Political Cowardice

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President Joe Biden (D) is desperate to avoid encountering Russian President Vladimir Putin during the upcoming G20 meeting.

The White House is bent on preventing President Biden from having a run-in with Russian President Vladimir Putin while the pair attend the G20 summit next month, according to a new report.
White House aides want to avoid even a hallway meeting between the two, or any other situation that might allow for them to be pictured together[.]

It’s true enough, if “reports” are accurate, that it’s those White House aides who are fronting this shameful avoidance, but those folks work for Biden, not the other way around, and as cowardly as Biden would be to run away from Putin, it’s just as cowardly to hide behind his aides on his retreat rather than speaking for himself on the matter.

After all, goes the pseudo-thought, the barbarian chieftain isn’t doing anything worthy of being publicly confronted over. Nothing going on in Ukraine. No barbarian hordes raping and pillaging. No Russian attacks on civilian housing, hospitals, schools, or water and electricity distribution networks. No Russian attacks threatening nuclear power plants.

No Russian cyber attacks made against our allies and friends—or against us.

Nothing to see here.

Instead of running away from Putin, Biden should seek him out and publicly confront him over his invasion of a sovereign nation and the barbaric behavior of his horde inside that nation. Biden should publicly confront him over his cyber attacks.

Election Cheating

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Pennsylvania’s legislature has made clear that undated mail-in ballots are invalid ballots and cannot be counted.

Even so, Pennsylvania’s Progressive-Democratic Party governor Tom Wolf has ordered counties to continue counting undated ballots.

His move comes even after a ruling in a related Pennsylvania case:

Last week the US Supreme Court sided with another Republican politician in the state and invalidated hundreds of mail-in ballots that the state had previously counted even though they lacked a date along with the voter signature.

As the Progressive-Democrat Wolf knows full well, he has no such authority. Here’s our Constitution’s Article I, Section 4:

The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof….

The State’s legislature makes that decision, not anyone in the State’s Executive Branch—or in the State’s Judicial Branch. Pennsylvania’s legislature has spoken on the matter very clearly: undated ballots are invalid and uncountable. Full stop.

Americans shouldn’t have to go into court as a matter of course to enforce any law, including an election law. The matter of course should be following the law, with resorting to court the exception.

We Americans need to remember this, and remember who thinks laws can be disregarded at convenience, in the elections coming up.

Indentured Servitude

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The Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West wants to force unionization on companies and their employees whether those employees want it or not. The SEIU-UHW’s proximate target is California’s dialysis industry. California’s Proposition 29 is the union’s latest (after two prior ballot failures in the two prior election cycles) effort targeting dialysis.

The measure, which would require dialysis clinics to have a physician, nurse practitioner or physician assistant “on-site during all patient treatment hours, would cost dialysis clinics $376,000 to $731,000 per year—per clinic. That would drive many into bankruptcy closure because they can’t afford those costs.

That’s bad enough. Here, though, is the enforcement mechanism the union has included in its ballot measure.

[T]he language of Prop 29 says it would prohibit “clinics from closing or substantially reducing services without state approval.”

That’s naked indentured servitude. That’s what unions want. Recall unions’ prior and long-standing drive to force non-union workers in any company to pay union dues under the guise that the union is working for them as well as their actual members.

Now unions want to reduce businesses and their employees to the status of serfs, permanently tied to the land/permanently tied to operation.

Credibility

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CNN‘s ex-boss Jeff Zucker and MSNBC‘s ex-boss Phil Griffin defended their decision to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop news in the runup to the 2020 Presidential election.

Griffin:

The Justice Department was looking into it, never reported it until he [Hunter Biden] is the son of a candidate. I don’t think it’s a main story until that happens.

The son of a major candidate for office misbehaving badly isn’t news. Never mind that Joe Biden had been making Hunter part of his campaign all along, seeking sympathy for his drug-abusing son for having overcome his addiction. Never mind that Hunter Biden already was news for his use of his diseased brother’s widow, his business dealings, and his use of his familial relationships in furthering his deals.

But his laptop and its contents weren’t news?

Zucker:

He was the son of the candidate; he wasn’t the candidate.

And, he said, as cited by Just the News:

CNN “did not know enough about” the story to cover it and “the problem” was that former Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani was the first to come forward with materials from the laptop….

So the news wasn’t news because one of the early sources regarding the laptop was a man Zucker didn’t like.

This is the editorial “judgment” of the journalism guild.

Who’s in Charge?

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British Prime Minister Liz Truss and her then-Chancellor of the Exchequer Kwasi Kwarteng proposed a serious personal and corporate tax reduction for British subjects. The Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey demurred—loudly—and sent the British securities and debt markets into a tailspin.

As a result of the turmoil, Truss folded, fired Kwarteng, and removed the corporate tax reduction.

That wasn’t enough for Bailey and now the TINAs—Tories in Name Alone—and now Truss has virtually quit the game altogether: she’s now withdrawn all of the tax reductions, even those income tax reductions that would have benefitted the ordinary British subject.

Never mind, either, that the tax reductions would have spurred British economic growth and gone a long way toward getting its high inflation back under control and back down.

Elected Truss doesn’t seem to be in charge. Bureaucrat Bailey does. On the other hand, between the two of them, only Bailey seems to have the courage to stay the course he’s set.

One of those TINAs, a carefully unnamed Conservative lawmaker who won his district in 2019 with a 65% majority had this:

One says that he lies awake at night worrying about being kicked out when the country next goes to the polls.
“I’ve got private school fees to pay and my mortgage is going through the roof[.]”

More worried about his elite status and personal welfare than he is about the job his constituents hired him to do.

And isn’t all of that a sad state of affairs for the British people.