Jul
29
2023

I Wonder If Navy Will Be Invited to a White House Christmas?

The irrepressible Mary Katharine Ham tweets:

Grandpa Joe and Daddy Hunter were unavailable for the kid's baptism. Or any of her four birthday parties. But I suppose it's better late than never.

The happy news was released exclusively to that paragon of American journalism, People magazine.

“Our son Hunter and Navy’s mother, Lunden, are working together to foster a relationship that is in the best interests of their daughter, preserving her privacy as much as possible going forward," President Biden said in a statement provided exclusively to PEOPLE.

Federalist writer Evita Duffy-Alfonso notes the backstory here: People Magazine Acknowledges Navy Biden After Getting The ‘OK’ Signal From Joe>.

On Friday, People Magazine ran an “exclusive” PR statement from Joe and Jill Biden, announcing that after four years, they are finally acknowledging their 7th grandchild Navy Joan Roberts. That same day, the publication dramatically altered a months-old article titled “Joe Biden’s 7 Grandchildren: Everything to Know” to include 4-year-old Navy after her name was initially omitted.

In the original article, People Magazine writes gushing paragraphs about each of the Biden children but refuses to even mention Navy by name, instead opting to address her with two curt, legalist paragraphs about Hunter’s court-ordered paternity test.

I assume Joe was simply getting confused when people talked "Navy Joan Roberts" in his presence. He may have thought they were talking about… the US Navy? SCOTUS Chief Justice John Roberts deciding to transition?

Also of note:

  • Olympic-level figure (of speech) skating. We've talked about the corrupt DOJ plea bargain for Hunter enough already, but I'm a sucker for headlines How A Federal Judge Turned The Tables On Hunter Biden’s Sweetheart Plea Deal.

    That's two: "turned the tables" and "sweetheart" deal. The subhed on the Federalist article manages three more:

    Judge Noreika knew lawyers were trying to paint her into a corner and hide the ball while forcing her to rubber-stamp their absurd bargain.

    What an image: a couple lawyers painting the floor around the judge, while a couple others hide a ball, and a couple more pushing a rubber stamp and a document into her face. That is absurd.

  • Generating the immense shower of invective. Jeffrey A. Tucker writes on The Great Cloud of Disrepute.

    A dark cloud of disrepute hangs over all official institutions in the developed world. It affects governments most but also all the institutions that cooperated with them over three and a half years, including media, the biggest corporations, and tech companies. The cloud covers most all academia, medicine, and experts in general.

    The reason traces to the utterly preposterous pretense that by the mass violation of rights and freedoms, governments would somehow contain or control (or something) a common respiratory virus. Not one tactic they tried worked – one might suppose that at least one would show some effectiveness if only by accident, but no – yet the attempt alone imposed costs that we’ve never before experienced on this scale. 

    Tucker doesn't mention Martin Gurri; he probably should have.

  • Disclaimer: I actually live in a small town, and I've never tried any of that stuff. Kevin D. Williamson has some quibbles with Jason Aldean: Staying Safe: Try That in a Small Town

    Jason Aldean, who has made a stink with his “Try That in a Small Town,” should think about spending some time in a small town. He might learn something. (If you missed it, the ruckus began with complaints that Aldean shot a video for the song near where a lynching had happened many years ago, though it isn’t clear that that horrible crime had anything to do with the site selection; the criticism later moved on to the generally vigilante-ish tone of the song.) Like so many of the self-appointed spokesmen for small towns and simple country folk, Aldean himself is nothing of the sort: He is, in fact, a former private-school kid from Macon, Georgia., metro population 420,693, adjacent to the greater Atlanta metropolis, population about 6.3 million. Macon, you may not be surprised at this point to learn, has a considerably higher crime rate than New York, Los Angeles, or Newark, New Jersey.

    When it comes to actual small towns and rural areas, the data can be a little wonky—one ugly Saturday night in Muleshoe, Texas, can throw the numbers off for a whole year. But the data we do have do not support the hypothesis that life is safer in small towns: The aforementioned Muleshoe has had a higher-than-average crime rate in recent years. Homicides jumped 25 percent in rural areas in 2020. “It was like people lost their ever-lovin’ minds,” one small-town prosecutor told the Wall Street Journal.

    Our big law enforcement problem here in Rollinsford, if you can go by our Facebook page, is people ignoring the "clean up after your pet" signs.

  • I just get slightly depressed when I do it, but: yes I can. Jeff Jacoby asks the musical question: You can name the Three Stooges. Can you name your three members of Congress?

    Vivek Ramaswamy, the successful high-tech entrepreneur running for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, is a long shot whom relatively few Americans can correctly identify. But one of his campaign themes — that all Americans should be able to correctly identify basic facts about American government, law, and history — is excellent and deserves to be embraced by candidates across the board.

    "Every high school student should be required to pass the same 128-question civics test required of legal immigrants to become citizens," Ramaswamy said recently on Twitter. To audiences on the campaign trail he has made the case that "young people do not value a country that they simply inherit. We value a country that we have a stake in creating, in building, in knowing something about."

    To that end, he suggests a straightforward reform: In addition to passing English, math, and science, kids in school should have to know the answers to the same list of questions that immigrants are tested on as part of the naturalization process.

    Fun fact from the article: "More than 96 percent of applicants pass the test. Yet when the test is posed to native-born US citizens, nearly 2 out of 3 fail."

    For the record: although I know my DC reps (Shaheen, Hassan, and (sigh) Pappas), I would have a tough time rattling off the names of my representatives in the New Hampshire House of Representatives. I do know my state senator, though.