Tag Archives: political parties

Dangerously Hypocritical

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And dangerous in its own right. President Joe Biden (D), even as he pays lip service to supporting Ukraine against Russia’s invasion of that nation, is conspiring with Russia to let Iran obtain nuclear weapons. Here’s Fred Fleitz, former CIA analyst and ex-senior staffer on the House Intelligence Committee and the National Security Council:

The US has partnered with Russia to get a new nuclear deal with Iran. This includes secret talks with the Russians over the last year and agreements where Russia would hold uranium enriched by Iran and give it back to Iran if a future Republican president backed out of a new nuclear deal.

This is dangerously hypocritical in that Biden is conspiring with one enemy nation to free up another enemy nation in the latter’s effort to get nuclear weapons. The agreement that Biden is so desperate to get back into (with its trivial tweaks) expires, ends sanctions against Iran, and with that expiry leaves Iran with an unrestricted path to nuclear weapons.

Biden’s dealings with Russia in this are dangerous in their own right because Russia is going to give that enriched uranium back to Iran under any circumstance—that uranium is a threat to us and to Israel, and that’s what Russia wants. This is how desperate Biden is to prevent a subsequent President—especially a hated Republican President—from canceling his precious deal: he knows Russia will give the uranium back.

In the end, any agreement Biden might enter into here becomes hard for future Presidents to undo only if Biden submits the deal to Congress for majority votes in each house, which would make the deal a statute, or he submits it to the Senate for ratification as a treaty. Absent those, all Biden’s agreement becomes is an Executive Agreement, which can be undone with the stroke of a pen—just as former President Donald Trump (R) did with the prior failure of an Obama Executive Agreement.

And a future President should cancel such an EA without hesitation, given that Russian return of uranium.

There are Tax Cuts, and There are Tax Cuts

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Some are tiny, but useful first steps. Some are serious and useful in their own right. Georgia Republicans are proposing the latter.

The State currently has a graduated income tax with a top rate of 5.5% on income above $10,000 (except singles; they pay 5.5% on income above $7,000) and standard income tax deductions of $4,600 for single filers, $3,000 each for married filing separately, and $6,000 for married filing jointly.

The proposal, led by State House Ways & Means Chair Shaw Blackmon (R-Bonaire), envisions serious changes. It reduces and simplifies the State’s income tax rate to a single 5.25% rate regardless of income level. It increases the standard income tax deductions to $12,000 for single filers and $24,000 for married couples, a move that appears also to eliminate the marriage penalty inherent in the current deduction. [A] family of four would not pay state income tax on their first $30,000 of income compared with the present first $500 to $1,000 of income, depending on filing status.

Now that’s a tax cut that a mother can love. And fathers and singles.

Nothing to See Here

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No need for signature verification on mailed-in ballots. Never mind what the law requires.

A study of Maricopa County’s mail ballots in Arizona’s 2020 presidential election estimates that more than 200,000 ballots with mismatched signatures were counted without being reviewed, or “cured”—more than eight times the 25,000 signature mismatches requiring curing acknowledged by the county.

And

Of the 1,911,918 early voting mail ballots that Maricopa County received and counted in the 2020 presidential election, the county reported that 25,000, or 1.3%, had signature mismatches that required curing, but only 587 (2.3%) of those were confirmed mismatched signatures.

What the county’s nominal rules require:

Under Maricopa County election rules, a reviewer first compares a signature on an envelope with the signature on file for the voter, which takes about 4-30 seconds. If the signature does not appear to match, the ballot is cured, which takes three or more minutes and includes attempts to contact the voter to determine whether or not the signature is a match.

But taking that time would have been…inconvenient.

The existence of such a failure by the Maricopa County’s election monitors contributes heavily to the county’s motivation for fighting so strenuously against any sort of investigation of their performance.

It’s unlikely that such “laziness” was widespread enough to change an election outcome, but the existence of error and outright fraud is well established; Maricopa County’s failure to perform provides a particularly dramatic example of that. Beyond that, whether or not the failures are widespread, the errors need to be corrected, loopholes and enforcement procedures that facilitate such errors need to be corrected, those committing fraud need to spend time in jail contemplating their sins.

But the Progressive-Democratic Party; their communications arm, the press; and the Left in general want this sort of thing covered up. They want the possibilities such things create for Party.

Business and Climate Risk

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The Securities and Exchange Commission wants information from our businesses

about their climate risks as it gears up to propose new disclosure requirements on the topic.

In particular (so far):

The SEC requested information from the companies [43 or more US public companies] about significant risks related to climate change. The risks ranged from physical effects such as severe weather to litigation and regulatory compliance costs.

However, the only real risks American businesses face from the claimed climate situation are two. One is from Government regulations as Government men and women overreact to claims of dire climate evolution. Examples of this risk are that litigation and regulatory compliance cost bit and this:

The Biden administration and the SEC under Chairman Gary Gensler have made combating climate change and nudging investors to deploy more capital toward greener businesses a priority.

The other risk is from Government men and women using claims of dire consequences of climate evolution to expand bureaucratic power. The SEC’s demands for “climate risk decision-making” data preparatory to issuing related disclosure regulations is an example of this.

Two Examples of Progressive-Democrats’ Assault on Free Speech

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California doesn’t want anyone to contradict the State’s preferred narrative regarding the Wuhan Virus—not even medical experts.

Disagreement with the “contemporary scientific consensus” on COVID-19 issues could be deemed “unprofessional conduct” for California doctors.
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The bill, which was cowritten by five other California Assembly and Senate members, goes beyond regulating how California doctors can treat their own patients. It opens their statements about COVID—public or private—to review by the Medical Board of California and the Osteopathic Medical Board of California, with possible sanctions to follow.

This bill doesn’t care about disagreeing science. Medical opinion doesn’t matter unless it’s the State’s opinion. There is no Truth but Truth, and State is its name.

Illinois is joining the assault.

“Though the Illinois State Police respects the rights of citizens to express their opinions in a lawful manner, there is great concern with any event that is designed to impede or block the normal and reasonable movement of traffic,” ISP Division of Patrol Colonel Margaret McGreal said in a statement. “Traffic backups are a major contributing cause to traffic crashes which lead to property damage, personal injury, and even death. A planned event designed to impede normal traffic flow is dangerous to the innocent motoring public.”

There might be a problem—which the State government will define to be illegal after the fact, or will define preemptively, as convenient—so truckers shouldn’t speak up with their convoy protest. And they’re not even honking their horns.