Townhall Review | Commentaries

California Governor Gavin Newsom has put forth a massive budget that proposes to spend $268 billion next year. Included in it are rebates for many families in the state—a provision that will undoubtedly win support as he faces a recall election this Fall. 
 
But a good look at what he proposes reveals a bigger problem. A desire to spend money without transparency into or accountability for how it’s being spent. It’s an age-old problem that we see in state capitols and yes, in Washington, D.C. too. It’s become a particularly acute problem during a time when eye-popping sums of money are being spent in the name of “relief” and “recovery.” 
 
California has a neutral scorekeeper called the Legislative Analyst Office, that just reviewed Newsom’s budget proposal. Their advice: don’t spend the money until there’s a plan in place to spend it wisely and account for every dollar that goes out the door.  
 
Seems like basic advice. It’s what families and businesses across our country do. We should hold our public leaders to the same standard.  

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I recently participated in the annual shareholders’ meeting of AT&T. The conservative Free Enterprise Project had attempted to place a proposal on the ballot this year which would allow shareholders, the owners of the company, to vote on whether the company should be required to disclose its charitable contributions. 

According to the conservative group, Second Vote, AT&T has a history of giving to organizations which support abortion, something that there’s no moral case for, and certainly no business case either. Even ignoring the sanctity of life, there’s no business reason for a company to support the killing of future customers. 
 
AT&T lawyered up and got the Securities and Exchange Commission to block the proposal from the ballot. I asked them why and they simply did not answer the question. 
 
So: AT&T management used shareholder dollars to fight a shareholder resolution to keep shareholders from voting on how shareholders’ money is used, and then refused to discuss it with shareholders at the shareholders annual meeting. 
 
For a phone company, AT&T seems pretty disconnected.
 

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This week the CDC finally said that vaccinated people no longer have to wear masks indoors or outdoors. It’s about time.

No such luck for our long-suffering children. The CDC has told schools to keep kids in masks for the rest of this school year.  Worse, it said this guidance can inform school planning for next year.

This is craziness. Every adult who works in schools has already had a chance to be vaccinated. And according to the CDC itself, young children are at a higher risk of severe illness from the flu than from COVID 19.

Too many little ones have already spent too much of their lives in masks, unable to breathe normally or fully interact with their peers. They shouldn’t pay the price for the adults’ unreasonable fears.

Those who want their children to wear masks may keep having them do so. For the rest of us, it’s time for our kids to be able to smile in public again.

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This Supreme Court has announced that they’ll be hearing a case on abortion. The decision has media buzzing that the conservative majority has finally targeted Roe. Mississippi’s ban on abortions after 15 weeks had been overturned in lower courts relying on precedents regarding viability. Taking the case certainly suggests that the current court wants to take another look at scrutiny over abortion rights.

Despite the coverage and the protest, the court signaled that it will take a very narrow approach. The court declined to address its Casey precedent, which requires strict scrutiny of any abortion restrictions. Their grant only involves the question of constitutionality for any pre-viability restrictions, which suggests that any change will be incremental.

But: Incremental progress would still be progress. Wise pro-life leaders know the Supreme Court will not issue sweeping rulings, and have pursued a legal strategy of building cumulative change on incremental progress. While this case may not win the war, the Supreme Court could advance the lines with its decision.

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There is another war in Israel.

Hamas, the internationally recognized terrorist group that controls the Gaza Strip, unleashed thousands of missiles aimed indiscriminately at civilian targets in Israel. If it were not for the sophistication and effectiveness of Israel’s Iron Dome air defense system, scores of Israelis would be dead.

The Israel Defense Forces responded appropriately, bombing Gaza with precise munitions aimed at Hamas terrorists, killing scores of senior terrorist leaders and exploding the tunnels underneath Gaza.

As the IDF begins ground operations, there’s no question that Israeli leaders and the Israeli people will be wondering whether or not their key ally—the United States—will be with them as they defend themselves.

We ought to be.

President Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan should make clear to our ally and to the hard left in their own party:

America stands with Israel.

Israel should do what is necessary to secure the country and diminish or defeat the threat from Hamas.

This is no time to equivocate.

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In speaking to the press recently, Fed Chairman Jerome Powell finally admitted that inflation is on the rise. But then he let himself off the hook by blaming “transient factors,” which is Fed-speak for, “it’s not our fault and it won’t last long.” Powell's comment is an almost perfect inversion of the truth. 
 
The factors which suppressed inflation last year are the transient, that is short-lasting, ones. When you shut down the stores, people stop buying stuff, temporarily forcing prices to drop. Temporarily. What drives long-term inflation is when the government does lots of spending and lots of borrowing and the Fed “prints” the money to finance it. And that has been happening at a jaw-dropping rate. 
 
What we can reasonably expect is that a temporary price suppression from the shutdowns will give way to the more long-lasting effects of spend, borrow, print, inflate, repeat. 
 
That’s why inflation hedges are doing so well. Investors know that if the Fed isn’t worried about inflation, consumers should be. 
 

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Americans might be forgiven for assuming that the American Federation of Teachers—the AFT—had some interest in the welfare of children, and the CDC existed to offer trustworthy, unbiased scientific guidance.

Apparently not. 

In fact, it’s been revealed that the CDC actually changed its official school reopening guidelines in response to AFT demands. It’s worth mentioning that Randi Weingarten, the AFT’s president, is a major Biden supporter.

The entire episode is a disgrace. 

Our children need to be back at school—living normal lives with their friends, not languishing in isolation behind screens.

Even by the fall of last year, math performance in third to eighth graders was 5 to 10 points lower than it was a year before. And a Harvard study found that two-thirds of the children studied were anxious and depressed, compared with only 30 percent before the pandemic.

The CDC and the AFT have played politics with our children’s lives. Shame on them.

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At the end of his life in 2015, commenting on the state of religious liberty, Archbishop of Chicago, Francis Cardinal George said, “I expect to die in bed, my successor will die in prison and his successor will die a martyr in the public square. His successor will pick up the shards of a ruined society and slowly help rebuild civilization, as the church has done so often in human history.”

That sort of succession is in process. It took the U.S. Supreme Court to redress some of the more grievous and unconstitutional abuses of enthusiastic lockdown politicians during the pandemic.

The rest of the West is in even worse shape. Recently, a longtime evangelical pastor in north London was arrested outside of a transit station for the crime of preaching a traditional understanding of men, women and families with Genesis 1 as his text.

Americans should be thankful for our 1st Amendment protections … thankful but not complacent. 

In our nation, private actors are doing well at limiting free expression.  

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If there’s anything the Democrats and the left want you to know these days, it’s that they hate racism. In fact, they tell us, the biggest problem facing America is … wait for it … we are marked by white supremacy.

That’s what made their recent behavior so hypocritical and disheartening. Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, an African American, was chosen to provide the Republican response to President Biden’s joint address to Congress. In doing so, Senator Scott minced no words. He said that America was not a racist country, and he defended Georgia’s voter integrity law.

Predictably, the left went wild—because a black man dared to stray from Democratic orthodoxy. The term “Uncle Tim”—an ugly play on the racist epithet “Uncle Tom”—trended on Twitter. Worse yet, a Democratic Party official in Texas called Scott an “oreo”—referring to a black person perceived to display characteristics of a white person.

This is where the race-baiting bred by critical race theory leads us. Americans of both parties—and no party at all—deserve better.

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This is Ed Morrissey of HotAir.com for Townhall.

Imagine a Catholic priest blessing couples cohabiting rather than marrying, or polyamorous households, or any other relationship rather than sacramental marriage. That might sound laughable to people inside and outside of the Catholic Church, but that concept might become a reality in Germany next week.

Priests and lay ministers plan to conduct public blessings of same-sex relationships, defying an edict to cease from Pope Francis and the Vatican. This activism has no basis in Catholic teaching, but instead is intended to pander to popular opinion—and tax revenue, which German churches receive based on affiliation.

This has serious ramifications outside of the Catholic Church. The Vatican has remained firm on its core teachings on marriage and abortion, one of the few global institutions to resist a wave of relativist reconstruction of truth and scripture. A German assault on the integrity and authority of the Catholic Church will damage everyone who works to spread the truth of the Gospel.

I’m Ed Morrissey.

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