Townhall Review | Commentaries

For decades, NATO built a massive arsenal as a counterweight to Soviet and then Russian imperial aggression. Could just one percent of it actually defeat Vladimir Putin in a war? That’s what Volodymyr Zelensky promised in an urgent request for support in his fight to free Ukraine from Russian conquest.

Five weeks ago, that would have sounded absurd. Now, however, Ukrainian forces have proved their mettle not just by stalling Russian advances but effectively counterattacking as well. A successful attack on a Russian resupply ship in Berdyansk last week could well threaten the Russian positions around Mariupol—the city that has been battered by Russian artillery for weeks. 

Kyiv remains unconquered too, despite two massive Russian thrusts to the capital. The Ukrainian military has not just stopped the Russians but have begun to cut them off and grind them down. 

Zelensky is not asking Americans or other Westerners to die for Ukraine. He just wants the weapons that will allow Ukrainians to once again live in peace in their own sovereign land. That’s worth the one percent investment.

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We’re now in the season which the church has historically called “Lent.”

The word is just a shortened version of the word for Lengthen, because it accompanies the end of winter and the lengthening of daylight. But Lent also rhymes with repent. During almost all of human history, when calamities, pandemics, wars, depressions, inflations occurred people wondered whether God had been offended.

But we’ve got all that backwards now: Rather than asking whether God is offended, we tend to gin up our own offense. Instead of covering ourselves with sackloth and ashes, we cover ourselves with self-serving internet memes.

Whether the things that are happening to us now are judgments of God, I don't know. But I do know that calamities certainly can be judgments—and we have much to repent of.

This is not a time for finger pointing: it’s a time for fingers to be interlaced in prayer, including prayers of confession and repentance. This lent, don't let a crisis go to waste.

Let’s use our troubles to change our lives for the better.  

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President Biden erred in announcing that he planned to nominate a black woman to the Supreme Court. It’s wrong to exclude people from consideration for any job just because of their race or gender.
But elections have consequences and Ketanji Brown Jackson is President Biden’s choice. She deserves to be evaluated on her merits and her record—without the lies and life-destroying tactics Democrats have employed in recent years.

Among the questions Judge Jackson should answer: Will she defend the Supreme Court’s legitimacy by opposing court packing, as Justices Breyer and Ginsburg did? Does she share the left’s belief in a “living Constitution,” that is, that the meaning of the Constitution can evolve over time—almost always, it seems, in accord with a justice’s policy preferences?

Because elections matter and Joe Biden is President, Judge Jackson will likely soon be Justice Jackson. But every hearing is a chance to help the American people understand why good presidents—who’ll appoint good justices—matter.

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Late last week at the CDC erased over 72,000 previously identified deaths from COVID-19 rolls, including over 30 percent of previously designated pediatric deaths. They said these patients died of Covid. Now they’re rolling it back.

A brief and ambiguous footnote announced the change but not the scope of the adjustment, nor the actual errors involved.

This has finally embarrassed the CDC’s top echelons into action. In a new e-mail to staff, CDC director Rochelle Walensky has suddenly taken an interest in “remedying the data gaps” for COVID-19.

The CDC did nothing to correct the obvious data collection issues when high numbers bolstered Joe Biden’s political arguments for mandates and restrictions. It’s likely no coincidence that the CDC is now trying to fix those issues and get lower numbers now that voters are fed up with Biden’s mandates.

The CDC and the Biden administration have earned the deep skepticism of American voters on COVID-19.

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I recently attended the Apple, Inc. Annual Shareholder meeting. A shareholder with concerns about ways in which Apple might have been colluding with the government of China in suppressing free speech put a proposal on the ballot before shareholders, asking Apple to be transparent about their removal of apps at the request of governments. The proposal didn’t tell management which apps to ban or not; it simply asked Apple to give a report to shareholders about this at reasonable cost. Apple opposed the resolution. It also opposed a resolution calling for a report about forced labor in the supply chain.

Apple CEO Tim Cook routinely issues pronouncements about what he alleges is wrong with America on race and gender and LBGTQ issues—but he refuses to even report to his own shareholders about Apple’s relationship with some of the worst human rights abusers in the world.

Apple should stick to computer engineering—while showing the transparency shareholders expect on their engagement with China.

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For generations, seeing the Disney label on children’s entertainment has been tantamount to a seal of approval. Moms could be confident that Disney content would reinforce the lessons they teach at home: Virtue is its own reward, be brave, truthful, loving, patriotic—and good will triumph over evil in the end.

Sadly, that assumption is no longer operative. Disney seems to be pursuing a different, more progressive agenda. Last week, its CEO spoke out against a Florida law that’s been wildly mislabeled by the left as the  “Don’t Say Gay” bill.

Actually, all it does is prohibit teaching about sexual orientation and gender identity to children in kindergarten to third grade.

Moms and dads ought to be paying attention: Why would an entertainment company that specializes in children’s entertainment oppose such commonsense legislation designed to protect children?

The trust of parents has been the fuel that built the Disney empire. 

That trust is fast eroding.

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We just got the new inflation numbers and they are—yet again—very bad.

We’re seeing the highest year-over-year inflation in a generation. President Biden tried to place the blame on the war in Ukraine, but that’s patently false. First, these numbers were for February and so the crisis had very little effect on it. Second, the government also reports something called “core inflation,” which excludes food and energy, two of the commodities most affected by the war, and the core inflation data was also the highest in a generation.

Putin has a lot of evils to answer for, but U.S. inflation so far is not among them. We did this to ourselves, or more precisely—our ruling classes did it.

When our currency is sound, foreign wars don’t give us inflation. For example, Iran and Iraq—both petro states—waged war during almost all of the Reagan presidency, and yet we beat inflation and dropped oil prices to some of the lowest levels ever.

The difference is leadership.

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President Biden’s blame game on inflation simply will not work.

Inflation soared 7 percent in 2021, the biggest jump in four decades. This was the result of massive federal spending over two years. The country is dealing with inflation on a scale not seen since 1979-80—an inflation that led to Ronald Reagan’s election.

President Biden is now eager to blame our accelerating inflation on Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. In his blame-shifting onto Putin, Biden has gone not one, but many bridges too far.

Americans are not stupid.

President Biden’s priority—on day one—was the killing of the Keystone XL pipeline. That was a sonic-boom signal for the global market for oil: They guessed less petroleum would be forthcoming from North America—and prices went up. Markets are, after all, are forward-looking.

Biden continues to insist “I didn’t do it.” That’s what children declare when everything goes awry.

Biden’s protestations to the contrary are just more reason to rebuke him in the fall in the voting booth.

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Do six in ten Americans really support teaching children below the age of 10 about sexual orientation and “gender identity”? That’s what ABC News and Ipsos want readers to believe from its latest polling, but their methodology exposes this as yet another a media narrative stunt. 

By their own admission, the poll oversamples LGBTQ respondents in its too-small number of adults rather than registered voters. It appears that ABC and Ipsos polled specifically where they could expect opposition to be strongest—in selected urban areas—as a means to rebuke Florida governor Ron DeSantis. 

DeSantis will sign a bill that prohibits instruction on sexual orientation before the fourth grade, keeping sex-education efforts focused instead on basic human biology. 

DeSantis appears to have a better sense of parental opinion in Florida than ABC would like you to believe. We all need to watch carefully as media companies cook up surveys—like this one—in order to push a narrative rather than measure public opinion.

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Elton John once sang that, “Sorry seems to be the hardest word.” But hard or not, government officials must publicly apologize for their many destructive mistakes in handling the pandemic.

The purpose of an apology isn’t to humiliate or punish.

Rather, in a democratic republic like ours, government is the people’s servant. If government workers escape accountability, their mistakes aren’t corrected and public trust isn’t restored. Worse, it sends a message that they’re superior to those they’re supposed to be serving.

What’s more, the leaders at the CDC, NIH, and elsewhere didn’t just make mistakes. They tried to disgrace, marginalize and silence those with dissenting views who—for the most part—turned out to be right. That behavior ran contrary to best scientific practices and demonstrates why free speech and the free exchange of ideas matter. It was a disgrace.

We require school children to take responsibility for their wrongdoing. Surely high government officials can rise to the same standard.

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