Five Quick Things: The Vortex Emits a Giant Sucking Sound - The American Spectator | USA News and Politics
Five Quick Things: The Vortex Emits a Giant Sucking Sound
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Greetings and welcome to another edition of the 5QT. We’ll do our best to keep this brief, but we’ll surely fail. There’s too much to cover!

1. Will the inflation rate overtake Joe Biden’s approval rating?

That’s only half a joke. One doesn’t seem to be slowing down much, while the other seems to be accelerating in its shrinkage.

Inflation is now seven percent, which is the worst America has seen since 1982…

Rising inflation has reached levels not seen since 1982, according to federal numbers released Wednesday.

The consumer price index, the standard measure of inflation, rose 7% from December 2020 to December 2021. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, it’s the largest yearly increase since June 1982.

This is despite month-to-month inflation slowing down. In December the CPI rose 0.5%, down from the 0.8% in November and 0.9% in October. But prices on some items are rising faster than others, and some are starting to drop in price.

The fact that the monthly upticks are slowing, which could be seasonal or it could be a sign that the economy is cratering, actually set Team Biden to crowing that they’ve got the problem licked. But even the Washington Post isn’t buying that.

And while the economists argue over how bad the inflation problem will ultimately get (true inflation, as the CPI used to reflect before it was sanitized, is likely in the teens — and the Producer Price Index is just shy of 10 percent), something else is coming down quickly. See that Quinnipiac poll? Ouch.

President Joe Biden’s approval rating dropped to 33% in a new Quinnipiac University poll, the lowest mark of any major public survey during his presidency, as he takes a beating over his handling of the economy and coronavirus.

The poll, conducted Jan. 7 though Jan. 10 and released Wednesday, found 33% of all 1,313 adults surveyed approve of Biden’s job performance, while 53% disapprove. Ten percent did not offer an opinion.

The poll has a margin of error of 2.7 percentage points. When isolating just registered voters, Biden’s approval rating improves slightly to 35%.

Glenn Greenwald had a lot to say about it…

Joe Biden is an utter and complete disaster as president, and we’ve come to the point where most people — whether they’ll tell a pollster this or not — don’t think he’s mentally fit to continue in office. What’s more, nobody has confidence in the people around Biden to cover for him.

And nothing is happening right now which is likely to change anybody’s mind.

Which colors our second item…

2. The OSHA vaxx mandate goes bye-bye.

The Supreme Court heard all the arguments and then proceeded to take a big fat dump on the Biden regime’s central response to COVID…

The court’s conservative majority concluded the administration overstepped its authority by seeking to impose the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s vaccine-or-test rule on U.S. businesses with at least 100 employees. More than 80 million people would have been affected.

“OSHA has never before imposed such a mandate. Nor has Congress. Indeed, although Congress has enacted significant legislation addressing the COVID–19 pandemic, it has declined to enact any measure similar to what OSHA has promulgated here,” the conservatives wrote in an unsigned opinion.

The Court did cut the regime a bit of slack on its vaxx mandate for workers at companies holding federal contracts, something the real world will surely address in time — in fact, the chaotic effects of that, particularly given the CDC’s recent admission that the vaccines are mostly worthless, will inflict a lot more political damage on Team Biden than the Supreme Court’s rebuke will.

But as we’ve said in this space before, while these are good developments in the long term, because you want bad outcomes for tyrants whenever you can get them, the Biden vortex is a dangerous thing. It inflicts damage not just of the collateral kind. He’s going to keep lashing out at his detractors as he collapses, like he did in Georgia this week.

3. The unbearable racism of Joy Reid (and her guests).

We don’t have room in this space for a full diatribe assailing the abject bigotry of MSNBC’s token black host Joy Reid, and it perhaps isn’t worth our time to go there when the word has it they’re about to dump her overboard. Perhaps when that happens we’ll deliver a suitable Bronx goodbye to Reid.

For now, we’ll just enter this into the record as Exhibit 1,131 for the prosecution (but who’s counting) in indicting Reid as a race-hatred shock jock. It’s not even something she said but rather the bleatings of a racist moron she subjected the public to on her air…

MSNBC guest Elie Mystal said that White Republicans in the south are attempting to break from the country, and in doing so, might take “their black people with them” during an attack on federalism Wednesday.

Mystal and fellow guest Heather McGhee joined The ReidOut with host Joy Reid to discuss a range of topics, including the Supreme Court, the culture war, and Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL).

Reid opened the segment by attacking DeSantis over his handling of Florida’s Covid-19 response. The host opined that under the leadership of the governor, the Sunshine State is a “giant natural herd immunity experiment.”

Mystal, later on in the segment, warned that progressives who do not live in the southeast should pay m0re attention to the court’s embrace of federalism.

He said:

“When the Supreme Court rules with what’s called federalism, which is the idea that the states should have broad authority to kind of do whatever they want within their borders, there are a lot of people who think that’s a reasonable outcome. There are a lot of people who are center, center-left people, who think that, you know, it’s fine for the states to choose for themselves and that really, if I’m, you know, a northeastern liberal, you know, whatever. Who cares about Florida? Who cares about Mississippi? I live in New York. I live in California. I’m going to be fine. And there are a couple of real, deep problems with that. One of them is that most African Americans in this country still live in the states where their ancestors were enslaved, right?”

Mystal noted that states such as Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Florida each have high populations of Black Americans, where many of their ancestors were once slaves. He then warned that those descendants could become vulnerable to the whims of rogue Republican state leaders:

“So, when these Republicans, as you saw — I don’t know if you saw Marjorie Taylor Greene yesterday was just like, we just want a civil divorce from the rest of the country. When these White people in these states talk about leaving, they’re talking about leaving and taking their black people with them, just like before.

And I know that’s gonna hurt Ron DeSantis’ feefees that I’m making this analogy or comparison between what they’re doing now and what their ancestors did when they owned people, but it’s the same thought process that these states, these policies exist–these policies exist for the benefit of the White, cis, hetero males in charge. And it’s not free for anybody else, not for the Black people, not for the brown people, not for the women in these states. And so we can’t as liberals, we can’t as left-of-center people just consign the south to its White supremacist fate, because we cut off our left hand when we do that. We have to fight for these people, and that means that we have to fight the Supreme Court and fight their interpretations of federalism.”

Good grief. “Taking their black people with them?”

One might actually expect these “racist” new secessionists in the South to want the opposite of Mystal’s prediction in the event the country were to effect a red-blue split. But this kind of stupid analysis appears on Reid’s air all the time — usually it comes out of Reid’s mouth.

Nobody will miss her when the ax finally falls. But can you imagine what will fill that time slot after she’s gone? Good grief again.

4. Put a muzzle on Mike Rounds

As I’ve mentioned in this space, I’m hustling to get the first draft of The Revivalist Manifesto out to Bombardier Books, the publisher, by the end of the month. There will be a significant amount of the book, particularly in the section talking about what a revivalist America would look like, dealing with the heightened expectations Republicans need to have of our politicians.

I’m going to have to make some space in that chapter to talk about this stupid episode.

Sen. Mike Rounds stood his ground Monday after former President Donald Trump labeled the South Dakota Republican a “jerk” for insisting the 2020 presidential election results were legitimate.

Rounds, who acknowledged in an interview with ABC’s “This Week” Sunday that Trump “simply did not win the election,” said in a statement that he was “disappointed but not surprised by the former president’s reaction” to his comments.

“However, the facts remain the same. I stand by my statement. The former president lost the 2020 election,” Rounds added.

“This isn’t new information. If we’re being honest, there was no evidence of widespread fraud that would have altered the results of the election,” the lawmaker added.

Here was the video of Rounds’ appearance. Bear in mind that he’s talking to George Stephanopoulos, a partisan Democrat political operative, about Jan. 6, and he actually says the 2020 election was “as fair as we’ve seen.”

Stupid. Of course Trump called him a jerk.

If you want to know how that question should be answered, Rand Paul set the standard in a segment with the very same partisan Democrat operative interviewer nearly a year ago.

There’s a big difference between Mike Rounds and Rand Paul. Rand Paul, who was there when crazed Bernie Sanders fan James Hodgkinson attempted to mass-murder the Republican congressional baseball team in 2017 and a year later was put in the hospital by an unhinged leftist neighbor over political disputes — meaning Paul has nearly paid twice with his life for his political beliefs and has literal skin in the game — doesn’t back down and cower from people like George Stephanopoulos when acceptance of partisan media narratives is demanded.

But Rounds doesn’t have the stones for that.

Paul never said the 2020 election was stolen. He said the irregularities and law-breaking surrounding the 2020 election were unacceptable and can’t be allowed to repeat. Which is very clearly true from the perspective of any Republican political figure not named Adam Kinzinger or Liz Cheney. Why is that template so hard for Mike Rounds to follow?

In the next political era, we’re rapidly approaching as the current one craters into dysfunction, Republican voters won’t tolerate wimps with R’s next to their names in the U.S. Senate and will run the pantywaists off in favor of fighters who won’t play Washington Generals to the Democrats’ Harlem Globetrotters. And Mike Rounds has a long way to go to make that cut. Ditto for the other Washington Generals who later defended him, like Mitt Romney.

5. Good grief, Kamala. Good grief.

This might be the worst interview a national political leader has ever given. And it started out as a reasonably friendly conversation with TODAY’s Craig Melvin on NBC yesterday, while ending with her screeching about how members of her own party are racist for not being willing to kill the filibuster and then failing to answer the question about whether there will be a Biden-Harris ticket in 2024.

Every answer was evasive, every answer was dismissive. Harris has neither the charisma nor the intelligence, nor the credibility to get away with such performances.

This is why they’ve been talking about getting rid of her.

This was the TODAY show, for crying out loud, and that’s the best she can do?

Good grief.

Scott McKay
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Scott McKay is a contributing editor at The American Spectator  and publisher of the Hayride, which offers news and commentary on Louisiana and national politics, and RVIVR.com, a national political news aggregation and opinion site. Scott is also the author of The Revivalist Manifesto: How Patriots Can Win The Next American Era, and, more recently, Racism, Revenge and Ruin: It's All Obama, available November 21. He’s also a writer of fiction — check out his four Tales of Ardenia novels Animus, Perdition, Retribution and Quandary at Amazon.
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