Category Archives: politics

Biden Paying Interns

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In a first for our Federal government, Presidential interns will be paid, per current President Joe Biden (D).

The White House will offer a $6,000 stipend to its interns, beginning with the summer class which will work from June 20 to August 12.

$6,000 for seven weeks. But will they be good-paying union jobs?

I have another question, too. We’re two summers into Biden’s term, and he’s only just now getting to this. Why? Did he not know his interns have been unpaid? Is he only now getting told this, like he was “slow” to get told about baby formula problems?

A Good Beginning

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Texas Governor Greg Abbott (R) wants random inspections of Texas’ schools focused on safety checks and protocols. In a letter of instruction, Abbott wrote Texas School Safety Center Director Kathy Martinez-Prather:

Your team should begin conducting in-person, unannounced, random intruder detection audits on school districts. Staff should approach campuses to find weak points and how quickly they can penetrate buildings without being stopped.

The inspections are intended to lead to a series of recommendations for legislation regarding security system improvements.

It’s a good start; although I would have thought such inspections already would have been de rigueur on individual school administrators’ initiative for some years, at least since the Columbine shooting.

Those inspections, though, need to go unpublicized at the individual school level, although results aggregated to the school district level should be readily available to the public.

The goal should be to help individual school administrators and school district administrators identify and correct weaknesses (as well as provide those legislative recommendations, which should center on systemic weaknesses) rather than to embarrass the administrators.

Of course, publicizing district aggregations of findings will tend to contradict that last, but here’s where the parents’ need, and right, to know must take precedence over administrator embarrassment. And parents aren’t stupid; they’ll recognize whether a district administrator takes prompt action to correct weaknesses or weasel words his way around them or otherwise blows them off.

Self-Fulfilling Prophecies

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Germany and France have two of them. They were mentioned (although not as such) in a Wall Street Journal piece centered on Russia’s slow grind gains in Ukraine’s Donbas.

The first self-fulfilling prophecy:

Germany and France, which have sent limited heavy weapons so far, are skeptical about whether Ukraine can realistically drive the invading Russian army back to its positions when the war began on February 24.

Which Germany and France are making all the more difficult by their decision to withhold serious amounts of weapons and ammunition from Ukraine.

The second self-fulfilling prophecy:

Berlin and Paris are particularly anxious to avoid an accidental escalation into a direct clash with Russia….

Which surrenders the initiative to Russia and guarantees their continued backing down by telling Putin that such threats work.

We really need a mutual defense alliance with the Three Seas Initiative and a redeployment of American forces out of Germany into Poland and the Baltics.

What’s the Logic?

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President Joe Biden (D) has decided to forgive all $5.8 billion of the loans outstanding still held by the folks who went to any of the Corinthian Colleges institutions.

[T]he remaining 560,000 borrowers will be eligible for automatic discharges of their remaining Corinthian federal student-loan debt. All remaining federal loans held by anyone who attended a Corinthian school between its founding in 1995 and its 2015 closure are eligible.

Education Secretary Miguel Cardona:

As of today, every student deceived, defrauded, and driven into debt by Corinthian Colleges can rest assured that the Biden-Harris administration has their back and will discharge their federal student loans[.]

Either the Corinthian students were cheated, or they were not; I have questions. Notice that I’m eliding the question, here, of why us average American taxpayers should be on the hook for the misbehaving Corinthian Colleges’ pecadilloes.

Why does only some of the debt—the unpaid balances—get canceled? Why don’t the amounts already paid by those students with remaining debt balances also get returned?

Why aren’t the Corinthian students who paid off their debt—and there are quite a number—eligible for recompense?

Is Biden actually saying, with a straight face, that the students were cheated only to the extent they still owe money?

Help me understand the logic of this.

It’s All About the Power

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DoJ has decided to appeal US District Judge Kathryn Kimball’s (Middle District of Florida) lifting CDC’s mandate requiring masks on airplanes, buses, and in transit hubs. The judge’s reasoning was that the mandate exceeded CDC’s authority and so was unlawful.

DOJ’s objection and reason for appeal is highly instructive.

None of the district court’s quarrels with the CDC order comes close to showing that the CDC has acted outside the “zone of reasonableness.”

And (as paraphrased by Reuters)

the CDC findings in early 2021 provided “ample support for the agency’s determination that there was good cause to make the order effective without delay.”

What the law actually allows or bars be damned. Law is irrelevant; Government definitions of “reasonableness” is all. No, we won’t work to change the law; no, we won’t try to convince our fellow Americans—those beneath us—to change the law.

This goes hand-in-glove with this Progressive-Democratic Party-run government’s decision to appeal the order barring lifting Title 42. “We know better. Leave us the power.”