At Biden’s $25M bash

The Washington Free Beacon devotes The Stiles Section to the work of senior writer Andrew Stiles. Stiles previewed last night’s Million Dollar Bash in New York City in “Liberal Celebs Host ‘Fundraiser From Hell’ for Joe Biden.” This morning in his companion weekly newsletter (readers can subscribe to it here) Stiles ran it down this way:

Worst party we weren’t invited to: Rich liberals shelled out as much as $500,000 this week for tickets to a Democratic fundraiser at Radio City Music Hall and the chance to have their photos taken (by celebrity photographer Annie Leibowitz) with Presidents Joe Biden, Barack Obama, and Bill Clinton. Attendees were lucky enough to experience a “lively conversation” between the three presidents moderated by Stephen Colbert, a former comedian.

The star-studded extravaganza featured performances from Queen Latifah, Ben Platt, and Lizzo, the morbidly obese pop star facing multiple accusations of sexual harassment. Speaking of which, it’s good to know that Democrats have reconsidered their reconsideration of Bill Clinton’s legacy in light of the movement formerly known as #MeToo, which lasted from 2017 until the moment Biden was credibly accused of sexual assault in 2020.

President Trump was also in New York yesterday. The New York Post covered Trump’s counterprogramming here.

We’re warming up for Bob Dylan’s birthday in May. Dylan gave an account of what might have been last night’s theme song in “Million Dollar Bash.” It was one of the songs he recorded with The Band in Woodstock on The Basement Tapes. I think we first heard it courtesy of Fairport Convention.

The case against secession

John Hinderaker knows the history of the Civil War about as well as anyone I know, so I’m sure he’s ever more familiar with the case against secession than I am. His case for secession is pretty, pretty good, but I believe it runs contrary to the Constitution as well as American tradition and history. I thought the case against it was decided more or less definitively by the Civil War.

Following the election of Abraham Lincoln to the presidency in 1860 and before his inauguration in March 1861, seven states purported to secede from the Union. When he took the oath of office, secession was accordingly on his mind. He made the case against it in his First Inaugural Address. Here is an excerpt:

I hold that in contemplation of universal law and of the Constitution the Union of these States is perpetual. Perpetuity is implied, if not expressed, in the fundamental law of all national governments. It is safe to assert that no government proper ever had a provision in its organic law for its own termination. Continue to execute all the express provisions of our National Constitution, and the Union will endure forever, it being impossible to destroy it except by some action not provided for in the instrument itself.

Again: If the United States be not a government proper, but an association of States in the nature of contract merely, can it, as a contract, be peaceably unmade by less than all the parties who made it? One party to a contract may violate it–break it, so to speak–but does it not require all to lawfully rescind it?

Descending from these general principles, we find the proposition that in legal contemplation the Union is perpetual confirmed by the history of the Union itself. The Union is much older than the Constitution. It was formed, in fact, by the Articles of Association in 1774. It was matured and continued by the Declaration of Independence in 1776. It was further matured, and the faith of all the then thirteen States expressly plighted and engaged that it should be perpetual, by the Articles of Confederation in 1778. And finally, in 1787, one of the declared objects for ordaining and establishing the Constitution was “to form a more perfect Union.”

But if destruction of the Union by one or by a part only of the States be lawfully possible, the Union is less perfect than before the Constitution, having lost the vital element of perpetuity.

It follows from these views that no State upon its own mere motion can lawfully get out of the Union; that resolves and ordinances to that effect are legally void, and that acts of violence within any State or States against the authority of the United States are insurrectionary or revolutionary, according to circumstances.

I therefore consider that in view of the Constitution and the laws the Union is unbroken, and to the extent of my ability, I shall take care, as the Constitution itself expressly enjoins upon me, that the laws of the Union be faithfully executed in all the States. Doing this I deem to be only a simple duty on my part, and I shall perform it so far as practicable unless my rightful masters, the American people, shall withhold the requisite means or in some authoritative manner direct the contrary. I trust this will not be regarded as a menace, but only as the declared purpose of the Union that it will constitutionally defend and maintain itself.

A few months later Lincoln had much more to say on the subject in his July 4th Message to Congress.

Well, times have changed and we have a president who doesn’t much believe in the faithful execution of the laws. As Lincoln put it in his 1855 letter to his old friend Joshua Speed, “Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid.” His case against secession nevertheless abides.

Thoughts from the ammo line

Ammo Grrrll proudly celebrates her Power Line anniversary and announces the publication of Over My Limit – Ammo Grrrll’s Tenth Year of Shooting Fish In A Barrell. She writes:

The NSFW but hilarious comic Ron White has the famous wonderful line (at least 30 years old, so I feel comfortable quoting it) about being unable to avoid further trouble when arrested: “I had the right to remain silent, but I did not have the ability…”

Oh my, how I could relate! How much unpleasantness I could have avoided in my long life had I but invested in a lot of duct tape and covered my mouth with it except at feeding time! In fact, with all my years of dieting and regaining, maybe not even then!

Once when I was about 12 I was reminded by my father, not for the first time, that the back and front yards were getting pretty shaggy and it was my job to mow them. Mind you, it was the ’50s and we didn’t even have an electric mower – strictly an old-fashioned push deal.

I did the back yard – made much more difficult, of course, by my procrastination — and decided to read just a little of the book I was currently engrossed in before doing the front. One thing led to another, and before I knew it, Daddy was home and hacking his way through the front yard with a machete.

No, seriously, he could tell it hadn’t been done, and was not happy. He said nothing till about 9:00 o’clock when it was pretty dark. He then turned on the front porch light and made me go finish the job.

He was an old Navy man and told me, “Either you do the job right – or not at all,” and, of course — say it with me now — I said: “I had no idea that ‘not at all’ was an option!”

Well, for the last ten years – watch this segue! – not turning in a column on Wednesday has not been an option, either. I have never missed a week. It is, of course, nothing next to what the Power Line boys do every single day and have done for about twice as long. But THEY don’t have to be funny! And I don’t always feel funny or think funny, either.

Frankly, my dear readers, I had been feeling a little discouraged lately and not only about our wretched political climate. A recent lab report laid bare a pathetic array of pesky but not life-threatening health issues, the discovery of which had been affecting my mood.

Oh my goodness, I have many wonderful friends and acquaintances facing down and fighting through much more serious health challenges, so I’m honestly not complaining.

But it turned out that almost everything that should be low was high and almost everything that should be high was too low. Kind of like if my bowling and golf scores were reversed, I could be a professional at both sports. So if my HDL and my fasting blood sugar were reversed, my doctor would be pleased. Or, possibly, I would be dead, never mind — the analogy, doesn’t really work.

And on top of that, my very nice young lady doctor, an escapee from Canada, assured me that she believed that I WAS doing everything “right,” but that THE major risk factor for high blood pressure was AGE, which is the one thing this Control Freak can do nothing about! Just so you know that all is not doom and gloom, my Vitamin D levels are great and my Triglycerides are within normal range, so I got that goin’ for me, which is nice.

To continue on the theme of despair, as I blurted unfunnily last week, our political situation would seem about as dire and depressing as anything since World War II and the Holocaust. I know I am far from alone in our tiny worldwide Jewish community to feel fairly traumatized by 10/7/23 and, yet more shocked by the subsequent unmasking of the virulent anti-Semitism “heree, there and everywhere” (to channel the Beatles).

Nevertheless, every once in a while, the Universe sends you a message if you pay attention.

I was out walking with my walking partner of some 12 years, The Paranoid Texan Next Door. He is a very funny guy and I spend a lot of my time kind of doubled over (really) with laughter, so I’m not always as observant as I could be. He, being a self-diagnosed paranoid, is always aware of his surroundings. Especially since he virtually memorized the Risk Management book by our dear friend Capt. Jim Wetherbee.

So The PT was the one who noticed the sweet little single blooming flower coming up out of a crack in the pavement in the middle of the major street here in our Gated Geezer Enclosure. It was not a weed like a dandelion, but an actual flower.

I remember when the late, great African-American Shirley Chisholm was first elected to Congress in 1968. She was hoping to make an impact on things that she felt affected her Bed-Stuy District community. But the powers that be put her on the Forestry Committee. And because back then people had class and style and not just Entitlement Hysteria, she said, “They must have heard about the Tree that Grows in Brooklyn.” Witty! And also just happens to be one of my Top 10 Favorite Books!

But what to make of the little posy springing from the asphalt? Was it God telling me to buy a lottery ticket? Probably not. I think God was telling me that beauty can come from adversity and emerge in the strangest places. And that we must constantly be on the lookout for miracles and wonder. Somehow, I also felt He was telling me that everything was going to be alright. Either that, or that I should remember that looking around was how I fell off a three-inch curb and almost broke my face. Sometimes God speaks in quite mysterious ways…with messages open to diverse interpretation, especially when it comes to The Lottery or what team He favors in the Super Bowl.

In any event, this very day marks the end of ten full years of Friday columns – totaling somewhere in the vicinity of 520 of them — and the release of the latest compilation in book form. I titled the collection Over My Limit because – like you – I am fairly fed up with what is going on in our great and good land. I also used the subhead Ten Years of Shooting Fish In A Barrel because the Left just tees the topics up week after week with its trademark hysteria and certifiable lunacy. Anyone who can use “her” to modify “penis” has gone round the bend and every sane human knows it. Some pretend to be fine with it, but they know the truth.

Five hundred twenty columns seem like a lot. I have allowed myself some repetition of favorite stories for newer readers and some cannibalizing wholesale of my own material when new ideas are hard to come by. But mostly I turn out a new one every week.

Based on my employment track record, I expected to be “let go” after a few months. (Here we deal with the philosophical question “Can you technically be fired from an unpaid gig?”) But I’m still here a decade later. I have also considered that this nice round number might be a good “point in time” – a funny meaningless phrase popularized during the Watergate hearings — for me to resign. But the truth is that the commenting experience makes my whole Friday joyful, all day, every Friday. And maybe no kinda sorta able-bodied fighters should abandon the field at this critical juncture.

So if the PL boys will still have me, and you dear readers are not sick of me, then I will continue to throw my ideas out there every Friday and then watch the commentariat take it from there – down many circuitous lanes, a few dark alleys, some heartfelt sharing of joys and grief, and a lot of really funny memes, poems, snarky bon mots, and cartoons. It’s more fun than Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride. Thanks from the bottom of my heart to my loyal readers for a decade of memories and belly laughs. Onward to save our country. Together. Never give up. Never give in. If a flower can bloom in a crack in pavement on a well-traveled road, who are we to throw in the towel?

The eBook and paperbacks are available — here — on Amazon. And paperback will be available at Commenter-Con April 14, 15, 16 at the Hilton Doubletree in sunny Mesa, AZ. If you live in the Phoenix area, stop on by even if you aren’t signed up for the event to buy the book and browse at the tables of the other authors.

Or you can order the paperback directly from the authors at VWAMbooks and receive the special 20 percent Power Line Discount. Just enter PLDISCOUNT (all CAPS, one word) at checkout.

The Times Looks Back on Covid

The New York Times looks back on covid, four years down the road, and says “Here’s what we’ve learned.” I would say we have learned some things that the Times doesn’t touch, like the idiocy of shutting down stores, businesses, churches and, especially, schools.

But admitting that would be a bridge too far for the Times. Even on the lessons the Times acknowledges, you sometimes have to read between the lines:

When the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic in March 2020, nearly everything about the novel coronavirus was an open question: How was it spreading so quickly? How sick would it make people? Would a single bout buy you protection from future cases?

I think we knew quite about covid, early, based in part on cruise ship experiences. It was known that many people who tested positive for covid didn’t even notice it, that for most it was a mild respiratory infection, and that serious consequences were relatively rare and centered on those who were elderly and in bad health.

By now, most Americans have had COVID-19 at least once. While the majority of those infected have been hit with flulike symptoms, some have been hospitalized with serious respiratory issues, and others have had no symptoms at all.

See above. It didn’t take four years to figure that out. And the fact that most–I would say, nearly all–Americans have now had covid makes a mockery of the “Black Death” predictions that liberals were making four years ago.

Part of this can be explained by the amount of virus we are exposed to, but our bodies also play a big role. People who are older or have existing health problems tend to have more severe symptoms because their immune systems are already weakened.

This was blindingly obvious from the beginning, and applies to most diseases.

In some cases, the body can fight off the virus before it replicates enough to cause symptoms, or clear it so quickly that a person never tests positive.

Again, this was known from the start and is typical of many or most viruses.

There’s also strong evidence that vaccination makes illness less severe.

I’m not sure how strong that evidence is. I’m willing to assume that on average, vaccinations reduced the severity of covid symptoms. But the Times delicately refrains from mentioning that this isn’t how the vaccines were promoted. Health “experts” including, as I recall, Joe Biden, told us that if we got vaccinated we wouldn’t catch covid. They claimed we had a moral duty to be vaccinated because then we wouldn’t spread the disease to others. And on that basis, they fired people, and imposed other sanctions on people, who declined to be vaccinated.

This turned out to be a vicious exercise in fascistic control. Getting vaccinated didn’t prevent you from catching, or spreading, covid. The people around you caught covid (or didn’t) regardless of whether you were vaccinated. Maybe vaccination tended to reduce the severity of symptoms, and if so, you could benefit from it. But the idea that you had a duty to others to be vaccinated–the foundation of liberal covid totalitarianism–turned out to be a fraud.

Generally speaking, an infection or vaccination protects you for several months, said Akiko Iwasaki, a virologist and immunologist at Yale University.

Remember when liberals denied that having had covid gave you at least as good immunity as being vaccinated? That claim never made any sense, since the purpose of vaccination is to cause the body to mimic the effect of actually having a disease. But it was the basis for firing people who had had covid but had not been vaccinated, and for other liberal totalitarianism. Now no one claims the liberals were right about this, but the Times delicately refrains from pointing out that what we have now “learned,” while obvious all along, is the opposite of what liberals tried to impose on us.

The Times actually admits this:

T cells provide a different form of protection — reducing the severity of symptoms rather than blocking infection — and research now suggests that this immunity may last a year or longer.

Better than vaccination, in other words. I believe Glenn Reynolds has been writing about the importance of T cells for several years. But I wouldn’t make too much of that. No one imagines that New York Times reporters or health bureaucrats are as smart as Glenn.

Early in the pandemic, people feared that children, as notorious germ spreaders, would catch and spread the virus easily. They also worried that children would fall particularly ill, because they tend to experience some of the most severe outcomes with influenza and RSV.

This was the excuse for shutting down schools, a catastrophically bad policy whose consequences we will live with for decades.

But with COVID, children seem to have largely been spared from severe illness. Only a small number are hospitalized or develop life-threatening conditions such as multisystem inflammatory syndrome, or MIS-C.

We now have a clearer idea why that’s the case: Children’s immune systems may be better primed against COVID because they are frequently exposed to the benign coronaviruses that cause common colds, said Dr. Alpana Waghmare, an infectious-disease specialist at Seattle Children’s Hospital.

I think this is the only time when the Times admits that, while covid was novel in some respects, it is a coronavirus–a category with which we have a great deal of experience, since the common cold is a complex of coronaviruses. And, while the Times would never admit it, by now covid is basically the common cold.

The Times article concludes with this:

Al-Aly said that while many of COVID’s mysteries have been solved, he fears that the public has grown weary of the virus — when in reality, he said, it’s “not in our rearview mirror yet.”

I am pretty sure that the public has, indeed, “grown weary” of endless blather about covid. If covid isn’t in our rear view mirror, it should be. Like all diseases, it is a bad thing that can do harm. But the idea that we should disrupt our entire society; damage our children, perhaps irreparably; cause many billions if not trillions of dollars in economic loss; bankrupt hundreds of thousands of small businesses; and separate many millions of people from their families, on account of covid, is far worse than the disease itself. As many of us could have told you four years ago, and as the Times now does not dare to deny.

The Case For Secession

On Tuesday, a three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Texas cannot enforce its border control law, SB 4, because it conflicts with federal law that preempts the field of immigration. The decision is here. Jonathan Turley analyzes the issue here.

Briefly, Turley thinks the panel decision is a correct interpretation of the Constitution and of case law on preemption. The constitutional issue turns on the meaning of “invasion,” which the states are empowered to resist under Article I of the Constitution, and against which the federal government is required to defend the states under Article IV. For the moment, I don’t want to debate that conclusion. Let’s assume it is true that the best interpretation of the Constitution and existing case law is that states cannot act to stop illegal immigration because that is a federal role, even if the federal government has completely abdicated its responsibilities. What then?

Whether or not the influx of millions of illegals across the southern border is an invasion in constitutional terms, it certainly is an invasion in common parlance. And for a border state like Texas, it is a comprehensive disaster. The people of Texas plainly have a right to defend themselves against this evil. If being part of the Union makes it legally impossible to defend themselves, it is only right that they should consider whether they want to remain in the Union. This is doubly true if the problem arises from a malicious determination on the part of the federal government to abandon, indeed subvert, one of the basic responsibilities that Texas and other states have delegated to that government.

Of course, no state would secede over an issue of less than enormous importance. But for Texas and other border states–and perhaps for some non-border states as well–illegal immigration is an issue of unparalleled significance. Might a state like Texas legitimately decide that the federal government has so abandoned its duties under the Constitution that it has no alternative but to remove itself from the Union, and vindicate its citizens’ rights itself? I think such a decision, given the enormity of the issue of illegal immigration, would indeed be legitimate. Whether it would be well-advised is a question that should, in my view, be open for debate.

The Daily Chart: Ideology and Anxiety

Do you suppose there just might be a relationship between student ideology and the increase in anxiety or mental illness among young people? Eric Kaufman has done it again, with a report just out from the new Centre for Heterodox Social Science at the University of Buckingham in the UK on how the mental health crisis does not explain wokery. I recommend looking at the whole thing, but one finding in particular jumps out:

The fine print on the x-axis is difficult to read, so here is the total contrast in prose form:

71 percent of the 120 students who are female, very liberal, not heterosexual, of lower socioeconomic class, with Grade-Point Averages below 3 (the 30th percentile) and no religious affiliation report chronic anxiety, whereas only 17 percent of male heterosexuals who have good grades, are conservative, and Christian, report high anxiety.

A word from JFK

Talking about the outrage of the day with a friend, I was reminded of JFK “fat-shaming” the youth of America in his speech at the 50th anniversary celebration of the Children’s Bureau held at the Statler Hilton Hotel in Dallas, Texas (April 9, 1962, video below). In the speech, JFK spoke out against childhood obesity. Indeed, he went so far as to say that “[t]here is nothing, I think, more unfortunate than to have soft, chubby, fat-looking children who go to watch their school play basketball every Saturday and regard that as their week’s exercise.” JFK thought we could do better! However, as a famous Roman orator put it, “O tempora, o mores,” i.e., times have changed. There was a time when this could be said by the President of the United States.