Infrastructure

Earth Rider to Biden

Featured image Last week John posted an inscrutable nine-second clip of President Biden displaying his mental acuity in remarks made during his visit to the Earth Rider Brewery in Superior, Wisconsin. It was challenging to make out what Biden was saying. Some translation is required. It needs to be translated from gibberish into English. I’m not sure that’s possible. This might be impenetrable. Biden is having a VERY tough time reading from »

A bridge too far

Featured image It’s been a few days since we checked in on one of President Biden’s appearances and remarks. Yesterday the White House staged a “Meeting with Inspectors General to Discuss his Long-Standing Commitment to Oversight, Accountability, and Transparency When Delivering Results for All Americans,” as the caption on the White House video puts it. Biden spoke after several of those in attendance made remarks that he seemed to follow in a »

Why Democrats are lucky Joe Manchin is in the Senate

Featured image As Democrats continue to trash Joe Manchin, we learn that they have succeeded in confirming the highest number of federal judges in the first year of a presidency in four decades. The Senate has confirmed 40 judges this year. That’s more than twice the number in Donald Trump’s first year. This couldn’t have happened without Joe Manchin. Without Manchin, the West Virginia seat he holds would be occupied by a »

Another House Dem will abandon the sinking ship

Featured image It’s an important one — Peter DeFazio, whom Politico describes as “the Oregon firebrand who leads the House’s transportation committee.” DeFazio says he’ll retire to “focus on my health and well-being.” Politico attributes the decision in no small part to the impending takeover of the House by the GOP. The two explanations aren’t inconsistent. Losing his chairmanship and being in the minority would not be good for DeFazio’s well-being. DeFazio »

Pete Buttigieg’s slush fund, Part Two

Featured image Earlier this month, I wrote about “Pete Buttigieg’s slush fund” — billions of dollars appropriated by the infrastructure bill that, as John Fund reported, allows the Secretary of Transportation to direct funds to combat climate change and “inequities caused by past transportation projects.” I argued that the goal of combatting past transportation inequities — of which, to be sure, there have been some — is a pretext for favoring Democratic »

A hypothetical bridge too far

Featured image President Biden went up to New Hampshire yesterday to celebrate the enactment of his trillion-dollar “infrastructure” monstrosity. Yes, some dare call it “infrastructure,” Biden among them. In the video clip below, Biden explains the merits of the bill with a hypothetical example. Would a Biden in full possession of his faculties have made quite such a fool of himself. Probably. Self-awareness has never been one of his strong points. What »

In the matter of Nicole Malliotakis

Featured image Nicole Malliotakis is a Republican who represents New York’s 11th congressional district in the U.S. House of Representatives. This is a swing district. Rep. Malliotakis won it in 2020, 53-47. She defeated a Democratic incumbent who, in turn, had defeated a Republican incumbent in 2018. Malliotakis is one of the 13 Republicans who voted to pass the bipartisan infrastructure-plus bill last week. In the Senate, 19 Republicans — 38 percent »

Pete Buttigieg’s slush fund

Featured image Some of the $1.2 trillion to be spent pursuant to the bipartisan infrastructure bill will be devoted to true infrastructure. That portion of the money presumably would have been appropriated had Donald Trump ever gotten around to presenting, and been able to enact, an infrastructure bill. But a goodly portion of the $1.2 trillion is pork. That money will be directed to groups favored by Democrats and in many cases »

Biden yanks our supply chain

Featured image On Saturday President Biden held a press conference to celebrate the passage of his alleged infrastructure bill. I have posted the video below. The White House has posted the transcript here. Biden’s comments creatively combine stupidity with insanity. He asserted that the bill will fix extreme climate events and other ills. I think it will aggravate the present discontents. We shall see. You can feel the excitement: We’re going to »

House passes infrastructure bill

Featured image Tonight (Friday), the House passed the $1.2 trillion infrastructure measure that the Senate passed months ago. It will now go to the White House and Joe Biden will sign it into law. The vote was 228-206. According to this report, 13 Republicans voted in favor of the bill. Six leftist Democrats — Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib (the four original “squad” members), Cori Bush, and Jamaal Bowman »

Manchin digs in

Featured image The Virginia gubernatorial race is the big news of the week. The outcome of the race, whatever it is, will remain Topic A for a while, as it should. However, the struggle of congressional Democrats to pass their two spending bills — infrastructure and reconciliation — is the big news of this Autumn, and continues to provide headlines. Yesterday’s development, reported by the Wall Street Journal, was Sen. Joe Manchin’s »

Two polls of interest

Featured image A new NBC News poll shows that Joe Biden’s approval among American adults has fallen to 42 percent. 54 percent disapprove. This represents a remarkable shrinkage. In August the same pollsters found America split 49-48 on Biden’s performance, with the marginally larger percentage approving of it. In April, they found that Americans approved of Biden’s performance, 53-39. Now, only 40 percent of adults approve of Biden’s handling of the economy. »

Has Sinema outgrown the Democrats?

Featured image How is the left’s campaign to harass Sen. Kyrsten Sinema until she agrees to in excess of $4 trillion in new spending working out? Not well, if this report is true: U.S. Senator Kyrsten Sinema, a key moderate, told fellow Democrats in the House of Representatives this week that she will not vote for a multitrillion-dollar package that is a top priority for President Joe Biden before Congress approves a »

Whom do you trust?

Featured image Groucho Marx was a big fan of Gilbert and Sullivan. He often played recordings of their comic operettas at home to the annoyance of his wife. One day Groucho said to her, “did you know that Gilbert couldn’t stand Sullivan and Sullivan couldn’t stand Gilbert?” The long-suffering woman replied, “it doesn’t surprise me, I can’t stand either one of them.” That line came back to me when I read the »

Pelosi reportedly will postpone infrastructure vote

Featured image The Hill reports that Nancy Pelosi is poised to postpone the vote on infrastructure legislation that was scheduled for tomorrow (Thursday). Apparently, Pelosi doesn’t have the votes to pass the $1 trillion bill. It seems that fewer than a dozen House Republicans will vote for it. That’s not enough to overcome defections from hardcore leftist Democrats. I’m surprised by this development. I thought that when push came to shove, only »

Dems scramble to keep their spending dreams alive

Featured image There are lots of moving parts to the Democrats’ struggle to spend trillions of dollars via bipartisan infrastructure legislation and Democrat-only-backed reconciliation. The debt ceiling has now been thrown into the mix for good measure. This piece in the Washington Post does a good job describing the Democrats quandary. It simplifies things considerably if one starts from the reality we have emphasized throughout — Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema »

Manchin calls time out on reconciliation

Featured image Sen. Joe Manchin has thrown a monkey wrench into Democrats’ plan to pass, via reconciliation, a $3.5 trillion spending package on top of the trillion dollar (or so) bipartisan “infrastructure” bill. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed called “Why I Won’t Support Spending Another $3.5 Trillion,” Manchin states: The nation faces an unprecedented array of challenges and will inevitably encounter additional crises in the future. Yet some in Congress have »