Joe Biden

King Cove is an Aleut Alaskan fishing village of about 400 people. It is adjacent to the 300,000-acre Izembek National Wildlife Refuge, which was designated a wilderness area in 1980.

This presented a lethal problem for the people of King Cove. The nearest full-service hospital is in Anchorage, 900 miles away. The town does not have an all-weather airport, meaning that very ill or badly injured people are unable to get to Anchorage during inclement weather.

A town called Cold Bay — only 20 miles away — does have an all-weather airport, so the people of King Cove came up with a commonsense solution, first proposed in 1997: Build a simple, one-lane gravel road through the Izembek National Wildlife refuge to Cold Bay so that those who need urgent care can be driven to the airport there. The proposed evacuation road would require only about 450 of the 330,000 acres in the wilderness zone, and any impact on the refuge would be de minimis. Later, to sweeten the pot, King Cove offered a land swap that would add ecologically delicate wetlands to the Izembek Refuge in return for the road.

King Cove is a remote town in the Aleutian Islands, adjacent to the 300,000-acre Izembek National Wildlife Refuge. In 1980, the refuge was designated a wilderness area. That caused a severe problem for the people of King Cove. The nearest full-service hospital is in Anchorage, 900 miles away. The town does not have an all-weather airport. This means that people Read More ›

The usual suspect medical and science journals have featured far fewer columns promoting progressive politics of late. Alas, it couldn’t last forever. The New England Journal of Medicine just published two opinion articles decrying immigration enforcement as inimical to public health.

The first column focuses generally on the adversity the author believes is caused to illegal immigrant communities by enforcing the law:

Current immigration enforcement is disrupting medical follow-up, exacerbating mental health symptoms, causing more patients to skip preventive care, and deepening mistrust in public institutions. In my clinical practice, I have seen sharp increases in anxiety, school absenteeism, deferred visits, and acute psychiatric symptoms after enforcement events. These effects are both predictable and preventable. Clinicians, health systems, and policymakers should recognize immigration enforcement as a social determinant of health currently implicated in a public health crisis and act accordingly. [Citations omitted.]

In other words, don’t enforce the law.

San Francisco was once a conservative city. Oh, sure, it had its bohemian side. The Beats of the ’50s were at home in North Beach, and Harry Bridges, the suspected communist who served for years as head of the longshoremen’s union, had a definite influence. But for the most part, San Francisco was well within the cultural mainstream. Indeed, the city was so staid that the Republican Party’s nominee for mayor won landslides in 1955 and 1959, and the GOP nominated the archconservative Barry Goldwater as its presidential candidate from the Cow Palace in 1964.

Then, San Francisco changed. Radically. In 1964, the University of California, Berkeley, a few miles across the bay, became the center of the “free speech” movement. Civil rights and then militant anti–Vietnam War advocacy found great sympathy. The Haight-Ashbury neighborhood became a hippy haven and the focus of a growing drug culture. The gay-rights movement sprang energetically out of the Castro District, and the once predominately Italian working-class neighborhood was transformed into a radical front of the sexual revolution. By the 1980s, the term “San Francisco values” — wielded by conservatives to describe the cultural and political radicalism of the Bay Area — had turned the city into something of a national joke.

Over the years, policies enacted by the city’s ever more extreme progressive leaders slowly destroyed San Francisco. I lived in and around the city for almost 25 years, starting in 1992, and saw the decline happen in real time. It broke my heart.

Sometimes the most intelligent people are the least smart. That sure seems true of the editors of Nature, once the universally respected British science journal. As I have noted before, Nature is becoming almost as ideological as it is scientific. It endorsed Kamala Harris for president and then, just before the election, doubled down on excoriating Donald Trump for somehow being anti-science — when most of the issues discussed in the article were blatantly political. Now that Trump is president-elect after an overwhelming electoral victory — and an apparent popular-vote victory — one would think that Nature’s editors would have the common sense to cease from excoriating him. But no. It just published another anti-Trump screed declaring that the world’s scientists are aghast that he won the election. Read More ›