Category Archives: politics

Where Is Joe Biden?

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Turkey is reopening its embassy in Kyiv.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and EU High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Josep Borrell went to Kyiv, along with Matti Maasikas, Head of the Delegation of the European Union to Ukraine, last week to meet face-to-face with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and Maasikas said he’d stay, reopen delegation facilities, and assess the safety of returning staff to the facilities.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson traveled to Kyiv Saturday and met face-to-face with Zelenskyy.

Italy intends to reopen its facility in Kyiv right after Easter—17 April.

Where’s President Joe Biden (D)? Oh, yeah—he still has his embassy hiding out in Poland. And neither Biden nor his Secretary of State Antony Blinken have been to Kyiv since Russia’s invasion and apparently have no plans to go.

Biden is channeling Sallah: Russians. Very dangerous. You go first.

Canceling Charter Schools

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The Biden-Harris administration is trying to. His Department of Education Secretary, Miguel Cardona, is proposing a cancelation rule, cynically called, in part, Expanding Opportunity Through Quality Charter Schools Program. The rule provides, among other things:

prov[e] there’s a demand for a new school—e.g., evidence satisfactory to Miguel Cardona that there is “over-enrollment” in existing public schools

Prove to the government’s satisfaction, that is. A government that the teachers unions, recall, heavily influence—lately regarding Wuhan Virus requirements for opening and operating in existing public schools.

show[] how they would ensure diversity

Not how they would ensure a quality education. That’s no longer a factor under this administration or the teachers unions.

limit the degree of control over their own schools that would be allowed outside for-profit companies

Because Big Government Knows Better than actual businessmen and educators how to run a school.

[A]n applicant [for Federal startup seed money] must propose to collaborate with at least one traditional public school or traditional school district

And

In its application, an applicant must provide a letter from each partnering traditional public school or school district demonstrating a commitment to participate in the proposed charter-traditional collaboration.

Under these two requirements, a new charter school functionally must get permission from its competitors—those public schools—even to operate. That permission is granted in part, or withheld entirely, by whether an existing partner school will agree, or not, to “partner” with the supplicant applicant.

The proposed rule goes on like that for over a dozen Federal Register pages, every single one of which is unnecessary, since this…rule…is less than unnecessary, it’s Government overreach.

It’s long past time to put these people out of office.

Student Debt

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President Joe Biden (D) is at it again. Now he’s extending for yet another time, and by diktat, not by Congressional action, the “moratorium” on student debt repayment requirements. As The Wall Street Journal‘s editors noted, this is debt cancellation on the installment plan.

Never mind that our economy—according to no less an authority than Biden, anyway—is fully capable of return[ing] to more normal routines. In what amounts to a deep insult to grown American citizens who still have student debt outstanding, Biden is excluding them from that return to normal. Apparently, Biden does not think this particular group of Americans is capable of much of anything.

I have a better idea. It begins with ending the debt moratoria, which only hurts those debtors, the lenders who lent to them, and us taxpayers, whose tax remittals will go—eventually—to those lenders in partial mitigation.

My idea continues with garnishing the wages and welfare payments of those without wages, of those debtors who claim to be unable to pay, even if those garnished payments are less than the payments the student loan contracts specified.

My idea finishes with limiting the root cause (to coin a phrase) of a student need to borrow in the first place: the over-high cost of going to college. One branch of this path is to get rid of the stigma of not being a college graduate. The trades are far more important than graduating with degrees in women’s studies, this or that race studies, or basket-weaving froo-froo. The trades are every bit as important as degrees in architecture or engineering: nothing gets built, no matter how creatively or usefully drawn up or engineered, without tradesmen—plumbers, electricians, carpenters, heavy equipment operators—to do the actual work. That needs to be emphasized.

Another branch is for the Federal government to stop sending taxpayer money to colleges and universities. What started out as a good idea, enlisting these institutions in basic research, has become badly abused in hiring “diversity” mavens, pushing identity separations, expansions of those froo-froo studies. The Federal monies have become excuses to hire excessive administrative overhead and to raise tuition to absorb the Federal influx. Cut it out.

A third branch is to require two things of colleges and universities: one is to publish, for each major the school offers, including “independent studies,” the average salaries of its graduates five years after graduation. The other is to require the college/university whose student applies for a loan(s) to be the lender of the majority of the borrowed amount or to guarantee the entire loan(s) provided by any other lender.

Biden’s Timidity on International Display

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President Joe Biden’s (D) timidity before Russian President Vladimir Putin is illustrated internationally by his embassy moves.

Recall that when Putin invaded Ukraine and threatened Kyiv, Biden ordered his American embassy to cut and run relocate west to Lviv. When Lviv came under air attack, Biden ordered his American embassy to quit Ukraine altogether and run off relocate to Poland.

Recall further that the Prime Ministers of Poland, Czech Republic, and Slovenia, along with the EU’s President of the European Parliament, Roberta Metsola—while Kyiv still was under threat of Russian capture—visited with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Kyiv. Biden, on the other hand, even though he went to Europe while Kyiv was under siege—to Brussels and later to Rzeszow, Poland—was too timid to travel to Kyiv and meet with Zelenskyy on Zelenskyy’s (besieged) home ground.

It gets worse.

Now that the barbarian has withdrawn from the vicinity of Kyiv and Ukrainian forces have retaken and are consolidating national control over much of northern Ukraine [emphasis added]

Turkey…became the first major nation to send diplomats back to Kyiv….
Turkey’s embassy, which had relocated to the western Ukrainian city of Chernivtsi [never leaving Ukraine], reopened in Kyiv and will resume consular services, it said on social media. The US, by contrast, currently doesn’t have any diplomatic presence on Ukrainian soil, with embassy staff operating from Poland.

Even with Kyiv safe from Russian occupation, Biden has no intention of having his State Department move his embassy back to Kyiv. Biden has no intention of visiting with Zelenskyy in the latter’s Presidential Office Building, or even of sending his Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin or CJCS General Mark Milley to meet with the leaders of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, whose offices also are in the Presidential Office Building.

The Biden-Harris administration is an utter embarrassment to our nation.

Lawless Press

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The Supreme Court issued a ruling Wednesday that the press doesn’t like, and the press is calling for President Joe Biden (D) to blithely ignore the ruling and go on about his business. By odd coincidence, the Court’s ruling reinstated a Trump administration rule that a lower court had struck down.

Democrats condemned the decision, but some reporters went even further and called for the Biden administration to ignore the Supreme Court.

For instance,

Former Niskanen Center Vice President for Research Will Wilkinson posted a Twitter thread explaining why he believes the White House should ignore SCOTUS decisions.

It’s been done before.

How many divisions has the Pope?

How’d Stalin’s question work out, in the end, for the Soviet Union?

And before that, regarding a John Marshall-led Supreme Court ruling on a Cherokee-Georgia dispute:

John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it.

That worked out poorly, also.

Nevertheless, here’s the press calling for any lawful thing disagreeable to its convenience to be ignored.

The press doesn’t want us to be a nation of laws, but a nation of men who will decide on the basis of what’s convenient to the press’ progressive ideology.