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The ADVANCE, May 5, 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: Leah Barkoukis, online features editor at Townhall.com: Psaki: White House 'respectfully disagrees' with leaders of Biden's faith on fetal tissue research. While Democrats cheered the administra tion's decision to lift the ban (on using fetal tis sue from elective abortions for research)earlier this month, Tom McClusky, president of March for Life Action, blasted the move. "This type of experimental research is a gross violation of human dignity and is not where the majority of Americans want their tax dollars being spent," he said in a statement. "The government has no business creating a marketplace for aborted baby body parts." Betsy McCaughey, Ph.D, former Lt. Gover nor of New York State and author of Beating Obamacare: Science says if you're vaccinat ed, enjoy life again. Johns Hopkins' Dr. Marty Makary faults the CDC's "counter-science track record of being late and wrong." Even less scientific than the six-foot rule is the agency's guidance for the fully vacci nated. The agency tells them to "continue to wear masks, maintain physical distance and practice other prevention measures when vis iting with unvaccinated people." That guidance eliminates a major incen tive for getting the shots and will slow Amer ica's recovery. Infections among the vacci nated do occur, but rarely, and serious illness is even rarer. The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines reduce the risk of developing COVID by 90 to 95%, compared with being unvaccinated. U.S. data show the risk of getting infected after these vaccines is a minuscule 0.008%. Matt Vespa, Senior Editor at Townhall.com: So, that's how Biden intends to tax the middle class. Well, Kelly Johnston wrote an op-ed for InsideSources to explain one tax hike that will wreck the middle class and noted how retire ment accounts and pensions could be next: "Whose money do the Democrats think we're talking about? They seem to think all money is the government's, and they're let ting you keep some of it. They clearly be lieve that they can spend it better than you. It doesn't take long before that extends into other private property. Your pensions and IRAs may be next." Reagan McCarthy, Web Editor atTownhall. com: Poll: Overwhelming majority still supports voter identification laws. The poll also found that Republicans are concerned about voter integrity, while Demo crats fear for "voter suppression." Far more Republicans are extremely or very concerned about voter fraud (81 per cent) than they are about voter suppression (46 percent), while significantly more Demo crats are troubled about suppression (78 per cent) than fraud (39 percent). In fact, voter fraud is one of the top concerns among Re publicans -- and comes in dead last among Democrats. There is no real evidence that suppres sion of voters occurs, but Democrats have led a massive misinformation campaign about Georgia's newly-signed voting reform bill. Ac tivists claim that implementing voter identifica tion requirements is equal to suppressing vot ers of color. Write Us A Letter Have you a gripe? How abouf a complimenf for someone for a job well done? Lef us know abouf if wifh a leffer fo fhe editor. We urge anyone fo wrife us abouf any subject of general public interest. Please limit all letters to 250 words double spaced. All letters must by signed, but we may withhold the writer's name upon request. Please write to us at The Advance, P.O. Box 669, Vidalia, GA 30475 or email: theadvancenews@ gmail.com (Subject Line: Letter to the Editor). Joe Biden’s Radical Gambit „ THE RICH LOWRY COLUMN There’s believing your own press releases. And then, there’s believing your own delusions of grandeur. Joe Biden should look at the mirror every day and see a president elected on the basis of the unpopularity of his predecessor at a time when the country was slammed by a once-in-100-years pandemic. Instead, by every account, he sees a transformative leader with a mandate to change America as rapidly and irreversibly as possible. As the news site Axios noted, Biden wants his next 100 days to be “more audacious” than his first 100, as he seeks “to re-engineer the very fundamentals of America — inequality, voting rights and government’s role in directing economic growth.” Oh, is that all? Biden’s drive to make himself the next FDR and erect a massive progressive edifice on the slightest of political foundations is monumentally arrogant and almost certainly bound to fail. Biden is contemplating the sort of the bait-and-switch that rarely goes over well. Yes, the policy plans he ran on last year were further to the left of Barack Obama’s and of Biden’s own lengthy record as a U.S. senator. But Biden described himself as a moderate who wanted to work with Republicans and restore a sense of normality to Washington. He said, as he put it when urging Republicans not to fill the Ruth Bader Ginsberg seat on the Supreme Court, “We need to de-escalate, not escalate.” No one listening to that or a thousand other things Biden said during the campaign would have had him pegged as the guy who’d immediately set about making wrenching changes in the American way of life. For a would-be FDR, Biden doesn’t seem to understand that a fundamental source of the New Dealer’s power was enormous congressional majorities. FDR came into office in 1932 with almost a 200-seat majority in the House, 313- 117, after Republicans lost more than 100 seats. Biden came into office in 2020 with a bare 9-seat majority in the House after Democrats surprisingly lost ground all over the country. It’s the narrowest Democratic House majority since the last two years of the administration of Rutherford B. Hayes. In the Senate, FDR had 58 Democrats, as Republicans lost 12 seats in 1932 in one of the worst senatorial drubbings in history. Biden has a 50-50 tie after Democrats eked out two special election victories in Georgia earlier this year, with Vice President Kamala Harris on standby to break ties. The fate of Biden’s legislative agenda hangs by a thread, depending on whether Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, relatively moderate Democrats, support his proposals. If FDR had been equally dependent on a couple of ideologically unsympathetic Democrats from the outset of his administration, he wouldn’t be FDR. If Biden feels emboldened by his first 100 days, he’s defining achievement downward. FDR signed into law more than a dozen major measures addressing the Great Depression during his first 100 days, while Biden got a $1.9 trillion COVID-19 reliefbill — a huge amount of spending, yes, but much of it is temporary. Pro-Biden pundits are currently exulting that he has about a 53% approval rating, a respectable showing, if hardly a position of overwhelming strength from which to try to revolutionize the country. Importantly, FDR initially got even more powerful after 1932. Republicans dropped down to only 17 senators and 89 congressmen in 1936, whereas Please see Lowry page 7A GRITTY Police Reform and Personal Responsibility It is indeed rare, if not unprecedented, to see a highly diverse group of organizations such as the conservative Alliance Defending Freedom, the liberal American Civil Liberties Union, the libertarian Cato Institute and the Reason Foundation on the same page as the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund on the same issue. But it is happening as the U.S. Senate takes up police reform. The issue is a legal doctrine known as qualified immunity. These diverse organizations all agree that qualified immunity is bad law and should end. The discussion is particularly high- powered today because it stands at the center of police reform that many see is needed in the wake of incidents such as the murder of George Floyd by former police officer Derek Chauvin. The nation’s first major civil rights law, the Civil Rights Act of 1871, passed shortly after the Civil War, contains a provision known as Section 1983 that protects citizens from violation of their civil rights by government officials. It says that a government official who violates a citizen’s civil rights is liable and can be sued by the injured party. Thus stood the law, until a series of Supreme Court decisions from 1967 to 1982 reinterpreted its application. A new standard, qualified immunity, was added saying that it must be shown that rights were violated per “clearly established law.” That is, there must be a previous case in which rights were violated the exact same way. So, if a citizen’s rights are violated but Please see Nitty page 8A COMMENTARY The COVID Passport: Fascism at Hand By Jay Valentine, writer for American Thinker Naomi Wolf is perfectly accurate warning that the COVID Passport is an unassuming, mild, reasonable- sounding concept that will lead to untold catastrophic civic conse quences. She is way out front, and we should all pay attention to her. The COVID Passport is the doorway to fascism in your lifetime, on your doorstep, and there may be no turning back once it happens. Her thesis is this: the COVID Passport creates the platform on which to add all kinds of different data types (information from social media, credit card purchases, whom you were with from your geo loca tion info on the phone) to profile every citizen and then take action against all of them. Do not think this is far-fetched. It has begun, and my team was at Ground Zero as it did. Remember the No Fly List? Sure, you do. My team built the technol ogy to make it possible. Let’s take a little stroll through some basic data concepts, and you will get it, I promise. Your name, height, weight, eth nicity, political party, residence, car you drive, products you purchase are attributes. You are, in data land, the sum of your attributes. If all we know is your name, ad dress, age, sex, well, not much to de duce here. Let’s add your social me dia posts, your friends, your friends’ social media posts, the orgs they joined — well, now we are getting a fuller picture of you. You know that Big Tech is doing this now. Of course you do. You are on Amazon and look at a pair of hiking boots, and every time you hit the enter key, even doing email, you get an ad for hiking boots. That is your profile coming from your computer cache and cookies. Somebody collected it. What if it isn’t hiking boots you seek, but rather you want to go to the Trump store or the Bernie website? You just added political attributes. Those define you in ways you never imagined. Your profile grows. Attributes can magnify each other as they accumulate. A dozen people are conservative, live in the same area, are of the two major sexes, are in similar age ranges, have generally similar incomes, edu cation, height, and weight. All are Trump -supp orters. But one bought 5.56 ammo on line. Another wrote a social media post against nonsensical masks. Those two little transactions just magnified their other attributes to make them stand out for “special at tention.” You’ve seen it. The TSA pat-down, the surprise that someone was added to the No Fly List. So far, one key concept is that you volunteered your information in exchange for product stuff. Fair trade in the digital age. Most of those transactions were with different platforms. They are Please see Guest page 7A
