to end with a Great Depression.
In the opening pages, Mills reminds us that the original Roaring Twenties didn’t start off so auspiciously, either. In fact, separated by a century, our situation seems eerily similar. The 1918 flu pandemic ran well into 1920, triggering a severe U.S. recession that lasted through summer 1921. Violent riots and political instability were also prevalent. Yet from this pit of public despair, Americans pulled themselves out. Propelled by remarkable advancements in mass production, medicine, electrification, communications via telephone and radio, movies, automobiles, and aviation, the United States saw its GDP rise by an astounding 43% between 1921 and 1929.
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As he documents the role of Hillary Clinton’s campaign in generating false allegations of Trump-Russia collusion, Special Counsel John Durham has also previewed a challenge to the FBI’s claims about how and why its counterintelligence investigation of the Trump campaign began. At stake is the completeness of the official reckoning within the U.S. government over the Russiagate scandal – and whether there will be an accounting commensurate with the offense: the abuse of the nation’s highest law enforcement and intelligence powers to damage an opposition presidential candidate turned president, at the behest of his opponent from the governing party he defeated.
The drama is playing out against the clashing approaches of the two Justice Department officials tasked with scrutinizing the Russia probe’s origins and unearthing any misconduct: Durham, the Sphinx-like prosecutor with a reputation for toughness whose work continues; and Michael Horowitz, the Department of Justice inspector general, whose December 2019 report faulted the FBI’s handling of the Russia probe but nonetheless concluded that it was launched in good faith.
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For all the attention paid to wondrous technologies, lifesaving new treatments and drugs, medicine remains by, for and about people.
This is both a blessing and a curse.
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It’s time for Dr. Fauci to go.
That’s a tough sentence to write considering the important role he’s played in advancing crucial public health issues from advancing HIV/AIDS therapies to our battle against COVID-19. His Bobble Head was well-deserved. Please, don’t shoot the messenger.
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It has been a little more than a month since the United Nations climate meeting at Glasgow, yet global use of fossil fuels has increased rapidly.
For instance, U.S. President Joe Biden cancelled domestic oil projects and vowed to stop funding for international fossil fuel projects. But as fuel prices rose, Biden responded to his self-induced energy insecurity by releasing 50 million barrels of oil reserves and even called for an increase in domestic oil production.
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Democrats across the country are pushing to continue allowing private money to fund public elections as Republicans try to limit the practice, which they say gave Joe Biden an unfair and perhaps decisive advantage in his victory over Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential contest.
So far at least 10 Republican-controlled states have passed laws to prohibit or limit the use of private money in public elections. These include the swing states of Arizona, Florida, Georgia, and Ohio. In another swing state, North Carolina, Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper vetoed such legislation, as did other Democratic governors.
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