Tag Archives: political parties

Just a Few Clarifications

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Janet Yellen, the Biden-Harris administration Treasury Secretary had an op-ed in Sunday’s Wall Street Journal that is full of gaslight claims, and so I offer here some clarification on some of them.

When President Biden and Vice President Harris took office, thousands of Americans were dying from Covid-19, and the unemployment rate was 50% higher than it is today.

Fifty percent more than a small number still is a small number. Aside from that, unemployment already had been starting down, sharply, and had reached roughly 6.5%—down from a peak of 10%-11% at the height of the shutdown—and was continuing to fall rapidly as our nation reopened in the latter half of the last year of the Trump administration.

We vaccinated millions to save lives and allow businesses to reopen safely.

Aside from the fact that businesses already were reopening—hence the already rapidly falling unemployment—those vaccinations occurred with vaccines developed under a Trump administration crash program. Production and distribution of those vaccines had already begun, and one of the first actions of the Biden-Harris administration in early 2021 was to delay delivery of those vaccines to the distribution centers.

[W]e made critical investments in infrastructure and manufacturing—from clean energy to semiconductors….

The Biden-Harris administration allocated those dollars; a large fraction of them, three-plus years later, remain unspent.

The US labor market recovered faster from the 2020 recession than from previous recessions. Economic growth surpassed private-sector predictions of a modest recovery.

Our economy already was in a steep, rapid recovery, beginning in late summer 2020—the last year of the Trump administration. Oh, and the labor market already was rapidly reemploying the work force.

[T]he US has outperformed many other advanced economies, with greater real gross domestic product growth and a faster decline in inflation while maintaining a strong labor market.

This is an especially large bit of gaslighting. Our economy doing better than “many other advanced economies” is a non sequitur. We aren’t those other nations; our citizens live here in the United States, and we operate here in our American economy. Too, that so much bragged about inflation decline is from a high peak caused by Biden-Harris policies, not least of which was the Inflation Reduction Act enacted in the Biden-Harris first year that threw trillions of dollars into our economy without an associated increase in production. Yellen also carefully ignored the fact that prices remain higher today, by double digit accumulated inflation, than they were in the final stages of the Trump administration. Those higher prices are an especially serious problem given that real wages have shrunk over Biden-Harris administration, with only recent periods of wage increases exceeding the same period inflation.

And that GDP growth? That’s compared to the exceptionally low GDP growth experienced during the depths of the Wuhan Virus situation.

There Is a Solution

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Department of Education Miguel Cardona continues to interfere with—to obstruct—House investigations. This time, he’s interfering with subpoenas the House’s Committee on Education & the Workforce has sent to five separate student loan servicers (Missouri Higher Education Loan Authority; Nelnet Servicing, LLC; Maximus dba Aidvantage; Edfinancial Services; and Central Research, Inc) to compel their testimony regarding…student loans. Cardona is trying to block their appearance under the risible fiction that his Department has legal authority to review and approve materials before they are sent to the committee, including documents sent by the servicers and held by DoEd personnel.

There is a solution to this, and I’ve written about it before.

The House can use the Jurney v MacCracken case to arrest Miguel Cardona; his Department legal counsel, Lisa Brown; and her unnamed Department contract officer and haul them before the relevant House committees to testify under oath regarding their obstruction. Applying Jurney to sitting government officials may be a stretch, though.

On the other hand, Jurney is directly applicable to those five student loan servicers, and that would emphasize the criminal nature of Cardona’s obstruction as well as force the servicer personages to testify regardless of Cardona’s obstruction.

There are statutes barring obstruction of Congressional investigations by individuals, including government officials. There also are contempt of Congress statutes, applicable even to government officials. Unfortunately, they depend on enforcement by the Biden-Garland DoJ, and that’s entirely too questionable.

Jurney, however, would allow to House to skip over Garland’s lack of performance, to ignore his DoJ altogether: under that Supreme Court ruling (in a Senae case, but it would apply to both houses of Congress), the Speaker can send the Sergeant at Arms and sufficient Capital Police to go get the managers of the five loan servicers, under arrest if necessary, and detain them in House facilities until they’ve testified, and produced originals of the documents currently held up by Cardona’s DoEd.

Reparations

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In the movement to demand reparations for past…mistreatment…of blacks, one group of Americans stands out for its absence from the collection of groups from which reparations for demands are made.

One group of Americans forced our Civil War over its demands to preserve a State’s “right” to keep slaves.

One group of Americans, in the era after our Civil War, enacted gun control laws that kept newly freed blacks and their white supporters disarmed and helpless against the depradations and atrocities inflicted on them by the Ku Klux Klan, an invention of that same group of Americans.

One group of Americans passed Jim Crow laws to deprecate, if not block outright, black Americans’ ability to vote in our elections.

One group of Americans enacted minimum wage laws explicitly to keep blacks from migrating north to compete for jobs on the basis of the wages they were willing to accept.

One group of Americans demanded an end to, and today simply seeks to ignore, our Constitution and its protections for all Americans, including blacks.

One group of Americans practices identity politics with the explicit intent of keeping black Americans separated from the rest of us Americans.

That group of Americans is the Progressive-Democratic Party and its pre-Obama administration ancestor, the Democratic Party.

I wonder why that group of Americans are exempted from demands to pay reparations.

On Whose Side…

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…is the Biden/Blinken State Department?

Mistakes happen, even egregious ones, even with matters of security. This one, though, should get some folks fired, for cause, and charges brought for the breach [emphasis added].

The independent watchdog for the State Department says the agency deviated from standard policy in the security clearance suspension of Biden Iran envoy Robert Malley, permitted the advisor access to classified meetings, and allowed him to continue work on sensitive issues while he was under investigation.

How does that work, exactly? This is, however it works, sadly typical of the lackadaisical attitude toward national security across a broad range of security milieus held by this Biden-Harris administration and Antony Blinken’s Department of State.

The…screwup…in more detail, from House Foreign Affairs committee Chairman Michael McCaul (R, TX) and Senate Foreign Relations Committee Ranking Member Jim Risch (R, ID) [emphasis added]:

The State Department IG’s report is disturbing and sheds light on the multiple ways the State Department grossly mismanaged Mr Malley’s case and intentionally misled Congress. Mr Malley, a political appointee and close associate of the secretary, was treated very differently than a civil servant or foreign service officer.
Among the new revelations in this report, Mr Malley conducted sensitive government business and was allowed to utilize his official email account after his clearance was suspended. As the report noted, this was done out of fear that Mr Malley might “conduct government business on a personal email account.” This concern was valid because it is one of the primary things Mr Malley did to get his clearance suspended in the first place.

The illogic of that last—that it was necessary to let Malley have the access because without it he might have conducted his business through his personal communications (and which he already was doing, but let’s not talk about that)—is so ludicrous that it had to be deliberately done from malice toward our nation’s security.

Hence my opening question: on whose side are Malley’s supervisor, that supervisor’s supervisor, and the official who restored Malley’s accesses and clearance in mid-investigation? They’re plainly not on the side of the United States of America.

Malley’s supervisor and that supervisor’s supervisor should be fired, those who misled Congress on the matter belong in jail for their perjury in their testimony, and individual who reinstated his clearance in mid-investigation needs to be arrested and put on trial for his espionage-related behavior.

Sadly, no State Department personnel will be harmed in the making of this breach.

Rhetoric and Violence

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Progressive-Democrats and pressmen whine that rhetoric of violence is coming from the right at least as much as, if not more, than from the left.

But: it’s folks on left who are trying to murder Republican Congressmen, who are trying to murder conservative Justices, who are trying to murder Republican Presidential candidates.

No one is shooting at Progressive-Democrats; especially, including no one from the right is shooting at anyone on the left.

Progressive-Democratic Party politicians and pressmen both know that. Their bleatings are a measure of their dishonesty.