Jun
25
2024

Who Has Two Thumbs and Likes School Choice?

Condi! Should she be the next Secretary of Education? We could do worse, and probably will:

Also of note:

  • We live in perilous times! Recent headlines served up by the Google:

    But what I want to share is Andrew C. McCarthy's insight (my final National Review gifted link for the month): Merrick Garland’s Special-Counsel Appointment of Jack Smith Is in Peril.

    In the coming weeks, there is a very real possibility that the federal district court in Florida will rule that Attorney General Merrick Garland’s appointment of Jack Smith as a special counsel (SC) violated the Constitution’s appointments clause (art. II, §2, cl.2).

    If Judge Aileen Cannon, the Trump-appointee who is presiding over Smith’s illegal document-retention prosecution against former president Trump, were to make such a ruling, would the Biden Justice Department have to start the case over from scratch? Perhaps, but I think that’s unlikely.

    More likely: AG Garland would have to reassign the case to a district U.S. attorney appointed by President Biden. That probably wouldn’t cause much delay. It would, however, force Garland to abandon his independent-prosecutor deception — i.e., the artifice by which he and Biden claim that they have no involvement in the government’s prosecution of Biden’s electoral opponent and that all decisions are being made by Smith, a supposedly independent actor. In truth, Biden and Garland are controlling the Trump prosecutions — as a matter of constitutional law, and as a matter of fact.

    What follows is a fine-tuned tutorial on Constitutional law and the appropriate Special Counsel regulations, which (as ACMcC notes) AG Garland "notoriously flouts". What would happen if Smith's appointment was ruled invalid?

    Nothing would change except the politics of the 2024 presidential campaign: It would be clear for all to see that the Justice Department, under President Biden’s control and authority, is prosecuting Biden’s electoral opponent, Donald Trump, including on charges of illegally retaining national-defense intelligence — felony charges of the same kind that the same Biden Justice Department declined to bring against Biden.

  • Ann sees it. Do you? She says The panic shows. About what? Her post in its entirety:

    "CNN abruptly takes Trump campaign spokeswoman off the air mid-interview as network is set to host first presidential debate" (NY Post)(video at link).

    CNN abruptly cut Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt from the air Monday morning.... Anchor Kasie Hunt pulled the plug just minutes after the interview got underway after asking Leavitt what former President Donald Trump’s strategy was for when he takes to the stage in Atlanta, Ga. on Thursday....

    The spokeswoman... noted the debate stage would likely be a “hostile environment” for her boss – and accused CNN’s debate moderators, co-hosts Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, of biased coverage of him in the past....

    In overreacting to the mention of CNN bias, CNN's Hunt showed bias. Now, we're all looking at this clip, and I doubt if much of anyone was watching whatever little CNN show that was. I had to look it up: "CNN This Morning with Kasie Hunt." But maybe that helps CNN. I believe the show has about 50,000 viewers, and there are sure to be Trump haters who love this plug-pull.

    Karoline was previously the Republican candidate running against my own CongressCritter, Chris Pappas, in 2022. I held my nose and voted for her, but she wound up losing 54.1%-45.9%. I have to say, judging from the video at the NYPost, she's a pretty good spokesmodel, attractive and composed.

  • Maybe warning labels need warning labels. Or is that too meta? Anyway, Kevin D. Williamson writes on The Superstition of Warning Labels. In specific reaction to U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, having nothing better to do, advocating for warning labels being slapped onto social media platforms.

    Dr. Murthy writes: “As a father of a 6- and a 7-year-old who have already asked about social media, I worry about how my wife and I will know when to let them have accounts.” Let me help here: The answer to “when?” is: never. Social media is a sewer, smartphones are the portal to that sewer, and you shouldn’t let your children have them. You can take $1,000 to a good used-book store and get enough reading material to keep your children busy until they are adults. That and a couple of subscriptions will do it. If your children whine about it, tell them “No,” tell them “No” again as necessary, and remind yourself who is the parent and who is the child and then act accordingly. Trying to make social media safe for children is like trying to make guns safe for children. I am as pro-gun a guy as you are going to meet, but they aren’t safe—being safe isn’t what they are made for. Social media is designed to give people instant, unmediated access to the very worst that humanity has to offer. That is what it is there for. If somebody has something thoughtful, well-considered, and worthwhile to say, something that is of long-term value, then he can write a book like a civilized human being would, or at least a newspaper column. Don’t go camping in the garbage dump and then complain that it is full of garbage.

    My suggestion for Dr. Murthy, who I'm sure is a nice enough guy: if you want to help people, perform general surgery. It's right there in your job title.

  • On the LFOD watch. A guy named Marty Smith writes for a publication called Willamette Week, over there in Oregon. A few days ago, he responded to an emailed question: Why Was Oregon’s Flu Season So Mild? Long, but LFOD appears near the end:

    The folks at the CDC, in spite of their role in the woke liberal conspiracy to deny Americans their God-given right to die of measles, do a pretty good job of tracking the kind of thing you’re talking about, George. According to them, the current flu season (it’s technically not over till September) was neither mild nor severe, but right-down-the-middle moderate. How boring!

    But that’s just the assessment for the United States as a whole. As you and the OHA (and I, since I totally knew and certainly did not learn about it just now) have observed, in Oregon the severity of this season’s flu stayed at “minimal” or “low” during every week but one. Interesting! Only two other states (Minnesota and Vermont) managed a similar feat this year.

    How? It’s tempting for us card-carrying weenie-liberal fans of Dr. Fauci to give these states a pat on their big blue backs. Obviously, we beat the flu because our people believe in science, and masking, and vaccination! Suck it, Meatball Ron!

    Unfortunately, it’s probably not that simple. Oregon’s flu vaccination rate is pretty decent, but we’re a good five percentage points behind reigning champs New York, and they still hit the high end of the severity spectrum last winter. So did our fellow socialist utopias Washington and California. Meanwhile, when you look at the county-by-county breakdown, mask-skeptical Southern Oregon stayed just as flu-free as we did up here in the Leninist Shangri-La of Portland.

    It gets worse: Last year’s winner of the no-flu sweepstakes was live-free-or-die New Hampshire, where Republicans control both legislative chambers and the governor’s mansion. The year before that? On-the-bubble swing state Michigan. In other words, we probably just got lucky: Much of flu’s severity (or lack thereof) is driven by random chance.

    The timing of superspreader events, a change in the weather just as the disease is getting a toehold, the immunological makeup of the region’s population—any of these can be the difference between a few sniffles and a veritable plague. Taking basic precautions can help on the margins, but there are no guarantees. (That said, states whose governors encourage licking bus station doorknobs as an act of patriotism will always have an uphill climb.)

    Amusing! And I have to give Marty some credit for successfully disguising his politics amidst all the mockery.