Tag Archives: responsibilities

Negotiating With Terrorists

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Secretary of State Antony Blinken, during his testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was asked by Senator Ted Cruz (R, TX) whether the [Iran Revolutionary Guard Corps] has been asked to stop plotting assassinations. Blinken answered:

…one of the strong messages we send to them [Iranian negotiators] is they need to stop targeting our people…and they said they know what they would need to do to address this problem.

Cruz also asked whether it is the case that

the IRGC is actively trying to murder former senior officials of the US.

Blinken:

…there is an ongoing threat against American officials both present and past.

Ongoing, after the “strong messages” have been “sent.” Plainly, Iran has a different view of what the problem is and what they would need to do to address it than has Cruz. Blinken appears oblivious to the difference.

This is what Biden-Harris is begging to “negotiate” with from the kiddie table in Vienna and who he has doing the begging negotiating.

Local Control vs Federal Funding

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Tennessee’s General Assembly is considering a bill that would indemnify teachers and all other employees of public schools and local education agencies against civil liability or “adverse job actions” if they refer to a student by pronouns consistent with his biological sex rather than by his preferred gender pronouns. The General Assembly’s Fiscal Review Committee noted that the bill

could violate Title IX and would put at risk the state’s federal funding, which for the current school year is more than $5 billion.

That’s the important aspect of this bill, and it has much broader implications for all State-level legislative actions. The $5 billion might seem like a lot of money for a State, but it pales against the long-term cost outcomes of a State accepting any Federal funds under any guise: the more money a State accepts from the Federal government, the more control over its own internal affairs the State surrenders to the Federal government.

The Feds are acting entirely legitimately when they attach strings to the money they provide the States, or to any non-State entity. Anyone providing money to anyone or anything else naturally gets to specify the manner and purpose for which the money is to be used. It’s the existence of those strings, not what they require, that should give States pause in the decision to accept any of the Federal government’s money.

In the end, States that want to retain control of their own intra-State affairs should reject Federal funds transfers—and join with other States in efforts across the legal spectrum to end Federal transfers of State tax remissions to other States altogether except in the event of an emergency declaration. Nor should any exceptions to the bar be allowed: once carve-outs are begun, in very short order, the bar will be so exception-ridden as to cease to exist in any meaningful form.

Skinflints

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President Joe Biden (D) and wife donated all of 2.8% of their income to charity in 2021. Average Americans in their income level donated 3.1% of their income to charity. Average Americans in the next lower income level donated 2.9% of their income—still more than the Bidens, despite their greater income.

Vice President Kamala Harris (D) and husband were just as tight. They donated 1.3% of their (higher than the Bidens’ by a factor greater than two) 2021 income to charity.

Just to emphasize how cheap these Progressive-Democrats are, average Americans with income under $50,000 and who still managed to itemize donated 8.4% of their income.

Keep in mind, too, the Bidens and the Harrises don’t have the expenses that us average Americans have. They get all expenses paid houses to live in, free transportation, and not only are their meals entirely free*, they’re catered by top drawer chefs.

But the Bidens, anyway, always have been chintzy with their charity. In 2007, while Joe was sitting in the Senate, he and Jill donated all of 0.3% of their income to charity.

*Free in this context means us American taxpayers are paying their expenses. And they’re still that chintzy.

Discrimination

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Recall the California law that requires (required) the boards of directors of California-headquartered public companies to have at least one member of an “underrepresented” race, ethnicity or sexual orientation, and two to three for larger boards. Recall further that California Superior Court Judge

Terry Green judge struck the law for violating California’s constitution.

Now The Wall Street Journal includes a bit of the judge’s reasoning from his opinion.

the judge says no one “appears to have made any effort to identify, define, or survey the qualified talent pool for director positions.”

Oops.

In an associated footnote, the judge went on, with clarity that even a California Progressive-Democrat should be able to discern.

Some of the experts have identified common feeder positions (such as “C-Suite” executive roles) and academic qualifications (such as an MBA), but there appears to be no one single” gatekeeping “qualification that could be used to define the pool in the way that a license might for lawyers and medical professionals, or a credential might for teachers.

Then he drove the point home in his conclusion.

Corporations Code § 301.4 [the board of directors membership law] violates the Equal Protection Clause of the California Constitution on its face. The statute treats similarly situated individuals—qualified potential corporate board members—differently based on their membership (or lack thereof) in certain listed racial, sexual orientation, and gender identity groups. It requires that a certain specific number of board seats be reserved for members of the groups on the list—and necessarily excludes members of other groups from those seats.

It’s hard to get any clearer than that, but if the California Progressive-Democratic Party legislators are true to their history, they’ll work hard to find a way to be confused.

Student Debt

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President Joe Biden (D) is at it again. Now he’s extending for yet another time, and by diktat, not by Congressional action, the “moratorium” on student debt repayment requirements. As The Wall Street Journal‘s editors noted, this is debt cancellation on the installment plan.

Never mind that our economy—according to no less an authority than Biden, anyway—is fully capable of return[ing] to more normal routines. In what amounts to a deep insult to grown American citizens who still have student debt outstanding, Biden is excluding them from that return to normal. Apparently, Biden does not think this particular group of Americans is capable of much of anything.

I have a better idea. It begins with ending the debt moratoria, which only hurts those debtors, the lenders who lent to them, and us taxpayers, whose tax remittals will go—eventually—to those lenders in partial mitigation.

My idea continues with garnishing the wages and welfare payments of those without wages, of those debtors who claim to be unable to pay, even if those garnished payments are less than the payments the student loan contracts specified.

My idea finishes with limiting the root cause (to coin a phrase) of a student need to borrow in the first place: the over-high cost of going to college. One branch of this path is to get rid of the stigma of not being a college graduate. The trades are far more important than graduating with degrees in women’s studies, this or that race studies, or basket-weaving froo-froo. The trades are every bit as important as degrees in architecture or engineering: nothing gets built, no matter how creatively or usefully drawn up or engineered, without tradesmen—plumbers, electricians, carpenters, heavy equipment operators—to do the actual work. That needs to be emphasized.

Another branch is for the Federal government to stop sending taxpayer money to colleges and universities. What started out as a good idea, enlisting these institutions in basic research, has become badly abused in hiring “diversity” mavens, pushing identity separations, expansions of those froo-froo studies. The Federal monies have become excuses to hire excessive administrative overhead and to raise tuition to absorb the Federal influx. Cut it out.

A third branch is to require two things of colleges and universities: one is to publish, for each major the school offers, including “independent studies,” the average salaries of its graduates five years after graduation. The other is to require the college/university whose student applies for a loan(s) to be the lender of the majority of the borrowed amount or to guarantee the entire loan(s) provided by any other lender.