We haven’t done a 5QT in this space in a while. It seems like I’m always saying that. Maybe it’s the fact that things are always so demonstrative or instructive as of late that they deserve full columns instead of quick little hits.
Or maybe yours truly just isn’t good at brevity. You, the reader, are welcome to decide.
In any event, today’s 5QT is brought to you by the journalistic stylings of Fox News’ Peter Doocy.
You probably saw this earlier in the week…
"Why won't you visit the [southern] border?"
BIDEN: "There's more important things going on" pic.twitter.com/ZmoCmh2aQ5
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) December 6, 2022
That was Doocy asking the question, and Biden’s response, that there are more important things going on, didn’t sit too well.
He was going to Arizona to do some public relations/ribbon-cutting photo op about manufacturing microchips or whatever, which might well be a nice win, though Joe Biden doesn’t know a microchip from a potato chip, and that’s absolutely, positively nowhere near as important as getting a handle on the fentanyl crisis and millions of illegal aliens streaming across that frontier.
Which everybody knows. The American people have been beyond furious about the border — the only reason the border didn’t kill the Democrats in the midterms is the lack of faith the public has in Republicans actually doing something about the problem either.
Say what you want about Donald Trump, but he was actually serious about controlling the border and brought most of these problems to a halt.
The Texas Republican delegation in the House is also serious about the border. Led by Rep. Chip Roy, they put out an outline for fixing the mess that deserves serious mention. Shawn Fleetwood at the Federalist discussed the plan Thursday…
Among the key tenets of the agenda are plans to complete physical border infrastructure, as well as rectify existing enforcement policies neglected by the Biden administration. Cracking down on cartels and criminal organizations is also a core component, according to the delegation.
“With this new Republican majority in the House, our Texas delegation is committed to using every tool and authority at our disposal to hold President Biden, Secretary [Alejandro] Mayorkas, and this entire administration accountable for their dereliction of duty,” said Rep. Jodey Arrington.
Mayorkas deserves to be impeached, and if the GOP leadership in both houses had said definitively that he would be impeached and tried were Republicans to achieve a majority, it could well have moved a seat or two. But of course Mitch McConnell scoffed at impeaching Mayorkas, so there was no real reason for people who care about the border to throw the Democrats out of their Senate majority.
As this column noted earlier in the week, Senate Republicans like Thom Tillis are cooking up an insane “bipartisan” amnesty bill that will only incentivize more illegals to cross that border and perpetuate the problem.
Hopefully, the new House majority will act on the Texas delegation’s border outline. It might go a long way toward rebuilding credibility if they did. The Senate’s credibility can’t be regained without a whole lot of new senators.
The Republican National Committee did almost nothing to help Republicans win the 2022 midterms, and the most important thing the party needed to do was to get ahead of the issue of process and procedure — meaning that if elections are now contests for collecting and turning in ballots rather than winning votes, it’s incumbent on the GOP to be as good or better at that than the Democrats.
It was a disastrous failure in that regard. And after the 2020 election, there was no excuse for failure. The lesson should have been learned.
And yet the RNC chair, Ronna Romney McDaniel, has no answers for any of it.
But she does seem to know how to do one thing — keep her job. Rep. Lee Zeldin, who came close to winning the gubernatorial election in New York and led a ticket that did quite well in congressional and legislative elections in a terribly blue state, was urged to challenge McDaniel for the RNC chair post, but Zeldin decided not to because he says the fix is in…
Outgoing Rep. Lee Zeldin said Wednesday he won’t run for chairman of the Republican National Committee because he lacks the votes to topple current RNC leader Ronna McDaniel, who is seeking a fourth term despite lackluster GOP results in last month’s midterm elections.
“I am grateful for all the messages I have received from across the country the past few weeks encouraging me to run for Chair of the Republican National Committee,” Zeldin, 42, said in a statement. “Change is desperately needed, and there are many leaders, myself included, ready and willing to step up to ensure our party retools and transforms as critical elections fast approach, namely the 2024 Presidential and Congressional races.
“However,” Zeldin added, “the issue is Chairwoman McDaniel’s re-election appears to already be pre-baked, as if the disappointing results of every election during her tenure, including yesterday in Georgia, do not and should not even matter.”
This is crazy.
How does the Republican Party stand on failure over and over again? The same losers running things, unfazed and unchastened by humiliating losses.
Someone might attribute this to Donald Trump as well. I won’t endorse that, but if you want to press the issue, sure — why should Trump go away? If everybody else in the GOP can go and lose elections and still sit at the head of the table, why can’t he?
If you’re the chair of a party that performed as badly in 2020 and 2022 as the GOP did, you resign well before they throw you out. But not McDaniel. She hangs around to see what kinds of losses she can rack up in 2024.
And why aren’t the party bosses forcing the issue? You’re not there to have a job, boys and girls. You’re there to do a job. And you’re failing.
Harmeet Dillon is challenging McDaniel for the chairmanship. If she’s the incumbent’s opponent, then she needs to win. Change is imperative if for no other reason than that there has to be punishment for failure if the failure is ever going to stop.
Because if McDaniel is going back in, then it’s time for the money to be spread out among other conservative organizations, keeping it away from the cabal of crooked incompetent consultants and crony vendors of the RNC in-crowd. You guys can get larded up with graft and kickbacks when you win. When you don’t, it’s time to get lean and mean.
Throw the bums out, for crying out loud. It isn’t like I’m the only one saying it. I’m parroting George Neumayr, after all.
You might have heard that the state of Louisiana divested its pension funds and other investment assets from BlackRock over the latter’s insistence on using Environmental, Social, and Governance investment strategies. Essentially, that’s an imposition of a leftist/socialist political agenda on investment decisions, and it’s an awfully good example of fascism at work. In ESG, you have private business being harnessed to fulfill a statist agenda that has nothing to do with the operation of that business, and it’s a coercive agenda that, among its other sins, sets money on fire.
You don’t make a profit running an ESG agenda. When the state of Florida analyzed the performance of BlackRock’s ESG investing, it became quite irate and pulled some $2 billion in assets from BlackRock’s management. Texas has now subpoenaed BlackRock over its ESG policies.
And now another massive hedge fund that had been in the ESG game, Vanguard, has thrown in the towel on ESG.
Vanguard Group Inc. is walking out of the world’s largest climate-finance alliance, marking the coalition’s biggest defection to date as US Republicans step up their threats against firms deemed hostile toward the fossil-fuel industry.
Vanguard’s decision followed a “considerable period of review,” according to a company statement Wednesday. Withdrawing from the Net Zero Asset Managers initiative, which is a sub-unit of the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero, “will help provide the clarity our investors desire” about everything from the role of index funds, to financial risks in the context of climate change, the firm said.
…Vanguard indicated its decision rested in a desire to maintain the freedom not to restrict its investment options.
Initiatives such as the net-zero alliance “can advance constructive dialogue, but sometimes they can also result in confusion about the views of individual investment firms,” Vanguard said. “That has been the case in this instance, particularly regarding the applicability of net-zero approaches to the broadly diversified index funds favored by many Vanguard investors.”
On the right, it’s become fashionable, and not unreasonably so, to look at the performance of the Republican Party and conclude that the country is finished. I keep saying this, and at some point people are going to believe it, but there is no reason to give up the fight. The Left is run by a bunch of unrealistic, megalomaniac buffoons who cannot do a proper job at honest work. They destroy everything they touch, and eventually that fact will sink them.
They’ll do incredible damage along the way, to be sure, but ultimately they’re going to lose what power they have for their trouble.
The focus has to be on building a Right that is capable of taking advantage of that failure. No, we aren’t there yet. But the bar gets lower all the time when even the big-boy hedge funds can’t make money off their own BS.
Can we cite this research? Or will Joe Biden’s FBI shut us down for spreading “misinformation?”
First things first: there is no way to know for sure how common this is due to poor screening and reporting, but German researchers have decisively demonstrated through autopsy that the COVID-19 vaccine-induced myocarditis was the cause of death in 5 patients they autopsied after sudden deaths experienced shortly after COVID-19 vaccination.
The study was published in the peer reviewed journal Clinical Research in Cardiology. The doctor sharing the study is a Johns-Hopkins professor and graduate of the Harvard School of Public Health, so not a nobody in the public health world.
The study itself is very convincing, as it is based not upon a statistical analysis of deaths based upon ICD codes or anything like that. It is based entirely on autopsies conducted by the researchers themselves, all in a single hospital on patients who had experienced sudden deaths following shortly after COVID-19 vaccinations using mRNA vaccines. mRNA are apparently the vaccines likely to cause the adverse reactions.
They do no analysis of relative risk between COVID infection and vaccine reactions, and understandably so. It is essentially impossible to do that given that almost everybody has been infected by COVID at some point, but the precise numbers are unknown. Hence there is no definitive way to compare the relative risks, although it is known that COVID itself can cause myocarditis, as can other viral infections.
However, it is pretty clear that the risk is not insubstantial, given the fact that 5 patients were identified in a relatively short period of time at one hospital alone in Berlin.
It’s a meme going around, but it’s the truth: you will look far and wide and abjectly struggle to come up with a single person who regrets not taking the vaccine.
I don’t know why, but somehow Norway is now better at making movies and TV than Hollywood is. Every time Netflix picks up a Norwegian show, it seems to be among the top items in their catalog, at least for a while.
That’s true of a new movie called Troll, which debuted a week or so ago. A trailer…
It’s an old-fashioned monster movie about a legendary fairy-tale troll who comes back to life after being disturbed in its rest when a construction crew building a high-speed rail line tunnels into a mountain where it’s been hibernating. The troll then stomps his way toward Oslo while the country’s Powers That Be muddle around in a redux of Independence Day and the Godzilla remakes.
The whole thing is campy as hell, and it’s almost a parody of the dumb Hollywood disaster movies. It’s deliberately bad, and that makes it a guilty pleasure. It’s almost like the Norwegians were aiming to out-stupid Roland Emmerich and succeeded.
Good for them. That was two hours I expected to write off as wasted and instead I thoroughly enjoyed them. If you’re like me, you will too.
