Category Archives: politics

One Option

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President Joe Biden (D)—of the Biden-Harris administration (or is it the Harris-Biden administration?)—sees few options for dealing with the border crisis his campaign promises triggered and his actions have actualized and badly potentiated.

The situation is creating a sharp political and policy challenge in Mr Biden’s first months in office.

Biden has just exacerbated his crisis, too, by turning his back on his responsibility and utterly abrogating his role as President by wishing the matter off onto his nominal Vice President, Kamala Harris (D). That personage has long demonstrated that she doesn’t give a rat’s patootie about our southern border. And no, I’m not talking about her contemptuous, laughing scorn of a reporter’s question about her border visitation plans.

Harris was a Senator before she became VP, and she was California’s AG before that. And in both chairs, she actively supported California as a sanctuary state, welcoming all illegal aliens with open arms.

Yet there is one option Biden-Harris/Harris-Biden (Harriden? Bidris?) could take to stem the tide and reverse it. The option wouldn’t take very long to have salutary effect, either. Of course, the option is difficult politically, and Biden and Harris, individually or collectively, don’t have the moral or political courage to effect it.

That option is to withdraw Biden’s Executive Orders, emitted in the first days of his tenure in the White House’s residence wing, canceling former President Donald Trump’s border and immigration control policies. Restore the prior administration’s status quo.

Mistaken Emphasis

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This is what our Federal Reserve Bank MFWIC Jerome Powell said, with a straight face, on public radio last Thursday:

Given the low level of interest rates, there’s no issue about the United States being able to service its debt at this time or in the foreseeable future[.]

Our current national debt is some $27.8 trillion. At Powell’s low interest rates, our interest payments on that debt will amount to some $380 billion for FY2021. Our economy has use for those $380 billion; it would behoove Powell and our…politicians…to cut out the borrowing and begin paying down the debt, rather than hiding behind “sustainability.”

Powell’s claim is just a tad bit circular, too: it’s his Fed that’s artificially suppressing those interest rates. And he’s going to lose control of the whole thing when, as our economy recovers from the Government-created shutdowns from the Wuhan Virus situation, Mr Market begins bidding down the prices of private economy debt instruments—driving interest rates higher—and walks away from Federal debt in favor of those private instruments’ returns—which will drive up Federal interest rates, whether Powell likes it or not.

After that claim, too, Powell added this, with no sense of irony:

[T]here will come a time—and that time will be when the economy is back to full employment, and taxes are rolling in, and we’re in a strong economy again [see, by the way, a couple paragraphs above]—when it will be appropriate to return to the issue of getting back on a sustainable fiscal path.

“Get back on a sustainable fiscal path.” Implying—no, meaning very clearly—that we’re not now on a sustainable fiscal path.

Which drives the question: since we’re not on a sustainable fiscal path, in what universe is our ability to service our national debt—which is Fed-speak for “make the interest payments, to hell with paying down principle”—a sustainable path at our debt’s current, and growing, level?

Slander

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Our slander laws are convoluted, and as part of that convolution, they put certain Americans—celebrities and politicians, for instance—out of effective reach of their protection, and they put other Americans—journalists, for instance, functionally immune to their restrictions. Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor, in his Thursday Wall Street Journal op-ed, wants to niggle around their edges to improve them.

No. It’s time, to coin a phrase, to go big. Libel law, in fact, is simple enough to simplify: if someone lies about or otherwise slanders another, the liar/slanderer is liable. If someone mistakenly mischaracterizes another and doesn’t correct the mischaracterization when advised of the error, mischaracterizer is liable, if to a lesser degree.

That’s pretty simple and straightforward. The only grey area—and this is where juries earn their pay—is in that area between lie and mistaken mischaracterization.

That straightforward correction of slander laws can be made simpler, yet. The new law should apply to the press—it’s really not that hard for a pressman to tell the truth, except, apparently, in the minds of those of the journalist guild—and it should apply equally to the politician or celebrity who’s the victim.

But, but—according to Reynolds, New York Times Co v Sullivan, the Supreme Court ruling that created the imbalances involving the press and celebrities and politicians,

grew out of a concerted effort by Southern states to use libel lawsuits as a weapon in a sort of asymmetric warfare. Civil-rights organizers had powerful support from national media organizations, but local judges and juries were sympathetic to segregation.

No, it didn’t. Those judges’ rulings and their influences on juries via judicial instructions to those juries had nothing to do with slander, per se, and everything to do with those judges acting in accordance with their personal agendas rather than in accordance with the text of the laws before them.

Sullivan needs to be reversed.

Income Inequality

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The Left and their Progressive-Democratic Party like to bleat about this and to complain further about how it has only gotten worse.

They know better.

Here’s a little tidbit, from Phil Gramm’s and John Early’s op-ed in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal:

While the disparity in earned income has become more pronounced in the past 50 years, the actual inflation-adjusted income received by the bottom quintile, counting the value of all transfer payments received net of taxes paid, has risen by 300%. The top quintile has seen its after-tax income rise by only 213%. As government transfer payments to low-income households exploded, their labor-force participation collapsed, and the percentage of income in the bottom quintile coming from government payments rose above 90%.

That bit is disguised, as Gramm and Early point out, by the Census Bureau’s decision to not count taxes paid and Government transfers—welfare payments—paid when it measures income.

Of course the Left and their Party want to ignore actual facts—that’s demonstrated by that last part: [low-income household] labor-force participation collapsed, and the percentage of income in the bottom quintile coming from government payments rose above 90%.

Those are carefully created Government dependents—and votes collected in payment for those handouts.

“Not Renew”

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Newspeak for “Cancel.”

That’s what the University of Cincinnati has chosen to do to its now ex-instructor John Ucker in the school’s…reaction…to Ucker’s referring to our favorite virus as the “chinese virus.”

The school’s Dean of Engineering and Applied Science, John Weidner, said this about that:

These types of xenophobic comments and stigmatizations around location or ethnicity are more than troubling. We can better protect and care for all when we speak about COVID-19 with both accuracy and empathy, something we should all strive for.

Regarding that, I have a question for Weidner: what are his preferred pronouns for the Zika, Ebola, West Nile viruses? What self-identifications does he find acknowledge for the South Africa Variant, the UK Variant, the Brazil Variant of our favorite virus?

The school said last Friday that Ucker’s contract “would not renew”—that Ucker would be canceled—because he spoke with accuracy and without stigmatization or xenophobia and not from within the school’s Parameters of Preciousness.