Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has announced that the Federal government will no longer
fine illegal aliens who fail to depart from the US and it plans to pursue the cancellation of any currently outstanding debts for people who previously incurred such financial penalties.
After all, he says,
We can enforce our immigration laws without resorting to ineffective and unnecessary punitive measures.
We can enforce our laws by not enforcing our laws….
Senator Josh Hawley (R, MO) is planning to introduce a child tax credit bill that would grant $6,000 to a single parent family with children less than 13 years old, and $12,000 to two-parent families with children in that age group.
We need a plan to help working parents that is pro-family and pro-work. I’ll be proposing legislation this coming week that gives a major tax cut to working parents to help them afford to start a family and raise their kids[.]
I have no doubt that Hawley’s heart is in the right place, but he’s badly mistaken on this.
For one thing, stipulating his underlying premise that tax gerrymandering is a good idea, he misses the point that kids cost the same to raise no matter how many parents they have, and regardless of how many of those parents work. The idea, predicated as it is on giving two-parent families a choice in how many of the parents work, also ignores the simple fact that a single parent not only has no such choice, but she (yes, I’m assuming. Sue me) has no support from a second parent, working or not.
For another thing, his underlying premise is badly flawed. Our tax code has no business being used for social engineering, whether for family support or for any other purpose. The same (tax) cost break could be given to those families, along with all American families and individuals, by limiting our tax code to covering the three—and only three—spending purposes enumerated in our Constitution, and then by setting that tax code to a single, low, flat rate shorn of all credits, subsidies, deductions, on all income, regardless of source, that leaves more of our money in the pockets of each of us.
Perhaps for the Intelligence Organization of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps?
If what Iran’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Mohammad Javad Zarif said, in what he thought was a secret interview intended for posterity’s sake and to be held by an Iranian Presidency think tank, is true, maybe.
Buried in a leak of three hours’ worth of a seven hour interview was this bit:
Former Secretary of State John Kerry informed him that Israel had attacked Iranian interests in Syria at least 200 times, to his astonishment, Mr Zarif said.
I sure hope Zarif is dissembling again. But he’s talking, he thinks, in secret, and none of what he said in the leak is particularly self-aggrandizing, so his motive for lying is unclear at best.
Of course, it also could be the case that Kerry isn’t a foreign agent. It’s at least as likely that it was Kerry’s self-absorbed superiority complex that led him to betray Israel and our nation. Zarif’s astonishment would certainly be a nearly addictive ego stroke for a man like Kerry.
That’s the question a Wall Street Journal editorial subheadline asks. This is how President Joe Biden (D) answered the question, using his Press Secretary Jen Psaki’s mouth:
We know that police violence disproportionately impacts black and Latino people in communities and that black women and girls, like black men and boys, experience higher rates of police violence.
Indeed. How systemically racist it is for a white cop to save the lives of one or two black girls who were under knife attack by another black girl. That’s the Biden line.
Because, I suppose, saving those two black lives was just the act of a Great White Savior.
Consider, also: that life-saving shooting happened fully 24 hours before Biden trotted Psaki out to speak his lines. He knew the situation full well. He knew the circumstances of the shooting full well. He knew that one of those black girls was under proximate attack, knife raised in the hand of her (black) attacker to strike at the time the (white) cop fired.
To answer the question, then, yes, systemic racism is behind every tragic shooting. But only in the minds of the racists who manufacture their racist beefs out of the empty æther. Or in the minds of Progressive-Democrats.
In the current debate over whether the District of Columbia should be admitted as a State, Congressman Jamie Raskin (D, MD) made this claim.
All that they [Republicans] see is two new liberal Democrat senators, but that cuts against everything that we believe in about American democracy. We do not deny people the right to vote based on our expectation of how they will vote.
What the Democratic Party and its politicians do, though—until the Civil War they forced over their demand to keep slaves—is demand that any State admitted to the United States as a Free State be balanced by the admission of another State as a Slave State—so that those Senators could be voted for by slaveholders.
Raskin knows the history of his Progressive-Democratic Party full well. Of course the move to admit DC as a State is all about getting two more of his Progressive-Democratic Party Senators. His Party has been pushing for voters who will vote for his Party in particular throughout its history.
Were the move centered on getting DC residents the right to vote in Federal elections, it would be straightforward enough to return the ex-Maryland portion of DC to Maryland (the ex-Virginia portion having already been returned), where they would have full representation. Straightforward, that is, were the Progressive-Democrats not in the way that simple granting of the Federal franchise.