Insight: “The goal of the ‘liberals’ — as it emerges from the record of the past decades — was to smuggle the country into welfare statism by means of single, concrete, specific measures, enlarging the power of the government a step at a time. Never permitting their direction to be summed up into principles, never permitting their direction to be identified or the basic issue to be named. Thus, statism was to come, not by vote or by violence, but by slow rot—by a long process of evasion and epistemological corruption, leading to a fait accompli.” —Ayn Rand (1905-1982)

Re: The Left: “These priorities may seem odd: Make decisions that cause widespread death? No problem. Tell a dirty joke? You’ve got to go! But they reflect a reality that the left will not articulate. First, if [Andrew] Cuomo is forced out because of his poor leadership during the pandemic, it humiliates the sycophants who have been worshipping at his altar for the past year. More importantly, however, the whole point of the Cuomo Adulation Club was to set him up as the perfect foil for Trump in the media’s ongoing narrative that Cuomo’s leadership during the pandemic has been exemplary and Trump’s was abysmal. By focusing on the sexual harassment accusations against Cuomo, those who drove the anti-Trump narrative can avoid scrutiny for their role in it and keep the public’s attention away from the fact that Democratic governors such as Cuomo, Gavin Newsom and Gretchen Whitmer have mishandled the pandemic, while Trump and Republican governors such as Ron DeSantis have handled things far better.” —Laura Hollis

Observations: “My mother, who was a math teacher … often gave the Dr. Seuss book, ‘Oh, the Places You’ll Go!’ to her students when they graduated. She also gave one to me. The story is about setting out in life, all the places that you’ll go, the challenges that you’ll see and how you will overcome them again and again. The storyline says that success is ‘98 and ¾ percent guaranteed.’ The challenges include the waiting place, where everyone is just waiting; and the fact that things will go well, ‘Except when they don’t. / Because, sometimes, they won’t. / I’m afraid that sometimes / you’ll play lonely games too. / Games you can’t win / 'cause you’ll play against you.’ That’s where we are as a country today. Playing games against ourselves. We worry more about the old illustrations and characters in books, rather than about children reading and attending school today. We are caught up in a game of division and reduction rather than addition and multiplication.” —Jackie Gingrich Cushman

For the record: “We all have heard what a grave threat Sen. Joseph McCarthy was to freedom of speech in the 1950s. He became one of the most famous figures in American history by threatening free speech. Now you have dozens of Democrats threatening whole networks, and no one has complained, not even in the media. What happened to freedom of speech?” —R. Emmett Tyrrell

Political futures: “Election laws should make it easy to vote and hard to cheat, but this bill would not only make it easy to cheat, it would effectively make it legal to cheat. At a time when half of Americans have lost confidence in the integrity of our elections, this bill will only drive distrust and division higher.” —Congressman Andy Barr (R-KY) on the passage of HR 1

Non compos mentis: “Override the parliamentarian and raise the wage. [McDonald’s] workers in Denmark are paid $22/hr [plus] 6 [weeks] paid vacation. $15/hr is a deep compromise — a big one, considering the phase in.” —Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (“There is one thing Ocasio-Cortez’s argument left out, though: Denmark doesn’t have a nationally mandated minimum wage.” —Fox News)

Who needs rules, anyway? “The idea that we have a parliamentarian who was elected by nobody, who was simply a Senate staffer, making a determination that 30 million Americans are not going to get a pay raise is to me unacceptable.” —Senator Bernie Sanders

Leftist babble, continued: “I now understand that I acted in a way that made people feel uncomfortable. It was unintentional and I truly and deeply apologize for it.” —Governor Andrew Cuomo, who added, “I wasn’t elected by politicians, I was elected by the people of the state of New York. I’m not going to resign.”

Braying jackass: “The last thing we need is Neanderthal thinking that in the meantime everything’s fine, take off your mask, forget it. It still matters.” —Joe Biden excoriating red states for rescinding COVID restrictions (“The same day he said that, in Texas, the Biden administration was releasing illegal immigrants into our communities who had COVID. … That is a Neanderthal-type approach to dealing with the COVID situation.” —Texas Governor Greg Abbott)

And last… “When embracing liberty and individual responsibility is called ‘Neanderthal thinking’ but opening our borders to COVID-infected illegal aliens is called ‘compassion,’ you know we have a serious problem in this country.” —Charlie Kirk