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(51?e Ahuattce The ADVANCE, May 17, 2023/Page 7A
A free press is not a privilege but
organic necessity in a great society.
-Walter Uppmann
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:
Matt Vespa, Senior Editor at Townhall.com:
Why Georgia's championship football team
rejected Biden's invite to the White House.
It's now May; where's the photo oppor
tunity with Biden and the Bulldogs? It won't
happen because Georgia rejected the invi
tation sent last week. The game occurred in
January. Inviting the 2023 College Football
Playoff champions is a no-brainer move. This
task was too great for Biden's staff, who fum
bled the ball here. And it's not just Joe Biden
who is looking like an idiot; Jill wanted to in
vite both LSU and Iowa women's basketball
teams after the NCAA tournament, an awful
idea shot down by LSU's champion forward
Angel Reese.
Sarah Arnold, political commentator: Eric
Swalwell gets hilariously roasted after being
fact checked by Twitter.
The Democrat claimed that Trump had
been "convicted of sexual assault" and that
McCarthy was "all in with his sexually abusive
pal."
However, Trump was acquitted of sexual
assault. Instead, a jury found him liable but
not found guilty.
Thanks to Twitter's official fact-checking
rules, Swalwell's tweet was flagged by the so
cial media platform explaining that the Dem
ocrat's accusation was "factually inaccurate.
Conviction is the authority of criminal courts
only. Civil litigation only deals with liability.
Trump was found liable. No determination of
guilt was made by the jury."
Kurt Schlichter, conservative commenta
tor and trial lawyer: When words stop mean
ing anything.
In other words, select racism now not only
is OK, but to be against racism requires rac
ism. The ridiculous Ibram X. Kendi says it out
right in his stupid book How to Be on Antiracist
(2019) at page 19: "The only remedy to racist
discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The
only remedy to past discrimination is present
discrimination. The only remedy to present
discrimination is future discrimination."
Derek Hunter, Washington, DC, based
writer, radio host and political strategist: Let
Democrats destroy each other.
These areas of left-wing control are hell on
Earth and getting worse, being made worse
proudly by Democrats. And they keep elect
ing Democrats, crazy Democrats charging
hard toward the deeper bowels of insanity. If
there are large areas of a city normal people
can't venture into, if the crime and harass
ment at every intersection for money aren't
enough to change voting habits or even in
spire any semi-sane Democrats to stand up
to the destructive power structure, then it's
time to let them destroy themselves.
Katie Pavlich, Editor of Townhall.com:
BREAKING: Biden backs down on debt ceil
ing.
In April Republicans passed legislation
lifting the debt limit by $1.5 trillion while also
capping federal spending at 2022 levels. In
addition, the bill claws back billions in unused
pandemic relief funding. The White House
says they want to avoid a debt default. Re
publicans have passed a bill doing exactly
that.
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The absurd 14th
Amendment option
on the debt
GRITTY
Why Doesn’t
Drowning in Debt
Bother Biden?
The most per
plexing thing about
President Joe Biden’s
stance on the debt
ceiling issue is that
the staggering na
tional debt does not
seem to bother him.
In remarks Biden
made the other day, he
noted that the national
debt has “accumulated over 200 years.” And
he also noted the debt increased under
President Donald Trump.
But the president’s selective memory
chooses to overlook that when the Obama-
Biden administration took office in 2009,
national debt stood at 60% of GDP. When
they left eight years later, it was at 100% of
GDP.
We also must note that from 1965 to
2008, the annual average growth of the U.S.
economy was 3.1% per year. From 2009,
when the Obama-Biden administration
started piling on the debt, to today, average
GDP growth has been 2.1% year.
But let’s forget, for now, the “who did
what” of the past. Let’s focus on today.
What is clear is that we have entered
uncharted, and dangerous, territory. The
Congressional Budget Office forecast of
national debt reaching 118% of GDP is a
historic high. And then CBO goes on to
project that the debt will reach almost twice
GDP over the 20 years after.
Why doesn’t this bother our president?
If House Republicans, under the leader
ship of Speaker Kevin McCarthy, had not
passed a bill to set conditions for spending
cuts as a quid pro quo for authorizing an
increase in the debt ceiling, most Americans
would not even know the critical situation
we are in. Our president would have been
just fine authorizing the debt ceiling in
crease, taking us further into unchartered
debt territory, with little fanfare.
Biden has released a video defining his
By Star Parker
The position of the White
House on the debt limit may be
shifting from, “President Joe
Biden doesn’t want to compro
mise,” to “President Joe Biden
doesn’t have to compromise un
der the U.S. Constitution.”
The heretofore fringe idea
that Section 4 of the 14th
Amendment empowers the
president to keep borrowing and
spending as usual even if the
debt limit isn’t extended is get
ting a respectful hearing.
Back in January, the U.S.
reached the current debt limit of
$31.4 trillion, which — surprise,
surprise — wasn’t nearly
enough. The Treasury Depart
ment has been using “extraordi
nary measures” to this point to
avoid hitting the wall but will
exhaust its running room around
the beginning of June.
The looming deadline has
concentrated the minds of the
White House and its allies —
not on how to cut a deal, but
how to find a fig leaf of legiti
macy for Biden engaging in his
most flagrant abuse of his au
thority to date. He’d simply ig
nore the debt limit as a suppos
edly unconstitutional infringe
ment on his obligation to honor
our debts.
“Is the Debt Limit Constitu
tional?” read a New York Times
headline last week. “Biden Aides
Are Debating It.”
A sign of the shifting ground
is that left-wing legal scholar
Laurence Tribe wrote an op-ed
in The Times during the last big
debt-limit showdown in 2011
saying that the 14th Amend
ment couldn’t be used to ignore
the debt limit (“A Ceiling We
Can’t Wish Away”) and now has
written another op-ed in The
Times saying he’s changed his
mind.
Desperate times call for des
perately motivated reasoning.
In an interview on “This
Week with George Stepha-
nopoulos,” Treasury Secretary
Janet Yellen repeatedly refused
to say the 14th Amendment is
off the table; at the same time,
she said invoking it would cause
a “constitutional crisis.”
She’s right about that, at
least.
It’s a dead giveaway that the
14th Amendment option is a ri
diculous contrivance that pretty
much everyone in authority dis
missed the idea until now.
Although the 14th Amend
ment as escape hatch was ban
died about during the debt limit
confrontation in 2011, the
Obama administration ulti
mately dismissed it. “Like every
previous secretary of the Trea
sury who has confronted the
question,” the Treasury Depart
ment general counsel wrote of
his boss, Timothy Geithner, at
the time. “Secretary Geithner
has always viewed the debt limit
as a binding legal constraint that
can only be raised by Congress.”
Indeed, the debt limit is not
some innovation dreamed up by
the House Freedom Caucus. It
was first passed in 1917 as part
of the Second Liberty Bond Act.
This was hardly a congressional
power grab. Before the advent of
the debt limit, as Georgetown
law professor Anita S. Krishna-
kumar points out, Congress au
thorized each bond issue, gener
ally to fight wars and bolster the
economy during recessions. The
debt limit is the logical exten
sion of Congress’ power to tax
and spend.
The 14th Amendment does
say that “the validity of the pub
lic debt of the United States, au
thorized by law, including debts
incurred for payment of pen
sions and bounties for services
in suppressing insurrection or
rebellion, shall not be ques-
Please see Lowry page 9A
Please see Star page 8A
added more raw vegetables and nuts to
our meals, and I keep a can of lightly
salted mixed nuts in the kitchen cabi
net for snacking. I’ve also been trying
new recipes and different spice combi
nations here and there trying to reig
nite my once-healthy appetite. I made
an Indian-style curry rice salad two
weeks ago that I devoured, and I’ve
been using a lot of spicy salsa in my
dishes lately.
I have not mentioned my food
boredom to my doctor. Last year, dur
ing my annual exam, I mentioned to
him that my thighs felt numb some
times, and that I was concerned that my
legs weren’t getting adequate blood cir
culation. He looked me right in the eye
and said, “I’ve seen this a lot since the
pandemic. My patients think they have
something wrong with them, but it’s all
in their head.” Needless to say, I’m not
going to tell him that I’ve been bored
with food for going on three years now.
I’m sure that’s all in my head, too. And
who knows? Maybe it is. I’ve read that
there could be a psychological compo
nent to my disinterest in food.
My husband cooks some evenings
and tries to create meals that appeal to
me. He’s 50/50 at this point, but he
gets an A+ for effort.
“What sounds good tonight?” he
asks.
I respond by saying, “Delicious,
nutritious food.”
“You’re going to have to give me a
little more than that,” he says.
“Nothing really sounds good to
Please see Amber page 8A
3 Food Fatigue
From the Porch
By Amber Nagle
A few
years ago, I re
alized that I’m
simply bored
with food —
not all the
time, just
sometimes, and not all food, but some
of our go-to foods. Some folks refer to
this feeling as food fatigue, while oth
ers call it food boredom or meal bore
dom. I don’t know what to call it, but
it’s annoying, and I feel guilty about
revealing it because I know there are
millions of hungry and starving people
around the world who would love to
have my problem — access to so much
food that I sometimes lose motivation
to eat and slip into a food rut. Still, the
truth is this: the older I get, the less in
terested I am in both making meals and
eating food in general, and that scares
me for three reasons.
First, I have low blood sugar (hy
poglycemia), and skipping a meal or
snack can precipitate shaking, sweat
ing and a severe headache that only
subsides after I consume food, pop an
aspirin and take a nap. My husband
says I get “hangry,” but it is much more
complicated than that, and something
I manage on a daily basis. So even
when nothing sounds good to me, I
force myself to go into the kitchen and
eat something — anything. But it’s get
ting harder and harder to make myself
eat, and so I’ve been eating a lot of junk
lately, which isn’t like me at all.
The second reason is that up un
til about three years ago, I found great
joy and satisfaction in sitting down at
a table with family or friends and con
suming my favorite foods — fresh,
sweet watermelon; a ripe, juicy peach;
chicken and dumplings; fried shrimp
with cocktail sauce; tiny green field
peas (like Cream 40 or Lady peas);
homemade buttermilk biscuits; Mom’s
potato salad; Mom’s Thanksgiving
dressing, etc. This food funk has start
ed interfering with one of the greatest
pleasures in my life — eating.
The final reason lies 13 or more
years down the road of life, when I’m
70 or 80 years old. I’m concerned that
my food boredom will escalate, and
I’ll stop eating like I should, and I’ll
just start wasting away. We’ve all seen
elderly folks in our families and com
munities lose so much weight that they
become weak, frail and unsteady —
like a gust of wind could blow them
over. Is this in my future? I think a ro
bust appetite is key to preventing this
from happening and maintaining my
independence and quality of life.
So I’ve got to puzzle out this issue
and find a way to regain my love of food
and the pleasure associated with gob
bling it down. I’ve tried a few online
suggestions that have helped some.
I read that crunchy foods still ap
peal to those who have experienced
similar food fatigue feelings, so I’ve