Serving the High Plains
Serving the High Plains
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Watching the Senate confirmation hearing of Amy Coney Barrett reminded me of the promise my father made to my sister Maureen to put the first woman on the U.S. Supreme Court. It's a great piece of POTUS-SCOTUS history I haven't told in many years. Democrats and the media said a lot of nice things about the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the liberal icon who in 1993 became the second woman appointed to the Supreme Court. But I don't remember hearing anyone — unfortunately, including the Republican senators — pay homage to Justice Sandra Day...
The Kamala Harris-Mike Pence death match will go down in history as another forgettable vice presidential debate, but it had its pluses. It showed us two important things we already knew. It showed us that Vice President Pence is a smart, sober and able defender of Donald Trump and his record at home and overseas. And it showed us that Sen. Harris is an empty pants suit who likes to laugh and smirk, play the race and gender cards, hide her own leftwing politics and blame the Trump administration for everything that’s wrong with the world. T...
It didn’t matter what the findings of the Breonna Taylor grand jury were going to be. Black Lives Matters and their sympathizers were well prepared to riot on Wednesday night in Louisville and other cities, like New York and Washington. The video of that rented U-Haul filled with big signs and who-knows-what-else is all the proof you need that their “peaceful protest” was a planned operation. Taking over the streets, burning down buildings, destroying businesses, shooting things at police and roughing up ordinary citizens was like a summer job...
Lots of people in politics and the media out here in California are blaming global warming for the 26 major wildfires that have killed at least 24, burned more than 3 million acres and destroyed thousands of homes. But let’s get real. This state has been plagued by wildfires long before baby left-wingers like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez decided that they’re caused by humans heating up the planet by burning fossil fuels. I grew up in Los Angeles in the 1950s. We didn’t have as many people, cars or smokestacks in those days, but we had plenty of 11...
Am I in hell, or just L.A.? The other day it was 121 degrees here. There’s so much smoke in the air from all the wildfires the sun looks like the moon. Everything’s closed because of the coronavirus pandemic. People can’t go to work. School kids are struggling to learn on Zoom. Parents are going nuts. Some are hiring teachers, wannabe teachers or former teachers to come in and tutor their kids. And now the Los Angeles County Health Department has tried to wreck Halloween. At first the county announced a ban on trick-or-treaters going door-...
At least the media haven’t politicized the weather reports — yet. Watching the next Category 4 hurricane hit Florida is about all I can stand to see on TV these days. The news and cable talk shows are brutal — all partisan politics all the time. Sports programs are almost as bad, thanks to their blind worship of the Black Lives Matter movement and its dangerous ideas. The NBA coverage is the worst. You almost feel like you have to swear your allegiance to BLM or confess to being a lifelong racist before every tip off — which is why the NBA’s TV...
Last week’s Republican National Convention was the best I’ve ever watched. The locations and settings were great. Melania did a fine job in the White House Rose Garden. Vice President Mike Pence praised President Trump remotely from Baltimore’s Fort McHenry. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo spoke from somewhere in Israel. In addition, the GOP’s diversity quotient was off the charts. The impressive speakers included Tim Scott (the U.S. senator from South Carolina whose inspiring life story is summed up by “From Cotton to Congress”), Nikki Haile...
I know you’ve been busy binging the exciting coverage of the Democrat National Convention. But have you heard the latest bit of horrible news from the once golden state of California? I don’t mean the 367 wildfires that are out of control and charring the hills of Northern California. Or the heat wave and the rolling blackouts caused by the high electricity demand for air conditioning. I’m talking about the possible disappearance from California of the popular ride-hailing giants Uber and Lyft. Both companies were planning to completely shut...
It’s the opening of fire season in California. But the biggest threat to the people of the state right now is Gov. Gavin Newsom and his shifting rules about closing businesses and schools to fight the coronavirus. Until last week, things were starting to look up out here, pandemic-wise. Los Angeles County, where I live, has been the worst hit county in the state, by far, with 5,112 of its 10,813 COVID-19 deaths. As in every other state between here and Boston, the already very sick and the very old accounted for most of the deaths. About 75 p...
At this writing, I’m happy to report I haven’t heard Nancy Pelosi’s name in five days. I haven’t heard President Trump accused of being responsible for 159,000 COVID-19 deaths since last week. And I don’t even know if Portland was burned to the sidewalks last weekend by its permanent mob of “peaceful protesters.” I’m not in heaven. I’m in Newport Beach in a rented house by the sea. My wife, kids and I are taking boat trips to watch the whales, cooking fancy meals for ourselves and watching the Pacific crash on the beach. It’s called a sum...
I have good reasons to be worried about catching the coronavirus. I fit the demographic profile for the most typical victim — I’m 75 and I have a serious medical precondition. And here in Los Angeles, where about 4,500 of the state’s 9,000 coronavirus deaths already have occurred, the pandemic is still hanging around. My immediate family members and I haven’t had so much as a sniffle or cough in four months, but the virus has claimed a few people around me. The brother of our housekeeper died of the coronavirus in Guatemala. So did his son. Th...
Build Back Better. Build Back Better. Build Back Better. Try saying Joe Biden’s clunky campaign slogan three times fast without gagging — or laughing. Biden is obviously cognitively impaired, he’s morphed into a Bernie Sanders lefty and he’s been making wrong decisions about race and foreign policy for half a century in Washington. Yet his boosters and protectors in the liberal media would have us believe that if he’s elected president America’s serious problems will miraculously disappear. The COVID-19 pandemic will vanish overnight....
Can we all agree the kids living in our biggest cities don’t get a good education? Can we all agree it’s a travesty that upwards of 75 percent of the kids in our inner-city schools aren’t able to read, write and count at grade level? Can we all agree that if we don’t open our schools this fall the group that will be hurt the most are the poor kids of every color in our inner cities? I’m glad we all agree. The trouble is, the teachers unions and the educrats who run the public school system in Los Angeles and elsewhere say they don’t want to reo...
The other day I mentioned to my son Cameron something I heard the great economist Thomas Sowell say. Sowell had reminded the Black Lives Matter protesters who were indiscriminately toppling statues and defacing monuments around the country that a lot of white people were instrumental in ending slavery. Not just Ulysses Grant, Abraham Lincoln and the hundreds of thousands of Northern soldiers who died in the Civil War, but also many abolitionists who were fighting to end slavery long before the shooting started. “That’s funny,” Cameron said,...
Everyone everywhere is demanding that we reform the police. Everyone everywhere is demanding that we have to root out the “systemic racism” in our police forces because it results in innocent blacks being treated unfairly and even killed. The demands for reforming, defunding and even disbanding our police are being driven by the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis and the police shooting of Rayshard Brooks in Atlanta. But despite the global reaction to the tragic deaths of those black men at the hands of police, they are extremely rare eve...
Getting rid of the police. Now there’s a brilliant, progressive way to improve the criminal justice system. There’s no question there are systemic problems with the way we police our cities that we need to address and fix. But when Black Lives Matter and its allies begin demanding that cities like Minneapolis “defund the police” or get rid of their police departments altogether, it’s obvious they haven’t thought through what comes next. What will happen in the real world of cops and robbers if the police are gone? Apparently, you’ll call...
OK, protesters, we get it. You were angry, sickened and sad about the cold-blooded killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. Who do you know who wasn’t? Tens of thousands of you have marched in dozens of cities demanding that Chauvin and the three cops who helped him press Floyd’s body to the street until he died be charged with murder. On Wednesday the state of Minnesota finally agreed with you. The charges against Chauvin were upgraded to second-degree murder and the other officers were charged with aiding and abe...
I feel terribly sorry for the hundred thousand Americans who’ve lost their lives to the coronavirus. I also feel sorry for all the small business owners in the country who have become innocent victims of the government’s mishandled war on COVID-19. They worked long and hard to start up their local restaurants, coffee shops, clothing stores, hair salons, health spas, book stores and pet grooming shops. But in just three months their livelihoods — and the livelihoods of millions of their employees — were destroyed by the unnecessarily severe...
Don’t tell the people in charge, but my friend’s wife is a member of the L.A. resistance. She’s been regularly going out into the underground economy to get her hair done. She’s been meeting with her hairdresser at an undisclosed location — his daughter’s driveway — and striking a small but symbolic blow for old-fashioned American freedom. My friend’s wife is in no danger of getting in trouble with the authorities, but her hairdresser is. According to power-mad politicians now in charge of the economic and social lives of 10 million people...
The disease experts and the panic-pushing media initially scared the pants off California’s 40 million people with their predictions about the death toll of the coronavirus pandemic. They said 25 million people in the state would become infected by COVID-19 and a million of us would die from it. Predictably, the experts’ computer models were way off the mark, thank goodness. Compared to devastated states like New York and New Jersey, California has been relatively unscathed by the coronavirus pandemic. So far about 3,000 people in the sta...
A month ago I said it will be the public that makes the decision to reopen America, not the government. It took too long, but that’s exactly what has happened. From the beaches of Southern California and Florida to the state capitals of Michigan and Pennsylvania, thousands of regular people have yelled, “End the COVID-19 shutdown. Give us back our country and our freedoms.” The elite liberal media portrayed the peaceful crowds that crashed the beaches and waved their handmade “Freedom is Essential” signs as irresponsible grandma killers,...
California was well down the road to becoming a Bernie Sanders-model socialist state when the coronavirus crisis came along. But fighting COVID-19 and slowing its spread gave “liberal” Gov. Gavin Newsom a perfect excuse to unleash his inner dictator and greatly expand his power over the social and economic lives of his subjects. Like other authoritarian Blue State governors across the country, he quickly ordered the shutdown of all nonessential activity in the entire state and issued stay-at-home orders for 40 million Californians. Almost 4 m...
I don’t know what daily life is like during our Great National Shutdown in states like Pennsylvania, where I hear golfing is verboten, all liquor stores are closed and masks must be worn into retail stores. But out here in sprawling Los Angeles, where half of the state’s 1,512 COVID-19 deaths have occurred, things are getting goofier and scarier all the time. It’s not the coronavirus I’m sacred of. It’s power-mad politicians like Gov. Gavin Newsom and L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti, both of whom have been making it sound like we’re going to be in st...
I ran into a nurse I know last week. “Let me ask you a question,” I said, keeping a safe six feet away from her. “About 40 percent of the people in the country get a flu vaccine each year and yet we still lose between 25,000 and 60,000 every flu season. A couple years ago there were something like 80,000 deaths. And we didn’t shut down the country.” “That’s right.” “I know people who get flu shots each year but still get the flu. Their doctor always explains it was because they caught a different strain of the flu than the one she gave them...
It’s lucky I’m being such a good American and sheltering at home. Every day I’ve been able to watch President Trump’s coronavirus White House press briefings and the press conferences of New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and California Gov. Gavin Newsom. It’s been tough keeping up with all the scientific, financial and political twists and turns of our national war on the coronavirus. On Monday, I was ready to dump all my stocks and start hoarding cash when I heard predictions of 37 million unemployed and concerns about the coming of another G...
