Meeting the challenges: Biden and Harris

The New Neo Posted on by

At today’s press conference, President Biden discussed the uneasy situation in Ukraine and issued a challenge to President Putin:

You know, Putin’s been in charge of Russia one way or the other since 1999. That’s almost as long as I’ve been around.

And he’s not so young, either. His days of riding around on a horse without his shirt on are over. I could still do it, you know. I’m mighty fit, and I used to be a jockey and once sat on Secretariat back in my prime. But I knew enough to keep my shirt on.

Now that coward, that bully, that wimp Vladimir Putin is attacking a country much smaller than Russia. I say to him, why don’t you pick on someone your own size, huh? Oh, I know, I know – you’re the biggest country in the world. You must think Russia’s a big f***ing deal.

Well, let me tell you, size isn’t everything. Russia’s a punk country, and you’re a punk. I can do more pushups than you. And I say if you’re so big, Russia, why ain’t you rich?

Then Biden turned on his heel and walked out, refusing to answer any questions and leaving analysts reeling. What would be Putin’s reaction?

Some pundits quickly opined that Biden’s harangue was a stroke of brilliance, and that he set the perfect tone to challenge the strident Putin. Tit for tat. Later, Nancy Pelosi delivered some remarks of her own in which she asked the rhetorical question, “Can you imagine what Trump, Putin’s puppet, would have done? And we all know that Trump can’t do a single pushup.”

In other news, Kamala Harris is due to appear tomorrow night on Saturday Night Live. Rumor has it that she’s going to do Al Franken’s old bit as Stuart Smalley.

Kamala’s got the starry-eyed smile, and she’s got the Daily Affirmations. In fact, she’s got a coloring book of affirmations entitled, Leadership Looks Like Me.

Such a relief that the adults are in charge.

Open thread

The New Neo Posted on by

Is he making love to the piano? Caressing it? Melting into it? Casting a spell on it? Giving it a massage?

My favorite Gould version of The Goldberg Variations was also the later, slower, more soulful one from 1982 rather than the brash and brilliant early one.

Roundup time again

The New Neo Posted on by

(1) There’s been a study of anomalies in the 2020 election, by John Lott. Here’s a summary of some of the main points, and here’s the paper itself. It points out many of the inherent problem with increased absentee voting. It also includes this passage, which is very similar to what I found when I researched how absentee voting is handled in other developed countries:

35 of the 47 countries in Europe ban absentee voting entirely for citizens living there. Another ten countries allow it, but require voters to show up in person and present photo IDs to pick up their ballots. Six of those ten countries limit the practice to people in the military or a hospital, and they require third-party verification. Another 16 European countries ban absentee ballots for voters living abroad on Election Day. Similar requirements are imposed in other nations.

Developed countries, with few exceptions, did not adopt emergency voting measures during the coronavirus pandemic.

Much much more at the link.

(2) The teacher’s union had input on determining COVID school policy for the CDC. Not a surprise.

Republican lawmakers who sit on the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis are releasing a report Wednesday revealing a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) official’s testimony claiming that the agency coordinated with teachers’ unions at an extraordinary level in crafting its school reopening guidance, despite the agency’s earlier claims that such coordination was routine and nonpolitical.

In the interim report, exclusively reviewed by Fox News Digital, Republicans wrote that emails between the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the White House, and the CDC showed that the AFT’s “cozy relationship with the Biden administration’s political leadership at the CDC positioned the union to impose line-by-line edits” to the reopening guidance, despite the CDC’s “past practice to keep draft guidance confidential.”

See also this from Powerline.

(3) And then there’s looming disaster on the southern border:

It has been a crisis since Jan. 20, 2021. Now, Biden proposes to make it much, much worse.

(4) Now you can officially travel internationally as neither man nor woman. I wonder how many takers there will be.

(5) The White House supports early treatment for kids who identify as trans:

“For transgender and nonbinary children and adolescents, early gender-affirming care is crucial to overall health and well-being as it allows the child or adolescent to focus on social transitions and can increase their confidence while navigating the healthcare system,” the White House messaging says.

Federal oversight of local police departments: consent decrees

The New Neo Posted on by

Recently in this thread the topic of federal involvement in local police departments came up, and there are some points I want to add.

The main way this is done at present is through federal oversight. And it didn’t just start with the Obama administration; it’s been going on much longer than that. Just to take one example (the article is from this past January):

U.S. District Judge William Orrick said during a hearing Wednesday that the police department still has a ways to go to meet court-ordered reform goals, reported the East Bay Times.

“Despite what I know have been the good-faith efforts and hard work of the chief and of the command staff, there still remain important areas of noncompliance, and some of them seem to have straightforward fixes and they need to be fixed in order to reach substantial compliance,” Orrick said. “I’m frankly disappointed they haven’t been as of yet.”

Orrick said he believes the police department needs to complete Internal Affairs and use-of-force investigations more quickly and make sure that officers consistently activate their body cameras.

The hearing also included top police and city officials including Mayor Libby Schaaf, and the attorneys who filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against Oakland in 2000 after a group of Oakland police officers known as “The Riders” were accused of beating Black residents, planting drugs on them and falsifying records.

Oakland has been under federal oversight for decades, it turns out. It’s not alone, although it’s one of the longest cases. That process is a way for the federal camel to get its nose – and a large portion of its body – inside the local police tent (the article linked is from May of 2021):

After a four-year hiatus under President Donald Trump, the federal government will once again investigate local law enforcement agencies for systemic constitutional violations, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland announced last month. First in the queue are the police departments of Minneapolis and Louisville, Kentucky.

Both cities were at the heart of the Black Lives Matter protests last summer…

The federal investigations and possible court orders to follow could take years to complete. Local police departments under federal oversight complain about the immense strain on resources and personnel it takes to meet court-approved benchmarks for accountability, training and amended use-of-force policies. Community activists sometimes feel federal oversight does not do enough to fix systemic issues…

“I never once in my time there saw DOJ launch one of these investigations unless they had determined there was a long history [of abuses] and the agency has either been unable or unwilling to fix those problems,” said Christy Lopez, a former federal attorney who led the Department of Justice team that investigated the Ferguson Police Department after an officer shot and killed Michael Brown in 2014.

She also led federal investigations of local police in Chicago, Los Angeles and New Orleans, as well as in Newark, New Jersey, and Missoula, Montana.

“The government has a responsibility to protect people,” continued Lopez, who now co-leads Georgetown Law’s Program on Innovative Policing. “When you have state actors routinely violating people’s rights, of course you need a system for someone else to step in and protect those rights, vindicate those rights.”

Note the list of cities.

The practice begin as a result of a law passed by Congress in the wake of the Rodney King case:

Three years after the horrific beating of Rodney King by Los Angeles police officers, Congress enacted a law in 1994 that gave the Justice Department authority to investigate local police departments to see whether there is a “pattern or practice” of unconstitutionality or civil rights abuses.

The measure allowed the federal government to look beyond individual officers to root out systemic issues in local law enforcement agencies. The first investigation took place in 1997, examining the Pittsburgh Police Department.

The DOJ uses some sort of incident to claim systemic racism (or other problems I suppose, but my sense is that racism is the main one) and then to put the local police under a consent decree. These consent decrees last until the DOJ is satisfied – which can take a long long long time. Such a process is not uncommon, either:

Enforced by a judge and overseen by a court-approved monitor, consent decrees can take years to complete. The Oakland Police Department has been under a consent decree since 2003.

Over the past three decades, the Justice Department has conducted more than 70 investigations of local police departments. The Obama administration, for example, conducted 25 investigations and entered into 14 consent decrees.

And then there was Trump:

The investigations all but stopped when Trump was elected president. In 2018, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions issued an order limiting the Justice Department’s ability to investigate and oversee the nation’s 18,000 local police departments, saying it wasn’t the federal government’s responsibility to oversee local policing. He also said the probes hurt police morale.

The Trump administration did not enter into a single consent decree.

But that approach changed last month, when Garland rescinded Sessions’ order.

This is the way the feds establish control, or partial control, and/or the constant threat of control, over local police forces.

[NOTE: The entire article is well worth reading. Here’s another fascinating tidbit that gives you some of the flavor of the process and the people who are involved [emphasis mine]:

There can be tension between the police departments under investigation and the federal attorneys instructing them on what amounts to a constitutional violation, said Sharon Brett, one of the lead attorneys for the Obama administration’s investigation of the Chicago Police Department. She also worked on consent decrees for Cincinnati; Seattle; Ferguson, Missouri, and other cities.

When Brett would sit down with officers during the investigation, she recalled, the first question she would get is whether she had ever been a police officer or served in the military.

“There’s a sense among the rank-and-file that, you don’t know what I’m dealing with if you’ve never been here,” said Brett, who now is the legal director at the American Civil Liberties Union of Kansas. “Law enforcement does not like people coming in who have no law enforcement experience and telling them how to do their job correctly.”

Now, why on earth would anyone resent that?]

Not your father’s Disney

The New Neo Posted on by

Not Walt’s, either.

Chris Rufo reports:

In the wake of Florida’s Parental Rights in Education legislation, which prevents public schools from promoting gender ideology in kindergarten through third grade but which critics call the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, Disney executives organized an all-hands meeting, called the “Reimagine Tomorrow Conversation Series,” and pledged to mobilize the entire corporation in service of the “LGBTQIA+ community.” Executives recruited the company’s most intersectional employees, including a “black, queer, and trans person,” a “bi-romantic asexual,” and “the mother [of] one transgender child and one pansexual child,” and announced ambitious new initiatives—seeking to change everything from gender pronouns at the company’s theme parks to the sexual orientation of background characters in the company’s films.

In a featured presentation at the meeting, executive producer Latoya Raveneau laid out Disney’s ideology in blunt terms. She said her team was implementing a “not-at-all-secret gay agenda” and regularly “adding queerness” to children’s programming. Another speaker, production coordinator Allen Martsch, said his team has created a “tracker” to ensure that they are creating enough “canonical [see * NOTE below] trans characters, canonical asexual characters, [and] canonical bisexual characters.” Corporate president Karey Burke said she supported having “many, many, many LGBTQIA characters in our stories” and reaffirmed the company’s pledge to make at least 50 percent of its on-screen characters sexual and racial minorities.

Remember when these movements were supposedly about non-discrimination? That’s all that was wanted.

And I suppose if you define “discrimination” as refusing to incorporate the teaching of information about homosexuality and trangenderism to five-year-olds in the public school system, then they are still “anti-discrimination.” Talk about slippery slopes.

I wonder whether parents will still take their kids to Disney movies (or rent them, or stream them, or however it works these days) if Disney keeps adopting this sort of agenda for its children’s fare.

Oh, and by the way, it goes without saying – although these days it needs to be said – that the Florida bill doesn’t stop any parents from teaching their own children about whatever gay and transgender issues they wish to cover. It simply keeps the topic out of public school instruction for the youngest of children. That shouldn’t be the least bit controversial, but of course it is to today’s relentless activists.

[* NOTE: “Canonical” definition:

1 : of, relating to, or forming a canon canonical scriptures
2 : conforming to a general rule or acceptable procedure : orthodox His proposals were generally accepted as canonical.
3 : of or relating to a clergyman who is a canon
4 : reduced to the canonical form a canonical matrix

This seems to be a currently favored new use of an old word, lending a sort of pseudo-intellectual and official (canonical?) flavor to more simple utterances. The left is rife with this sort of phrase du jour word use.]

Maybe Biden was referring to himself, not Putin

The New Neo Posted on by

There was a big brouhaha the other day over Joe Biden remarking about Putin, “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.” Way to go, Joe – make Putin even more paranoid and angry and certain that the US wants to unseat him or kill him.

But since Joe is addled, it occurs to me that maybe he was talking about himself, not Putin at all.

Rand Paul is right about this:

Well, you know, a lot of times when you’re around somebody who’s in cognitive decline, you find yourself trying to help them with a sentence, trying to help them complete it, and say, oh no, that’s not what you really mean. Let me help you complete the sentence. But we shouldn’t have to do that for the commander-in-chief. And it is actually a national security risk. Because he’s sending signals that no one in their right mind would want to send to Russia at this point. We aren’t trying to replace Putin in Russia, we aren’t trying to have regime change, we’re not sending troops into Ukraine, and we’re not going to respond in kind with chemical weapons. So, none of those things are true.”

Paul continued, “But, you know, he lives in an alternate universe where he just says they’re not true and he didn’t say them. So, I guess you’re supposed to look the other way. But even the left-wing media is noticing these gaffes. So, I do think that it is a real problem. And there’s a humorous angle to this, but it’s really not funny. I mean, because we’re worried about what he’s saying precipitating or escalating the conflict in Ukraine into a world war. That’s very serious.”

So serious that it’s dangerous.

And there’s a good question here – “was Joe Biden ever competent?” The question isn’t merely flippant; it’s worth pondering. I think that Joe used to be competent in the legal sense of a defendant about to be tried. But in the ordinary vernacular sense I’d say no, he was never competent, or perhaps he was just marginally competent. He also (as I’ve said many times) was mendacious, corrupt, full of himself, of dubious general principles, and kind of weird.

But now he’s truly dangerous and “cannot remain in power” – that is, should not remain in power, and even his own party must know that. But so far most of them have protected him from removal and have pretended he’s just a normal average president albeit with a speech impediment and some rather lovable eccentricities. That may be changing, as indicated by the fact that the NY Times and the WaPo are belatedly acknowledging that the Hunter Biden laptop is real and incriminating.

But in the meantime, Joe does great damage.

The only good thing about the Biden presidency so far, and I mean the only good thing, is that it has highlighted the utter corruption and destructiveness of the Democratic Party itself. More and more people are noticing this, and perhaps that will matter.

Gaetz, the FBI, and the elusive laptop

The New Neo Posted on by

One of the many odd things about the Hunter Biden laptop is the fact that, around when the story first broke in the NY Post – and was almost instantaneously suppressed by the rest of the press plus social media giants – it also came out that the FBI had had possession of the laptop beginning in December of 2019.

Note that was prior to Joe Biden being chosen as the Democratic presidential nominee. And it’s about ten months before the Post’s story on the laptop. And yet we’d not heard a previous word about any investigation or even the existence of the laptop, until the NY Post’s revelations came out.

Not that I’d expect the FBI to give an official report on what was supposedly or at least theoretically an ongoing investigation. But you’d better believe that, had the laptop been from one of the Trump offspring, the FBI would have leaked like a sieve. But for Hunter Biden and Joe, nothing.

Now we have this exchange in Congress between Matt Gaetz and FBI Assistant Director for the Cyber Division Bryan Vorndran. The latter certainly should know about the laptop, right? But apparently not, to hear him tell it [emphasis mine]:

Who has it?” Gaetz asked. “I don’t know who has it,” the witness responded to surprise.

Next, Gaetz entered into the committee record the contents of Hunter’s Biden’s Laptop and a receipt from Mac’s Computer Repair evidencing the FBI taking possession of the Laptop in December 2019. Still, the FBI Cyber Assistant Director testified that after three years in possession of the Laptop, no assessment had been made.

Apparently they had more important things to tend to, like chasing down parents who object at school board meetings to CRT or are upset by sexual attacks on their children in schools.

More:

“How are Americans supposed to trust that you can protect us from the next Colonial pipeline if it seems you can’t locate a laptop that was given to you three years ago from the First Family, potentially creating vulnerabilities for our country?,” Gaetz asked…

the FBI Cyber Assistant Director said Hunter’s Laptop was not in his “purview.”

It seems pretty clear to me that the FBI sat on the laptop and never had any intention of doing anything about it. As for Vorndran, I doubt he’s the fool he makes himself out to be. He just thinks the American public consists of fools – or perhaps just powerless peons who can’t do much about it even if they’re angry at the FBI. The FBI not only holds the laptop, it holds the cards.

Gaetz had another trick up his sleeve, though. He had a copy of the laptop’s hard drive and entered it into the Congressional record. Where I assume it will languish.

Open thread 3/30/22

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m left-handed, and in my family three out of four of us were lefties. My mother was left-handed but was switched as a child, so she wrote and ate with her right hand but did just about everything else with her left.

I’m not sure I buy the theory advanced in this clip about why left-handedness has persisted in a certain percentage of humans, but it’s interesting:

Double yolk eggs

The New Neo Posted on by

The other day I was about to cook a couple of eggs. When I got them out of the carton, I noticed that one of them was bigger the the others. When I cracked it, out plopped an egg with a double yolk.

I can’t remember the last time I saw one of those. But it made me feel as though I’d won a little prize.

And so of course I looked it up:

In many cultures and religions, a double yolk is a good thing; luck is on the way. Old folklore tells us someone close to you might be having twins or a new beginning is on the horizon. Or you just cracked into the about one-in-1,000 egg that has a double yolk.

The article says that young birds are more likely to lay eggs with double yolks, and the incidence of double yolks seems to be increasing, perhaps for this reason:

“If egg consumption is growing, which it did during the pandemic, then you need more birds,” Arnsperger said. “And so you’ll have a disproportionate wave of young birds.” This could lead to more double yolks (remember, younger hens lay more double yolks).

But because of the increased demand during the pandemic, there may be another reason you’ve gotten a lot of double yolks. Most of the time, double yolk eggs are sorted out by an egg sorter because of their size, Arnsperger told me. “It’ll screen out the size of the egg it doesn’t want,” he continued. “But if you’re short on eggs, like during the pandemic, companies will widen the tolerance of the sorter to include larger eggs that could have double yolks.”

So they screen out larger eggs? My double yolk egg was in a carton of jumbos, so they were all big. But that egg was bigger than the others, quite noticeably. And why, oh why, did egg consumption increase during the pandemic? Comfort food?

It turns out the Democrats aren’t soft on crime at all

The New Neo Posted on by

Forget these Soros DAs. Forget “defund the police” – you must have imagined it. Forget the Floyd riots and the open borders.

Forget it all, because of Biden’s proposed new budget:

The plan sent to Congress allocates more than $32 billion to fighting crime, especially violent crime, with $20.6 billion going to the Department of Justice and $3.2 billion in discretionary resources for funding local and state law enforcement, much of it in the form of grants to hire more police officers. About $30 billion in mandatory resources will be funneled to “support law enforcement, crime prevention, and community violence intervention.”

The proposal directs $17.4 billion, an increase of $1.7 billion above the 2021 amount, for DOJ law enforcement. That sum includes $1.7 billion for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) to crack-down on gun-trafficking. U.S. Attorneys will be given $72.1 million to prosecute violent crimes.

What could possibly go wrong? Well, for starters, increased federal government involvement for any policing that is done on the local level is worrisome. Federal money equals federal control.

Here’s an indication of the sort of thing going on:

While the budget appears to be aimed at boosting police numbers and resources to tackle crime, it does so while treating national gun proliferation as a primary culprit, promising to “increase regulation of the firearms industry, enhance ATF’s National Integrated Ballistic Information Network, and modernize the National Tracing Center.” The plan also emphasizes police accountability, acquiescing to progressive pressure after the wave of social justice riots during the summer of 2020 that alleged widespread police brutality.

There’s also this little tidbit:

The White House is also requesting funds for the Department of Justice for police reform, prosecuting hate crimes, and enforcing voting rights. The proposal is for $367 million, an increase of $101 million from fiscal 2021.

That would include $18 million for the FBI to investigate civil rights violations, $8 million for the U.S. attorneys’ offices to prosecute civil rights violations, and $1 million for the Criminal Division to expand its investigations of election related crimes, such as voter suppression.

I’d love to hear their definition of “voter suppression.” Could it possibly include things like voter IDs and other requirements the GOP is trying to protect in order to prevent voting fraud? And then there are those hate crimes. “Hate crime” is a category of crime that doesn’t add much to the criminal code except the opportunity to place people in double jeopardy by prosecuting them at the federal level if the state hasn’t managed to convict them.