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The ADVANCE, June 9, 2021 /Page 6A
allie 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:
"If you have always believed that every
one should play by the same rules and be
judged by the same standards, that would
have gotten you labeled a radical 60 years
ago, a liberal 30 years ago and a racist to
day. "
Thomas Sowell
Larry O'Connor, host of The Larry
O'Connor Show and political commentator:
China's Act of War.
Also, why does a government need to
go to such great lengths to lie and cover up
an accident?
Accident or not, if the "lab leak theory"
is true and is no longer considered a theory,
we as a nation must grapple with the fact
that a foreign country has maliciously acted
and killed hundreds of thousands of our citi
zens and crippled our economy for over a
year,
Destruction and death exponentially
worse than the Japanese attack on Pearl
Harbor,
Yes, This would fall under the category of
an act of war,
The question is: What will we do about it?
Terence P. Jeffrey, editor-in-chief of
CNSNews: Biden plans to reduce the deficit
— in 2030.
Yet, there is something worse. "President
Biden's budget proposal," reports National
Public Radio, "fulfills a campaign promise
to remove a longstanding ban on federal
funding for most abortions known as the
Hyde Amendment."
If Biden gets his way, the federal govern
ment will force Americans — through their
tax payments — to fund abortions.
In Biden's vision for America, the federal
government will pay for the killing of some
innocent unborn babies and place an ever-
increasing burden of debt on the children
who survive.
Katie Pavlich, Editor of Townhall.com:
Fauci was told early on that Wuhan corona-
virus looked 'engineered'.
And yet, that's not what he said publicly
as he rejected the possibility of a lab leak
in interviews, during testimony to Congress
and during official White House Task Force
briefings. On April 18, 2020, three months af
ter being told the virus looked engineered,
Fauci told reporters at the White House, un
equivocally, it didn't come from a lab. Most
of the media then reported his remarks as
"debunking" a conspiracy theory.
Monica Showalter, writer for American
Thinker: Failing upward: Joe Biden makes
Kamala Harris his voting rights czar.
It's weird stuff and with Kamala on it, it's
sure to fail. She's alienated every member
of Congress including Republicans and isn't
about to start persuading, let alone getting
up from her selfies and Instagram posts and
doing the work.
So here we are: More Joe Biden dele
gating his presidency to a person chosen for
the job, not for her brains, but for her gender
and skin color, Joe fobbing off another job
he doesn't want to look at her, and sure to
get more failure.
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Yes, Democrats Should
Fear the Crime Wave
On the anniversary of the
death of George Floyd, dozens
of gunshots rang out in the
middle of the day at George
Floyd Square in Minneapolis,
forcing reporters and bystanders
to duck and cover.
The symbolism was
unmistakable — the yearlong
bout of protest after Floyd’s
killing has coincided with a
surge of urban crime that has
made gunplay dismayingly
common.
Indeed, the intersection
where Floyd was killed, now a
memorial blocked to vehicular
traffic, has become a watchword
for mayhem.
The issue of public safety
may be about to play its most
significant role in our politics
since the mid-1990s, the
beginning of a decades-long
decline in crime that steadily
eroded its political salience.
Donald Trump tried to
make law and order a defining
issue in 2020, but the rioting he
so forcefully denounced was, in
most places, too transitory to
become an overwhelming issue.
Now, more than a year into
a serious crime wave, Democrats
are fooling themselves if they
think they won’t be blamed for
rising violence in Democratic-
run cities.
Overall, murder increased
by more than 25% in the United
States last year, the biggest jump
in 60 years. Surely, the
dislocations of the pandemic
have been a factor, but it’s also
obvious that anti-police
agitation has put the cops on
their back feet. Exhibit A is
Minneapolis.
In the fevered aftermath of
the Floyd killing, the City
Council pledged to do away
with the police department,
among the most outlandishly
unachievable and self
destructive promises ever made
by an elected body. Of course, it
couldn’t follow through on it
any more than it could have
followed through on a promise
to eliminate traffic lights or
municipal snow removal.
Still, cops have fled the force
while crime has soared. The
impeccably progressive mayor
of Minneapolis, Jacob Frey, who
desperately wanted to ingratiate
himself at a tribunal-like anti
police rally last summer, but, to
his credit, wouldn’t commit to
defunding the police, now
occasionally sounds like he’s
channeling Rudy Giuliani circa
1993.
Another dyed-in-the-wool
progressive, Portland Mayor
Ted Wheeler, faced with
ongoing unrest that once was
blamed on Trump, has called for
the city’s residents to “take the
city back,” and for unmasking,
arresting and prosecuting
rioters.
Los Angeles cut its police
budget by 8% in the wake of the
Floyd protests, and now is
adding it right back. In South
Los Angeles, the LAPD is
increasing patrols and vehicle
stops to search for guns and
gang members.
Irving Kristol famously said
a neoconservative is a liberal
who has been mugged by reality.
If progressive politicians who
are now sounding friendlier to
the police haven’t been mugged,
they at least have been alarmed
by the sound of approaching
gunfire.
The turnabout isn’t
universal. White House press
secretary Jen Psaki was asked the
other day whether there’s a
crime problem and, sounding as
evasive as when she discusses
the border, would only say there
is a “guns problem.” This was a
reference to the completely
unconvincing argument that
increased gun sales have led to
the spike in crime when surges
in gun sales since the mid-1990s
never before led to higher crime.
The problem that
Democrats have is that they have
accepted — and celebrated —
the people making a
comprehensive case against the
Please see Lowry page 12A
GRITTY
The Natural
Habits of the Shad
One afternoon,
when I was a young
boy, I arrived at my
grandparents’ house
just before supper. I
immediately smelled
the sweet aroma of
fish cooking and
asked my Papa where
he got the fish. He
laughed and said,
“Your grandmother caught them with a
silver hook.” I told him I’d never seen a
silver hook, and he let me know the hook
was actually a silver dollar, because she
bought the fish at Mr. Palmer’s market.
When I asked — “What kind of fish?” He
proudly answered, “It’s a shad — you need
to try it because it’s delicious!”
I had never heard of a shad, but my
PaPa was right — it was very good. My
MaMa knew how to prepare the shad,
which required some special preparation
because of the many tiny bones in the fish.
She would slice the meat off the sides of
the fish and then cut deep gashes into the
meat about Vi” apart. When the shad
cooked, the bones were dissolved and the
result was a very tasty piece of fish.
I just got back from a few days at the
East Side Fishing Club on the Altamaha
River near Darien. The weather was very
cold, so we didn’t spend a lot of time sitting
in a boat — even though Crappie were
biting. However, we did spend a few hours
each day drifting with a shad net — the
drifts were so successful that we had fried
shad each night for supper. Larry
Dickerson, who does most of the cooking,
has mastered the technique for preparing
and cooking the shad.
Lee Foskey, another club member,
who personally caught a lot of shad during
our trip, also told me a few more things
about the shad. According to Lee, when
the fish is about 5 years old — it will leave
the ocean and travel up a fresh water river
to a point where they will spawn. They’re
Please see Nitty page 9A
COMMENTARY
Stacey Abrams Lines Her Pockets
While Georgians Suffer
By Vernon Jones
Whether she’s writing fiction
novels or shilling for wealthy white
liberals, Stacey Abrams makes things
up for a living.
Hot on the heels ofher disastrous
campaign to oppose election
integrity in Georgia, Abrams secured
two new book deals that will allow
her to combine her passion for
storytelling with her passion for
partisan spin. If she can pull that off
without destroying anyone’s
livelihood, at least it will be an
improvement over her most recent
endeavors.
More so than any other single
individual, Stacey Abrams is
responsible for the loss of at least
$100 million in economic activity
that would have gone to Atlanta-area
businesses and their employees. In a
futile attempt to gin up public
outrage and stop state lawmakers
from passing legislation to help
secure Georgia’s elections, Abrams
shamelessly compared the Georgia
Election Integrity Act to “Jim Crow”
- a preposterous comparison that
was nonetheless echoed by white
liberals such as Joe Biden.
According to Stacey Abrams,
Black Georgians are incapable of
obtaining free identification
documents, require weeks of early
voting accommodations - including
night and weekend voting hours -
and can’t be expected to vote unless
partisan activists provide them with
free food and water while they wait.
That’s obviously ridiculous, and her
insistence that convenience is
equivalent to fairness is an insult to
all Black Americans.
What’s even more outrageous is
that Stacey Abrams presents herself
to the world as though she speaks on
behalf of all Black people - and the
mainstream media unquestioningly
accepts it. She certainly doesn’t speak
for me, though. Nor does she speak
for the Black workers and small
business owners who are being
directly hurt by her exaggerations
and fabrications.
Unfortunately, weak-kneed and
“woke” corporate executives fell
hook, line, and sinker for Abrams’
antics. After Atlanta-based
corporations such as Coca-Cola and
Delta Airlines caved to her demands
by issuing statements denouncing
the Georgia Election Integrity Act,
Major League Baseball responded to
her dissembling about the
appropriateness of boycotts by
moving the 2021 All-Star Game -
which had been slated to take place
in Atlanta - to Denver, Colorado.
The economic toll that the
MLB’s decision will have on
struggling businesses in one of the
country’s largest majority-minority
cities is difficult to overstate. After
more than a year of pandemic-
induced losses, restaurants, bars, and
other businesses were eagerly
anticipating a rejuvenating jolt from
Please see Guest page 9A