Tag Archives: political parties

Brinkmanship

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ME Sarotte thinks Putin has bought into the concept of a 30-year-old betrayal of a commitment by a past US President to a past Russian President to not expand NATO east to include nations that used to be under Soviet domination. Sarotte says that’s the basis for Putin’s current brinkmanship; he’s merely trying to redress that betrayal, as NATO has, indeed, accepted erstwhile Soviet-dominated (even occupied) nations into NATO.

I think it’s hard to take seriously Sarotte’s view. More likely, it seems to me, is that Putin merely is putting that out as a public rationale. The most likely case for his seeming brinkmanship is that Putin doesn’t see his behavior as brinkmanship at all. On the contrary, he’s convinced—rightly or wrongly—that Biden-Harris will fold in the moment of truth.

Weaponized Impeachment

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Senator Ted Cruz (R, TX) thinks there’s a chance a Republican-majority House of Representatives would, in 2023, impeach the President Joe Biden (D) half of the Biden-Harris Presidency. It’s hard to tell from his remarks whether Cruz advocates such a move, or whether he’s merely making a prediction, given the mood of many politicians.

House GOP Conference Chairwoman Elise Stefanik (R, NY) has a different priority, but she doesn’t go far enough.

Anything is on the table when we are in the majority. But what I believe we should focus on is conducting oversight and making sure that we’re passing legislation to secure the border once and for all.

Impeaching Biden, however good that might feel in the moment, should not be part of the everything that’s on the table. It shouldn’t even be under consideration. Tit-for-tat impeachments aren’t the way forward for the Republican Party or for Conservatives—or for our nation. Republicans and Conservatives don’t need to act like Progressive-Democrats. We’re better than that.

Republicans and Conservatives—individually in their respective districts and in Progressive-Democrat neighboring districts, as well as at the party level—need to make the case for their policies, and not be solely against the others’ moves. They only should talk about Progressive-Democrat failures, of which our border is only one, and about Progressive-Democrat assaults on our republican democracy in terms of how Republican and Conservative policies will advance our nation and correct those failures.

The best “impeachment” of Biden-Harris would be to skunk him in the 2024 Electoral College.

Blame-shifting to Middlemen

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Now Biden-Harris is throwing a billion dollars at the food supply chain problem, even as he’s blaming food supply chain middlemen for his supply problems.

This is just more blame-shifting by Biden-Harris.

Middlemen can, indeed, price gouge. So can end-sellers. So can original producers. However, in the vast main, middlemen drive prices lower: they insulate original producers from end sellers, giving those producers more flexibility in to whom to sell, the middlemen more choices to whom to sell, and they give end sellers more choices of from whom to buy. Competition among middlemen and on both sides of the middlemen drive prices down.

And never mind the risks taken by middlemen. They don’t broker deals between original producers and final buyers; they buy from those producers, own the product, and subsequently must find buyers to whom to sell. Even if middlemen think they’ve lined up their buyers prior to purchasing from producers, many of those deals are only potential and can fall through, or the agreed future price can prove to be wildly inadequate in the realization of delivery.

Biden-Harris actually claimed with a straight face, through his unsigned “fact sheet,” that

[m]ost farmers now have little or no choice of buyer for their product and little leverage to negotiate, causing their share of every dollar spent on food to decline.

Maybe yes, maybe no. But a farmer has far more choice than if there were no middlemen to take the risk of a bumper crop driving down the price he can get on sale after harvest, or of a poor crop driving up the price he could have gotten had the crop done poorly before he committed to sell.

Biden-Harris, aside from the dishonesty of their blame-shifting, in the particular case of farm production is pretending to be ignorant of the time lags involved from crop planting to final crop delivered to the end user, and of the time lags involved from crop planting to final delivery to the livestock rancher to the end user.

Child Abuse

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Now the New Orleans government is requiring children as young as five years old to get vaccinated, whether they need it or not, whether their parents want it for their children or not.

Mayor LaToya Cantrell said she is implementing the policy “to keep the omicron variant at bay,” amid surging cases in Orleans Parish.

And

“The vaccine mandate will expand to include children ages 5-11,” she said. “We will require proof of vaccination or negative tests at bars and restaurants and other locations for everyone ages 5 and older.”

(I’m not aware that patrons as young as five years are allowed in New Orleans bars, but that’s another story.)

And, she orders:

Starting in January, you MUST ensure that your children are getting vaccinated!

This too closely approaches child abuse. There is virtually no risk to children—or from them to others—from the Wuhan Virus, especially from the mildest of all the variants, Omicron. It’s also true that the risk of dangerous side effects from the vaccines against the virus seems very small.

However.

We have more than two years of empirical data from a sample size that is the population of children on Earth with which to assess the level of risk to children from a Wuhan Virus infection. We have a much smaller set of data, collected over a much shorter period of time, with which to assess any risk to children of serious side effect from any of the virus vaccines.

Stipulate, though, that the vaccines’ serious side effect risk really is quite small. The comparison of interest is not whether the vaccines have an absolute level of risk in isolation of other factors or risks. The proper comparison is the level of risk to a child from being unvaccinated compared with the risk to the child of serious side effect from the vaccine.

If the two levels of risk are comparable—and they seem to be, even with the so-far assessed optimistic side effect risk—then the risk from the vaccine is not worth the risk to a child from going unvaccinated.

Forcing that second risk onto the child is too risky, to the point of abuse.

Censorship in New York State

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Now the wonders of the New York State Senate want to ban, formally by statute, speech of which they disapprove.

A New York Senate bill if passed would criminalize the promotion of content that “includes a false statement of fact or fraudulent medical theory that is likely to endanger the safety or health of the public.”

This is rank censorship. Whose definition of “likely?” Whose definition of “fraudulent theory?”

Here are just a few items that are threatened by this censorship:

  • Advertising
  • Political ads/speech
  • Satire
  • Comedy
  • Ridicule
  • Exaggeration for effect
  • Irony

This is an all too typical effort by Progressive-Democrats to control our speech.

O brave new world, that has such people in ‘t in this new year of New York.