Monthly Archives: September 2024

At What Cost?

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The headline and subheadline say it all:

Ignore the Defeatists. America’s Strategy Is Working in Ukraine.
Kyiv remains far from victory, but the US is achieving its primary goal: containing the spread of Russian power

The strategy of Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden and his Number Two, Progressive-Democrat Vice President Kamala Harris, vis-à-vis Ukraine, far from working, is an utter failure and wholly immoral. This so-called strategy is not one of helping Ukraine win its fight for survival against Russia’s barbaric invasion; rather, it’s one of keeping Ukraine from losing its fight.

The news writer’s lede:

As summer turns to fall, the news from Ukraine has been harrowing. Across the country, Russia has been attacking civilian targets, destroying residential buildings, schools, and hospitals. Russia has been steadily degrading Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, ensuring that Ukrainians have a very hard winter ahead of them. In the next few months, fresh waves of Ukrainian refugees could well be pouring into Europe.

By slow-walking delivery of most of the weapons Ukraine needs at the rate at which it needs them, by limiting the targets against which Ukraine is permitted to use our…largesse…and by withholding outright many other of the weapons Ukraine needs, all the Biden-Harris administration is doing is keeping the AFU in the field steadily bleeding, soldiers being maimed or killed outright, Ukrainian civilians, women, and children being explicitly targeted by the barbarian—and keeping the barbarian’s war continuing.

On top of that, this slow-walk and withhold only runs up our own costs in dollars and equipment, and that is leading to increasing disgruntlement among Congressional politicians with their concerns about what we’re actually getting for our money and equipment, and their concerns about whether we should continue those costs—even at the expense of Ukraine’s ability to defend itself and to survive the barbarian’s invasion.

Containing the spread of Russian power? I wonder what impact on Russian power an outright Ukrainian victory would have.

Wrong Response

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As usual. And as usual, the wrongness of the response is due to mischaracterizing the problem.

The Treasury Department on Thursday released 603 pages of proposed rules for the corporate alternative minimum tax, or CAMT, reaching a milestone in this exceptionally complex endeavor for regulators and corporate tax executives. The proposal comes more than two years after Congress passed the law creating the tax and more than 20 months after it took effect.

The rationalization is offered by the Biden-Harris’ Deputy Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo:

This is about tax fairness. The ability to use accountants and lawyers to reduce tax bills down to zero gives billion-dollar corporations a competitive advantage over smaller businesses.

They don’t understand what’s fair. Here’s what’s fair: make the problem irrelevant by simplifying the corporate tax code, rather than complexifying it, by reducing the corporate tax rate to that paid by those ill-treated small businesses. Even fairer, and not just for businesses, would be to reduce the corporate tax rate to zero for all businesses. That way, large corporations, with their accountants and lawyers, won’t have any “unfair” advantage over smaller businesses.

And there’d be no need to write 603 pages of regulation to implement a simple-sounding and wrong-headed tax rule. Which would reduce the need for all those Treasury bureaucrats whose jobs center on writing arcane, excessively complex regulations.

Another Reason to Shift

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Boeing and union leaders reached a tentative labor deal that includes:

  • 25% pay increase over four years
  • bolster retirement benefits
  • lower healthcare costs
  • commit Boeing to building its next plane in the unionized Pacific Northwest

The rank-and-file object. They want a 40% pay increase over four years, and they’ve characterized it as a hard line. They’re also still upset that Boeing dared set up an aircraft production plant in the non-union south. They voted Thursday to reject the contract and then to strike beginning that night at midnight.

The strike will halt most of Boeing’s aircraft production, and that would occur

at a time the aerospace giant is bleeding cash and piling up debt….
A prolonged work stoppage could further strain the industry’s supply chain and exacerbate jet shortages for airlines struggling to meet resurgent travel demand.

A strike—telling company management that if the union doesn’t get its way, it’ll destroy the company by preventing it from operating at all—is nothing more than legalized extortion.

This is one more reason to move even more aircraft production to right-to-work States.

With unions having monopoly power over business labor, and this Boeing branch of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers union (among so many other unions) so blatantly abusing its monopoly power, this also is one more reason to rescind the special status of unions as being exempt from antitrust laws.

Realistic War Aims

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The first two paragraphs lay out the case, erroneous as it is.

Since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Ukraine’s leaders have insisted that Russia needs to be driven out of all Ukrainian territory before any peace talks could begin.
Now, with Russia continuing to make slow gains on the battlefield and Western support for Ukraine showing signs of fatigue, Ukraine may need to come up with a more realistic plan, at least for the next year of the war, according to European diplomats.

The first mistake is the claim that Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. This is false, as even the authors of this missive must know: Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014 and occupied Crimea and two of Ukraine’s major eastern oblasts.

Leave that aside, though. The larger and more serious mistake is that Ukraine needs a more realistic plan than the one it plainly stated when Russia began the second phase of its invasion in 2022. That plan is the ejection of Russia from all of Ukraine as a precondition to peace talks.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy will travel to Ukraine on Wednesday to meet with Ukrainian officials in part to discuss how best to define a Ukrainian victory and what aid it will need to achieve that, according to officials.

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has already defined what a Ukrainian victory would be—see above. The problems that make achieving it difficult for Ukraine are Western—and mostly caused by the Biden-Harris administration, in particular. Start with Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden’s tacit permission to Russia’s President Vladimir Putin during the Russian buildup in Belorussia in early 2022—Biden said that a small invasion incursion would be OK (It’s one thing if it’s a minor incursion…). Continue with Biden’s offer to Zelenskyy, after Putin’s barbarians went in and tried to capture Kyiv on the fly, of transport out of the country, to which he responded I don’t need a ride…. I need more ammunition, therewith demonstrating far more courage and understanding of the situation than Biden and his team.

Continue to where we are now: Biden and the rest of the West, while bleating about unshakable support for Ukraine, do not insist that Ukraine win, only that it not lose. Worse, in keeping with that timidity and immoral support for only keeping Ukraine in the fight bleeding and dying, Biden and Europe are still(!) slow walking the arms and ammunition and logistics that Ukraine needs at the rate Ukraine needs them in order to fight to win. Biden even is telling Ukraine that US weapons may not be used against targets inside Russia except those just across the border and then only to break up an attack in progress.

With Biden preserving Russia as a sanctuary nation (and the left worries about Donald Trump “collaborating with” Russia), it’s the Biden-Harris administration that needs to better identify its role in Ukraine’s efforts to achieve victory.

What She’s Committed To

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This is excerpted from the ACLU questionnaire that Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Kamala Harris filled out the last time she ran for President (via Just the News):

6. Will you commit to ending the use of ICE detainers?
Yes X No⬜
Explanation (no more than 500 words): Throughout my career, I have made it clear that law enforcement should use their time and resources to keep communities safe, not act as federal immigration agents. It’s also important that law enforcement build trust with the communities they are sworn to protect—acting as de facto immigration officers erodes this trust. As Attorney General, I issued a bulletin on December 4, 2012 informing all California law enforcement that they did not have to comply with ICE detainers. As president I will focus enforcement on increasing public safety, not tearing apart immigrant families. This includes requiring ICE to obtain a warrant where probable cause exists as to end the use of detainers.

This is nonsense. ICE detainers in no way convert police into immigration officers. The detainers merely ask police, who have already arrested the individual(s), to notify ICE that the police have the individual, so ICE can pick him up at the jail or on release by the police. The ICE agents respond promptly; there’s no call, by the detainer, to hold the individual longer.

10. Will you work to stop states from shutting down abortion providers by urging Congress to pass and signing into law the Women’s Health Protection Act? If yes, how will you take a leadership role in advancing this legislation at the national level?
Yes X No ⬜
Explanation (no more than 500 words): I am a co-sponsor of the Women’s Health Protection Act and will fight to sign it into law as president. As President, protecting the right to reproductive healthcare services will be one of my top priorities and I will fight to stop dangerous state laws restricting reproductive rights before they go into effect. That’s why I have a plan to require states with a history of unconstitutionally restricting access to abortion to pre-clear any new law or practice with the Justice Department before it can be enacted. We have to fight back against this all out assault on reproductive rights. Women have agency and they have authority to make decisions about their own lives and their own bodies. My administration won’t leave them to fight alone.

This is wrong on a number of levels. Most basic is the error embedded in the ACLU’s question and carried through by Harris’ response: there’s not a minim of concern for protection of the baby, only concern for the woman’s “right” to kill the baby for no better reason than she wants to.

Secondly the history of unconstitutionally restricting access to abortion is nonsense. There is not, and there never has been, a constitutionally based access to abortions. There has only been a Supreme Court generated access, and that has been rescinded by the Court so the matter can be returned to the States and to each State’s citizens so those citizens can decide for themselves the degree of access. And that’s where the matter should be.

Thirdly, the requirement for States to say “Mother may I” to the Federal government is an active and blatant attack on the federal structure of our nation and our nation’s governance.

There are other such…errors…in Harris’ questionnaire, many of which are variations on a theme, as well as some on separate subjects.

These, though, are Harris’ indelibly stated extreme positions, no matter her current rhetoric—which no less a light than Bernie Sanders (I, VT) has said are just words convenient to her effort to get elected, and in no way are to be taken seriously.