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(51?e Ahuattce The ADVANCE, January 10, 2024/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:
Leah Barkoukis, online features editor
at Townhall.com: True the Vote Wins mon
umental' election case against Stacey
Abrams' Fair Fight.
Abrams' group sued TTV in 2020 after the
organization helped citizens file lawful chal
lenges asking counties to clean up voter
rolls, (TTV President Catherine) Engelbrecht
explained in a video statement. The effort
was undertaken after TTV's data showed
about 364,000 residents had moved out of
the county or state they had been regis
tered in. ...
"This decision is monumental," said TTV's
lead attorney Jake Evans. "It vindicates True
the Vote in totality and establishes that eli
gibility challenges under Section 230 are a
proper method to ensure voter rolls are ac
curate. I am grateful to help achieve this
great victory."
Todd Starnes, best-selling author, award
winning journalist, and syndicated radio
show host: If Republicans follow THIS ad
vice, they win in a landslide.
But most of all — it's my hope that Re
publicans will coalesce around the winner
of the 2024 Republican presidential prima
ry. If the RINOs and Never Trumpers can't
set aside their petty differences — they will
sabotage the election. That would send this
country into a socialist death spiral. But if
we stand together as one — we will win the
day. And together we will make America
great again.
Byron York, chief political correspondent
for The Washington Examiner. Biden and the
polls: He 's fallen and can 't get up.
The White House, the Biden campaign
and the Democratic Party know they are
just one serious health episode away from
a crisis in which they have to find a new
presidential candidate in an election year.
Biden's handlers are working to make sure
he gets his rest, but there is only so much
they can do.
That doesn't mean Biden can't make it
to November and win reelection. It could
happen, especially in what promises to be
the most volatile presidential campaign in
anybody's memory. But Biden's current situ
ation — polls, age, job performance — just
doesn't look good. He has fallen so badly
that getting up again will be a very difficult
proposition.
Tim Graham, director of media analy
sis at the Media Research Center and ex
ecutive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org:
One way you can tell journalists are worried
about Biden in 2024.
Predictions are a dicey business, and so
is the method of awarding politicians credit
for job creation. When the economy is bad,
liberals often complain it's out of Biden's
control, like they complained it was out of
Jimmy Carter s control.
Regardless, journalists expressing the
opinion that Biden should be more popu
lar betrays a tilt toward Biden's reelection. It
might be subtler than suggesting Trump will
viciously end American democracy, but it's
still obvious.
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Confession of a
public-health expert
THE
RICH
LOWR
COLUMN
The public-health officials
are getting around to admitting
the fallibility of public-health
officials.
The former head of the Na
tional Institutes of Health dur
ing the pandemic and current
science advisor to President Joe
Biden, Francis Collins, has
noted that he and his colleagues
demonstrated an “unfortunate”
narrow-mindedness.
This is a welcome, if be
lated, confession.
Not too long ago, anyone
who said that epidemiologists
might be overly focused on dis
ease prevention to the exclu
sion of other concerns — you
know, like jobs, mental health
and schooling — were dis
missed as reckless nihilists who
didn’t care if their fellow citi
zens died en masse.
Now, Francis Collins has
weighed in to tell us that many
of the people considered close-
minded and anti-science during
COVID-19 were advancing an
appropriately balanced view of
the trade-offs inherent in the
pandemic response.
“If you’re a public-health
person and you’re trying to
make a decision, you have this
very narrow view of what the
right decision is,” Collins said at
an event earlier this year that
garnered attention online the
last couple of days.
This is not a new insight, or
a surprising one. It’s a little like
saying Bolsheviks will be fo
cused on nationalizing the
means of production over ev
erything else, or a golf pro will
be monomaniacal about the
proper mechanics of a swing.
The problem comes, of
course, when public health, or
“public health,” becomes the
only guide to public policy.
Then, you are giving a group of
obsessives, who have an impor
tant role to play within proper
limits, too much power in a way
that is bound to distort your
society.
Francis Collins, again: “So
you attach infinite value to
stopping the disease and saving
a life. You attach zero value to
whether this actually totally
disrupts people’s lives, ruins the
economy, and has many kids
kept out of school in a way that
they never quite recover from.”
True and well said, but
that’s an awful lot of very im
portant things to attach “zero
value” to.
He also admitted to having
an urban bias, driven by work
ing out of Washington, D.C.,
and thinking almost exclusively
about New York City and other
major cities.
If Francis Collins and his
cohort got it wrong, the likes of
Florida governor Ron DeSantis
and Georgia governor Brian
Kemp — and the renegade sci
entists and doctors who sup
ported their more modulated
approach to the pandemic —
got it right.
It’s always worth remem
bering that the pandemic was a
once-in-hundred-years event
and initially, we had very little
information and very few
means to prevent and treat the
disease. It is inevitable that de
cision-makers are going to
make mistakes in such a crisis,
and adjust as they go.
That said, the scientists
who were in positions of au
thority could have shown more
modesty. They could have wel
comed debate. They could have
distanced themselves from —
or better yet, denounced — the
campaign of moral bullying car
ried out in their name.
Many people wanted to
outsource their thinking to the
experts and then, with a great
sense of righteousness, rely on
arguments from authority to
demonize their opponents and
shut down every policy dispute.
Francis Collins, one of the
most eminent scientists in the
country and a subtle thinker
who dissents from the ortho-
Please see Lowry page 10A
GRITTY
Securing Our
Border at Home,
Defending Our
Values Globally
With migrants
now flooding our
Southwestern border
at a reported 10,000
seeking entry daily, it
is essential that we
take steps to crystal-
ize a national immi
gration policy
Republicans in
sist that $74 billion in
funds that the Biden administration is ask
ing in aid for Ukraine and Israel be part of a
larger package that deals with border secu
rity and comprehensive immigration pol
icy
Agreement on such a package will ben
efit the whole nation.
At first glance, linking U.S. immigra
tion policy and border control to aid to
Ukraine and Israel may seem like a politi
cally motivated version of linking apples
and oranges. But that’s not the case. The
issues are related.
We are dealing with the issue of na
tional territorial integrity. The current con
flicts in Ukraine and Israel are the results of
such violations — in Ukraine, aggression
from Russia; in the case of Israel, the cross
ing of the Gaza border into Israel by Hamas
operatives who murdered and committed
atrocities against more than 1,200 Israeli
citizens in one day
Nations are physical entities that are
based on principles that define what their
existence is about. Borders define the area
where this unique national reality exists.
Whether borders are violated by an
army, by terrorists or by undocumented
migrants amounts to the same thing: a vio
lation of national integrity
Those who have violated the territorial
integrity of Ukraine and Israel — Russia
and Hamas, backed by Iran — are also our
Please see Star page 11A
By Star Parker
Color Blind
On so
many spring
days, an aza
lea bush brim
ming with
silky fuchsia
blossoms —
as bold as Avon lipstick — has taken
my breath away In the summertime,
I can’t count the number of times Fve
stopped before a bright blue hydran
gea to take in its beauty Flowers and
their colors sing to my eyes and soul
— daffodils in the shade of yellow
mustard, Shasta daisies that make a
field look like a blanket of snow has
fallen, and cosmos in palettes of or
ange and gold that make me think of
an Indian sunset.
“Look at that! Just look at that!”
I’ve said this to my husband
dozens of times throughout the last
34 years of our marriage. He usually
glances over, shrugs his shoulders,
and replies, “I don’t think I see what
you see.”
My husband, Gene, is color
blind, a color vision deficiency that
makes it difficult for him to distin
guish certain shades of green. More
over, objects that I see as vibrant ap
pear dull to him.
He first realized that he was color
blind in his teenage years.
“We would all be looking at
those color tests where the num
bers are hidden within a sea of col
ored dots [Ishihara Color Tests],
and the friends and family members
around me would see the numbers,
but I could not,” he often recalls. “I
thought it was a joke, but I finally re
alized that I could not discern colors
the way others could.”
Throughout our married life, I’ve
helped him match his ties with his
shirts and his shirts with his pants.
He usually does okay on his own, but
every now and then, he puts two col
ors together that clash, and I spend
a minute or two explaining why the
colors don’t complement each other.
He listens somewhat perplexed.
A few years ago, I began seeing
videos on television and social me
dia chronicling other people who are
color blind looking through special
glasses that allow them to see the
world as most of us do — in all its
colorful, blissful glory The moment
of seeing true color brought many of
the people in the video recordings to
tears. Perhaps the emotion stemmed
from sensory overload, or perhaps
the tears were shed because at that
moment, the person realizes how
much beauty they’ve missed in their
lives.
So, for Christmas, I gave Gene
some EnChroma sunglasses with
patented lens technology designed to
expand the range of visible colors he
sees. He took the glasses out of their
box then wrinkled his brow.
“I want you to see what I see —
colors,” I said.
That’s when he understood. He
made his way to the front door — a
portal to our front yard with fescue
grass that is green year round, silvery
trunks of oaks and hickories, and
newly fallen leaves blanketing the for
est’s floor. I took out my phone and
prepared to record the big moment.
“No!” he said. “Please don’t re
cord this.”
I slid my phone in my pocket as
he lifted the glasses to his face and
looked around. It was an overcast
winter day with not much color to be
hold. Still, he looked here and there.
“Are the leaves really that color?”
he finally asked. “Are they reddish-
brown?”
“Yes,” I answered.
“I’ve always thought they were
gray”
He turned his head.
“It really enhances the color, and
I think I’m seeing a lot more con
trast,” he said. “Over there, the green
leaves of that Lenten Rose bush pops
out of those reddish-brown leaves. Is
that what you always see?”
“Yes.”
“And look at that sky...” he said.
I won’t pretend to understand
Please see Amber page 8A
From the Porch
By Amber Nagle