“A better solution to the student loan crisis would be a government-sponsored income share agreement and a simplified IRS-managed income withholding repayment system.“
Crisis? What constitutes a “crisis”? The fact millions of miseducated myrmidons borrowed money to finance what they should have known were useless college degrees, and their lenders expect the loans to be repaid?!?
While we understand AEI’s intent, here’s what we deem a better solution:
In other words…
Problem solved, crisis averted and, most importantly, critical life-lesson learned.
Now, owing to our anniversary, here’s an abbreviated edition of The Gouge!
We lead off our mid-week offering with two outstanding commentaries from the great Victor Davis Hanson. First, writing at American Greatness, the good doctor reveals how Socialists, like incarcerated criminals, can’t change their stripes, as he introduces us to…
“In his latest incarnation as president emeritus and corporate multimillionaire community activist, we are reminded of the earlier Barack Obama of “get in their face,” “take a gun to a knife fight,” and “punish our enemies” vintage. From time to time, Obama ventures from his hilltop, seaside, $12 million “you didn’t build that” Martha’s Vineyard Estate or his tony Washington, D.C. $8 million “spread the wealth” mansion to lecture the nation on all of its racist sins, past and present.
In these outings, he seeks to advise lesser folk on how we can still find redemption (make Puerto Rico a state?), given that his own eight years as president apparently proved that the United States remains hopelessly captive to the spirit of Bull Connor and that a president such as himself—starting out with complete control of the Congress—had no power to change much.
His latest weaponization of the funeral of John Lewis revealed all the Obama signature characteristics.
…Why is Obama reemerging with greater frequency now? There are a few reasonable suppositions.
He has already made tens of millions of dollars in the last four years and now believes that he has the “security” of being a multimillionaire several times over, and so can once again dabble in politics.
His party has moved hard Left. And he rues now that he did not then lead the cultural revolution during his own tenure, given his community organizing Bill Ayers-youth, which as a badge of honor we should expect will now no longer be airbrushed away. His early revolutionary cred will likely resurface as the audacity of hope becomes the audacity of woke.
He resents those like “the squad” who usurped his hard-Left brand, which was tarnished during his past few years in his period of “not the time to profit” corporate profiteering.
He thinks Biden suddenly can now win. Yet better than any he knows that Biden is challenged and is a useful vessel. Thus, he envisions his sudden behind-the-scenes role as substantial. He can piggyback on the cultural revolution this summer and then claim that he helped “deliver” the progressive and identity politics vote—and thus becomes an active wise-man advisor to a challenged Biden.
Then again, there is always the chance that Biden’s unbreakable oath to appoint a woman as vice presidential nominee and his inference that she will be an African-American opens up all sort of wild card possibilities to Obama—given that he knows best the VP slot could well be a quasi-presidential nomination, given Biden’s cognitive issues, given that Biden is now ahead in the polls, and given that there is some chance that all the candidates whom Biden considers may have high negatives in his internal polling.
And thus Michelle Obama, the most popular woman in today’s polls, could “rescue” the Democrats, unite the party, and finish out an Obama 16-year term, with the last eight-year regnum revealing the inner and true Obama that was stymied the first go around.
These “are such stuff as dreams are made of.”“
Dreams for Barry, a nightmare for America.
Though, as Tucker Carlson relates, were we the first former anti-American President in the nation’s history, we wouldn’t be counting our Communist chickens just yet:
In a related item, not only do the Hodge Twins accurately echo Hanson’s points, they share our incredibly low opinion of The Great Divider:
Since we’re on the subject of nightmares for America, writing at NRO, Hanson details…
“Cultural suicide used to be a popular diagnosis of why things suddenly just quit.
Historians such as Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee cited social cannibalism to explain why once-successful states, institutions, and cultures simply died off.
Their common explanation was that the arrogance of success ensures lethal consequences. Once elites became pampered and arrogant, they feel exempt from their ancestors’ respect for moral and spiritual laws — such as the need for thrift, moderation, and transcendence.
…Professional sports, universities, and the motion-picture industry all know that what they are doing is bad for business. But they still believe they are rich and powerful, and thus invulnerable. They also are ignorant of history and cannot be persuaded that they are destroying themselves.
At this late date, all that matters is that the country itself learns from these suicidal examples and heals itself. If the U.S. is not to become an extinct Easter Island, it must rediscover a respect for its past, honor for the dead who gave us so much, the desire to invest rather than spend, and a need for some sense of transcendence.
If we do not believe that what we do today has consequences for our children after we are gone, there are ancient existential forces in the world that will intervene.
And it won’t be nice.“
It’s already not nice; if The Donald goes down to a defeat of his own orchestration, it’s going to be a whole lot worse than were he never elected in the first place.
Next up, we continue our coverage of the Chi-Com’s latest creation with this update on things Swedish courtesy of Jeff Foutch, as Red State‘s Michael Thau relates…
“…As my colleague Brandon Morse reported Friday, it looks like bothering to read what the experts proposing lockdowns actually said they were supposed to accomplish may have paid off:
Europe is seeing another surge in Coronavirus cases with the exception of Sweden who is still seeing a marked decline since June.
But a Twitter researcher who goes by the name El Gato Malo(The Bad Cat) did a thread that’s essential reading for anyone who wants to understand whether Sweden made the right choice.
It turns out their COVID numbers are incredibly good independent of the fact they seem to be avoiding the recent spike in cases lockdown nations are experiencing.
Moreover, there are differences in the criteria for counting COVID-19 deaths which cast a very different light on some of the comparisons being made.
To start by considering Sweden’s numbers in isolation, their COVID fatalities were almost entirely restricted to the elderly. 88% were over 70 and 75% were in nursing homes or elder care. Only 4.5% of fatalities were under 60. Sweden had less than 500 reported COVID fatalities under 70, just 12% of the total.
Before the “even one death is too many” crowd starts accusing me of being a heartless monster, they might want to take a look in the mirror. A recent report from the British government estimates that in just a single year lockdowns may cause 200,000 deaths from depriving people of medical care for ailments other than COVID-19 alone. (Yes, Mr. Thau’s grammar is in dire need of an overhaul.)
Britain has around 6 times Sweden’s population. But even dividing the British number by 20 gives you 10,000 deaths.
That’s 20 times those 500 people under the age of 70 that Sweden reported as succumbing to COVID-19 and almost twice their total for all ages.
Moreover, it’s very unlikely that the real death toll in Sweden (or any country!) is anywhere close to the number they’re reporting. Like the U.S., Sweden’s criteria for counting COVID-19 deaths are so loose that they’re bound to be including a lot of people who would’ve died regardless of the virus.
As Johan Norberg pointed out way back in April:
Sweden systematically checks the list of people who have tested positive for the virus against the population register.Every time the government discovers that someone who had the virus has died, that person is registered as a COVID-19 death if it happened within 30 days of the diagnosis.
It doesn’t matter what they died of — could be a heart attack, cancer or even a car accident…”
Thus does Sweden’s decision to learn from history seem better and better by comparison than America’s.
In a related item forwarded by Balls Cotton, Conservative Review‘s Daniel Horowitz rediscovers our country’s…
““Let us all keep a cool head about Asian influenza as the statistics on the spread and the virulence of the disease begin to accumulate.” ~New York Times editorial, Sept. 17, 1957
“So, what was it like to live through the Asian flu of 1957?” I recently asked my father. “What’s the Asian flu?” replied my father, who was in second grade at the time.
“Well, do you remember the Hong Kong flu of 1968?” I followed up, thinking that surely he’d remember something that killed around 100,000 people (the equivalent of 160,000 today) when he was in college and very news-savvy. “I remember the riots in ’68 and the oil crisis in the ’70s, but don’t recall anything about flus.”
Try this social experiment on anyone who lived through the 1950s and 1960s, or try it on yourself if you are a Baby Boomer or older. You likely don’t recall (as we don’t!) any disruption in your life nor any trauma-induced fear and panic. That is because there wasn’t any disruption…”
“Dr. Henderson was convinced that it made no sense to force schools to close or public gatherings to stop.(You know, like Woodstock…or Black Lies Matter riots…er,…peaceful protests!)Teenagers would escape their homes to hang out at the mall. School lunch programs would close, and impoverished children would not have enough to eat.Hospital staffs would have a hard time going to work if their children were at home.
The measures embraced by Drs. Mecher and Hatchett (the aforementioned government MDs with neither virological nor epidemiological experience.) would “result in significant disruption of the social functioning of communities and result in possibly serious economic problems,” Dr. Henderson wrote in his own academic paper responding to their ideas. (How come Dr. Henderson
The answer, he insisted, was to tough it out: Let the pandemic spread, treat people who get sick and work quickly to develop a vaccine to prevent it from coming back.“
Had Dr. Henderson not unfortunately passed away back in 2016, perhaps he’d be our “foremost infectious disease expert”, while Dr. Faux-Chi was deservedly demoted to the dust bin of uncertain history.
And would it shock anyone to learn this uninformed, inexpert strategy was commissioned by George W. Bush, the gift…
…provided your a Progressive!
Which brings us to The Lighter Side:
Then there’s these two from the lovely Shannon…
…one from Speed Mach…
…another from Balls Cotton…
…and one more from our eldest son Jon:
Finally, we’ll call it a wrap with another sordid story straight from the pages of The Crime Blotter, and a…
“A woman was reportedly kicked off an American Airlines flight last week because her mask was deemed “offensive” by a flight attendant. Arlinda Johns, from South Florida, was on her way to Illinois when she boarded a plane wearing a mask that said “F— 12” and a T-shirt that said “Black Lives Matter,” she told Florida’s Local 10 station.
According to the station, “f— 12” is slang for “f— the police.”
A flight attendant reportedly asked Johns — an activist who believes in defunding and abolishing the police — to cover her mask. Johns did, saying in a Facebook Live video later: “Everything she asked me to do, I did.”
…American Airlines did not immediately respond to Fox News’ request for comment. However, the airline did tell Local 10 that Johns “refused to follow crew member instructions to remove or cover a face mask with offensive language and although the passenger initially complied, they later continued to display the inappropriate language. After arriving at the gate, the passenger was asked to deplane.”
…She reportedly ended up having to rent a car and drive to Illinois in order to reach her destination.“
Yeah,…’cuz there were no other flights leaving Charlotte for St. Louis. It’s also worth noting, like any good activist, Johns did not begin her video until after her part in this senseless melodrama had been played.
Regardless, here’s hoping the bitter, obese Arlinda never disrupts one of our flights, as it’s highly likely we’ll…
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