And speaking of the GOP and fighting spirit…

The New Neo Posted on by

Ted Cruz picks himself up off the January 6th floor and asks this:

And Senator Roger Marshall of Kansas presses Fauci on COVID:

First, Marshall notes that there were more deaths under Joe Biden than under President Donald Trump. That’s the chart you see behind him in the following video. But then he tells Fauci that 59 percent of Americans didn’t trust him. Fauci replies that that was a real “distortion of reality.”

Next, Marshall hones in on the gain of function research lie. He noted how DARPA rejected a proposal but the NIAID didn’t reject it under Fauci. Marshall asks why had Fauci previously said that they hadn’t funded gain of function research when the report indicated that they had. He also asks if Fauci would commit to providing all the documents on this subject — unreacted — to Congress by the end of this week…

Fauci denies that they had funded the grant, but Marshall says they would have all the supporting information available. Fauci’s response to that is crazy, claiming that Marshall was “backing down from this,” which didn’t match what Marshall had said. Fauci just keeps saying that Marshall is incorrect, so Marshall challenges him to provide all the unredacted information.

Fauci doesn’t respond to that question and Committee Chair Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) once again comes to his rescue…

More on that DARPA report can be found here and here.

Of course, when you’re out of power, it’s difficult if not impossible to enforce your words, so at this point it’s just rhetoric from the GOP and perhaps it will remain so. But the slow drip-drip-drip of rhetoric has some force as well, and the American public in general is also getting much more fed up with Fauci and the like through repeated experience.

There’s some fight in the old GOP yet

The New Neo Posted on by

Kevin McCarthy shows some of it:

House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy told Breitbart News that as speaker of the House he would strip Reps. Adam Schiff (D-CA) and Eric Swalwell (D-CA) of their assignments on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) and Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) of her committee assignment on the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

McCarthy also said Swalwell would not be allowed to serve on the Homeland Security Committee either…

“The Democrats have created a new thing where they’re picking and choosing who can be on committees,” McCarthy said. “Never in the history [of Congress] have you had the majority tell the minority who can be on committee. But this new standard which these Democrats have voted for—if Eric Swalwell cannot get a security clearance in the private sector, there is no reason why he should be given one to be on Intel or Homeland Security. He will not be serving there.”

…McCarthy also said he will remove Omar from the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

…In addition, he said he will pull Schiff—the current HPSCI chairman—off the Intelligence Committee.

“You look at Adam Schiff—he should not be serving on Intel when he has openly, knowingly now used a fake dossier, lied to the American public in the process and doesn’t have any ill will [and] says he wants to continue to do it,” McCarthy said.

Much more at the link.

To actually accomplish this, Republicans first would have to take over the House, and then McCarthy actually has to follow through. Will he? Your guess is as good as mine.

[NOTE: The title of this post is a riff on this number:

That’s Tammy Grimes, in one of those musicals – albeit an obscure one – that I memorized in my extreme youth. I had seen it on “The Play of the Week.” Going to that link just now I see that it aired in May of 1960. It wasn’t easy to find that record back then, but somehow I (or my parents) did, although I can’t remember how.]

The Democrats’ “pretend it’s someone else” game: that NSBA letter about parents and school boards

The New Neo Posted on by

Actually, I think we already knew the gist of this was true even though we didn’t know every detail:

[Biden’s] Education Secretary Miguel Cardona solicited the much-criticized letter from the National School Boards Association that compared protesting parents to domestic terrorists, according to an email exchange reviewed by Fox News.

The email exchange indicates Cardona was more involved with the letter’s creation than previously known.

President Biden’s Department of Justice relied on the NSBA letter, which suggested using the Patriot Act against parents, in creating its own memo directing the FBI to mobilize in support of local education officials.

In the Oct. 5 email, NSBA Secretary-Treasurer Kristi Swett recounted that NSBA interim CEO Chip Slaven “told the officers he was writing a letter to provide information to the White House, from a request by Secretary Cardona.”

This was the letter about concerned parents being a threat, and sparked the “war on parents” policy. Here’s the part we already knew:

Previous emails had revealed that the NSBA was in contact with the White House and Justice Department in the weeks before it publicly sent the letter.

Here’s how it works. Get a friendly person or a friendly group to ask you to do what you already want to do, all the while pretending that the person or group instigated it on its own.

Or you can – as with Russiagate and the dossier – pay a friendly person or group to write something at your behest that falsely defames your opposition and pretend it comes from some independent and trusted source and that you had nothing to do with its genesis at all.

You can also leak something to a friendly newsperson who will then write a story about that thing, and you can pretend you’re investigating it because this independent newsperson got some independent source to tell them whatever it was that was in the leak.

Another way to do it is what’s called a collusive lawsuit, a tactic I described previously in this post The following material is from John Hinderaker at Powerline, written a year ago (the context was voting fraud):

Of course Secretaries of State have no power to change election laws, hence the need for collusive litigation, which is one of the most sinister forms of corruption in today’s world. In Minnesota and other states, the Democratic Secretaries of State immediately “settled” the lawsuits brought “against” them by their fellow Democrats. The “settlements” simply agreed to what the Democrats wanted – no safeguards to prevent fraud in mail-in voting.

The Democrats knew how corrupt, and therefore likely to fail, this tactic was, so in my state they made sure they had two bites at the apple. They recruited two sets of plaintiffs, one in federal court and another in state court, thereby dodging res judicata if they lost the first case. The key to collusive litigation is that the “settlement” conspired at by the supposedly adverse parties is ratified by a court. In Minnesota, the federal court refused to approve the Democrats’ fraudulent “settlement,” finding no showing to justify it. But a loyal state court judge went along with the Democrats’ charade. As a result, mail-in ballots in Minnesota, as in a number of other states following similarly corrupt litigation, bore no witness signatures, in plain violation of state law. The door to fraud was wide open, as the Democrats intended. One of the problems in assessing the 2020 election is that the same lax procedures that enable fraud in the first place also make it more or less impossible to prove after the fact. Sixty-nine million mail-in votes were cast; how many were fakes, and which ones? There is really no way to tell. Once those votes have been counted (sometimes in the absence of Republican poll-watchers, illegally excluded by Democrats from the rooms where counting was going on), there is no way to identify which ones were illegal and pull them out of the vote totals.

See the way it works? The Democrats have far more friends in the places that count than the GOP does: groups such as teacher associations and universities and lawyers’ groups, the State Department, the DOJ, the FBI, the press – I’m sure that you can probably think of others.

Will there be any punishment for the NSBA trick? Certainly not while the Democrats are in power and probably not even if Republicans take power next election.

On throwing Ted Cruz under the bus

The New Neo Posted on by

Ted Cruz isn’t perfect and wasn’t perfect even before he made his remarks about the January 6th defendants being “terrorists.” But he’s long been one of the most consistently conservative members of Congress. He’s also unusually smart, and rarely makes an error when he speaks. That’s probably one of the reasons why so many on the right seem unable to forgive him for this statement and are assuming it indicates some nefarious motive on his part.

I’m not one of those people, though. His statement took his standing down a notch in my eyes, but it didn’t invalidate his lengthy record and to me it’s at least plausible that his explanation is true: that he was using a term he’s used for many years to describe people who attack police, no matter what their politics, and by no means did he mean all the January 6th defendants.

Rejection of Cruz for his statement is the sort of thing I’ve come to expect from a lot of people on the right, though. It seems to me to be a zero tolerance policy that sometimes backfires and leads to Democrat victory and some very bad outcomes. I do believe that “the perfect is often the enemy of the good.”

So, what has Cruz previously said on these subjects? I did a bit of research, and here are some statements from Cruz last August about the long-term imprisonment of the January 6th defendants:

Republican Senator Ted Cruz is under fire for arguing that some participants in the Capitol riot should be spared prosecution.

Mr. Cruz told HuffPost that people who “assaulted a police officer” should spend “a long, long time in jail”, but balked at criminal charges for participants who entered the Capitol but did not harm anyone.

Here’s the HuffPost article:

“If, on the other hand, the Biden administration is targeting and persecuting people for exercising political speech that is nonviolent and simply expressing their peaceful support for a political party different from that in power, that is not the purpose of our criminal justice system,” he added.

There’s also this letter from Cruz to Merrick Garland:

In June, Mr Cruz and Senator Tommy Tuberville sent a letter to US Attorney General Merrick Garland complaining that Capitol rioters are facing harsher treatment than people who protested during the George Floyd demonstrations in 2020.

“DOJ’s apparent unwillingness to punish these individuals who allegedly committed crimes during the spring and summer 2020 protests stands in stark contrast to the harsher treatment of the individuals charged in connection with the January 6, 2021 breach of the US Capitol,” the duo wrote.

Also, from the same article (which is very anti-Cruz in the usual manner of the MSM):

Mr Cruz and many of his Republican colleagues have repeatedly tried to downplay the insurrection on 6 January. The senator has a vested interest in doing so, as he led the charge to reject the electoral ballot count the day the riot occurred.

Cruz was one of the main members of Congress defending the challenge to the 2020 election. He also voted against the Jan 6th commission’s establishment.

And what of Cruz’s previous use of the term “terrorist” to describe those who attack police? Well, there’s this from August of 2020 during the BLM/Antifa riots:

‘What you and I don’t have the right to do is to hurt somebody else, to physically assault someone else, to firebomb police cars, to loot and destroy a small business, to murder a police officer and sadly we’ve seen all of that in riots across our country.’

As well as blaming the violence on Antifa, Cruz also laid into Black Lives Matter organizers who he said are ‘pursuing a radical agenda’.

‘These are violent leftists, many of them are anarchists, some of them are affiliated with Antifa the national terrorist organization, some are affiliated with the group called Black Lives Matter which is founded by and is run by open Marxists – people who are calling for a Marxist government in the United States,’ he said.

‘We’re seeing radicals whose objective is what’s going on in Portland every night – they’re assaulting the federal courthouse and trying to burn it down.’…

‘The federal police officers are doing their job of stopping terrorists burning the courthouse to the ground,’ Cruz insisted….

[Many Democrats have made] the very unfortunate political determination that…given the choice between standing with innocent Americans or violent terrorists seeking to hurt their fellow citizens, to date too many of them have stood with terrorists.’

Last March, when Cruz was questioning FBI director Wray, Cruz said this:

In the past year, we have seen massive rioting and violence as extremists, many of them leftist extremists, took to the streets across the country, in just two weeks, at the end of May and early June, over 700 law enforcement officers were injured. Looking at all of 2020, over 14,000 people had been arrested in 49 cities, and at least 25 people have died in the violence. And it’s estimated that the property damages from these riots could exceed $2 billion. What is the FBI doing to counter this ongoing pattern of domestic terrorism?

Also, because Cruz was one of the people heading up the legal procedural challenges to the certification of the electoral votes on January 6th, 2021, as such he drew virulent criticism both before and after the January 6th demonstrations and violence:

U.S. Congressman Joaquin Castro and Texas Democratic Party Chairman Gilberto Hinojosa both said on Wednesday that Cruz should resign…

“I think that’s what it was intended to be: a coup,” he said. “This is an effort by people — who were being encouraged by the President of the United States, and people like Ted Cruz — to take the law into their own hands, and to force the declaration of Donald Trump to be the president of the United States, when he lost the election, when the people in the United States voted by almost 8 million votes to kick him out of office.”

He said Cruz should resign, and the Republican Party should take steps to restore trust in American democracy.

Not that Cruz ever considered resigning, but he probably has extra reason for being angry at the demonstrators/protestors who got out of hand and committed violent acts on January 6th, because he was blamed for it, along with Trump.

I think that, not only did Cruz make an error in calling the January 6th defendants “terrorists,” but I also think that Cruz’s previous remarks defending the non-violent among them haven’t been as strong as I would have liked. But he did defend them previously, and Cruz’s nature has never been to be a firebrand.

My opinion about Cruz even prior to these recent remarks of his is that he never was going to become president. He simply doesn’t have the personality. He’s smart and he can actually be very humorous, but he’s stiff – and the lawyer in him is always in the forefront. Most people don’t warm to him for those reasons, and I think there are better Republican contenders for 2024.

But I’m not turning on him, either; not for this. I think that would be wrong, given his history. He’s been one of the better GOP senators for a long time.

Roundup time!

The New Neo Posted on by

(1) You know that U of Penn transgender (male to female) swimmer Lia Thomas who’s been winning all the women’s meets? Of course you do. Well, move over Lia, here’s comes Iszac Henig, who beat Thomas in the 100 yard freestyle on Saturday (not the 100 meters, as some of the articles about it state).

Who is Henig? Also transgender. I initially assumed that Henig was, like Thomas, a male-to-female transgender person, but that’s not correct. It turns out that Henig was born female and is currently “transitioning” to male, but claims to have never taken male hormones despite having had what’s known as “top” surgery.

If indeed Henig has not taken male hormones, what’s going on? It’s not beyond the realm of possibility that some skillful female swimmer could beat Thomas, I suppose – after all, neither Thomas’ time (52.84) nor Henig’s time (49.57) are near the women’s NCAA record for the event of 45.56. But on Saturday, Thomas swam uncharacteristically slowly in this event, finishing sixth, and yet won many others.

(2) Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes has tested positive for COVID. I’m going to assume that her youth and generally good health will mean a mild course. It’s a reminder, though – although we already know it full well – that vaccinated people can certainly get COVID or at least test positive for it.

(3) RIP Bob Saget. It seems as though there have been a lot of celebrity deaths lately, doesn’t it?

(4) Manhattan’s new leftist Soros-funded DA Alvin Bragg can’t figure out why so many people, including the DAs of New York’s other boroughs as well as New York’s police commissioner, are so angry with him.

(5) What comes after James Webb? Maybe this.

Open thread 1/10/22

The New Neo Posted on by

Yvonne Elliman and Tulsi Gabbard, separated at birth? And they both are from Hawaii:

By the way, it’s a Bee Gees’ song of course. It was given to Elliman to sing on the “Saturday Night Fever” soundtrack, for variety. Here’s the Bee Gees’ version:

My grandmother and pencil sharpeners

The New Neo Posted on by

I recently stayed at an airbnb that was woefully understocked – and that was the least of the things wrong with it, alas. I did notice that one of the few pieces of kitchen equipment it had was a vegetable peeler. But one evening when I took it on myself to make soup and to peel several types of vegetables, I discovered that the peeler didn’t work.

Not that it didn’t work well. It didn’t work at all.

And so I resorted to something I hadn’t done in a long time, which was to peel carrots by scraping them with a knife. While I was engaged in that task, I suddenly flashed on a memory of my grandmother sharpening pencils with a knife.

My wonderful grandmother was born in the early 1880s, but this memory was from the 1950s. And I never ever saw her use a pencil sharpener, although she lived to be over eighty. She would whittle that pencil down with a knife. Her pencils bore the markings of her efforts, much like prehistoric arrowheads or flint tools.

Why did she do it that way? I neglected to ask her, and now I’ll never really know. When I began to write this post, I thought perhaps the pencil sharpener hadn’t been invented yet when she was in school. But in fact it had, and even the prism type (the small hand-held one still commonly used) was able to be mass-produced from 1851 on.

Apparently, even today artists still knife-sharpen their pencils at times. My grandmother was good at drawing and had had some formal instruction in it, so perhaps that’s where she picked up the habit.
There are plenty of YouTube videos on how to do this, but they don’t use my grandmother’s technique. She used a regular knife rather than the very sharp edges in the videos, and she laid the pencil on a surface rather than holding it in her hand (videos like the following one make me nervous):

I once tried to hand-sharpen a pencil and I was nowhere near as good at it as my grandmother was. When I contemplate the fact that she was born about 140 years ago, it seems wondrous to me that I have that window back to a distant time.

Here’s a photo of my grandmother on graduation from teacher’s training school around 1902 or thereabouts:

The world’s softest throw

The New Neo Posted on by

I don’t usually promote random items. And I’m not a big Macy’s fan recently, having had a problem with a mail order.

But I have to say that this throw, which I recently encountered and gave as presents to several people for Christmas, is a wonderful item and is on sale right now for a great price. If you want to get the world’s softest throw under which to snuggle up, here it is. I think the plaid ones are especially attractive but it’s the tactile pleasure that makes the thing so wonderful.

Sentences in the Arbery case have been handed down…

The New Neo Posted on by

…and they are very extreme.

Ordinarily, life sentences – and especially life without parole- are reserved for the most heinous of premeditated, purposeful,, callous murders.

No more. If you’re a white guy who looks like he might be a member of the cast of “Deliverance,” and you killed a black man under the fact circumstances of the Arbery case – which involved an ill-advised attempt at a citizens’ arrest gone horribly bad, possibly self-defense for the actual killing, and even without self-defense involved probably no more than some form of manslaughter – you will be treated as though you were one of those vicious murderers. And that’s true even if you were just along to document the intended citizen’s arrest and had nothing to do with the killing – although that defendant got a life sentence with the possibility of parole.

Travis and Greg McMichael got life without parole plus 20 years for Aggravated Assault, to be served consecutively. William “Roddie” Bryan got life plus 5 years, with the possibility of parole, plus 10 years for False Imprisonment, which means he serves at least 30 years. They also all face federal hate crime charges.

This is a terrible result, just another indication of a double standard of justice in America. If the races had been reversed, such a harsh sentence would never have been rendered. In this case, the actual sentence was at least partly motivated by the fear of mob violence if the sentence wasn’t draconian enough. One of the other motives of several recent cases has been to threaten to mete out extreme over-the-top punishment to citizens who arm themselves, even if the crime obviously did not conform to the usual facts that would justify the extreme severity of the sentence.