Whine, Whine, Whine

Chicago’s Progressive-Democrat Mayor Brandon Johnson has joined the Whiners’ Chorus. Now he’s accusing Texas’ Republican Governor Greg Abbott of “attacking” the United States itself.

We have a governor—a governor—an elected official in the state of Texas, that is placing families on buses without shoes, cold, wet, tired, hungry, afraid, traumatized. And then they come to the city of Chicago where we have homelessness, we have mental health clinics that have been shut down and closed, you have people who are seeking employment.

Leave aside, as Johnson does, the fact that these illegal aliens are volunteers to travel—at Texas’ expense, mind you—to Chicago, and to New York City, Los Angeles, and elsewhere throughout our nation. Nor are they particularly tired, or cold, or hungry, or traumatized—they’re fed before they get on the bus, and they’re fed on the bus, which itself is warm and the seats sleepable.

The larger, overarching, fact is that Johnson and his cronies in those other cities—Progressive-Democrat Mayors Eric Adams, Karen Bass, et al., are actively inviting, calling come one, come all, those illegal aliens into their cities by loudly proclaiming them to be sanctuary for all illegal aliens. Even at that, the numbers of illegal aliens that these sanctuary cities receive over a period of months is what Texas’ (and Arizona’s) border towns—not even cities, many of them—receive in the course of a day or two to a week.

If Johnson and his were serious about their cities’ claimed level of ability to deal with what they have, with the influx of illegals overlaid, they’d take at least a first step and stop being sanctuaries and instead help get the for illegals deported.

Johnson, in particular, seems to have joined the Let’s Go Brandon chorale.

Eric Adams Has Given Away the Left’s Game

New York City’s Progressive-Democrat Mayor Eric Adams says he’s down with raising New Yorker’s already sky high taxes along with firing city employees, including cops—[Asked “where the layoffs would begin,” Adams only repeated, “Everything’s on the table”]—and he’s blaming the Federal government for his budget failures. His statement on that last is the tell-all:

Our insurance policy was the federal government. They’re not paying us[.]

It doesn’t get any clearer than this.

Medical Marijuana

Amid the long and still growing controversy and disconnect between States’ handling of marijuana—viz., State level legalization of marijuana sales both for recreational and medicinal purposes—and Federal law maintaining marijuana trafficking as illegal, one aspect of that controversy keeps getting overlooked.

States often rationalize their legalization of marijuana with the claim that medicinal marijuana is good. This overlooks the fact that marijuana has no more medicinal value than does the opium poppy. There is a growing body of anecdotes that indicate that there can be medicinal value from some of the chemicals in marijuana, just as there is established medical value in some of the chemicals, viz., morphine and codeine, in the opium poppy.

There also, though, is a growing body of evidence that uncontrolled use of marijuana is physiologically and mentally damaging to the users as they become increasingly dependent—emotionally as well as physiologically—on the plant’s drugs. Further, chronic use of the plant appears to lead to damage to still-developing brains (which development continues into a person’s mid-twenties) and to slower developing damage to mature brains.

What really needs to happen is research into marijuana to identify the chemicals and combinations of chemicals in marijuana, if any, that do have medicinal value. Once that research has been done, and specific chemicals’/chemical combinations’ medical value established, then marijuana growing should be licensed just as is opium poppy growing for the medicinal value of some of its chemicals. The marijuana chemicals/combinations with medical value then should be marketable as prescription drugs for particular medical uses, just as poppies’ prescription-required drugs, are.

Impeaching Mayorkas

House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Mark Green (R, TN) is bent on impeaching DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas over his palpable, and dangerous, failure to perform. This is, at best, a fool’s errand since the votes don’t exist in the Senate to get even a serious trial, much less a conviction.

I have a better idea, because of course I do.

Instead of wasting time on impeaching Mayorkas, Green, and the House at large, should exercise the House’s Constitutional control over government spending and move to cancel all funding for much of the Department of Homeland Security until Mayorkas and his Deputy and Assistant Secretaries are gone and the Department has materially improved its performance related to keeping illegal aliens from entering our nation.

Specific DHS agencies that should receive full, if not increased, funding include these:

  • United States Citizenship and Immigration Services
  • United States Coast Guard
  • US Customs and Border Protection
  • Federal Emergency Management Agency
  • US Immigration and Customs Enforcement
  • United States Secret Service
  • Transportation Security Administration
  • Office of the Inspector General

All the other agencies—and there are 16 more of them, including such strongly overlapping agencies as the Management Directorate, the Office of Legislative Affairs, the Office of Partnership and Engagement, and the Office of Public Affairs (there’s a hint there regarding how bloated the Department has become)—should have their funding zeroed out.

Further, the House should refuse to pass any DHS-related bill that does not include these funding reductions.

FDA Official Shames…Who?

Peter Marks, FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research Director, thinks he’s shaming Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo over Ladapo’s raising the question of whether the FDA has adequately monitored mRNA-based Wuhan Virus vaccines for possible contamination with extraneous DNA fragments. Marks is claiming—and he’s actually serious—that simply raising the question is intrinsically misleading.

Yet he claims this, also:

Given the dramatic reduction in the risk of death, hospitalization, and serious illness afforded by the vaccines, lower vaccine uptake is contributing to the continued death and serious illness toll of COVID-19[.]

The mortality rates for children from a Wuhan Virus infection are

  • 3 per 100 000 for those younger than 1 year [with their unformed immune systems]
  • 6 per 100 000 for those aged 1 to 4 years
  • 4 per 100 000 for those aged 5 to 9 years
  • 5 per 100 000 for those aged 10 to 14 years
  • 8 per 100,000 for those aged 15 to 19 years

For adults, the rate is 0.5% or less—a maximum of 500 per 100,000. Hospitalization and less than hospitalized serious illness rates are even smaller—and the number of actual infections that are so trivial that the individuals don’t bother to see a doctor about it or even don’t notice the infection illustrates the growing lack of general severity of the Virus.

mRNA vaccines may lower those rates further, but calling such reductions “dramatic” is itself…misleading.

Marks shames himself with his distortion.