About The Advance. (Vidalia, Ga.) 2003-current | View Entire Issue (Aug. 18, 2021)
The ADVANCE, August 18, 2021 /Page 6A (Site 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: Frank Liberato, writer for American Thinker: Biden's six months in office have us on the road To communism. But then who would vote for Demo crats? The only immigrants crossing into this country from the south who would not eventually vote for Democrats in large numbers are Cuban refugees. They are also, by and large, the only group with legitimate asylum claims -- and they are the only group Biden's government is turning away. Their fate is something you probably don't want to think about, but it serves the purposes of the Biden adminis tration, whose goal is to import as many future Democrat voters as humanly pos sible. Derek Hunter, Radio show host and author: Liberals show you what they really think of the country (and you). Essentially, liberals are ready and eager to believe anything and everything bad about this country. . . , It's how you get hoax after hoax reported as fact and screamed from the mountain tops, only to be corrected in the dark in the hopes that no one will notice that no one both ered to do any journalism in the process of reporting. John Stossel, author of "Give Me a Break: How I Exposed Hucksters, Cheats, and Scam Artists and Became the Scourge of the Liberal Media": Silenced! The real reason for shortages and suf fering in Cuba is communism. "When the government controls your business," says Cuban emigre Alian Collazo, "people don't have food. All resources end up in the hands of the state." Other American "useful idiots," like Michael Moore, praise Cuba's "free" ser vices. In his documentary "Sicko," Moore took a group of Americans to a Cuban hospital and celebrated how they were given free health care. But Collazo points out that "free" is mis leading. "Go to a hospital in Cuba -- they don't even have aspirin! Yeah, (health care's) free. (But) it's horrible." Greg Gutfeld, host of Gutfeld! and co host of The Five: Climate change is saving hundreds of thousands of lives Fact: more people died from cold weather than hot. A new Lancet study re ports that while a half million people die from heat per year, roughly 4.5 million die from the cold. More than have officially died worldwide from COVID, but global warming has reduced the intensity of ex treme cold weather. According to (Bjorn Lomborg of the New York Post): "as temperatures have in creased over the past two decades, that has caused an extra 116,000 heat deaths each year... But... Because global warm ing has also reduced cold waves, we now see 283,000 fewer cold deaths." Write Us A Letter Have you a gripe? How about a compliment 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). The Biden Blowout Is Just Beginning A trillion dollars used to be a lot of money, even in Washington. Now, a trillion-dollar spending bill is a trifle barely worth arguing over and the stuff of bipartisan consensus. Oscar Wilde famously said that nothing succeeds like excess, but even he might blanch at the shameless profligacy that is America’s new normal. In their wisdom, Senate Republicans decided to help President Joe Biden pass a portion of his blow-out fiscal agenda, a $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill that is a prelude to an even bigger, vastly more consequential $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill. The infrastructure bill itself is, as fiscal analyst Brian Riedl of the Manhattan Institute notes, “one of the largest non-emergency spending bills of the past 50 years.” Republicans told themselves that only about half, $550 billion, is new spending, and that by going along they can take the heat off of Democratic moderates Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin, who are being constantly pressured to ditch the filibuster. Perhaps, but there’s no doubt that the GOP has blessed, and lent a bipartisan imprimatur, to a portion of the president’s hoped-for historic spending spree. In so doing, they have taken at least a little ownership of an agenda they should want no part of. Republicans will have much less influence, and perhaps none, on the next spate of spending, which is the so-called “soft” infrastructure (aka, a wish list of progressive social programs) after the “hard” infrastructure in the bipartisan bill (roads, bridges, rail). Under the reconciliation process, tax and spending bills evade the filibuster in the Senate, so Democrats can pass whatever they want so long as they hold all 50 of their senators. The sheer numbers here are jaw dropping. Including the $1.9 trillion so-called COVID-19 relief bill from earlier this year, Biden wants to spend nearly $6 trillion in three measures passed within months of each other. In 2019, by point of comparison, the entire federal budget was $4.4 trillion (and at the time, President Trump wasn’t exactly tightening the country’s fiscal belt). The tide of new spending will add to already extraordinary levels of red ink. The White House projects that the U.S. debt will reach 109.7% of GDP this year, higher than at the end of World War II when we had abandoned all fiscal restraint to win an existential struggle against two expansionistic totalitarian empires. The Senate instructions for the reconciliation bill say that only half of it has to be paid for. Democrats will claim a dog’s breakfast of purported savings and painless revenue increases, but the bulk of the new dollars will have to come from a tax increase that easily could rank as one of the biggest ever. The parameters of the reconciliation bill were crafted by the socialist chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, Bernie Sanders, and it shows. The priorities read like crib notes from his old presidential campaigns. The bill would add new government programs for the young and the old, from universal pre-K to tuition-free community college, to family and medical leave, to expansions of Obamacare and Medicare. It would make a big nod to Please see Lowry page 8A GRITTY Cancel Culture and Wokeness Will Destroy Our Country The enabling tool of what we call “cancel culture” or “wokeness” is language. People are put in categories to which names are assigned, and this supposedly captures who they are and what should be done with them politically. Unfortunately, the whole business of racial identification and categorization is not about advancing the quality of the human condition and human dignity but about progressive politics. The left puts people in racial categories as instruments toward their political agenda. In 1977, the Federal Interagency Committee on Education produced a five- race classification for the American population: American Indian or Alaskan Native, Asian or Pacific Islander, Black, White and Hispanic. These categories, over time, continued to undergo changes and refinements. The Hispanic category emerged in the 1970s, and the legislation described this group as “Americans who identify themselves as being of Spanish-speaking background and trace their origin or descent from Mexico, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Central and South America, and other Spanish-speaking countries.” So, an American with roots in Spain and an American with roots in Peru wind up in the same category because their country of origin was Spanish-speaking. Hispanic is neither race nor ethnicity. It is a category of political design, including individuals from 20-plus countries, with no commonality other than the language Please see Nitty page 8A By Star Parker COMMENTARY Back to Golden Isles ST. SI MONS IS LAND - If I did not live in Athens, I would want to live here, where the liv ing is easy and the laid-back lifestyle touch es your senses so poignantly that you feel rather Shakespearean upon taking leave, “Parting is such sweet sorrow.” When the exit takes place, you know that you will find your way back to the Golden Isles. With the good fortune of having traveled our state top to bottom, corner to corner over the years, no place has less-to- like features than St. Simons. You cross the Fernando Torras Causeway and park at your destination, fully expecting a greeter to open your car door and smile, “at ease.” No place in our state is more relaxed, reassuring and inviting. St. Simon’s tranquil atmosphere leaves you appreciating abundant good things and shooing away pessimism and melancholy. Mental apathy is not allowed in the Golden Isles. Good feelings wash over me when I come this way. It all begins when I pull out of the driveway and connect with Georgia Highway 15 in the Five Points section of Athens and head south. Along the way, a lei surely drive awaits. It will be a stop and go routine by choice. I want to connect with good friends along the way. First, there was a call in Greens boro to the Journal Herald and the latest news from Carey Williams, an old friend who probably knows more Georgians than the last half dozen governors. It was Carey, who arranged for my first Masters ticket. I’ll always be grateful for that. He is the only person I know who actually won the lottery. In Sandersville, I raised an imagi nary toast to my late friend Tommy Walker, who was a Damn Good Dawg if there ever was one. How I miss his chatterbox conversations and his generous and perpetual laugh. As I aimlessly ride though my hometown of Wrightsville, I re call Friday Night Lights, dating in a pickup truck and the fun that I had with my friends; the 4-H club, FFA and a coach named Red. His Knute Rockne style oratory seldom made a difference, mainly because he didn’t have the talent to make a difference. Nevertheless, it was fun playing for him. When I approached Tarrytown, 4.4 miles south of Soperton, a call went out to Georgia Supreme Court Judge, John Ellington. Hooray, he was home and had time for a Diet Coke and conversation about turkey hunting, Gridiron, Bulldawg foot ball, haying, Atlanta traffic and his forthcoming trip to Charlotte for the opening of football season, now less than a month away. There was an invitation to stop by on my return for a bouquet of roses, tended by his Please see Loran page 8A By Loran Smith
