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The ADVANCE, December 29, 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:
Spencer Brown, managing editor for
Townhall: 'Cloth Masks Are Little More Than
Facial Decorations': CNN Medical Analyst.
Excuse me? Cloth masks — the likes of
which have turned into a cottage industry
peddled everywhere from Etsy to grocery
store checkout lanes to the CDC's guid
ance— are "little more than facial deco
rations" now? Got it. But the White House
doesn't seem to....
As the CDC guidance on masking — last
updated on October 25, 2021 — explains,
including with renderings that seem to show
cloth masks, that Americans should not
choose masks "specially labeled 'surgical'
N95 respirators, as those should be prioritized
for healthcare personnel." In the section ad
dressing mask guidelines for Americans who
rely on lipreading to communicate, the CDC
advises "wearing a clear mask or a cloth
mask with a clear panel."
Brian C Joondeph, MD, physician and
writer: Roses are red, Crime is blue.
ABC News' conclusion of "no clear an
swer" seems as clear as could be. If you de
fund and criticize something, expect less of
it. Red cities and states, for the most part, of
fer residents a rosy life. At the same time, the
blue locales provide not violets, but crime,
murder, and mayhem. Remember this when
it comes time to vote, and more importantly
count the votes.
Greg Gutfeld, host of Gutfeld! and co
host of The Five: CNN has successfully vac
cinated itself against high ratings.
Yet, it wasn't enough to target Fox News.
You got to go after Trump voters, parents,
the police, anyone who dared question
mask mandates, they became the mouth
piece for enforced conformity.
As they mocked real crime, they happily
tried to cancel you for a meme.
They ignored mobs destroying cities while
trumpeting phony hate crimes.
They'd be happy if we were all on terror
watch lists.
But there is a bright side.
If CNN is too busy focusing all their en
ergies on FOX, at least maybe the kids are
safe.
Karl Rove, Fox News Channel (FNC) po
litical contributor and columnist for the Wall
Street Journal: Team Biden will pay a hefty
price for their attacks on Manchin.
Jen Psaki essentially called Manchin a
liar and a traitor to his party. Who told her to
do this? ...
The problem for Biden - or any president
- is that once his image of competence be
gins to decline, only a strong demonstration
on another significant issue or crisis can stop
and perhaps reverse it. That will likely require
a major exterior event to occur, meaning
Biden's standing with voters is increasingly
out of his control.
The powers of Biden's office are awe
some, but since his actions on BBB and so
many other fronts have raised serious ques
tions about his competence, he's entered a
cycle of decline he may not be able to ar
rest.
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The High- Water Mark of
Biden-Era Progressivism
Joe Manchin and London
Breed have nothing in
common.
One is an old-school
Democratic senator from West
Virginia, surviving and thriving
in an increasingly red state; the
other is the progressive mayor
of San Francisco, a city that is a
byword for cutting-edge left-
wing politics.
Yet both, in their own ways
signaled that Biden-era
progressivism has reached its
high-water mark. Manchin, of
course, delivered an emphatic
thumbs down to Joe Biden’s
signature Build Back Better
plan, while Breed reversed
field on crime in a stunningly
frank endorsement of law-and-
order in a jurisdiction infamous
for the opposite.
The de facto pincer
movement by the wildly
different Democrats from
wildly different parts of the
country — San Francisco is
roughly 19 times as large as the
biggest city in West Virginia
— shows that the progressive
tide that built in the Trump
years is finally colliding with
political reality and the real-
world consequences of
progressive extravagance.
This doesn’t mean that
progressivism is spent,
obviously. It dominates the
media, academia and almost
all the rest of elite culture. At
the same time, Democrats still
control the elected branches of
government in Washington.
But a growing backlash against
progressive excess has found
expression in two notable acts
of Democratic defiance.
By now, the context of
Manchin’s “no” on Build Back
Better is familiar. Joe Biden
campaigned as a pragmatic
Democrat only to reverse field
after his election and develop a
heroic image of himself as the
next transformational
Democratic president in the
line of FDR and LBJ.
This drove the mistake of
not realizing that Manchin or
anyotherDemocratic dissenter
in the 50-50 Senate had the
power to derail Build Back
Better and accordingly scaling
it back from the outset. Instead,
the White House and
congressional leadership acted
as if Manchin could be cajoled
or bullied out of his oft-
repeated qualms.
Perhaps Democrats will
reunite with the senator on a
scaled-back spending bill in
the new year, but the era of
FDR fantasies is definitely
over. Democrats should ask
themselves, if they had a
mandate to remake the
country, why the entire project
depended on the approval of a
single conservative Democrat
from West Virginia?
Now, Democrats are
looking down the barrel of a
mid-term election wipe-out
that could give the GOP a
durable House majority that
will put paid to any thought of
BBB-style legislation for years.
If Manchin said “enough”
to big-spending federal
aggrandizement, London
Breed said it to the soft-on-
crime consensus in blue cities
that has led to spiraling
disorder. The Bay Area, home
to the smash-and-grab robbery
and other routine offenses
against basic human decency,
has been Exhibit A.
Concluding that even the
tolerant people of perhaps the
country’s most tolerant city
wouldn’t put up with it much
longer, Breed had her Howard
Beale moment. In a speech
clearly meant to set down a
political and rhetorical marker,
she called for an end to “the
reign of criminals who are
destroying our city.”
The Breed turnabout,
from police-defunder a year
ago to would-be Rudy Giuliani
now, marks an end to the
period after George Floyd’s
death when anti-police
sentiment was ascendant.
There are other signs that
the progressive momentum is
beginning to give way. A
rightward shift among Latinos
shows the limits of paint-by-
the-numbers identity politics.
That the left’s response to the
grassroots movement against
critical race theory in schools
has been to deny there is any
critical race theory in schools
speaks to a telling
defensiveness. Next year, the
Supreme Court may well
Please see Lowry page 7A
GRITTY
Thank You,
Sen. Manchin
The saying, “One
man with courage
makes a majority”
has been attributed
by historians to dif
ferent sources.
But regardless of
who said it, there is
one man who stands
out today worthy of
this description.
It’s West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin.
Manchin has been a one-man show in
the Democratic Party, standing often in
solitude, holding feet-to-the-fire of his pres
ident and his party’s leadership, pushing
back on the massive and irresponsible
spending avalanche in the Build Back Bet
ter act.
Now, Manchin has slammed the door,
saying he can’t vote for the bill, effectively
killing it.
In so doing, Manchin has done a great
service to his country and to his party.
Ideologues in leadership in the Demo
cratic Party, intoxicated with the power
voters gave them in the last election, lost
touch with those same voters.
Last February, immediately after the
elections, Democrat voters gave the Demo
crat-controlled Congress a 61% approval
rating, per Gallup. By October, the approval
rating for Congress by Democrat voters was
down to 33%.
And, of course, President Joe Biden’s
own approval rating has plummeted from
57% from early last February to 42% by the
end of October.
Voters gave Democrats control of Con
gress in the last election by a tiny eight-seat
margin.
Yet, they have been governing like they
were voted in in a landslide with a major
mandate to transform the United States
into a new secular humanist bastion of so
cialism.
It’s not true, and Manchin has been a
bulwark holding fast against this usurpation
of power by the far left in his party. As he
said in his statement announcing that he
will not vote for the bill, “My Democratic
colleagues in Washington are determined
to dramatically reshape our society in a way
that leaves our country even more vulnera
ble to the threats we face.”
The senator also expressed very legiti-
Please see Parker page 9A
By Star Parker
Old Songs Bring Memories
Should have
paid attention.
A 1940’s
hit by the Ink
Spots featured
the wonderful
tenor, Bill
Kenny, in
“Whispering
Grass” (Don't tell the trees 'cause the
trees don't need to know.”). It pro
vided the background for a car com
mercial.
Commercials have working titles
we never see. “It's Up to You,” is the
title of a COVID Collaborative TV
spot with a female singer delivering
“I'll be Seeing You.”
It sounds like a Doris Day re
cording but lacks the presence qual
ity available in the 1950's. I found she
never had a commercial recording of
the song.
Her phrasing and approach re
mind me of Billie Holliday, and Miss
Billie had several recordings of that
song and wins by default.
The Scottish group, Pilot, had a
1970's hit, “Magic.”
Producers turned “Whoa, Oh,
Oh It's Magic” into “Whoa, Oh, Oh
Ozempic” for the diabetes medica
tion. It is still running.
“Go Your Own Way” by Fleet-
wood Mac was covered by a studio
band for the COPD medication An-
ora. It is still running.
United Airlines racked up mile
age out of George Gershwin's “Rhap
sody in Blue.”
For a while the world loved the
California Raisins' delivery of Mar
vin Gaye's “Heard it Through the
Grape Vine.” It wasn't Marvin's voice
but Buddy Miles singing.
The characters were everywhere
with spin-off claymation characters
and television specials, but the pro
duction cost twice as much as raisin
growers made. It was scrapped.
In a Sansbury grocery commer
cial (UK) “A Christmas to Savour”
(or “savor” here) a 1960's recording
of “At Last” by Etta James runs in the
background. The actors are frozen as
the song plays and the spot ends
with:“It has been a long time coming
so let's make it a Christmas to sa
vour.”
Nothing wrong with Etta James'
version, but they could have used the
original sung by Ray Eberle with the
Glenn Miller Orchestra.
A currently running ad shows
the Lincoln electric Aviator arriving
into a subdivision that could be Palm
Springs, California, with distant
mountains and palm lined streets.
The yard is covered in snow from
a snow machine with the song “It's a
Most Unusual Day” playing.
It was sung by Beverly Kenny, a
jazz singer who never found the nitch
she wanted and deserved even
though she was a popular jazz club
singer and recognized for her record
ings.
She never got to where she
wanted to be and ended her search
for that place in 1960.
Some of the songs bring back
memories. It's nice to hear them
again.
joenphillips@yahoo.com
By Joe Phillips
Dear Me
