UNSUNG HEROES
Instead of the usual dinner party for the glitterati, frontline workers got the front-row seats at both the Rainbow Room (pictured) and the Beverly Hilton. “We are so grateful for the work that you do and that you’re here, so the celebrities can stay safely at home,” Fey joked in the show opener. — Catherine Kast
While Gov. Cuomo was winning an Emmy for his pandemic news conferences, Michael Hendrix notes at City Journal, “a number of heartland governors paired efficient government with trust in their communities and people” to speed up vaccinations. West Virginia’s Gov. Jim Justice, for example, “has boasted one of the nation’s highest vaccination rates”; on Dec. 15, the state’s first COVID-19 shots were administered, “weeks before any other state could do the same.” Other states — “smaller, redder” ones — have also been successful. “Alaska, North and South Dakota and Utah” top the list of the states with the most shots administered. Fact is, while blue, coastal leaders get all the good press, leaders in heartland states “are vaccinating and educating like their residents’ lives depend on it, which they do.”
In a new and deeply troubling twist on Big Tech’s power, Amazon has decided to quietly squelch a book on transgenderism. Last week, the virtual marketplace stopped selling Ryan Anderson’s 2018 book, “When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Movement,” which offers a scholarly critique of transgenderism, questioning politically correct sacred cows. In particular, it shares the stories of adults who were encouraged to transition as children — and later greatly regretted those irreversible alterations.
Amazon now handles an astounding 83 percent of US book sales, and its guidelines say that “providing access to the written word is important, including content that may be considered objectionable.”
It makes exceptions for hate speech and sexual exploitation of children, but neither explains why a book making perfectly legitimate points suddenly vanished after three years on the site. Was it just that the House was passing the Equality Act, which expands anti-discrimination protection for transgender people?
A group of senators including Marco Rubio wrote Amazon boss Jeff Bezos asking why “Amazon has unabashedly wielded its outsized market share to silence an important voice merely for the crime of violating woke groupthink.”
Typically, the tech giant reaches out to publishers or authors before taking action against supposedly offensive content. But Anderson, who is president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, still has yet to hear why his critically acclaimed work got squelched.
Yes, you can still buy the book. But Big Tech won’t make it easy for you.
REPUBLICANS should stop referring to the Democrats’ newest ideological wish list as a COVID “relief bill.” Surely, there is some GOP spin doctor who can come up with a more precise name for Joe Biden’s $2 trillion partisan monstrosity?
The media have mobilized to warn us about the devastating fallout if the GOP opposes the Dems’ plan; not only for the future of the country, but for their own party.
Do you remember when the Republican resistance to President Barack Obama’s partisan slushfund “stimulus” bill sunk them in the 2010 midterms? Nor do I.
Although polls told us that a majority of Americans supported Obama’s efforts, not a single House Republican voted for the 2009 stimulus bill. By the next year, a majority had turned against the plan, and the GOP picked up a historic 63 seats, the biggest victory by a party in the midterm elections since 1938. By 2014, the Republicans, after remaining equally intractable on other bogus stimulus efforts, would run both the Senate and House.
Oh, the endless warnings we heard about the pitfalls of “obstructionism” in those days. When Republicans were sinking the 2011 stimulus, Obama adviser David Plouffe warned that it would be an American “tragedy.” When Republicans represent the desires of their constituents, the nation suddenly becomes “ungovernable.”
It is possible that, by the point when Republicans objected to a second stimulus, the ObamaCare fight had already sunk the Democrats’ national prospects. But in a sense, that’s the point. There will be scores of other divisive policy debates between now and the 2022 midterms, and, thus far, Team Biden has shown no inclination to pursue meaningful consensus.
And anyway, the same accusations will be leveled against the GOP. Republicans have the better long-term argument. “Critics say that my plan is too big, that it costs $1.9 trillion,” was Biden’s Obama-esque reply to questions regarding his $2 trillion plan. “Let me ask them: What would they have me cut? What would they have me leave out? Should we not invest $20 billion to vaccinate the nation? Should we not invest $290 million to extend unemployment insurance for the 11 million Americans who are unemployed so they can get by?”
Thank you for asking, Mr. President. How about the $570 million teachers-unions payoff that offers more “emergency leave” to erstwhile educators who have been paid all year to work from home and now stand in the way of reopening schools? How about the $50 million for abortion funding? How about the $350 billion to prop up the budgets of a handful of irresponsible states that refuse to balance their budgets? The Biden plan provides $852 million for lefty-approved civic-volunteer agencies that have zero to do with COVID-19 relief or stimulus. Why? The majority of the bill has nothing to do with the novel coronavirus.
As once-hero and future-villain Mitt Romney points out in The Wall Street Journal, the Congressional Budget Office’s recent analysis of Biden’s plan found that more than a third of proposed funding, around $700 billion, wouldn’t be spent until 2022 or later, by which time the economy will be doing just fine. It is difficult not to suspect that the plan, like most other massive hikes, is propelled by a desire to create a new baseline for federal spending, so that, in the future, anything less can be framed as a drastic and immoral “spending cut.”
The five previous COVID-19 relief bills were filled with many stables’ worth of Democratic hobbyhorses, but at least then there was a genuine case that the proposals had to pass.
There is no such case now. With the pandemic likely to recede, the best stimulus will be a return to normalcy, accompanied by a handful of narrow, targeted bills designed to assist those who were the most adversely affected by the government-induced shutdowns.
Before long, there will be a backlash over the government’s zealous and ineffective behavior during the pandemic, and Republicans should make sure they’re on the right side of it. Sure, GOP legislators will be accused of being massive hypocrites on the issue of spending. And in most cases, these accusations will be true. But it is never too late to do the right thing.
A minority party that stands against waste, expansion of federal power and corrosive dependency only half the time is better than a minority party that never says a word.