Chesapeake Observer

A Letter to Our Readers from the Chesapeake Observer Editors

December 22, 2020

This holiday season, we ask each of you to join us in sending to our state and county health authorities the suggestion that, as a matter of common sense, they provide for vaccination certificates immediately. To date, there is a dearth of specific information regarding the timing and distribution of Covid-19 vaccinations, except for health care workers and those in long term residential care facilities. Moreover, there is no plan that we have seen that ensures that those who elect to receive Covid-19 vaccinations will be provided with a certificate attesting to that inoculation. In decades past, international travelers were advised or, depending on destination, required to have a record of their vaccinations recorded in a “yellow book” or some other official document. ... Read More

Editors Note

December 8, 2020

Once again, the three editors have combined forces to comment on the men and women who have been or might be named to head Cabinet Departments under a Biden-Harris Administration. As of this issue, there is little to go on for some important departments, so that we only cover those departments for which current announcements and rumors reveal likely directions for policy. We will return to this topic in future issues.... Read More

Worth Reading

JDQB:

Last weekend’s Wall Street Journal Interview was a highly favorable summary and review of Philip Howard’s new book Public Unions vs. The People. I had not appreciated that all presidents, even the sainted FDR, opposed public unions until JFK legislated them into existence supposedly “as a payback for union support.”. The book’s author, a lawyer, has concluded that the public union problem has become so entrenched that it cannot be solved politically, but must be attacked through the courts as an unconstitutional limitation on the executive power to terminate employees, a proposition that has strong constitutional precedent. A link is here (paywall). I was persuaded to buy the book.

I am new to Mark Halperin, who puts out a daily email called Wide World of News. On Saturday he did a short piece on Trump’s nearly two-hour stemwinder at the annual Conservative Political Action Committee CPAC conference. Then on Sunday he did an equally short piece critiquing DeSantis’ performance in his first “major” speech, which was at the Reagan Center. The former is The Trump Machine Hums at CPAC . and the latter is Is That All There Is?. Spoiler alert: he thinks Trump did way better than expected and that DeSantis did worse than expected.

WDM:

I urge readers to ignore the title and skim through the insider-only story of the Intellectual Dark Web to get to Christopher Rufo's perceptive discussion of the need for conservatives to get beyond writing polemics about CRT and gender ideology and get down to political action. One of his points, in bare bones, is that public school curricula are and always have been set by government bureaucrats, the political bodies that appoint them, and the voters that elect them. Conservatives should not therefore be deterred by accusations of "banning books" from electing their own to run the schools and revise the curricula. The other is that those who care about these issues have no choice but to work to take over the Republican party, as there is no other route to electoral success.