John Kerry’s ‘unchecked power’, an utterly Canadian star, RIP and other commentary
Climate beat: John Kerry’s ‘Unchecked Power’
President Biden’s climate czar “John Kerry leads an international jet-set life that might exhaust a runway model,” hopping around places like Brazil, the Bahamas and Germany — yet the State Department, grumbles James Varney at RealClearInvestigations, wraps his work in “secrecy.” It refuses to specify who he’s met with, who’s advising him and how he spends his $16.5 million budget. It’s now “reaching a boiling point with the threat of a congressional subpoena.” House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) says Kerry’s activities “skirt congressional authority, threaten foreign policy” and “could undermine economic health” — all without being transparent. And given Biden’s “penchant” for executive orders, adds Varney, Kerry’s work “could translate into unchecked power to commit the United States to binding agreements with foreign powers.”
Conservative: Senate Dems’ Supreme Smear
The Senate Judiciary Committee’s Supreme Court Ethics Reform hearing aimed “to discredit the high court and slander justices with innuendo. Nothing else,” fumes The Federalist’s David Harsanyi. “The recent hit pieces on Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch were shoddy and transparently partisan. They did not uncover any conflict of interest nor corruption,” and “the same histrionic coverage did not accompany” amended financial disclosures from Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson in 2022 or Justice Sonia Sotomayor in 2021. Democrats are just “creating the perception of corruption” among conservative justices “where there is none” because the current court “happens to occasionally uphold basic constitutional principles of American governance.”
Woke watch: DEI Is Killing Medicine, Us
“For better or worse,” sighs Stanley Goldfarb at The Free Press, “I have had a front-row seat to the meltdown of twenty-first-century medicine.” DEI initiatives at medical schools are leaving students “unprepared to care for critically ill patients.” (Like UPenn’s allowing students from historically black colleges “to attend its med school after maintaining a 3.6 GPA but no other academic requirement, including not taking the MCAT.”) Add “the idea that black physicians provide better healthcare to black patients” — effectively “resegregating medicine.” “Physicians, nurses, and medical students” must “fight back using every tool at your disposal. Highlight the damage that follows the lowering of standards. Call out discrimination done in the name of ‘equity’ and ‘anti-racism.’ ”
Music desk: An Utterly Canadian Star, RIP
“Gord — stolid, fame-averse Gord — just kinda kept on truckin’ with guitar and voice and a handful of chords he never tired of combining in arresting, uncanny ways. Along the way he became one of the most prolific pure hitmakers on earth,” mourns The National Post’s Colby Cosh of Gordon Lightfoot, who died Sunday. “He took the simplicity and universality of folk music absolutely as far as it could go commercially, subsiding gradually into a curious but comfortable obscurity.” Unlike other Canadian folk stars, he “didn’t quit the country.” He was “the only one who had a relatively uncomplicated and concrete attachment to it.” “I find unexpectedly that I will miss” hearing “of neighbourhood Gord sightings from Toronto”; “no more will I be reminded that the world, and my country, still includes such an elemental, fertile, naturally gifted creator.”
Libertarian: Biden’s Fringe-Dem Vulnerability
Two national polls reveal President Biden as “an incumbent far more vulnerable to intraparty challenge than Donald Trump ever was in 2019–20,” chortles Reason’s Matt Welch. Biden’s 66% combined poll average against Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Marianne Williamson “compares unfavorably to Trump’s average of 84 percent” against opponents he “derided as ‘the three stooges.’ ” Poll after poll has “shown pluralities and sometimes even majorities of Democrats saying they wish Biden wouldn’t run for reelection.” If his vulnerability grows it will bring “the more ambitious of establishmentarians beginning to quietly edge off the sidelines.” Unlike 2020 GOP primary voters, however, “Democrats, love ‘em or hate ‘em, seem much more interested in a real-life contest.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board
