Visit the Border?

Nah. The border tsar was too busy noshing with mega-donors in Texas to take the time to go to the border and see with her own eyes the disaster the Biden-Harris administrating is inflicting on us. She has people to do that, with their eyes. Except, no, she doesn’t….

She did, though, spend her busy time speechifying.

Harris [joined] a conversation at the LBJ Presidential Library on Saturday to discuss abortion access, then [gave] a speech at a fundraiser for the Texas Democratic Party.

The LBJ library, in Austin, is just about 200 miles from the Rio Grande River, a bare 3 hours, more or less, by auto and even quicker via Marine Two. But it’s too much trouble for the woman appointed by President Joe Biden (D) to the responsibility of dealing with our border to spend half a day there, on the river, seeing the illegal aliens walking/wading across that border, illegal aliens that Biden, through his Press Secretary, yokked it up (skip ahead to 1:50) over the very idea that anyone walked/waded across.

Power to the People

Or not.

In a Friday op-ed centered on California’s hog-raising requirements for pork sold in the State, Robert Alt, President and CEO of the Buckeye Institute had this throw-away line:

California—which boasts of recent policies that require residents to reduce electricity use to prevent rolling blackouts….

The only State—and possibly the first nation in the world—to institutionalize steady state brownouts.

What a legacy for the Progressive-Democratic Party running California.

“This is unsustainable”

That’s what the Progressive-Democratic Mayor of New York City, Eric Adams, is saying about the influx of illegal aliens into his city, a city that is proudly sanctuary to illegal aliens. So he’s declared a “state of emergency” over that influx.

These are the statistics Adams is citing:

  • More than 61,000 people are now in city shelters, a near-record that officials say they will shortly exceed
  • Officials are renting rooms in more than 40 hotels across the city to try and keep up with the influx
  • Arriving families have enrolled 5,500 new students in New York City’s public schools, a jump from the previous tally of 3,200
  • [I]t will cost $1 billion to provide [the illegal aliens] with shelter space and social services

Never mind that more than 2 million illegal aliens have flooded across our wide open southern border this year—and the year is not over. The Dell Rio sector, which includes the city of Eagle Pass, had 350,000 illegal aliens come through. The El Paso sector is getting 1,000 to 1,300 illegal aliens per night.

And none of that includes the unknown number of illegal aliens who got across our border undetected, no does it include the hundreds of thousands of gotaways, those known to have crossed illegally, but escaped capture.

Nor does any of that include the massive amounts of drugs flooding across our southern border carried by so many of those illegal aliens.

Nor does any of that include the crimes the illegal aliens commit once across our southern border, crimes ranging from petty theft through vandalism to killing pets to killing livestock to robberies and murders. None of which the illegals bused to Adams’ sanctuary are doing.

Adams at least knows all of the illegal aliens he’s whining about sheltering in his sanctuary city.

Adams thinks what he’s getting is unsustainable. He needs to come down to the border, do a ride-along with the border patrol along the border, get out on the river with the border patrol—see what unsustainable really is. And quit his crocodile tears.

A Method of Identifying Acceptable Views

The Wall Street Journal‘s Thursday Notable & Quotable contains an excerpt from a Times Literary Supplement piece in which the piece’s writer recounted a classroom incident in which he had touted a free market society and the instructor had written on his paper, “Are you Margaret Thatcher?” and left the paper ungraded. The classroom boy was mortified.

[T]he comparison shocked me into a more thoughtful politics and provided an early lesson: if you don’t like the fact that you share a view with someone objectionable, consider revising that view.

And

That doesn’t mean that every person with [fill in that disagreeable person’s identity] views endorses those links, but some soul-searching is surely called for.

Of course. It isn’t the merits of the message that’s important; rather, it’s the merits of the person carrying that message.

This is what has passed for teaching our children for too many years.

“Ukraine Needs a Guarantee from NATO”

That’s the headline of Andrew Michta’s op-ed in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal. Michta is the George C Marshall European Center for Security Studies’ College of International and Security Studies Dean in Garmisch, Germany, so he would seem to speak with some knowledge.

His piece objected to the EU’s emphasis on fast-tracking (to the extent it really is) Ukraine’s membership in that body at the expense of guaranteeing Ukraine’s security by bringing it into NATO’s defense perimeter if not actually into NATO (which Michta favors).

He’s ignoring reality here, though, and so to borrow a term from a cable advertiser, Nonsense.

Guarantees of Ukraine’s security are as worthless today as they were with the Budapest Memoranda and the Minsk Protocols.

What Ukraine needs is stepped up transfers of serious weapons, ammunition, and supply—including air- and missile-defense systems, armor, and increased supply of HIMARS, including the full-range missiles that nation currently is denied.

Full stop.

EU membership and even NATO “security guarantees” can follow only on Ukraine’s successful defeat of the barbarian’s invasion and the permanent ejection of the barbarian from that nation. Absent that, there will be no nation to bring toward the West; it will have been utterly destroyed by the barbarian, which is the avowed goal of the Vladimir Putin.