Tag Archives: politics

“Candid and Professional”

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That’s what Antony Blinken’s State Department negotiators said about the Taliban representatives at Doha, as the Biden-Harris met with them to beg for negotiate the safe passage for US citizens, other foreign nationals, and our Afghan partners, along with human rights, including the meaningful participation of women and girls in all aspects of Afghan society.

The discussions were candid and professional with the US delegation reiterating that the Taliban will be judged on its actions, not only its words.

Along with the willful ignorance—it no longer can be written off to naivete—of State and of Biden-Harris that the Taliban terrorists care about how they’re judged.

The Taliban…negotiators…may have conducted themselves in a structurally professional manner, but leaving aside that deliberate ignorance, it’s not something our government should be publicly praising in our enemies.

That just shows how desperate the Biden-Harris administration is to curry their favor.

Anti-Business Anti-Freedom Left Strikes Again

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Their latest assault comes from left-of-the-west-coast Los Angeles.

The city of Los Angeles will begin requiring most people to provide proof of full COVID-19 vaccination before entering a wide variety of indoor businesses including salons, restaurants, gyms, museums, and theaters.

Alternatively, those with medical conditions that do not allow them to be vaccinated, or those with sincerely held religious beliefs that prevent them from being vaccinated, will be allowed to enter on presentment of a negative Wuhan Virus test done within the prior 72 hours (whose definition of “sincerely held?”). Never mind that the cost of such a test starts at $20 and that the median cost is $127. And you thought the costs at the theater concession counter were high. How’s that blowout or updo at the salon sound now? The testing requirement looks like it’s going to swamp that dinner out you thought you were going to enjoy with the family.

Notice, too, that many—most?—of the businesses in these categories are small businesses, mom-and-pop businesses, low margin businesses.

This isn’t only an assault on American businesses and American business owners, though: it’s also an assault on Americans qua Americans.

It’s a demand that we citizens give up our medical privacy and proclaim to the world what our medical status is, using only the Wuhan Virus situation—which is on the wane—as an initial step to expose all of our medical privacy.

It’s more than that, even. This vaccine mandate, and others like it, are a demand that we citizens give up an essential liberty—a liberty over which we’ve already fought one civil war—our control over our own bodies. It’s an essential liberty that the Left and its Progressive-Democratic Party are trying to take away from all of us this time, not just a minority which they held and hold in contempt.

“Threats of Violence”

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Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco, under [last week’s Senate hearing’s] questioning from [Senator Josh, (R, MO)] Hawley, said the memo is only about violence and threats of violence, and it’s the role of the FBI address those threats.

And

Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke said in a separate hearing that the Justice Department does not see parents as a threat and that the attorney general’s memo is only focused on threats and intimidation.

The FBI’s claimed responsibility in this context is to

help protect you, your children, your communities, and your businesses from the most dangerous threats facing our nation—from international and domestic terrorists….

To help. Help whom? State and local police forces, acting within a State’s police powers, their authority to enforce law, are fully capable of handling “threats and intimidation;” they might need help only against domestic terrorism.

To help. Emphasis on “help.” The FBI’s claimed responsibility also is to help State and local law enforcement agencies deal with violence, not to do for the State and locals, or dictate to them, or to usurp their responsibilities.

But, if we can take Clarke’s and Monaco’s claims at face value, the only ones talking about domestic terrorism or domestic terrorists are the worthies of the National School Boards Association. Specifically, neither DoJ nor the FBI are talking about domestic terrorism, either in the Garland Memo or in those Senate hearing testimonies. Thus, there is no reason, by Garland’s own memo or those testimonies, for the FBI’s presence in these matters: with no domestic terrorism involved, there’s nothing for which the FBI need assist State and local law enforcement.

AG Merrick Garland’s memo is reprehensible, and dangerous to liberty, not because it focuses on threats of violence (which is bad enough FBI interference)—stipulate, arguendo, that that insistence is accurate—but because it exists.

Garland’s memo is reprehensible and dangerous to liberty because it is a naked attempt to usurp those States’ police powers and law enforcement capacities and arrogate them to the Federal government’s national police.

Bank Experts Need Risk Management Advice from Government Bureaucrats

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Federal Reserve System Governor Lael Brainard actually said that with a straight face [Wall Street Journal‘s paraphrase]:

…financial regulators should direct the nation’s biggest banks to take new steps to manage climate-related risks as part of a broader effort to monitor potential hazards posed to the financial system.

She said this (quoted by WSJ) at last week’s conference at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston:

Ultimately, I anticipate it will be helpful to provide supervisory guidance for large banking institutions in their efforts to appropriately measure, monitor, and manage material climate-related risks.

Yeah. Because finance businessmen, bankers, whose businesses live or die on their abilities, are incapable of understanding the financial risks to their businesses without the…guidance…of government bureaucrat/regulators.

School Choice

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Two Ohio State legislators are taking this seriously.

The Ohio Backpack Bill, originally introduced in May and updated with a sub-bill to House Bill 290, would allow all parents to send their children to public school or establish an education savings account. The state would send the money earmarked for that student to the public school or into the parent’s account, allowing it to be used for private school tuition or other education expenses.

That’s all parents, for all children, not just parents of the few who win a lottery, as is the case in so many other jurisdictions. Ohio already has a means-tested criterion; this expands the right to choose, and it expands competition among schools and school systems, which can only improve school performance, including public schools, which in turn can only benefit the children.

Congressman Riordan McClain (R, Upper Sandusky):

It’s about students and increasing the education opportunities for all. This bill seeks to find the right educational opportunity for each of the children in Ohio. It creates a true money-follows-the-child program. Money goes to public school if parents want, and if a parent wants an educational scholarship account, then the state has to put that money in that account, which the parent can use for education expenses.

Stand by for the Keep Teachers Unions Featherbedded movement to crank up.