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from Competitive Enterprise Institute
The United States Supreme Court today upheld a decision by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to relax media ownership rules, freeing up the industry to function with greater competition and fewer restrictions.
A new study from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, which shows that a single dose of either the Pfizer-BioNTech or the Moderna vaccine protects against infection by the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19, raises the strong likelihood that we are close to achieving herd immunity for the pandemic. Herd immunity occurs when enough people become immune to a disease—either through being infected and recovering or being vaccinated—to make its further spread unlikely. It is believed that roughly 70 to 75 percent of the population needs to be immune to reach herd immunity for COVID-19.
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from Foreign Affairs
Council on Foreign Relations
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Council on Foreign Relations
The Perilous Bargains That Keep Putin in Power
For 21 years, Vladimir Putin has reigned supreme over Russian politics. A skillful manipulator of public opinion, he wields the blunt force of repression against opponents at home and the sharp power of cyber-operations and espionage campaigns against enemies abroad. Increasingly, Western analysts and officials portray him as all-powerful, a ruthless former KGB man who imposes his will on Russia from behind dark sunglasses. This narrative, which the Kremlin goes out of its way to reinforce, is tempting to believe. Putin has jailed the closest thing he has to a political rival—the opposition leader Alexei Navalny—and crushed a wave of protests by Navalny’s supporters. Putin’s intelligence agencies brazenly hacked the U.S. government, and his troops are gradually eroding U.S. influence everywhere from Libya to Syria to Ukraine. ________
from The Heritage Foundation
RIGHT BIAS, MIXED American conservative think tank based in Washington, D.C.
RIGHT BIAS, MIXED American conservative think tank based in Washington, D.C.
Just a week after Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson signed bills protecting women’s sports and medical conscience protections from being forced to bend to progressive gender ideology, he now has the chance to sign yet another pro-science bill that would protect children from harmful surgical and hormonal interventions on their bodies in the name of “gender affirmation” and “transgender medicine.” The Arkansas General Assembly on Monday passed HB 1570, the Save Adolescents From Experimentation (SAFE) Act. The bill would prevent the chemical and surgical destruction of minors’ genitalia by preventing doctors from prescribing puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones or performing surgeries to “affirm gender identity” for children and youths under 18 years of age. The American Civil Liberties Union has wrongly decried the bill as “banning trans youth from accessing health care and health insurance.” The bill does no such thing.
Putin is a killer because his meteoric rise to power was based on one of the most brutal and bloody military actions in history. Putin is also a killer because of the continuing Russo-Ukrainian War in the eastern Donbas region of Ukraine. It is essential to remember that the U.S. cannot trust Russia as a partner so long as Vladimir Putin is in power. He is beyond the point at which he can be trusted.
It’s becoming increasingly difficult to ignore a growing, insidious ethos overtaking America’s most powerful institutions. Individual merit and reasoned debate are out. “Lived experience” and the hierarchy of group grievance are now what matter most. Even truth is considered meaningless. Narratives are everything. The concept of fundamental human equality, derived from ideas at the heart of America’s founding and famously rearticulated by civil rights champion Martin Luther King Jr. in his “I Have a Dream” speech, is now being replaced by the enforced “equity” of the woke. The end result, ironically, is the resegregation of America. This new woke ideology, building on critical race theory, increasingly embraces actual governmental race-based discrimination. Qualifications are irrelevant. Racial discrimination is good, as long as you discriminate against the right people. The intellectual vanguards of critical race theory demand that the most fundamental aspects of self-government and preservation of individual rights be abandoned.
Progressives have never let go of the notion that the 1933 Glass–Steagall Act outlawed the problems that caused the Great Depression. They have also consistently sought to tax every activity known to man because they feel that profit and wealth accumulation—by people other than themselves—are unjust. Basing policies on these misguided ideas is dangerous, but the Biden administration appears to be moving in that direction. Apparently, President Biden sees “eye to eye” with Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) on reimposing some version of Glass-Stegall. Warren’s big idea is to use a new version of Glass-Steagall to start “breaking up the biggest U.S. banks.” Biden also supports a financial transaction tax, and Sen. Warren has just co-sponsored a new bill to implement “a 0.1% tax on each sale of stocks, bonds and derivatives.” There is virtually no evidence that banks engaged in securities trading prior to the Depression were in worse financial condition than their peers. Stock (and bond) trades of all kinds help ensure that capital flows to where it is most needed and most productive, thus helping working families. Penalizing people for creating wealth does not help the typical American, nor does penalizing people for trying to create wealth.
Senate rules require a supermajority to end debate before a simple majority can pass a bill. That gives the minority more influence and encourages deliberation. Today, Democrats are threatening to abolish the legislative filibuster so they can pass whatever legislation they want and ignore the minority altogether. Has power so corrupted Senate Democrats that they will simply abandon all of what they themselves proclaimed only a few years ago?
Given that the economic recovery during the pandemic is still fragile, the last thing we need is tax increases that discourage private sector investments. Not only would this plan damage the economy and waste unimaginable amounts of taxpayer money, but it also would cause permanent damage to our democracy. Americans should recognize that the plan would do tremendous harm to the economy and our foundational system of divided government.
In a victory for free speech, the rule of law, and common sense, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit recently ruled that a philosophy professor at Shawnee State University in Portsmouth, Ohio, could not be forced to use a transgender student’s “preferred pronouns,” and that his suit against the university for violation of his First and 14th Amendment rights could proceed. The court’s decision is the first of its kind, and establishes a needed boundary against American culture’s new, brutish sexual orthodoxy. The court went on to clarify that the Supreme Court has recognized that the government may not compel a speaker to affirm a belief with which the speaker disagrees. The decision reminds us that there are no “personal” truths, but only truths immemorial: realities that exists independent of our wishes to the contrary.
Public education, the Presbyterian scholar and pastor J. Gresham Machen once wrote, is one of the greatest achievements of the modern era. And yet, he warned, "when once it becomes monopolistic, it is the most perfect instrument of tyranny which has yet been devised." Something similar could be said of Big Tech companies and online retailers such as Amazon. Truly, Amazon is a miracle of modern society: same-day delivery, instant streaming, and an endless selection of just about anything one could want. But when the world’s largest online retailer makes itself the arbiter of a new cultural orthodoxy, as it has done in recent days, it quickly becomes one of the most insidious instruments for, yes, tyranny. Just a few days before the House vote on the Equality Act, which enshrines gender identity into civil rights law as a protected class, Amazon decided it would no longer sell Ryan T. Anderson’s book When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment, which has been sold on the site since its release in 2019. This decision goes well beyond one book. When the world’s largest online retailer makes itself the arbiter of a new cultural orthodoxy, it quickly becomes one of the most insidious instruments for tyranny. Recent events reflect the beginning stages of a widespread erosion of freedom of conscience and speech. The alternative to freedom and peaceful pluralism is persecution. This is where we will be headed if radical progressives have their way.
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from National Review RIGHT BIAS
For the third time in as many years, fabulists of all stripes have descended on the Peach State to stoke an entirely baseless political controversy.
Once again, the liars of the world have descended upon Georgia, which, in its infancy as a purplish state, has become a cynosure for fabulists of all stripes. This is the third time in as many years that Georgia has been wantonly maligned. Who among us would bet against there being a fourth before the end of next year? The tradition started in earnest in 2018, when Stacey Abrams became nationally famous for refusing to accept the results of a fair election that she lost by 50,000 votes. Abrams still insists that she was cheated, is supported in this holding by many in the press, and has so effectively spread her distortions that, three years later, they are still echoed habitually by figures such as Elizabeth Warren.
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from The Spokesman-Review
Newspaper in Spokane, Washington
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Each Spokane Public Library branch will soon display a formal acknowledgment that it stands on the ancestral lands of the Spokane Tribe of Indians. The library announced Tuesday that it partnered with the tribe to craft the land acknowledgment, which offers “gratitude to the land, river, and peoples who have been fishing, hunting, harvesting, and gathering here for generations.” “May we learn from one another’s stories, so that we may nurture the relationship of the People of the Spokane Tribe and to all those who share this land,” the statement reads.
The oft quoted “lies, damned lies and statistics” is attributed to British politicians but most famously to Mark Twain, itinerant freelance writer and observer of human nature. Politics as well as journalism are full of opportunities to use and be abused by statistics. And so the title of the little orange book caught my eye a few years ago when packing my aunt’s apartment after she died, “How to Lie With Statistics” by Darrell Huff. It takes an entertainingly Twainian approach to the ways and means, then turns serious with advice on spotting statistical fraud. Huff admits his book “may seem altogether too much like a manual for swindlers,” but promises it will be useful for the reader’s self-defense. The 1954 cartooned graphics are original. Sixty years after first publication it’s still a best-selling reference for the non-statistician who wants to know “how to talk back to a statistic.” Huff recommends five key questions.
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