Wise words from an English Bloke who is the equivalent of America's deplorables.
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Sent to me by a long time friend and fellow memo reader who actually is a Californian:
I have always considered myself a New Yorker having gone to a grade school, high school, college and graduate school in New York and having lived in the New york metropolitan area until 1983. I have seen the bad days of Dinkens and the good days of Giuliani. But, this is really terrible. It is just a shame to see this happening to a once great city.
By Eric Kampmann has been a New York publisher for five decades.
Alec Klein, who grew up in New York, is a former reporter for The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal reporter and author of the new book, "Aftermath."
“The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and beauty in the world.” —F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Great Gatsby”
Listen: The sound you just heard was of a distinct lack of traffic, a dearth of hum, the slight sound of a great city in a death spiral.
Is New York committing suicide?
That’s a fair question in the wake of the relentless pandemic choking major American cities. The Big Apple is plagued with joblessness, peaking with a 20% unemployment rate this summer, double the national rate
Want more bleak numbers? Take your pick: About 1,200 restaurants have permanently shuttered since March. The city has around 600,000 fewer jobs than a year ago. About one-third of the city’s small businesses may never reopen.
But, of course, it’s not just about numbers.
It’s the vitality of the city that has been struck down. Tourism is practically a thing of the past. Hotels lay in waste. Broadway remains dark. Offices spaces are just that—vacant.
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which operates the subways, is hemorrhaging $200 million a week. Nobody, it seems, is going anywhere. Take a look at the platforms at virtually any subway station: a ghost town.
Imagine the wreckage occurring to the city’s tax base.
Forget foot traffic. Nightlife is practically kaput. The beehive of midtown Manhattan? Vanishing.
The New York of the mind’s eye is lost. The city has always been about the emerald imagination. Making it big a la Sinatra. The scrum of street jockeying. The oasis of Central Park with its nooks and crannies. The bubbling concoction of diversity and greatness.
A favorite activity: Walking up Broadway, stopping for a hotdog at Gray’s Papaya, getting a slice at Famous Original Ray’s Pizza, listening to snippets of arguments, of passions, of cabals being formed along the broad boulevard, from one end of the city to the other.
Call it pop-up entertainment on the go. Let’s not forget, this is the city that stood up to 9/11. It’s the city where George Washington prayed to God upon becoming the first president of this republic.
Meanwhile, Mayor Bill de Blasio and Gov. Andrew Cuomo continue to impose various COVID-19 restrictions on travel, dining, and people’s movement.
If the pandemic doesn’t kill New York, the reaction to it just might.
The city never was about its soaring skyscrapers; it has always been about its towering people. But people are being turned away in droves. Others are fleeing en masse.
The dark days of early COVID-19 are no longer gripping the city; indeed, New York has managed to keep infection numbers low for several months. But even as the city has quelled the number of coronavirus cases, New York has witnessed the rise of another affliction: A startling surge in shootings and other violent crimes.
Shooting victims rose 81% and shooting incidents increased 76% from Jan. 1 through Aug. 2, compared with the same time a year ago, according to the New York Police Department. The recent rioting and looting have cast a long shadow over the city, the likes of which we haven’t seen in half a century.
The last time the city felt this dangerous was way back when New York was financially destitute in the 1970s, when, if you took a stroll down Times Square, you were liable to see an unconscious body prone on the sidewalk, as undisturbed people stepped over and around it.
But even New York of that hard time wasn’t as bad as it is now.
What happened to New York, the capital of the world? The Rome of the 21st century? The center of culture, media, finance, theater, food, fashion—you name it.
A recent New York Times article declared, “Is New York City ‘Over’?”
What’s happening to New York is happening to other great cities across the nation—and, for each metropolis, it’s largely not a medical event. It’s a conscious decision about how we live and what we do.
If, with the beginning of the fall, we can send New York children back to the largest school system in the United States with more than 1 million students, we can surely find a way to open up much of the rest of the city.
Here’s what we think needs to happen to resuscitate the city, with appropriate safeguards:
- Open all restaurants.
- Open Broadway.
- Open museums and other cultural institutions.
- Open all churches.
While we’re at it, the city should slash prices for subways and other public transit by half.
Much as the federal government has done, the city should institute tax and payroll incentives to get the city back to work.
And, finally, the city should launch a campaign, something along the lines of “New York Is Back.” It should rival the “I Love New York” slogan that originated in the 1970s during the city’s last epic crisis.
What we need now is political courage, not grandstanding. It’s a human decision whether we save the city or not.
"Toomey was ahead of the curve. He was the Tea Party before there was the Tea Party."
By Salena Zito
“Bob Casey laughed at the suggestion that describes both he and Pat Toomey as boring but did not necessarily disagree with the assessment in an interview. “I'm going to call Kris Toomey when this phone call is over and ask her if she thinks her husband is boring,” he said.
He went on to say, “I think both of us recognized a couple of things, a couple of fundamental truths, or at least considerations when you're in the Senate and you have a colleague of a different party. No. 1 is you either believe or you don't believe that it's important that you work together and people see you working together where you can. Some people don't believe that. They have a different approach. But I think both of us basically believed that."
Click here for the full story.
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Titles mean nothing and often the reverse of what they say. Why is it that vacuums are generally filled by the worst of humanity? When the righteous reman silent the "drech" take over. If that God's way of reminding us to be ever vigilant?
The UN's Human Rights Council Grows More Odious
LAWRENCE J. HAAS, SENIOR FELLOW, AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY COUNCIL
With freedom and democracy in retreat now for more than a decade around the world, the United Nations General Assembly is poised to take a step in coming days that, if anything, will make the problem worse.
In a vote scheduled for Tuesday, the General Assembly is expected to fill 15 openings on the UN's 47-member Human Rights Council by approving new three-year terms for such leading human rights abusers as China, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Cuba—most of which will be returning members. Joining them will be such problematic countries as Bolivia, Cote d'Ivoire, Nepal, Malawi and Senegal. Rounding out the new 15 will be the only two countries that, while surely not perfect, unhesitatingly deserve membership—Britain and France.
"Electing these dictatorships as UN judges on human rights," said Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch, a Geneva-based watchdog group, "is like making a gang of arsonists into the fire brigade."
To be clear, the new autocratic members will not be tarnishing an otherwise-effective, well-functioning body. Instead, they will be joining what is already an institution that does little to improve human rights around the world, choosing instead to focus overwhelming attention on Israel. Consequently, most of the new members will likely just take a bad situation and make it worse.
Created in 2006, the Human Rights Council has merely picked up where its justifiably maligned predecessor, the Human Rights Commission, left off. It has made Israel its only permanent agenda item, meaning that it discusses the Jewish state at each of its three meetings a year. It has focused its investigations and resolutions overwhelmingly on Israel while ignoring far more egregious problems elsewhere. And it has created a "blacklist" of companies that do business with companies in East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Golan Heights.
Tuesday's vote for the problematic slate of new council members reflects three realities about the United Nations.
First, while the UN resolution that created the council called on member-nations to elect council members based on their "contribution to the promotion and protection of human rights and their voluntary pledges and commitments made thereto," most of the General Assembly ignores that mandate.
Second, under UN rules, specific numbers of council seats are reserved for specific regions—13 for "African States," 13 for "Asia-Pacific States" and so on. In certain regions, even the best-intentioned General Assembly membership might be hard-pressed to fill all of the seats with deserving members.
Third, with freedom and democracy in retreat around the world, the General Assembly has fewer UN member nations that respect human rights from which to choose. In its latest annual survey of political rights and civil liberties (for 2019), the nonprofit Freedom House reported that freedom has now declined for 14 straight years.
So, before long, we'll have a Human Rights Council that includes China, which limits free expression and has sent more than a million Muslim Uyghurs to detention centers, where some are tortured or killed; Russia, which limits free expression, restricts free media, suppresses dissent, discriminates against minorities and conducts torture at detention centers; Saudi Arabia, which commits arbitrary killings, limits free expression, conducts torture and engages in violence against women, human trafficking and child labor; and Cuba, which limits free expression, abuses political dissidents and prisoners, restricts worker rights and bans labor unions.
These autocracies and the other problematic new members will join a council that already includes Venezuela, Sudan, Namibia, Somalia, Cameroon, Afghanistan and Bahrain—all of which are, according to Freedom House's latest rankings, "not free."
The council's coming membership changes provide a timely backdrop for a possible change in direction from Washington.
Each of the past few administration has faced the question of how best to approach the council—whether to dismiss it as irredeemably corrupt and refuse to participate, or to try to reform it from within.
Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump chose to dismiss the council and refused a U.S. seat on it while, in between, President Barack Obama expressed hopes for reform and put America back on it.
If Joe Biden defeats Trump next month, we'll likely see another change in direction; the 2020 Democratic platform, which Biden presumably approved, calls for America to "rejoin and reform" the council.
Frankly, neither approach has worked particularly well, for the council remains what it has been from the start—an odious, hypocritical and, in the end, all-too-embarrassing successor to its notorious predecessor. Whether a future U.S. reform effort will work any better is very much an open question.
Lawrence J. Haas, a senior fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council, is the author of, most recently, Harry and Arthur: Truman, Vandenberg, and the Partnership That Created the Free World.
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When you have nothing to actually attack then attack the person and go rogue. Democrats have been doing this for decades. Bork's wife's LTE to The WSJ was posted recently while I was away and I cannot find it or would post. In her short letter, she discusses how Democrat's "borked" her husband and noted Biden was on the Judiciary Committee.
Dick, The Democrats' Dilemma with Judge Amy Coney Barrett
by Newt Gingrich
President Trump's nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett creates a real dilemma for the Democrats.
Since President Ronald Reagan nominated Judge Robert Bork to replace Justice Lewis Powell on the Supreme Court in 1987, the Democrats have followed a policy of harshness and ruthlessness in going after Republican Supreme Court nominees.
The assault on Bork – a scholarly and widely respected conservative member of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit – was so vicious and underhanded that the process of personal destruction came to be known as "borking." In fact, the savaging of Judge Bork was so infamous the Oxford English Dictionary added the verb "bork" as US political slang: "[To] obstruct (someone, especially a candidate for public office) by systematically defaming or vilifying them."
The chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee while Bork was being slandered was Joe Biden. A report was issued known as the Biden Report, and Bork later said every word in it was false.
This was the same approach Democratic senators took against nominee Clarence Thomas when he was nominated to the Supreme Court. It was also a ruthless personal assault – and the Senate Judiciary Committee chairman, again, was Biden.
The assault on Judge Brett Kavanaugh was in Biden's Bork tradition of scandalous charges, hearsay, witnesses who made up falsehoods, hysteria in the liberal media, intense hostility among liberal activists, and hostile bullying questions during the nomination hearings.
Now, with the nomination of Judge Barrett, the Democrats face a real dilemma. Judge Barrett is incredibly smart, has an impressive career, and is well-known as a caring, compassionate person.
She graduated magna cum laude from Rhodes College, and then graduated first in her class at Notre Dame Law School. She went on to clerk for Judge Laurence Silberman on the DC Court of Appeals and then clerked for Justice Scalia. She taught at Notre Dame Law School for 15 years.
Judge Barrett is one of the most respected conservative jurists in the country, and conservatives have long hoped she would become a Supreme Court Justice.
Her personal life is as impressive as her professional life. She has seven children, two of whom she adopted from Haiti.
Judge Barrett is going to come across as professional, knowledgeable, and likable. By all rights, she should be considered a remarkable, inspirational figure to all Americans regardless of political leanings (and especially to young women).
The dilemma for the Democrats is they have to decide whether they will try to destroy her (as they tried with Bork, Thomas, and Kavanaugh) or to concede that she is unacceptable for liberals but acceptable (indeed preferable) to most Americans.
The Senate Democrats' dilemma is compounded by questions about whether California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, can lead the attack against Barrett. Sen. Feinstein's performance in the Kavanaugh hearings two years ago was sufficiently confusing that some Democrats have even whispered about trying to replace her as ranking member for the upcoming hearings. (This will almost certainly not happen.)
However, this could saddle another California senator on the Judiciary Committee with the responsibility of waging the attack – Vice Presidential Nominee Kamala Harris. Sen. Harris was widely recognized as one of the most hostile and one-sided interrogators during the Kavanaugh hearings. If she takes the lead, there's a question of whether Sen. Harris will continue Sen. Feinstein's attack on Judge Barrett's religion that started during Barrett's previous nomination hearings.
When Barrett was nominated to the appeals court, Sen. Feinstein questioned whether a devout Catholic could serve as a judge. Feinstein said, "when you read your speeches, the conclusion one draws is that the dogma lives loudly within you. And that's of concern." So, from Feinstein's San Francisco liberal viewpoint, someone who actually lives her religion is worrisome.
Sen. Harris is familiar with this line of interrogation. She went even further in questioning Judge Brian Buescher during his confirmation hearings when she said, "were you aware that the Knights of Columbus opposed a woman's right to choose when you joined the organization?" The implication that being pro-life is a disqualifying factor would eliminate virtually all Catholic and most Evangelical judicial candidates. It would create a de facto religious test for service on the court.
So, do Democrats want Harris to appear as an august, wise unifier – or as an aggressive prosecutor only interested in pleasing left-wing activists? The latter could potentially alienate independents and moderates in the November election.
Judge Barrett will be a much tougher target for Democrats to slander than Judge Kavanaugh was. I suspect even the rabid, propaganda media will be less inclined to champion the character assassination of a devoted mother.
Will they attack her in a way which turns her into a sympathetic figure (as happened with both Justice Thomas and Justice Kavanaugh)?
Will they attack her deeply held Catholic beliefs in a way which alienates the largest single denomination in the United States?
Regardless, Barrett is, frankly, smarter than the Democrats who will be trying to attack her. So, no matter what the Democrats decide, it will be a fascinating set of hearings.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Food for thought:
EVER
WONDER WHERE COLIN KAEPERNICK GOT HIS IDEA TO KNEEL AND DISRESPECT THE FLAG?
U.S.Code-1994, Title 36, Chapter 10, Sec. 171...
During rendition of the national anthem, when the flag is
displayed, all present (except those in uniform) are expected to stand at
attention facing the flag with the right hand over the heart. Or, at the very
least, "Stand and Face It".
Senator
Obama replied :
"As I've said about the flag pin, I don't want to be
perceived as taking sides.There are a lot of people in the world to whom the
American flag is a symbol of oppression...The anthem itself conveys a war-like
message. You know, the bombs bursting in air and all that sort of thing."
Obama continued: "The National Anthem should be 'swapped'
for something less parochial and less bellicose. I like the song 'I'd Like To
Teach the World To Sing'. If that were our anthem, then, I might salute
it.
In my opinion, we should consider reinventing our National
Anthem as well as 'redesign' our Flag to better offer our enemies hope and
love.
It’s my intention,if elected, to disarm America to the level of
acceptance to our Middle East Brethren. If we, as a Nation of warring people,
conduct ourselves like the nations of Islam, where peace prevails, perhaps a
state or period of mutual accord could exist between our governments".
With the entire country knowing what Obama thought and believed, he was still elected twice.
We deserved everything we got.
And:
OH MY!
BREAKING: Mike Pompeo Announces That He Has Recovered Hillary Clinton’s Deleted Emails, Will Be Releasing Them Soon
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