RIP Ronnie Spector

The New Neo Posted on by

On Monday I mentioned that it seems as though there have been a lot of celebrity deaths lately.

And now I see that pop singer Ronnie Spector has died:

Like burning magnesium, the Ronettes flared hot, brightly and quickly: Their string of hits, which began with 1963’s “Be My Baby,” had played out by 1966, as the producer’s interest in the group had run its course…

She was born in Spanish Harlem on Aug. 10, 1943; her mother was of African American and Native American descent and her father was white. She showed an affinity for singing at an early age; her mother, who split with her alcoholic husband when her daughters were still young, actively encouraged their professional career.

The Bennett sisters and their cousin Talley played New York sock hops and bar mitzvahs, performing material by Frankie Lymon & the Teenagers and the Shirelles, first as Ronnie and the Relatives and then, at Beatrice Bennett’s suggestion, as the Ronettes…

Granted an audition with Spector, the Ronettes, fronted by Ronnie, launched into a version of Frankie Lymon’s “Why Do Fools Fall In Love.” According to her autobiography, Spector instantly leaped up from his piano and exclaimed, “That’s the voice I’ve been looking for!”

It was the girl he’d been looking for, too – for a while, anyway. Their marriage of a few years was marked by the unbalanced Phil Spector’s abuse of his wife, but not before she’d become a big star for a while in classic early-60s hits like the following. Ronnie Spector looked like most of the girls in my junior high and high school – or maybe they looked like her. The accent she diplayed was the way everyone talked, too, although my New York accent wasn’t as strong (see this for the story of my New York accent). I didn’t have the beehive, but I certainly teased my hair to a formidable height, as well. You can get a feel for Ronnie’s effervescent personality here:

Here’s some history on the tune, which was not only produced by Phil Spector in the “wall of sound” style for which he became famous (“a Wagnerian approach to rock and roll”), it was also a song that obsessed Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys. To hear the wall of sound version, go here.

Democrats admit they want to change voting laws because if they don’t, they’ll lose elections

The New Neo Posted on by

We already knew this, but I’m surprised that they’re saying it:

Democrats are warning that they could box themselves out of winning Senate races in key states unless they change the legislative filibuster and pass voting rights and election reform legislation.

The fear boils down to a belief among Senate Democrats that unless they take federal action, changes being made by GOP-controlled state legislatures will make it harder for certain constituency groups to vote, which would make it harder for Democrats to win elections. That, in turn, would make it harder for Democrats to keep or win back control of the Senate in the future.

Note how HR1 is always referred to by Democrats and the MSM as an “election reform” bill to solidify “voting rights.” Nothing bad there, right? It’s actually an entirely partisan federalization of the voting laws heretofore almost entirely under state discretion, an attempt to stop red states from protecting the integrity of their elections with traditional safeguards such as voter ID (voter ID is supported by the vast majority of Americans). The idea the Democrats and the MSM wish to convey to the public is that the Republicans are trying to stop the opposition from voting, and the Democrats are just trying to keep voting “fair.”

It’s an incredible power grab by the Democrats, and only Manchin, Sinema – and perhaps SCOTUS – stand in their way. This is do or die for the Democrats for 2022, and they know it.

But this drive isn’t just recent. HR1 has been a top priority for the Democratic Party long before January 6th, COVID, and the 2020 election ever happened. HR1 was the first bill they took up in January of 2019, right after they had taken back the House and even though they knew it would be blocked in the then-Republican-controlled Senate.

A little over a year later, COVID gave them the golden opportunity to institute the state-by-state “reforms” (that is, relaxation of voting security) that they couldn’t legislate at the federal level, and which may have enabled their 2020 win. Now that COVID may be waning, they want to make their changes permanent for all states and thus make their power permanent.

A recent poll, for what it’s worth

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s from Quinnipiac:

A majority of Americans, 58 – 37 percent, think the nation’s democracy is in danger of collapse. Republicans say 62 – 36 percent, independents say 57 – 39 percent, and Democrats say 56 – 37 percent.

Makes sense. Actually, perhaps it has already collapsed.

More:

Fifty percent say the storming of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 was an attack on democracy that should never be forgotten, while 44 percent say too much is being made of the storming of the U.S. Capitol and it’s time to move on. That compares to a Quinnipiac University Poll on August 4, 2021 when 57 percent said it should never be forgotten and 38 percent said it was time to move on.

Do I detect a trend there?

Another trend:

Americans give President Joe Biden a negative 33 – 53 percent job approval rating, while 13 percent did not offer an opinion. In November 2021, Americans gave Biden a negative 36 – 53 percent job approval rating with 10 percent not offering an opinion. Among Democrats in today’s poll, 75 percent approve, 14 percent disapprove and 11 percent did not offer an opinion. Among Democrats in November’s poll, 87 percent approved, 7 percent disapproved and 6 percent did not offer an opinion. Among registered voters in today’s poll, Biden receives a negative 35 – 54 percent job approval rating with 11 percent not offering an opinion. In November, registered voters gave him a negative 38 – 53 percent job approval rating with 9 percent not offering an opinion.

Even if I were a Democrat and thought what Biden was trying to do was good, I can’t imagine giving him a positive approval rating for the simple reason that he sounds awful and he hasn’t even accomplished the policies he’s set out to implement. And yet 75% of Democrats still approve, although down from 87% in November (note that was already after the Afghanistan debacle).

The issues for disapproval of Biden are the economy, foreign policy, and the response to the coronavirus. Can’t say I disagree with any of that – he’s been abominable on all three. I expected nothing else of him, but many of those who voted for him probably expected more, although I don’t know why they would except for self-delusion.

So far I have only asked one Democrat what he thinks of Biden at this point. I got a terse, “He’ doing fine.” I didn’t probe further, but I plan to.

The Ray Epps puzzle

The New Neo Posted on by

The concern about Ray Epps isn’t just whether he was “a law enforcement agent or informant” (we’ll get to that phrase in a moment). It’s also these three things:

(1) Why was he high on the “wanted” list for a while – and then suddenly, when some media outlets focused attention on him, taken off it?

(2) With all the video evidence that he was at the very least a main instigator of the trespassing aspect of the incident for which so many people have been charged, why hasn’t he been charged with anything?

(3) Why hasn’t the government given the answers to (1) and (2)?

With regard to number 1, this is the closest I’ve come to finding a possible explanation:

If the FBI removes a picture, it means its agents no longer need the public’s assistance in identifying him, Daniel Richman, a former federal prosecutor who was an advisor to former FBI Director James B. Comey, told us in a phone interview.

There are many reasons that the FBI would remove Epps’ photo without filing charges during an ongoing investigation, Richman said, including that he may have spoken to investigators and clarified his role or that he is cooperating with investigators and may implicate others.

So has he become a witness for the government? Perhaps. At any rate, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that the government will not be charging Ray Epps with anything.

With regard to number question 2, what about a conspiracy or even an incitement charge? Whether or not he’s guilty of those things, he appears to be at least as guilty if not more guilty than many of those whom the government has charged with conspiracy. They were tracked down and charged and in some cases have been detained. Why not Epps? He also clearly was on restricted Capitol grounds, an offense for which some have been charged. Why not Epps?

For that matter, though, if he was indeed a government agent, why was he ever put on the FBI wanted list in the first place? Are they that disorganized?

Epps has – according to the Democrat-dictated and motivated January 6th Committee, denied being a “law enforcement” agent or informant, although why we should believe him or them is anyone’s guess:

“The Select Committee is aware of unsupported claims that Ray Epps was an FBI informant based on the fact that he was on the FBI Wanted list and then was removed from that list without being charged,” the committee said in a statement. “Mr. Epps informed us that he was not employed by, working with, or acting at the direction of any law enforcement agency on January 5th or 6th or at any other time, and that he has never been an informant for the FBI or any other law enforcement agency.”

Well, that settles it, right? And by the way, was Epps under oath? Only the Shadow knows.

Note also how carefully phrased the statement is. The denial specifies “law enforcement” agencies rather than the more general “government agencies.” What is a law enforcement agency, technically? It’s basically either a police force or the FBI. That seems to leave other possibilities. The government is a big tent these days. And no one under that tent is willing to answer some very simple questions:

With speculation swirling, Republicans have been clamoring for more clarity on Epps, but Justice Department and FBI officials have repeatedly declined to provide answers about the provocateur as well as any FBI informants or agents who may have been embedded within the pro-Trump crowd as people stormed the Capitol and disrupted the certification of now-President Joe Biden’s win in the 2020 election. The Jan. 6 committee made the first move Tuesday, saying House investigators interviewed Epps, but did not offer any insight into whether he was under oath when he denied being an FBI informant.

Epps’ actions that day were highly suspect. For example [emphasis mine]:

Video footage shows Epps, a former president of the Arizona Oath Keepers militia group, urging a crowd of Trump supporters on the evening of Jan. 5, 2021, to “go into the Capitol” the next day, provoking allegations from the crowd that he was working for the federal authorities, with chants of “Fed!”

As former President Donald Trump spoke to supporters outside the White House on Jan. 6, Epps went to work loudly encouraging people to move toward the Capitol. He was also part of an initial group of rioters who broke through a police barrier on Capitol grounds, and he whispered something unknown into the ear of one rioter a few seconds before that person began trying to rip at a police barrier…

There is no evidence that Epps entered the Capitol building during the riot nor is there any footage of him personally participating in acts of violence against police officers or anyone else. He, along with thousands of others, did unlawfully enter the Capitol’s larger restricted grounds, but most of those cases have not been charged.

It is interesting to me that although Epps was constantly urging demonstrators to enter the Capitol, he did not do so himself. Why? Was he aware that that would protect him from charges? And although that last quoted sentence says that most of the people who entered the Capitol’s restricted grounds have not been charged, in fact some of them have been charged for just that. Epps was “wanted” enough to have been prominently featured in an FBI list for six months, so someone must have thought he had violated some law or other, or perhaps many.

More of the details of Epps actions that day can be found in two lengthy Revolver articles: this one and this one. In the last couple of days, there have been a flurry of articles in the MSM of the “pay no attention” variety, but none that I’ve seen actually deal with the many allegations taken from the video. They all conclude, however, that any suspicion of Epps (who clearly was egging people on, at the very least) is “baseless” and “unsupported” (two of their very favorite words).

The MSM and the rest of the left, who ordinarily seem to believe that even those who merely attended the Trump rally are insurrectionists and should be shunned, seem to have no problem these days with Epps although he was clearly a major player.

Note also that all this focus on Epps obscures the issue. There were so many others, some with faces exposed, instigating and even breaking down barriers and/or windows, and as yet uncharged. To me, this is more disturbing than Epps himself.

As for the FBI, it’s keeping mum:

Republican Sen. Ted Cruz raised questions about Epps and about any possible Capitol riot informants during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing featuring Jill Sanborn, the executive assistant director of the FBI’s national security branch, who dodged most of the questions.

Cruz asked her who Epps is, and she said, “I’m aware of the individual, sir. I don’t have the specific background to him.” He asked whether Epps was a federal informant or whether he encouraged anyone to tear down barricades. “I cannot answer that,” she replied to both.

Cruz also asked Sanborn how many FBI agents or confidential informants “actively participated” in the events of Jan. 6. She said only, “I can’t go into the specifics of sources and methods.” The senator then asked directly whether any FBI agents or informants participated, whether any committed any acts of violence, or whether any encouraged or incited acts of violence. Sanborn replied, “I can’t answer that.”

“A lot of Americans are concerned that the federal government deliberately encouraged illegal and violent conduct on Jan. 6,” Cruz claimed. “My question to you — and this is not an ordinary law enforcement question, this is a question of public accountability — did federal agents or those in service of federal agents actively encourage violent criminal conduct on Jan. 6?”

Sanborn replied, “Not to my knowledge, sir.”…

Republican Sen. Tom Cotton also grilled Matt Olsen, the assistant attorney general of the DOJ’s National Security Division, about similar matters Tuesday.

Cotton asked Olsen whether DOJ or the FBI had any “plainclothes officers” about the Capitol riot crowd, and Olsen said he was “not aware of whether or not there were.” When asked if any plainclothes officers entered the Capitol that day, Olsen said, “I don’t know the answer to that.” Cotton criticized his unresponsiveness, and Olsen said, “As a general matter, it’s not appropriate to comment on an ongoing investigation.”

When Cotton brought up Epps, Olsen repeatedly said, “I don’t have any information about that individual.” He also claimed, “I’m not familiar with the most wanted page.”

That seems – unbelievable.

And then there’s this tidbit:

The New York Times reported in September that it had obtained records showing an FBI informant affiliated with the Proud Boys had texted his FBI handler as he marched into the Capitol during the riot. The outlet said the records did not disclose the informant’s identity but contended that “the records, and information from two people familiar with the matter, suggest that federal law enforcement had a far greater visibility into the assault on the Capitol, even as it was taking place, than was previously known.”

Far greater visibility indeed – and probably not just “visibility.” There’s plenty of reason for suspicion, and precious few answers or even acknowledgment that it looks suspicious.

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.