Itinerant policy journalist Ezra Klein, now with the New York Times, has highlighted something interesting about the Biden Democrats' now-defunct Build Back Better package -- something beyond its huge cost (trillions) and its failure to get majority support in the Democratic Congress, just like the single-payer health care bill that recently failed to pass in California's Democratic supermajority legislature.
When NBC's Lester Holt asked President Joe Biden what might prompt him to send U.S. troops to rescue Americans fleeing Ukraine, Biden replied: "There's not. That's a world war when Americans and Russia start shooting at one another."
— More than 20% of the nation’s counties gave 80% or more of its 2-party presidential votes to either Donald Trump or Joe Biden.
— Trump won the vast majority of these counties, but because Biden’s blowout counties are much more populous, he got many more votes out of his “super landslide” counties than Trump got out of his.
— Trump’s blowouts were concentrated in white, rural counties in the Greater South, Interior West, and Great Plains, while Biden’s were in a smattering of big cities, college towns, and smaller counties with large percentages of heavily Democratic nonwhite voters.
Today, two years after COVID-19 first hit these shores from China, most studies confirm that the heavy-handed government lockdowns of businesses, restaurants, schools, churches and parks did more harm than good to our health and well-being.
Whenever America is polarized, as it is today, people go back in memory and history to recall other times their nation was so divided.
Masks were necessary, especially in schools, to prevent mass deaths. Or so we were told, at great and tedious length -- until suddenly, in the last 10 days, they weren't.
Because America entered both world wars of the 20th century last, while all the other great powers bled one another, and because we outlasted the Soviet Empire in the Cold War, America emerged, in the term of President George H.W. Bush, as "the last superpower."
President Joe Biden was never a colossus of intellect, statesmanship, or wisdom, from his decades in the U.S. Senate, moving to the vice-presidency, and now the Oval Office. His predecessor and teammate for eight years, President Barack Obama famously noted, “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to f**k things up.”
— For all 50 states, we looked at 3 variables that are increasingly linked with partisan voting patterns: education level, race, and urbanization.
— When the states are rank-ordered by their composite scores on these 3 measures, the Republican-voting states for the 2020 presidential election cluster on one end of the spectrum, while the Democratic-voting states cluster at the other end, with many battleground states somewhere in the middle.
— In both the top (Republican) and bottom (Democratic) halves of our 1-through-50 list, only 5 out of 25 states broke ranks by voting for the presidential candidate who was at odds with the state’s demographic tendencies. This suggests that these 3 demographic factors have a strong influence on presidential voting behavior.
I'm the kind of guy
Who never used to cry
The world is treatin' me bad
Misery -- The Beatles
When the Union was fighting to preserve itself in the Civil War, the France of Napoleon III moved troops into Mexico, overthrew the regime of Benito Juarez, set up a monarchy and put Austrian Archduke Maximilian von Habsburg on the throne as Emperor of Mexico -- one month before Gettysburg.
Are we returning to normalcy?
Speaking in Conroe, Texas, last weekend, former President Donald Trump accused his successor of allowing millions of migrants to enter the country illegally across our Southern border.
— In the aftermath of the high-turnout 2020 election, many Republican-controlled state governments have passed legislation that Democrats believe will harm their party’s voter turnout.
— However, voting rules did not appear to have much impact on turnout and had no measurable impact on vote margins at the state level in the 2020 presidential election.
— Both voter turnout and voting decisions in 2020 were driven by the strong preferences held by the large majority of voters between the major party candidates.
The tally for how much the federal government spent to combat COVID-19 is now estimated to be $5 trillion. It is more than the combined costs of World Wars I and II. The left is celebrating that politicians in Washington saved us. Really? From what exactly?
Is the territorial integrity of Ukraine a cause worth America's fighting a war with Russia?
Do Americans really want transformative change? The evidence accumulates that they don't.
