Regarding the Joe Manchin (D, WV)-Chuck Schumer (D, NY) deal on Reduced-Build Back, this:
with another $64 billion dedicated to extending healthcare subsidies for three years for some Affordable Care Act users.
Her analysis:
If it [ACA] made “health care” affordable, there would be no need for any subsidies, much less extended ones.
Yep.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D, CA) may be planning to visit the Republic of China next month. Some folks are worried about that.
A Taiwan trip by Mrs Pelosi (D, CA) would likely set back any nascent rapprochement and set off a new bout of tensions, US officials and international affairs specialists said.
I’m having trouble seeing the downside of not continuing a “rapprochement” with an enemy nation whose avowed goal is to supplant and control us.
And
The visit, they said, would confirm Chinese suspicions that the US is deepening support for Taiwan, allowing its democratic government to resist Beijing’s claims to the island….
As well we should be doing, on both counts.
Further making Pelosi’s putative trip imperative is the People’s Republic of China President Xi Jinping’s threats of dire consequences, including military, if she actually travels. Any withdrawal of the trip now could only be taken as American abject surrender in the face of threats.
There’s this, too:
For Beijing, a trip by a politician as senior as Mrs Pelosi is seen as part of a perilous backtracking by the US on commitments limiting its relations with Taiwan.
We never should have betrayed the RoC all those decades ago in the first place. After all this time, it’ll be deucedly expensive and risky to correct that mistake, but it’s never too late to do so. All that just makes it imperative to get started; the expense and risk only grow over time.
The Wall Street Journal excerpted an article by Joan Biskupic for CNN regarding Supreme Court discussions among the Justices [emphasis added].
Chief Justice John Roberts privately lobbied fellow conservatives to save the constitutional right to abortion down to the bitter end, but May’s unprecedented leak of a draft opinion reversing Roe v Wade made the effort all but impossible, multiple sources familiar with negotiations told CNN.
Wow. Not only was a Supreme Court draft opinion leaked to the press, the Court’s private discussions about that opinion are leaked to the public.
Two things: one is that the Court has a serious problem with confidentiality, and the only way to fix it may be a complete removal and replacement of all of the Justices’ current clerks and of all of the Court’s current administrative personal. Even though the clerks are replaced annually as a matter of course, it’s clear that this crop needs to go now.
The other thing is that it’s instructive about press integrity that the press makes nearly as big a deal about the leak of the draft as it did about the draft, but it accepts this leak with utter equanimity.
Recall that the President Joe Biden (D) administration, some months ago, said it would
withhold food assistance funding from schools unless they comply with the administration’s guidance on a range of LGBT issues.
After these months of trying to get the administration to retract that threat—after all, in Dole v South Dakota, the Supreme Court said the Federal government could use funding to influence, but not to coerce, State compliance—22 Republican AGs have filed suit to try to force the administration to retract its threat. Notice, too, that no Progressive-Democratic Party AGs are party to the suit.
Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita has the right of it:
[T]hey’ve [the Biden administration] reached a new level of shamelessness with this ploy of holding up food assistance for low-income kids unless schools do the Left’s bidding.
It truly is disgusting that this Progressive-Democrat Biden administration would use children as hostages in its attempt to coerce K-12 schools into accepting Party’s extremist position.
Senator Rob Portman (R, OH), in his capacity as Ranking Member of the Senate’s Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, released a report detailing a decade-long effort by the People’s Republic of China to infiltrate the Federal Reserve system. The report concluded, in part, that
the Fed failed to mount an adequate response. The report’s findings show “a sustained effort by China, over more than a decade, to gain influence over the Federal Reserve and a failure by the Federal Reserve to combat this threat effectively.”
Of course, Fed Chairman Jerome Powell demurred from that report.
“Because we understand that some actors aim to exploit any vulnerabilities, our processes, controls, and technology are robust and updated regularly. We respectfully reject any suggestions to the contrary,” he wrote in a letter to Senator Rob Portman of Ohio, the committee’s top Republican.
Mr Powell detailed the central bank’s information security and background screening protocols, including reviews of foreign travel and personal contacts for staff who have access to restricted information. “We take seriously any violations of these robust information security policies[.]”
Of course. However, any procedure, no matter how robust or frequently updated, is only as good as the people executing the procedure. I have to ask: who does that vetting for the Fed? Who follows up on those travel reviews and contacts? What’s the Fed’s IG role in these procedures? How closely is the DoJ’s FBI involved?
That last, given the FBI’s demonstrated bias and too-often outright dishonesty, is especially important.