THIS EDITION OF THE WEEK IS PRESENTED BY |
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NATIONAL REVIEW
AUG 23, 2024 |
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◼ The big surprise was that the Democrats ran out of celebrities.
◼ In her hapless bid for the presidency during the 2020 race, Kamala Harris feared being labeled "Kamala the cop." Freed of the need to win any Democratic presidential primaries this time, Harris is running as a zealous prosecutor. And her main indictment is of course against Donald Trump. He has given her many things to criticize, and she is willing to invent others. (Trump isn't going to reform entitlements or ban abortions if he's elected.) She is also running as a change agent while serving as vice president—and getting away with it to an extent that reveals both the leanings of the press and the indiscipline of the Republican campaign. Her left-wing history and her share of the responsibility for the dismal results of this administration both deserve a scrutiny they may not receive.
◼ "Thanks for putting your trust in me," Tim Walz began his acceptance speech in Chicago. That trust is misplaced. Walz has, at minimum, comfortably nodded as other people have described him as a veteran of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He said he "carried a weapon of war in war," which he has now admitted was a mistake. He carried a sign that said "Enduring Freedom veteran," and his congressional campaign identified him as an "Operation Enduring Freedom veteran." Those labels are technically accurate but misleading; Walz later explained that he served in a support mission in Italy, not in Afghanistan. He has misstated his rank at retirement many times; in the biographical video at the convention, he was described as a "command sergeant major," although he had retired as master sergeant, a lower rank. Walz in a fundraising letter claimed, "My wife and I used I.V.F. (In Vitro Fertilization) to start a family." The Walzes used IUI (intrauterine insemination), a different procedure, which does not involve discarding fertilized embryos: a material omission given that he keeps claiming, falsely, that J. D. Vance favors banning IVF and that a ban would have prevented his family from existing. His congressional campaign offered a nonsense tale downplaying the severity of his DUI—going 96 mph in a 55-mph zone, with a blood-alcohol level of 0.128 percent, well above the state's legal limit of 0.1 percent at the time. As governor, he claimed that 80 percent of those arrested during the George Floyd riots were from outside his state. Two-thirds of those arrested in Saint Paul were Minnesotans, and 85 percent of those arrested in Minneapolis were state residents. He downplayed the consequences of student-learning loss during the pandemic, arguing, "These kids learned resiliency, these kids learned compassion for one another, these kids learned problem-solving." But the state's test scores since the pandemic tell a different story—68 percent of fourth-graders are not proficient in reading, the same percentage of eighth-graders are not proficient in math, and nearly a third of all Minnesota students were "chronically absent." In his convention address, Walz claimed that Donald Trump and Vance would "gut Social Security and Medicare"; they have pledged not to touch either program. Walz continued, "They will ban abortion across this country, with or without Congress," but this is an invention backed by nothing the Republicans have said. Walz is a very folksy liar.
◼ Biden's departure from the presidential race followed nearly a month of two rare things. One was press coverage and leaks pulling back the curtain on how the Biden White House works. The other was criticism by Democrats and the press of Biden's capacity to do his job. The conspiracy of silence, as New York magazine called it, unraveled after Biden's debate face-plant. But both trends ended abruptly the instant that Biden's X account announced his withdrawal. Since then, the president has been so rarely seen and heard, with so little on his daily schedule, that one must ask: Who exactly is acting as president now? Biden has not convened a full cabinet meeting since last October. He has been obviously confused in public, and there have been disturbing reports of his not recognizing friends and Democratic lawmakers in private. If Kamala Harris is running the show, she should answer for it on the trail—if ever she is asked a question. If Jill Biden is running things, that's a different scandal—one Americans never voted for. Is convicted felon Hunter Biden still closely advising his father? We're not merely in bad hands—we don't even know whose hands they are.
◼ House Republicans have produced a report extensively documenting the monetization of the "Biden brand." That's the euphemism that Joe Biden's collaborators—his son Hunter, his brother Jim, and their associates—used as they sold access to Biden to agents of corrupt and anti-American regimes. Among the details: shady business deals with Russian, Romanian, and Ukrainian oligarchs, as well as with Chinese companies with extensive connections to the Chinese Communist Party, involving not just Hunter but also then–vice president Joe Biden. The report also illustrates the complex web of LLCs that the Bidens and their associates used to conceal the flow of payments from foreign agents to Biden-family accounts, a pattern reminiscent of money-laundering. This Biden family business should have been the subject of an aggressive law-enforcement investigation, but Biden-Harris DOJ prosecutors obstructed such efforts by spinning the case as focused solely on Hunter and his tax problems and dragging their feet even there. The DOJ waited so long that any crimes arising out of Joe Biden's term as vice president exceeded the statute of limitations. House Republicans never had the numbers to seek impeachment articles against Biden. But they have made a strong case that his conduct was impeachable. |
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A MESSAGE FROM PACIFIC LEGAL FOUNDATION |
Government mistakes created the housing crisis, says new book |
Jim Burling, a veteran attorney who successfully defended property rights at the Supreme Court, reveals why so much of America is now unlivable. With stories from the Civil War to today, Nowhere to Live is being called an "outstanding" and "sobering" read. Available everywhere books are sold. Learn more. |
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◼ The Bureau of Labor Statistics issued its annual revision of jobs numbers, which showed that it had overestimated job growth between March 2023 and March 2024 by 818,000 jobs. This prompted outrage from Trump, who called it a "massive scandal" and accused the Biden administration of manipulating the data to its benefit. This is not true. The BLS does this revision every year in August as a benchmark for the more frequent but less precise Current Employment Statistics with the less frequent but more precise Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages. If it was trying to cover something up, the BLS wouldn't have issued the revision before the election. The revision regularly goes in both directions, indicating that it is due to genuine statistical error rather than bias. In 2022, the BLS underestimated job growth under Biden, and in 2019 it overestimated job growth under Trump. Markets were expecting a large negative revision this year and were not fazed by it. There's plenty to press Biden and Harris on concerning economic policy without making stuff up.
◼ "It's a tax on a country that's ripping us off and stealing our jobs. And it's a tax that doesn't affect our country," Trump said of tariffs at a rally in Pennsylvania. (Studies consistently find that nearly all the burden of tariffs falls on Americans.) In Nevada, Vance said, "We believe that a million cheap, knockoff toasters aren't worth the price of a single American manufacturing job." (This trade-off would be perverse even if it were not a fantasy.) Vance has been tapped as "policy attack dog" by the campaign, and he has been saying in stump speeches that Kamala Harris supported NAFTA (she did not) and that NAFTA sent American car-manufacturing jobs to Mexico. (U.S. car-manufacturing employment increased for the first six years after NAFTA came into effect, and many of the jobs that left Michigan and Ohio moved to Texas and Kentucky.) We're told that this willful economic ignorance is "populist," but polling shows that voters don't actually have strong opinions on trade or globalization. Even though tariffs have been a constant topic of discussion for the past eight years, a recent poll from the Cato Institute and YouGov found that 47 percent of Americans either had no opinion about or had never heard of tariffs. Tariffs raise prices for American consumers, hurt American manufacturers, and create opportunities for political corruption and back-room deals for well-connected Washington lobbyists—which are, incidentally, issues that "populists" claim to be concerned about.
◼ A federal judge struck down the Federal Trade Commission's rule banning noncompete agreements. Judge Ada Brown ruled that the commission lacks authority to ban all noncompete agreements rather than merely target individual agreements that are demonstrated to be harmful. It is only the latest in a long series of failures in the courts by the FTC under Biden-appointed chairwoman Lina Khan. The FTC has lost many of its top litigators after huge staff turnover under Khan's leadership. Despite its longings to fundamentally remake U.S. competition law, it has failed to persuade judges of its correctness in many cases. In this case, the FTC clearly lacked authority to issue the rule it issued. Critics of the FTC should perhaps be grateful for its sloppiness. If it colored between the lines, more of its bad ideas would be likely to stick. |
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A MESSAGE FROM PACIFIC LEGAL FOUNDATION |
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◼ Disney's live-action remake of its 1937 classic Snow White cannot escape controversy. First, lead actress Rachel Zegler took a blowtorch to the original film, saying that "there's a big focus on her love story with a guy who literally stalks her," that the plot is "weird," and that "we didn't do that this time." Zegler's Snow White, she said, is "not going to be dreaming about true love" but about "becoming the leader she knows she can be." Then, Peter Dinklage—the actor with dwarfism best known for his role in Game of Thrones—criticized the presence of dwarves in the film, leading Disney to cast non-dwarf actors as supernatural beings. That didn't last long, with Disney announcing that it would instead create CGI dwarves—and that it would delay the film by a year. Recent days have somehow been even worse for Disney: Israeli actress Gal Gadot, the bête noire of the Hamasnik crowd, plays the Evil Queen in the film, and once the trailer appeared online, so too did a torrent of anti-Israeli and antisemitic harassment of Gadot. To her post on X discussing the release of the trailer, Zegler added, "And always remember, free palestine." Zegler's social-media antics leave the viewing public in an interesting situation: They might decide to skip the film because it stars an Israeli actress; because its other star has done her best to destroy any likeability she may have had; or because Disney cast Gadot in a role where she is jealous of someone else's looks, and suspension of disbelief can get you only so far.
◼ In a recent video called "The Truth about Zionism," Candace Owens, the online personage, informed her audience that "many moons ago, before they decided to establish Israel as a country—I know you've read like the short version: [in a mock-whiny voice] 'Oh, the Holocaust happened and then we realized Israel is like a state.' No, that's not how it went down. Catholics and Christians were going missing, on Passover, then they would find bodies—okay?—across Europe, and they were able to trace them back to Jews." These Jews—bloodthirsty pedophiles and murderers—went on to establish Israel. She has "figured it out." It's tempting to dismiss the fetid rants of Owens, who was cut loose from the Daily Wire over her increasingly deranged comments about Jews and Israel after 10/7. The trouble is that she's known as a "conservative," with 5.5 million followers on Twitter/X and 2.3 million podcast subscribers. A recent podcast guest was the model Amber Rose, who gave a speech at the Republican National Convention. And Owens isn't dumb—in fact, she's smart enough to try to preempt her critics by shouting, in more mockery, "Blood libel!" Which doesn't change the fact that it's what she's doing.
◼ Many coma patients are conscious despite their inability to communicate, according to a new study in the New England Journal of Medicine. Researchers gave them simple commands (e.g., "Imagine playing tennis") and, using neuroimaging, found that one-fourth responded mentally. This finding corroborates a long-standing though controversial intuition in the medical community and may change our understanding of patients diagnosed with severe dementia as well as of the unborn and the newborn. (The word "infant" comes from a Latin word meaning "incapable of speech.") Because the subjective experience of a person unable to communicate it also tends to evade attempts by others to detect or measure it, the NEJM study warrants serious consideration and a deepened appreciation of the humanity that the nonverbal share with their caregivers and the rest of us.
◼ Walker Percy's book Lost in the Cosmos includes a sketch entitled "The Last Donahue Show," which imagines Phil Donahue, the talk-show host who ruled daytime cable TV during the Seventies and Eighties, interviewing four typical guests (a gay man who cruised parks, a straight adulterer, a pregnant teen, a sex therapist) and three unusual ones (John Calvin, a Confederate artillerist, and an alien from outer space). Percy imagined Donahue dealing with the last three with some consternation, although put to the test he probably would have done fine. Donahue was an intelligent and empathic listener. His show unfortunately began mass media's long slide to personality, pathology, and voyeurism: endless rounds of me, me, me, first presented as help, then openly offered as bear-baiting and emotional striptease. By the end—that is, now—his old shows looked like Platonic dialogues. Dead at 88, R.I.P. |
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A MESSAGE FROM PACIFIC LEGAL FOUNDATION |
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