Short and sweet. And wrong. At Tuesday’s morning session of the hearing to confirm/reject Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson:
Senator Chuck Grassley (R, IA): Do you believe the individual right to keep and bear arms is a fundamental right?
Brown Jackson: Senator, the supreme court has established that the individual right to keep and bear arms is a fundamental right.
Notice that. A court says so. Not our Constitution—the second of our Bill of Rights—says so.
This should be disqualifying.
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.
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.
The Wall Street Journal asked in its Thursday article concerning President Joe Biden’s (D) Friday telecon with People’s Republic of China President Xi Jinping whether the call, or any other factor, would shift [the PRC’s] alignment with Russia.
The answer is crystalline in my NSHO.
Not a chance. Putin’s performance in Ukraine and his request for Xi to send him additional arms, military foodstuffs, and money represent a golden opportunity for Xi to reduce Putin to even further dependency on Xi and on the PRC, and to solidify the PRC’s presence in eastern and southern Siberia. That presence already is greatly expanded over prior years by the Putin-Xi economic agreement to have the PRC and Russia jointly exploit the Siberian resources, with a significant fraction of the produce going to the PRC and with PRC citizens (and their families) moving into Siberia to provide the labor.
Xi won’t pass that up, and he doesn’t care in the slightest what other nations’ politicians might think of him. The gains will be worth it to him.
Senators Joni Ernst (R, IA), Chuck Grassley (R, IA), and Ron Johnson (R, WI) are proposing a law to modify how student loans are made. Their bill, the Student Transparency for Understanding Decisions in Education Net Terms, or STUDENT (aren’t we cute), Act
would provide student loan applicants with an estimate of the total amount of interest they would pay, based on a standard 10-year repayment plan, during or prior to taking out a loan….
It’s easy enough to calculate the amortization table, and the periodic and total interest paid, for any loan; there should be no problem in requiring the lender to include the tables in their student loan offers. But why wait until after the students have taken out the loan?
Aside from fixing that little fillip, though, more useful moves regarding the student loan industry include these:
Of course, at the Federal level, enforcement of the second bullet would be limited to withholding Federal funds from those colleges or universities declining to satisfy either of the requirements. Further Federal enforcement would be limited to withholding a fraction of Federal transfers to those States who choose not to enact similar requirements and to otherwise publicizing and jawboning those States who choose not to go along. Those are strong incentives, though.