Congress watch: Two-Faced on Israel War
Rep. Susan Wild (D-Pa.) just got caught pandering to opposite sides on the Gaza war, reports the Free Beacon’s Chuck Ross. A mother-daughter pair of constituents who each wrote her on the war got back “not one but two letters in response. One declared support for Israel and its ‘right to defend itself.’ The other called for international pressure on the Jewish state and an ‘immediate ceasefire.’ ” Both went out May 31, “signed by Rep. Wild herself.” One “said she was ‘outraged, devastated, and heartbroken’ over the ‘vicious’ Hamas attack”; the other “also said she was ‘outraged, devastated, and heartbroken.’ But this time, she was devastated about the ‘unspeakable tragedy continuing to unfold in Gaza,’ ” and slammed Israel for harming “staggering numbers of innocent Palestinian children, families, and civilians in Gaza.”
Eye on NY: 1199 SEIU Rules Albany Roost
As “the president of New York’s largest health-care union, George Gresham of 1199SEIU, has won the top spot on the ‘Labor Power 100’ list from City & State magazine” yet again, the Empire Center’s Bill Hammond recaps “the recent lobbying victories that have bolstered 1199’s claim to that No. 1 ranking.” This spring, the union 1199 got a bailout of its benefit fund by enrolling “many of its unionized home health workers in a taxpayer-funded health insurance” plan. It joined with nursing-home operators to roll back “minimum spending requirements” enacted in 2021, and allied with the hospital lobby to move “lawmakers to allocate ever-larger amounts of state money for Medicaid.” Those wins relied on “alarmist” TV ads making “baseless or misleading” claims “echoed by elected officials of both parties.”
Elex beat: Dems’ Abortion Problem
Democrats are betting the abortion issue “will mobilize their voters the way it did in the 2022 midterm elections,” notes The Wall Street Journal’s Jason L. Riley. But abortion tends to “animate liberal elites,” when “Democrats need working-class voters to prevail against” Trump — and those voters “say they are more concerned about the cost of fuel and housing than they are about reproductive rights.” “Just because it’s a pro-choice country doesn’t mean it’s a pro-Democratic country,” warns political scientist Ruy Teixeira, a liberal. “It doesn’t mean that just by turning up the volume on abortion, Democrats will get a lot more votes than they would have received anyway.”
From the right: Zuckerberg’s Non-Apology
Mark Zuckerberg basically bashed “the outgoing Biden administration for essentially forcing him to muzzle his users,” snarks Spiked’s Tom Slater. In his letter to Rep. Jim Jordan, Zuck said the administration “ ‘repeatedly pressured’ Meta to censor dissenting content about Covid-19, including satire and humor.” Despite the beg-pardon, the letter skips over the extent to which Facebook was willing “to do the state’s bidding, even before Biden entered the White House,” like “cracking down hard on what its know-nothing moderators deemed to be Covid misinformation.” Nor was speech-policing limited to COVID: “Facebook was one of the many platforms that gladly suppressed the Hunter Biden revelations.” So “Zuckerberg’s mea culpa” is “not a principled change of heart, that’s for sure.”
Culture critic: The Shameless Kennedy Clan
“The decision by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s family to attack his character for endorsing a candidate they don’t like” exposes the clan as “now just a group of truly shameless people,” fumes Derek Hunter at The Hill. President John Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, Ted Kennedy “and the others were never abandoned by the family, despite outrageous misconduct. They were never smeared as misogynists, which they all pretty clearly were. And the family didn’t give up on even the next generation of Kennedys . . . over their substance abuse scandals, infidelity to spouses and alleged criminal behavior.” Yet today, “party loyalty has overtaken family loyalty. It’s as if they’re saying they can overlook rape and driving under the influence causing someone’s death, but an endorsement of Donald Trump is just beyond the pale.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board