Tag Archives: politics

John Kerry Fails Again

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[L]ife is always full of tough choices and the relationship between nations. That was John Kerry answering David Westin, a Bloomberg Television anchor, who asked Kerry, “What is the process by which one trades off climate against human rights?” Kerry actually said that in all seriousness regarding the Biden-Harris administration’s prioritizing global warming over the People’s Republic of China’s genocide against Uyghurs.

Never mind that the Uyghurs are being murdered today, and even if Climatistas are right, nobody dies for generations under the warming.

But Kerry wasn’t done.

The point I’m making is that even as there were egregious human rights issues, which Ronald Reagan called them [Gorbachev and his Soviet Union] out on it, we have to find a way forward to make the world safer, to protect our countries, and act in our interests[.]

Never mind, either, that the Soviets—the Russians—were pushing serfdom, slavery. Serfs, slaves, however horrific their lives, are in fact alive and have a chance of escaping, of getting help to escape, their condition. The dead have no such opportunity.

This is what the Biden-Harris administration appoints and supports.

She Said No Such Thing

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The ACLU, pretending to celebrate the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and her position on abortion, has utterly changed—falsified—what she said about the matter.

The ACLU’s fabrication:

The decision whether or not to bear a child is central to a [person’s] life, to [their] well-being and dignity… When the government controls that decision for [people], [they are] being treated as less than a fully adult human responsible for [their] own choices[.]

What Ginsburg actually said was this:

The decision whether or not to bear a child is central to a woman’s life, to her well-being and dignity. It is a decision she must make for herself. When Government controls that decision for her, she is being treated as less than a fully adult human responsible for her own choices.

But that wasn’t woke enough to suit the “lawyers” at the ACLU, so they fabricated a claim and falsely attributed their artifice to her.

Greg Scott, Senior Vice President of Communications at Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), has one aspect of this:

The ACLU literally erasing women.

Additional to erasing women, this is an example of how blatantly dishonest the American Civil Liberties Union—the ACLU—has become.

Mandates and Military Discharges

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The House version of the current National Defense Authorization bill for 2022 contains a provision barring a service member being discharged over his refusal to take the Wuhan Vaccine from being given any other form of discharge than honorable. The Biden-Harris administration strongly opposes the provision.

The Pentagon, according to Fox News, has described the vaccine mandate as a “lawful order” that must be obeyed.

The Biden-Harris administration added

To enable a uniformed force to fight with discipline, commanders must have the ability to give orders and take appropriate disciplinary measures.

Certainly. However, whether the order, or the mandate in general, is lawful has yet to be established.

In any event, anything less than an honorable discharge is vast overkill for something as minor as disobeying an order to get a particular vaccine. Dishonorable discharges are handed down for crimes like sexual assault, murder, desertion, sedition. Refusing an order to get vaccinated hardly fits with those.

Assuming an order to get vaccinated is lawful, there are much more appropriate penalties: nonjudicial punishment and fines come to mind.

Insisting on a DD over such a minor act is nothing but an exercise in power for the sake of exercising power—petty ego by the authority doing the exercise.

This is Backwards

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In a Wall Street Journal article on the difficulty of estimating ridership on roads and highways to be built in the future and so the need for them, and the poor allocations of costs and Federal dollars that result from the inaccuracies, there was this statement.

If lawmakers enact the $550 billion bipartisan infrastructure bill now before the House, state and local officials will have to decide which projects to spend money on.

This is backwards. State and local officials should have to decide first what infrastructure projects they want to complete, their cost, their priority, and have contracts already let contingent on receiving Federal dollars before Congress contemplates an infrastructure bill that would send taxpayer money to any of those States.

Those are critical first steps in getting to shovel-ready jobs to which to commit funds.

What Should the Fed Do?

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Nick Timiraos, in his Wall Street Journal piece expressed some concern about the tightrope the Federal Reserve bankers must walk (his phrasing) regarding its bond purchase taper and what others, especially market players, might say about the Fed’s dot plot—a graph that’s generated from individual board members’ views of raising and lowering interest rates and to what level.

Getting that message [regarding bond purchasing] to stick could be tricky when the central bank’s two-day meeting concludes Wednesday if new interest-rate projections—the so-called dot plot—show officials are considering rate increases at the same time….

The only way to make any message stick is for the Fed to do what it says it will do in its “messaging,” regardless of any outside dumpster-diving interpretations of their tea leaf scraps. Seers are going to claim to see regardless of what the Fed does. If the Fed says it’s going to taper its bond purchase program, that’s what it should do. Full stop.

Rather than tapering, though—my humble opinion—it’s long past time for the Fed to reduce, to below zero, its bond buying, selling off the bonds it already holds to enormous excess. Put an end to half-measure tapering.

Separately, the WSJ asked

What action, if any, should the Fed take on interest rates?

The Fed should set their benchmark interest rates at levels historically consistent with their target inflation rate of 2%, more or less, and then sit down and be quiet. Stop trying to micromanage market rates.

Neither case is complicated, except that Government bureaucrats overcomplicate them with overthinking.