Tag Archives: political parties

Transparency in Schools

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Florida now has a significant measure of some.

As a part of the “Year of the Parent,” a commitment [Florida Governor Ron (R)] DeSantis has made to prioritize parental rights, DeSantis signed HB 1467, which includes several protections for parents, such as requiring school districts to allow parents to review all books in the school library, all required classroom book lists, and any instructional materials teachers use.

And

The new law requires school districts convening for the purpose of selecting instructional materials to post meeting notices and make them open to the public. They must also provide access to all materials at least 20 days prior to the school board taking official action on instructional materials, according to the new law. The Department of Education will also be required to publish a list of materials that have been removed or discontinued by school boards as a result of an objection and disseminate the list to school districts for their consideration.

Transparency—what a concept. We all still need, though, a resumption of the practice of parents occasionally sitting on a class their children are taking.

It’s About Time, Joey

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The Biden-Harris administration has finally gotten around to honoring an urgent request from an erstwhile American ally.

The Biden administration has transferred a significant number of Patriot antimissile interceptors to Saudi Arabia within the past month, fulfilling Riyadh’s urgent request for a resupply amid sharp tensions in the relationship, senior US officials said.
The transfers sought to ensure that Saudi Arabia is adequately supplied with the defensive munitions it needs to fend off drone and missile attacks by the Iran-backed Houthi rebels in neighboring Yemen, one of the officials said.

That’s good.

Now the Biden-Harris administration also needs to honor another urgent request, this one from a current American ally. The administration needs to ship multiple batteries of Patriot antimissile interceptors to Ukraine. Those batteries also need to be accompanied by the administration’s stepping out of the way of Poland, and others, transferring MiG-29s and other combat aircraft to Ukraine.

This would partially fulfill that nation’s urgent, repeated requests and desperate need for air and missile defense systems with which to defend itself from the actual and ongoing invasion by barbarians from the East and immediate north.

Oblivious

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Nero fiddled, but in the modern world, President Joe Biden (D)…bicycles. And he’s not even doing it in the capital like Nero did; he’s ducking out to Delaware to take his rides. Meanwhile, Kyiv burns, Kharkhiv burns, Kherson burns, Mariupol is being razed to the ground, Lviv is getting missiles and bombs dropped on it, barbarians are bombing women, children, hospitals, schools, refugee convoys on routes the barbarians pretended to agree to leave alone. Much of Ukraine burns.

And then other nations that Russia President Vladimir Putin wants to conquer in order to reconstitute the Russian empire will burn. And the conflagration is likely to grow from there.

Bicycling is good exercise, and the physical effort is good for clearing the mind and momentarily relieving the stress of office, even for one who so dedicatedly ducks out on those stresses at every opportunity.

However, Biden doesn’t need to run off to Delaware’s coast every time he takes the notion to go for a bike ride. There’s a nice, five-mile circuit closer to home that he could use to his heart’s content, if he weren’t so insistent on getting out of town.

He could ride his bicycle from the White House up Pennsylvania Avenue to Constitution Avenue, then take 23rd Street NW to loop the Lincoln Memorial, then return along Independence Avenue to Maryland Avenue, and finish back at the White House.

Easy peasy.

But easier for this president [sic] to hie off to Delaware to duck away from the stresses of office. And to avoid facing the world.

Oh, yeah—there is this on his calendar for tomorrow:

Biden is slated to travel to Brussels, Belgium, this week for the March 24 NATO summit on Russia’s war in Ukraine[.]

No plans, though, to travel to Kyiv to meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, like some eastern European heads of state did a few short days ago.

That would be a bicycle ride too much.

Political Disapproval of Private Enterprise Production

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The Wall Street Journal‘s editors are touting the withdrawal of Sarah Bloom Raskin from the nomination to the Federal Reserve Board’s Vice Chairman position, laying that defeat off to this:

But Ms Raskin’s most significant opponent was her oft-expressed view that the Fed and other regulators should deny credit to companies that produce or heavily consume fossil fuels.

It’s good that this one failed, but it’s just an early skirmish.

The problem is broader than this. It’s dangerous to our republican democracy that anyone would be nominated to the Fed or to any Executive Branch position who would willingly abuse that position’s authority to discriminate against any government-disapproved American enterprise.

Logistics and Transfers

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A retired USAF Captain, in his Letter in Sunday’s Wall Street Journal, laid out a long list of logistical impediments to Poland transferring “up to” 28 of its MiG-29s to Ukraine for the latter’s defense against the invading Russian barbarians.

The 35-year-old Soviet aircraft will need a staging area, a quality fuel supply, Ukrainian-compatible communications, compatible ordinance hard mounts and supporting electronics, spares for battle damage and routine mechanical failures, forward air controllers, IFF (identify friend or foe) interrogation, electronic warfare to combat surface-to-air missiles, and a secure radar and GPS to get around and defeat jamming efforts. The Ukrainian pilots already qualified on the NATO Fulcrum MiG-29 will also need differences training….

That is indeed a valid set of impediments to transferring Poland’s MiGs to Ukraine. But those impediments are surmountable.

The political impediments—Biden’s backing away from Putin’s blandishments—are not valid. Sadly for Ukraine’s welfare, they’re also not surmountable until Biden is removed from the White House, and that won’t come until far more Ukrainians are butchered by the barbarian invaders.