“I live, you…meh”

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That’s the deal Hamas’ MFWIC Yayha Sinwar is demanding before he’ll agree to a cease fire with Israel. Never mind that all the players but Hamas—Sinwar—have agreed to the latest set of ceasefire terms.

Sinwar emphasizes that the security of his life and well-being must be ensured, according to Egyptian officials.

Sinwar’s life matters; the lives of Palestinians, for whom he pretends to be fighting, don’t in the slightest. Sinwar and the terrorists he leads will go on killing Palestinians or arranging their deaths by using them as shields, using their schools, residences, hospitals, mosques and churches as weapons caches, weapon launch sites, control centers.

This is what Israel is fighting; this is what the Biden-Harris administration is so desperate to protect with its incessant demands for cease fires, withholding weapons from Israel, anti-Israel rhetoric.

“Conservative Leanings”

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In a Wall Street Journal article centered on a Federal judge’s ruling against the FTC’s rule presuming to ban noncompete agreements between employers and employees, the author quoted Mark Goldstein of ReedSmith LLP who characterized the Supreme Court as having conservative leanings.

This is a misapprehension that’s all too widespread among both conservatives and liberals.

In fact, the Supreme Court does have, currently, a strong originalist/textualist bent. There’s nothing particularly conservative, or liberal, in originalism/textualism, though; there is only rule of law.

This core tenet of our republican democracy runs contra activist judges’ and today’s political liberals’ demand for rule by law. That demand is epitomized by the late Justice Thurgood Marshall’s proudly self-important statement that he rules and expects the law to catch up and by today’s Progressive-Democrat administration’s repeated attempts to cancel student debt after each of our courts’ repeated strikes of prior attempts as contrary to existing law.

“Foreign Invasion”

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Much is being made of Ukraine’s incursion into a piece of Russia’s Kursk Oblast as being the first foreign invasion of Russian territory since World War II. That is, indeed, one interpretation.

Here’s another. Russian President Vladimir Putin has predicated his invasion of Ukraine on his premise that Ukrainians are Russian, and all he’s doing is reuniting the people. Given that, the Ukrainian move into Kursk isn’t at all an invasion.

It’s just a bunch of Russians going home.

What’s in Harris’ Econ Plans?

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Here’s an overview.

  • federal limits on price increases for food producers and grocers
  • legislation creating a new series of tax incentives for builders who construct “starter” homes sold to first-time homebuyers
  • $40 billion innovation fund for businesses building affordable rental housing units
  • provide $25,000 in potential down payment assistance to help some renters buy a home
  • accelerate Medicare and other federal programs to “negotiate” with drugmakers to lower the cost of prescription medications
  • work with state entities to cancel $7 billion of medical debt for up to 3 million qualifying Americans
  • make permanent a $3,600 per child tax credit
  • new $6,000 tax credit for those with newborn children
  • cut taxes for some frontline workers by up to $1,500

Each one of these is inflationary in its own right, and each one will drive a need to increase taxes in order to pay for them.

It seems to me—and the press is complicit in this, however unintentionally, with its focus—that Harris’ plan for price controls on those food producers and grocers to combat what she’s pleased to call “price gouging” is nothing but a distraction to draw attention away from her other proposals in order to get many of them enacted unnoticed.

On Harris’ Housing Subsidy Gimmick

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Progressive-Democrat Vice President and Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Kamala Harris wants to fork over $25,000 to every first-time home buyer looking to buy a house to help them buy. The quick and dirty of that silliness is as follows.

Harris and her team don’t believe in or don’t understand the truism of a simple supply-demand graph that’s taught in any serious high school Intro to Econ class. Throwing money at a supply of something whose supply cannot grow as fast as the increase in money will only run up the price of that something, along with the price of the inputs to that something—and that input price inflation will slow the demand-encouraged increase of the supply of the something.

Those getting the 25 stacks aren’t going to be helped at all beyond the first few. Those getting the Harris Bucks later not only will find it difficult to find a house among that reduced and reducing supply, they’ll be no more able to afford that find than they are now.

Ignored by Harris with her gimmick are those who’ve become empty nesters and those at the other end of their lives, retirees, looking to downsize into smaller, used to be cheaper, housing. These folks will be actively harmed by the same outcomes that will render the gimmick merely useless to those first-time buyers.

Alternatively, and more likely, these Harris Bucks are just a 21st century bread and circus vote-buying scheme and who cares about those first-timers and downsizer wannabes. Richard J Daley is spinning in his grave over not having thought of this.