McAuliffe Is Going To Make Your Life Hell Until Your Neighbors Get Jabbed
Biden's approval rating in freefall at 41%; Republican AG candidate Miyares kicks off Southwest Virginia tour.
Are you vaccinated yet? If not, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe wants the state to make your life hell until you do.
"Today, I am calling on every Virginia employer to require all eligible employees to be vaccinated against COVID-19," the former Virginia governor said in a statement Monday afternoon. "I have long said that the best way to defeat this deadly virus, keep our students in school and keep Virginia’s economy strong is by getting every eligible Virginian vaccinated as quickly as possible."
"We have 93 million Americans today that are not vaccinated, and we need to do everything that we possibly can," McAuliffe said earlier this month at the HIMSS21 Global Health Conference. "And I tell my private businesses all the time, I hope you mandate vaccines for people coming in. Until we make it hard for people to get on planes or go to movie theaters, people just aren't going to do it."
Nanny state types just can’t help themselves from using the government as a club, can they? Government after all is force — and if you give this boy a hammer? You will be treated as a nail.
Cass Sunstein used to write about the advantages of the avuncular state — meaning that rather than punishing people for bad behavior, the state rewards people for good behavior. One example is receiving a $100 gift card for taking a vaccine. Another example is some variant of tax exemptions for families, or for veterans, or for the elderly and disabled with Social Security. Obviously there are those who take advantage of such conditions — disability to be sure — but you can instantly see how lawmaking pushes culture downstream of politics in either case.
Of course, Northam was quick to impose the club with his prolonged and painful economic shutdowns — policies that treat Virginians as subjects rather than citizens; as children rather than adults.
Wouldn’t it be nice to have a governor that treated Virginians as responsible adults? One that pushed out information directly and clearly, asked people to do the right thing, and then left adults to make their own choices?
Been awhile since we had one of those.
NBC POLL: Biden Approval Rating Craters Among Independents
Check out that Congressional Generic Ballot, folks. From April to the present day? That’s a 15-point slide among independents.
Now the tricky part here is that independents doesn’t mean what it used to mean prior to Trump. Many people who voted for Trump identify as independents precisely because they are sick and tired of the two-party system and do not believe Republicans keep their word in power the way Democrats impose their will while in power.
That having been said? A 15-point slide isn’t something you can just ignore.
Something else to consider with all these new polls stacked up over at Real Clear Politics? The methodology on some of these is a bit janky at best:
VCU polled adults (we assume registered voters?) over 11 days with a margin of error of 5.3%. Roanoke College polled over 14 days to produce what ought to be a snapshot in time. Trafalgar — which has a history of bending numbers — could only get Youngkin to 2 back.
Equating margin of error to statistical tie is a bit of a misnomer. Sure, it’s true on one end of the seesaw, but if you’re on the wrong end then it’s no longer a tie — just statistics.
One has to wonder after two months of identifying Youngkin as the incumbent vis a vis Trump whether McAuliffe regrets the decision — given that the Trump/Biden contrast in Afghanistan is so painfully stark.
Mean tweets vs. mean Taliban.
As I’m writing this? USA Today/Suffolk puts Biden’s approval rating at 41%, with only 32% of independents supporting Biden at this point. 39% approve of Biden’s handling of the economy — the all important Bill Clinton/Jimmy Carville metric — and a mere 26% believe Biden handled the withdrawal in Afghanistan well.
I’d love to talk to one of those 26% who think the scenes in Kabul are the definition of well-doing.
Kristol Bends The Knee To McAuliffe
Meanwhile, Bill Kristol — former chief of staff to Dan Quayle and former editor of The Weekly Standard — threw in his lot with T-Mac.
Kristol hasn’t precisely been a keen supporter of President Trump, to put it mildly. When TWS was broken apart, Kristol led a group of like-minded souls to form The Bulwark in order to continue to promote his unique brand of neo-conservatism — interventionist abroad and centrist at home.
What makes it interesting is that while Kristol’s opinion outside the Beltway may be rather limited, it is a further sign we are dealing with a variant of Trump Derangement Syndrome more akin to Stockholm Syndrome — namely that they have adopted the ideas of their captors.
You see this with any movement. So-called progressive white allies of Black Lives Matter who are more fanatical about the movement than the black lives they pretend to care about. Such individuals have to be more outlandish and more violent in order to pretend to be authentic. Only they really aren’t — they’re just pretending to do so in order to curry favors with those who have perceived power.
You see it on the right as well — folks who put on all the Live Free or Die! (TM) stickers when you just know for a fact they wouldn’t last two weeks outside a McDonalds without stealing other people’s stuff. Or neocons who are trying to be more faithful liberals than the actual leftists.
In short? It’s a grift.
McAuliffe Takes $500K To Fight Virginia’s Right To Work Statute
Meanwhile, Terry McAuliffe is already reversing his pledge not to repeal Virginia’s right to work statute by taking money from organizations pledged to do precisely that.
The Virginia Public Access Project reported last week that his gubernatorial campaign got $500,000 from the Laborers' International Union of North America (LIUNA). Fox News previously reported on the $2 million influential labor unions gave his campaign after he said he would sign a repeal of the state's right-to-work policy.
Right-to-work laws guarantee an employee's right to refuse to join a labor union and prevent union dues from being a requirement for employment. More than two dozen states, including Virginia, have right-to-work laws in place, and labor unions and progressive groups continually seek to overturn the statutes.
Best of luck with forced unionism as a talking point, Terry.
Miyares Barnstorms Across Virginia With Whos-Who of Virginia Conservatives
Meanwhile, Republican AG challenger Jason Miyares is taking a grand tour of Southside and Southwest Virginia this week — and is doing it with some of the best human beings on the planet:
The RV tour started in Emporia yesterday and will swing through Lynchburg, Grundy, Tazewell, Giles and Roanoke before ending in Staunton on Thursday.
Meeting former AG Jerry Kilgore and former Governor George Allen isn’t a bad deal. Sending the message as to what sort of attorney general Jason Miyares wants to be?
Birds of a feather — you love to see it.
Raising The Cost of Cigars Only Increases The Risk of Illegal Immigration
I’ve been known to enjoy a fine cigar every once in awhile. The 50% tax on cigars imposed in 2009 certainly didn’t put a damper on the industry nor did it improve the standing of moralizers who believe that tobacco is bad but the Devil’s Lettuce — marijuana — is good.
So the Biden FDA is going to bring the hammer down again.
Who gets hurt? Nicaragua, Honduras and the Dominican Republic. That’s right, the very same places whose citizens are fleeing for better jobs in El Norte.
“To impose more restrictions on the premium cigar industry now would disrupt the economy in these countries, at the least,” said Pedro Gomez, who was born in in Nicaragua and worked as a saddle maker as a youth. After getting an education in the U.S., he returned home, determined to join the country’s energized cigar economy.
Gomez now lives in Miami where he is employed as a brand representative for Drew Estate, a cigar industry giant that grows its tobacco in Central America.
“There would be lost jobs, and those people would head to the U.S., where the better jobs are,” Gomez said. He recalls the tail end of the U.S. embargo on Nicaragua in the late 1980s, which produced long lines of people waiting for food or cooking oil, the same things that send people from Latin America fleeing for a better life.
For a Democratic Party that has been so aggressive about legalizing THC, they sure do seem to have a Puritanical fixation on nicotine. Given that the sin tax ultimately has diminishing returns if the purpose is to limit the use of a product?
Of course, cigars have the image of being something fat cats smoke in dinner jackets on some 1920s veranda — something very rich people do.
Facts are, the average cigar aficionado? Tends to be rather male, but also a far higher proportion of minorities. Black and Hispanic cigar smokers tend to be rather ubiquitous. While cigar smoking isn’t a poor man’s game or a poor man’s habit, there are cultural connections to a nice cigar and a smoky scotch off the back deck on a Friday evening.
Shaun Kenney is the editor of The Republican Standard, former chairman of the Board of Supervisors for Fluvanna County, and a former executive director of the Republican Party of Virginia.