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The ADVANCE, January 13, 2021 /Page 6A
(51?e Ahumtce
A free press is not a privilege but
organic necessity in a great society.
—Walter Lippmann
COMMENTARY
out of
CONTEXT
A compilation of quotations on a variety of
issues by national, state and regional writers,
well-known personalities, just plain everyday
people and from various publications
collected by the editors of THE ADVANCE.
Quotes for our Times:
Tim Graham, executive editor of News-
Busters and director of media analysis for
the Media Research Center: Kamala's un
challenged life stories.
When liberals swoon over their "trail-
blazers," they often love retelling their life
stories ... just as these politicians tell them.
In a cover story with women's magazine
Elle, Harris recounted how "she remembers
being wheeled through an Oakland, Cali
fornia, civil rights march in a stroller with no
straps with her parents and her uncle." At
some point, she fell from the stroller and
none of the adults noticed. When they re
turned, little Kamala was upset. "My moth
er tells the story about how I'm fussing,"
Harris says, "and she's like, 'Baby, what do
you want? What do you need?' And I just
looked at her and I said, 'Fweedom.'"
Ben Shapiro, political commentator:
How bureaucracy killed hundreds of thou
sands of Americans.
We now know that the miraculous
Moderna vaccine for COVID-19 had been
designed by Jan. 13, 2020. That was just
two days after the sequencing of the virus
had been made public. As David Wallace-
Wells writes for New York magazine, "the
Moderna vaccine design took all of one
weekend. ... By the time the first American
death was announced a month later, the
vaccine had already been manufactured
and shipped to the National Institutes of
Health for the beginning of its Phase I clini
cal trial." Meanwhile, for six weeks, Dr. An
thony Fauci assured Americans that there
was little to worry about with COVID-19.
Ed Brodow, political commentator,
negotiation expert, and author: Waving
goodbye to the America we all knew and
loved.
In spite of the media's efforts to hide the
truth, the public knows what is going on.
Actor James Woods tweeted, "70,000,000
Americans are outraged about this be
fouled election." "We don't accept this
fraudulent result." Whenever the president
tries to expose the fraud, the media poison
the airwaves with the same mendacious
phrase: "Trump's baseless allegations." It
makes my skin crawl every time I see this
lie repeated by CNN, the New York Times,
and the Washington Post. The media are
no longer free to express conservative
viewpoints and have abdicated their role
as the republic's watchdog.
Ed Timperlake, writer for American
Thinker: Vaccine priorities: Why Americans
have good reason to despise Congress.
The mind boggles at such a selfish
group of individuals serving in Congress.
Let this moment in time forever reflect
that the Democrat-controlled House and
the Republican-controlled Senate, if the
members and staff do not meet CDC
guidelines for their place in the queue but
jump the line. What they are saying to the
most deserving among us, our combat dis
abled veterans: Tough luck for you, we sim
ply do not care if you die alone in the dark.
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Trump’s Shameful Georgia Call
„ THE
RICH
LOWRY
COLUMN
President Donald Trump
has turned a narrow electoral
defeat into a bid for infamy.
His goal in the post
election interlude has been
more and more explicitly to
overturn the results of the
election. Indeed, a couple of
weeks ago he tweeted simply
“# OVERTURN.”
We now know, thanks to a
recording of his phone
conversation with Georgia
Secretary of State Brad
Raffensperger from over the
weekend, how far he’s gone to
pressure state officials to join
him in this reprehensible goal.
His hour-long lobbying of
Raffensperger to declare him
the winner in the state is among
the worst things an American
president has ever been caught
saying on the record.
There is now no doubt that
Trump lost Georgia. Both
machine and hand recounts
have confirmed a Biden victory
of fewer than 12,000 votes.
Trump has been agitating for a
signature audit, and state
officials examined a statistically
significant sample of 15,000
absentee ballot envelopes in
Cobb County. They found 10
mismatched signatures, but the
voters in question all vouchsafed
for the legitimacy of the ballots
when contactedbyinvestigators.
Georgia has certified its
results multiple times and
appointed its electors in time to
meet the “safe harbor” deadline
under federal law, when they
are supposed to be considered
final and conclusive by the
federal government.
Yet, here comes Trump
with an LBJ-style bout of arm-
twisting to get Raffensperger to
declare all of that a grievous
mistake.
The power differential
between a president of the
United States and a state
secretary of state is vast —
Trump is the most powerful
man on the planet, whereas
Raffensperger isn’t even the
most powerful man in Georgia.
Trump put Raffensperger
in the inherently awkward
position of having to tell him
“no” over and over — snowing
him with a variety of numbers
for supposed illegal votes,
making him parry wild
accusations, mocking him and
threatening him with vague
legal repercussions and,
implicitly, with the end of his
political career.
There is a reason that
Raffensperger didn’t take any of
the reported prior 18 attempted
calls from the White House.
Still, to his great credit, he
did indeed tell Trump “no”
politely and firmly. Of the two
elected officials on the call, only
one was calm, reasonable and
cogent — and it wasn’t the
president.
Trump was repetitive and
ill-informed. He had no idea
what charges had been
debunked weeks ago. He didn’t,
or couldn’t, distinguish
between true and false
information. He was fuzzy on
the details of his own legal case.
He retailed conspiracy theories
about ballots being burned and
voting machines being removed
that would be embarrassing if
your uncle shared them on
Facebook.
The only thing that
mattered to him was getting
Raffensperger to pronounce
him the winner — legal process
and facts be damned.
The problem with Trump
has always been his highly
personal view of the presidency,
wherein institutions,
constitutional principles and
sheer propriety take a backseat
to the felt needs of his ego.
At times in his presidency,
this failing has been made to
serve worthy ends, e.g., stoking
economic growth and
confirming record numbers of
conservative judges as bragging
points.
Since the election, though,
this tendency has been
particularly stark and
unredeemed. His personal
inability to accept the sting of
defeat has led him, shamefully,
to wage war on a legitimate
election.
Please see Lowry page 9A
GRITTY
Involuntary
Motor Skills
As I get older, I
am constantly
discovering that as I
grow in wisdom I
tend to lose some of
my other abilities. An
example is my
“involuntary motor
functions” which
seem to be decreasing
at about the same rate
as my wisdom increases. Of course, some
would argue that my wisdom hasn’t
increased — that I’ve just become a smart-
aleck.
When I say involuntary motor
functions, I’m referring to the ability to do
something without much concentration on
what you’re doing. It’s sorta like riding a
bicycle or skating — once you learn how
— you just continue to do it, right? Well,
that’s what I thought anyway.
Several years ago, before I left work for
the day, I called Sandra to discuss one of my
favorite subjects — food. I asked her if there
was anything she wanted me to pick up for
supper — she said chicken would be good.
That’s when my thought buds kicked in — I
figured I could get her some chicken and
also get myself some of those “crawfish” I’d
been craving that were being advertised at
Popeyes restaurant.
That afternoon, when I left the office, I
turned onto Belair Road and drove toward
Popeyes. My “involuntary motor functions”
took over — I had made many stops at the
old Hardees, which was now Popeyes. All I
could think about were those little crawfish
— batter fried and served with Cajun fries.
My mouth was watering. The sign out front
said, “They’re Back - Try Our Crawfish
Basket - $3.99.” I usually go through the
drive-thru, but since I was so excited, I
decided to go in and make sure I got what I
wanted.
The young lady asked for my order. I
said, “Give me a Chicken Club and a
Please see Nitty page 8A
By Bennie Harbin
COMMENTARY
Will the Real Racists in
America Raise Their Hands?
While
sitting in the
Delta lounge in
the Atlanta
airport waiting
for my flight
back to
Washington, a
white
gentleman
approached me
and struck up a conversation.
Politics was on his mind, and
seeing me, a black woman, he was
sure that he had found a kindred
spirit to share his hopes that
Democrats will prevail in both U.S.
Senate runoff races in Georgia.
I politely straightened him out,
leaving him a bit in shock that he had
incorrectly assumed that seeing the
outside of me was sufficient
information to know what is going
on inside of me.
There is a word for this:
stereotyping.
Is this gentleman a bad man? I
don’t know.
But he is proof of the horrible
success of the perception of racism
industry that has been damaging our
country since the 1960s. The result is
today’s identity politics, diversity
politics and all the politics of the left
that promote the notion that what is
relevant is the outside of a person,
what he or she looks like, not what is
going on inside the person.
With all the screaming about
racism, a huge story of recent months
hardly received any attention. Maybe
because it doesn’t fit into the story
that our left-wing media want to
report about what they call racism.
Several months ago, the Census
Bureau issued its annual report called
“Income and Poverty in the United
States: 2019.”
According to the report, real
median black household income in
2019 was up 7.9 percent - the largest
annual increase in median black
household income in history. This
put the increase in black household
income in 2019 1.1 points higher
than the 6.8 percent increase for the
nation as a whole.
Further, for the first time ever,
the percentage of high-income black
households exceeded the percentage
of low-income black households.
In 2019, 29.4 percent of black
households had income of $75,000
or more, compared with 28.7 percent
of black households that had income
of $25,000 or less.
In 1967, per the Census Bureau,
9.1 percent of black households had
income of $75,000 or more, and 44.5
percent of black households had
income of $25,000 or less.
Contrary to what blares out daily
from liberal media, African
Americans are not getting a raw deal
in our country. In fact, as this new
data from the Census Bureau shows,
Please see Guest page 8A