Kerry is protected and thus secure because of Hunter Tapes?
https://thenationalpulse.com/
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Who is Biden? We know a good bit about who Biden is because he has been around a long time. We know he has accomplished little as a politician, is a plagiarist and liar, has enriched himself, along with his family, at the public trough. We know he has flipped and flopped when it comes to his racial views and we know he will say and do pretty much anything because he is shallow. We believe he is in questionable mental health and may not serve he entire term in office and is under significant pressure from the radical element of his Party.
What we do not know is who he is as President and these articles I am posting, I believe, help to identify/define him.
The Joe Biden Mystery Dance
If there’s a strategy, it’s to inherit a boom and survive the left.
This idea didn’t originate in U.S. politics with Antifa or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. It was discovered in the offices of university presidents that were occupied in the late 1960s by student protesters and their announced strategy of “nonnegotiable demands.”
Mr. Biden knows as well as anyone what the tumultuous era of nonnegotiable demands was about because he served in the Senate alongside one of the most notable figures of that period, California Republican S.I. Hayakawa.
Before his election to the Senate in 1976, Hayakawa was president of San Francisco State University, an institution gripped by student strikes and occupations in late 1968. In testimony to Congress, Hayakawa astutely summarized what happened then—and where we are now.
“I have said repeatedly that impatience with democratic processes is at the heart of student unrest,” Hayakawa testified. They replaced the “unglamorous aspect of democratic decision making” with a “list of nonnegotiable demands.”
Predicting our current moment, Hayakawa concluded: “The way things have gone of late, their system seems to be working too well to abandon it for traditional processes.”
He’s right. Why should the left—whether in the streets, in the corporate boardrooms or at the highest levels of America’s government—abandon a strategy of refusing to negotiate? It’s working. Everywhere today the opposition is being overrun or intimidated into silence.
His latest $1.8 trillion plan rejects the old social contract of work for benefits.
By The Editorial Board
The progressive hits keep coming from the Biden Administration, and the latest is the $1.8 trillion American Families Plan introduced in broad strokes on Wednesday. It’s more accurate to call this the plan to make the middle class dependent on government from cradle to grave. The government will tell you sometime later, after you’re hooked to the state, how it will force you to pay for it.
We’d call the price tag breathtaking, but by now what’s another $2 trillion? Add $2 trillion or so each for the Covid and green energy (“infrastructure”) bills, and that’s $6 trillion of new spending in 100 days. That doesn’t include the regular federal budget of more than $4 trillion a year. No worries, mate, the Federal Reserve will monetize the debt.
But the cost, while staggering, isn’t the only or even the biggest problem. The destructive part is the way the plan seeks to insinuate government cash and the rules that go with it into all of the major decisions of family life. The goal is to expand the entitlement state to make Americans rely on government and the political class for everything they don’t already provide.
The White House talking points pitch this in the smothering love of the welfare state: “making care affordable”; free medical and family leave; “free education”; two years of “universal pre-school”; “invest in the care workforce.” Subsidies and millions of new care givers, all licensed and unionized, will nurture you through the challenge of earning a living and raising a family.
One question to ask is: Haven’t we tried this before? What is Head Start if not government pre-school education and child care? Weren’t school lunches and the Women, Infants and Children program supposed to prevent child hunger? Food stamps, welfare checks, child-care subsidies and a supplement to earned-income, plus public housing. Weren’t all of these programs and more from previous decades supposed to end poverty?
Why did the trillions of dollars spent on those programs fail? And if they didn’t work, why do we need more?
For the candid answer, listen to Rahm Emanuel, the Chicago Democrat who explained the political calculation this week to the Washington Post: “Once everyone’s in, all the parents want in. Then it’s not a poor person’s program or a poverty program. It’s an education program. . . . That to me, that is essential. It changes the center of gravity once it’s for everybody.”
So much for the “safety net” to prevent poverty. This is now about mainlining benefits to middle-class families so they become addicted to government—and to the Democratic Party that has become the promoting agent of government.
Democrats are enamored of this principle of “universality” because it has worked to sustain the popularity of Social Security and Medicare, despite their failing finances. But those programs promise benefits in return for work across a lifetime. The Biden New Deal isn’t a deal at all. Most of its programs are free handouts on the model of the 1960s Great Society.
The new pre-school entitlement will go to all families, as would free community college. The tax-credit expansion to $3,600 per child in the Covid bill, which Mr. Biden wants to make permanent, is on top of the other welfare subsidies. The Biden plan also makes permanent an expansion of ObamaCare subsidies for more affluent adults, eliminating the subsidy cap that was 400% of poverty. A new paid family leave entitlement will be an incentive for companies to drop leave benefits that already cover most workers.
All of this adds up to healthy guaranteed annual income largely untied to the social contract that requires work, which is the real path to independence and self-respect.
The White House is also less than honest about how it will pay for all this. Its short answer is that more taxes on the wealthy and more IRS audits are enough. But that doesn’t come close.
The permanent child-tax credit expansion would cost $1.6 trillion over 10 years, according to our friends at Cornerstone Macro. The White House says it only costs $420 billion, but that’s because it only includes four years through 2025. The new entitlements ramp up slowly but explode in the later years, while the tax increases are immediate and won’t raise the revenue they expect.
That’s especially true of the increase in the top tax rate on capital gains to 43.4%, which would lose money by all historical experience. The White House tries to get around this by eliminating the step-up basis for paying capital gains at death, meaning an heir would pay the tax based on accrued value over a lifetime. This is a back door addition to the current death tax rate of 40%.
The White House also predicts that unleashing thousands of new IRS agents will find $700 billion in unpaid tax bills. But this prediction is based in part on old IRS data, before the 2017 tax reform that removed many tax loopholes, especially in the corporate tax code. The only benefit of the IRS audit army is that its $700 billion bogey replaces what would be another tax increase.
The new taxes are destructive, but their impact will take time to be felt as the post-pandemic economy soars. The GOP shouldn’t ignore the taxes and spending. But a more potent political target may be the bill’s tripling down on a welfare state that disdains the dignity of work and seeks to make Americans the wards of government.
By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.
The U.S. liberation of Europe was a shambolic enterprise as all gargantuan novel efforts tend to be: “Swimming” tanks carried their crews straight to the bottom on D-Day; Eisenhower was at wit’s end over Allied bombing of friendly troops; in the war’s last months, the U.S. contended not just with the enemy but thousands of U.S. deserters engaged in pilfering and reselling American supplies.
The liberation was nonetheless successful because of a broad commitment in the American electorate and society to getting it done.
Eisenhower later as president would limit himself to realistic aims: an interstate highway system, the U2 program that allowed the U.S. to measure Soviet ICBM capabilities against the hysterical claims of Khrushchev and the Democrats.
Which brings us to Joe Biden. He speaks as if he has a mandate to do heroic things regardless of cost; hard to pick up amid the verbal grandiosity are the one or two realistic ones he perhaps hopes to accomplish. He might get a union-built electric-vehicle charging network, but the alleged problem of climate change would remain as unaffected as ever.
To govern is to choose, notes the journal Foreign Affairs, but “the administration of President Joe Biden often seems to believe that to govern . . . is to choose nearly everything.”
Uselessly, the press prefers to gobble up his rhetorical unrealities rather than diagnose them. A likely answer is that Mr. Biden sees his presidency nicely set up by the vaccine and an economy whose only possible direction is up; his first job is to make sure his party’s vitriolic left doesn’t spoil it for him. Deliberately, he may be playing for the midterms, when Republicans will be strengthened, the left will be weakened, and he will still be president and can choose his priorities more realistically.
It’s good to remember who Mr. Biden is. There was nothing in his 2020 campaign (from his basement), his nomination success (handed to him by his party’s black caucus), or his meager and coattail-less victory over the most vilified incumbent in a century that indicated he was meant to do big things.
His decades in the Senate reveal nothing like Ted Kennedy’s devotion to health care. His history on issues, for and against, adds up to little more than a record of ad hoc calculation. Famously, Obama Defense Secretary Robert Gates said that Mr. Biden was “wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national-security issue over the past four decades.” It might be fairer to say Mr. Biden, from his sinecure in Delaware, had little need to think about issues beyond what position might serve him best between now and dinner-time.
In the old-school leftist magazine the Nation, Kimberly Phillips-Fein nails a truth. In desperation, progressive pundits in 2020 seized on Mr Biden’s family tragedies, starting with his young wife’s and daughter’s deaths in a car crash. His personal suffering and America’s in the pandemic would become one, and the remedy (surprise) would be every item on the progressive wish list, from banning fossil fuels to the full woke panoply on race, class and big business.
This probably sounded as good to Mr. Biden as anything he might come up with on his own or borrow from Neil Kinnock. And when I say pundits were desperate, I mean desperate. In raising the curtain on Wednesday’s speech to a joint session of Congress, CNN’s White House correspondent Stephen Collinson crowed: “The increasingly radical presidency of Joe Biden was built on a straightforward foundation: putting Covid-19 shots in arms and stimulus checks in the bank.”
Yep, he annexed Mr. Trump’s final year to Mr. Biden’s first 100 days.
Of course what strikes any non-suborned thinker is the sheer tininess of the FDR comparisons. The pandemic is a misfortune, but it’s not the Great Depression, a world war and the shadow of nuclear armageddon rolled into one. The huge sums pumped out by the Trump Treasury and Federal Reserve to prop up incomes, plus the basic soundness of the underlying economy (no devitalizing credit excesses), means Mr. Biden was primed to inherit a world-beating bottle-rocket of a recovery.
He blurted out an insight when he declared his late son, Beau, the “finest” of the Biden's. Even the mainstream press occasionally notices that his brothers, son, sister and other relatives have built careers around their Joe connection in a manner that the Delaware News Journal somewhat defensively notes is “hardly a new phenomenon in Washington.”
At bottom he’s a machine politician, which is not the worst thing you can say about anybody.
He’s also old, white and rubbed shoulders half a century ago with segregationists in Congress in a party where the most influential activists are ready to call anyone a racist at the drop of a hat. A good part of what you hear on Wednesday night about “transforming” society likely will be aimed not at you but at this 1% of his coalition, from a president whom nature and the times still teach us to expect mercifully little.
The U.S. liberation of Europe was a shambolic enterprise as all gargantuan novel efforts tend to be: “Swimming” tanks carried their crews straight to the bottom on D-Day; Eisenhower was at wit’s end over Allied bombing of friendly troops; in the war’s last months, the U.S. contended not just with the enemy but thousands of U.S. deserters engaged in pilfering and reselling American supplies.
The liberation was nonetheless successful because of a broad commitment in the American electorate and society to getting it done.
Eisenhower later as president would limit himself to realistic aims: an interstate highway system, the U2 program that allowed the U.S. to measure Soviet ICBM capabilities against the hysterical claims of Khrushchev and the Democrats.
Which brings us to Joe Biden. He speaks as if he has a mandate to do heroic things regardless of cost; hard to pick up amid the verbal grandiosity are the one or two realistic ones he perhaps hopes to accomplish. He might get a union-built electric-vehicle charging network, but the alleged problem of climate change would remain as unaffected as ever.
To govern is to choose, notes the journal Foreign Affairs, but “the administration of President Joe Biden often seems to believe that to govern . . . is to choose nearly everything.”
Uselessly, the press prefers to gobble up his rhetorical unrealities rather than diagnose them. A likely answer is that Mr. Biden sees his presidency nicely set up by the vaccine and an economy whose only possible direction is up; his first job is to make sure his party’s vitriolic left doesn’t spoil it for him. Deliberately, he may be playing for the midterms, when Republicans will be strengthened, the left will be weakened, and he will still be president and can choose his priorities more realistically.
It’s good to remember who Mr. Biden is. There was nothing in his 2020 campaign (from his basement), his nomination success (handed to him by his party’s black caucus), or his meager and coattail-less victory over the most vilified incumbent in a century that indicated he was meant to do big things.
His decades in the Senate reveal nothing like Ted Kennedy’s devotion to health care. His history on issues, for and against, adds up to little more than a record of ad hoc calculation. Famously, Obama Defense Secretary Robert Gates said that Mr. Biden was “wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national-security issue over the past four decades.” It might be fairer to say Mr. Biden, from his sinecure in Delaware, had little need to think about issues beyond what position might serve him best between now and dinner-time.
In the old-school leftist magazine the Nation, Kimberly Phillips-Fein nails a truth. In desperation, progressive pundits in 2020 seized on Mr Biden’s family tragedies, starting with his young wife’s and daughter’s deaths in a car crash. His personal suffering and America’s in the pandemic would become one, and the remedy (surprise) would be every item on the progressive wish list, from banning fossil fuels to the full woke panoply on race, class and big business.
This probably sounded as good to Mr. Biden as anything he might come up with on his own or borrow from Neil Kinnock. And when I say pundits were desperate, I mean desperate. In raising the curtain on Wednesday’s speech to a joint session of Congress, CNN’s White House correspondent Stephen Collinson crowed: “The increasingly radical presidency of Joe Biden was built on a straightforward foundation: putting Covid-19 shots in arms and stimulus checks in the bank.”
Yep, he annexed Mr. Trump’s final year to Mr. Biden’s first 100 days.
Of course what strikes any non-suborned thinker is the sheer tininess of the FDR comparisons. The pandemic is a misfortune, but it’s not the Great Depression, a world war and the shadow of nuclear armageddon rolled into one. The huge sums pumped out by the Trump Treasury and Federal Reserve to prop up incomes, plus the basic soundness of the underlying economy (no devitalizing credit excesses), means Mr. Biden was primed to inherit a world-beating bottle-rocket of a recovery.
He blurted out an insight when he declared his late son, Beau, the “finest” of the Biden's. Even the mainstream press occasionally notices that his brothers, son, sister and other relatives have built careers around their Joe connection in a manner that the Delaware News Journal somewhat defensively notes is “hardly a new phenomenon in Washington.”
At bottom he’s a machine politician, which is not the worst thing you can say about anybody.
He’s also old, white and rubbed shoulders half a century ago with segregationists in Congress in a party where the most influential activists are ready to call anyone a racist at the drop of a hat. A good part of what you hear on Wednesday night about “transforming” society likely will be aimed not at you but at this 1% of his coalition, from a president whom nature and the times still teach us to expect mercifully little.
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Biden’s First 100 Days—and the Next 100
Voters like the president’s demeanor, and he can notch a win on infrastructure.
By William A. Galston
As Joe Biden heads toward the 100th day of his presidency and prepares to address the nation, he has reason to feel good about his time in office so far. His job approval is holding steady in the mid-50s, and he is getting high marks for his character, leadership and demeanor. The public supports his handling of the Covid-19 pandemic, especially his vaccine rollout. He quickly passed his first major initiative, the American Rescue Plan. His aides appear to be working well together, and for the most part internal conflicts have been kept off the front pages.
Mr. Biden has also done well in another important dimension of the presidency—his role as party leader. Surveys have shown nearly unanimous support for him among Democrats. This isn’t surprising, because his statements and proposals have reflected the center of gravity in the Democratic Party. Cynics dismissed the results of last year’s post primary negotiations between progressives and the center left as a campaign truce that would give way to factional fighting after the election. Instead, these unity documents have turned out to be reliable predictors of the administration’s stances.
There is one conspicuous exception—the administration’s handling of refugees. Democrats criticized President Trump for lowering the annual cap on refugee admissions to 15,000. During his campaign, Mr. Biden promised to raise it to 125,000. After hesitating for several months, however, earlier this month he declined to increase it, provoking a backlash from his party that forced him to change course.
As the controversy unfolded, the press reported that the president had rebuffed a plea from Secretary of State Antony Blinken not to maintain Mr. Trump’s cap. This is a classic example of John F. Kennedy’s maxim that victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan. No administration is exempt from public discord when officials want to distance themselves from unpopular policies.
As the president looks beyond his first big proposal to two others—the recent American Jobs Plan and the American Families Plan, which reportedly will be released ahead of his national address—he faces a choice: Will he try to pass initiatives totaling more than $4 trillion with the votes of Democrats only, or will he accept the compromises needed to bring some Republicans on board?
Mr. Biden campaigned on a pledge to mend the divisions that have disfigured the legislative process and threatened the stability of governing institutions. Making good on this pledge would require him to move away from the center of his party toward the center of the country—a shift that would anger many on his left flank. The flap over refugee policy offered a foretaste. Many Democrats believe that the quest for compromise is a fool’s errand in an era of polarized politics.
President Biden appears to have a more optimistic view. Three weeks ago he signaled his openness to negotiations on the jobs plan. “Compromise is inevitable,” he declared. “Changes to my plan are certain.”
If Mr. Biden wants broad support, he will have to give ground on the scope of the bill and how to pay for it. Republicans have indicated a willingness to proceed with the portions of the bill they regard as infrastructure investments (broadband, roads, bridges), but not the others. None will accept the administration’s proposal to increase the corporate tax rate to 28%.
Sen. Chris Coons, a Democrat from the president’s home state of Delaware, has suggested dividing the jobs proposal into two bills. One would focus on infrastructure, the other on items such as housing and home healthcare. Democrats could work with Republicans to pass the first bill, and pass the latter through reconciliation if all Democrats support it.
Although it’s possible that some Republicans would back a more modest increase in the corporate tax rate, the bulk of the funding would have to come from other measures. As I argued last week, a multiyear commitment to improving tax collection could raise revenues by $1.5 trillion over the next decade. A broad-based minimum tax would ensure that every large corporation would pay something. User fees are off the table, because the president won’t break his pledge to increase taxes only on households making more than $400,000 annually.
Compromise is still possible. Both President Biden and Republicans must now decide whether they are prepared to take heat from their own ranks to pursue it.
Voters like the president’s demeanor, and he can notch a win on infrastructure.
By William A. Galston
As Joe Biden heads toward the 100th day of his presidency and prepares to address the nation, he has reason to feel good about his time in office so far. His job approval is holding steady in the mid-50s, and he is getting high marks for his character, leadership and demeanor. The public supports his handling of the Covid-19 pandemic, especially his vaccine rollout. He quickly passed his first major initiative, the American Rescue Plan. His aides appear to be working well together, and for the most part internal conflicts have been kept off the front pages.
Mr. Biden has also done well in another important dimension of the presidency—his role as party leader. Surveys have shown nearly unanimous support for him among Democrats. This isn’t surprising, because his statements and proposals have reflected the center of gravity in the Democratic Party. Cynics dismissed the results of last year’s post primary negotiations between progressives and the center left as a campaign truce that would give way to factional fighting after the election. Instead, these unity documents have turned out to be reliable predictors of the administration’s stances.
There is one conspicuous exception—the administration’s handling of refugees. Democrats criticized President Trump for lowering the annual cap on refugee admissions to 15,000. During his campaign, Mr. Biden promised to raise it to 125,000. After hesitating for several months, however, earlier this month he declined to increase it, provoking a backlash from his party that forced him to change course.
As the controversy unfolded, the press reported that the president had rebuffed a plea from Secretary of State Antony Blinken not to maintain Mr. Trump’s cap. This is a classic example of John F. Kennedy’s maxim that victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan. No administration is exempt from public discord when officials want to distance themselves from unpopular policies.
As the president looks beyond his first big proposal to two others—the recent American Jobs Plan and the American Families Plan, which reportedly will be released ahead of his national address—he faces a choice: Will he try to pass initiatives totaling more than $4 trillion with the votes of Democrats only, or will he accept the compromises needed to bring some Republicans on board?
Mr. Biden campaigned on a pledge to mend the divisions that have disfigured the legislative process and threatened the stability of governing institutions. Making good on this pledge would require him to move away from the center of his party toward the center of the country—a shift that would anger many on his left flank. The flap over refugee policy offered a foretaste. Many Democrats believe that the quest for compromise is a fool’s errand in an era of polarized politics.
President Biden appears to have a more optimistic view. Three weeks ago he signaled his openness to negotiations on the jobs plan. “Compromise is inevitable,” he declared. “Changes to my plan are certain.”
If Mr. Biden wants broad support, he will have to give ground on the scope of the bill and how to pay for it. Republicans have indicated a willingness to proceed with the portions of the bill they regard as infrastructure investments (broadband, roads, bridges), but not the others. None will accept the administration’s proposal to increase the corporate tax rate to 28%.
Sen. Chris Coons, a Democrat from the president’s home state of Delaware, has suggested dividing the jobs proposal into two bills. One would focus on infrastructure, the other on items such as housing and home healthcare. Democrats could work with Republicans to pass the first bill, and pass the latter through reconciliation if all Democrats support it.
Although it’s possible that some Republicans would back a more modest increase in the corporate tax rate, the bulk of the funding would have to come from other measures. As I argued last week, a multiyear commitment to improving tax collection could raise revenues by $1.5 trillion over the next decade. A broad-based minimum tax would ensure that every large corporation would pay something. User fees are off the table, because the president won’t break his pledge to increase taxes only on households making more than $400,000 annually.
Compromise is still possible. Both President Biden and Republicans must now decide whether they are prepared to take heat from their own ranks to pursue it.
++++++++++++++++
Joe Biden’s Art of the Non-Deal
Negotiating with the opposition, the left concluded, merely impedes achieving their policy goals.
By Daniel Henninger
At 100 days, 90% of Joe Biden’s presidency can be summed up in one sentence: Whatever Donald Trump did, do the opposite.
The reversals have come on taxes, energy, Iran, climate, regulation, the border, the police and press conferences.
And one more thing. Mr. Trump famously wrote “The Art of the Deal.” Joe Biden is perfecting the art of the non-deal.
A hallmark of Mr. Biden’s governing style so far is that the longtime member of the U.S. Senate hasn’t done a deal with anyone. On any given issue, he or the people who do most of the talking for him say they are willing to negotiate. But then they don’t. He’s issued more than 60 executive orders and memos already.
In February, 10 moderate Republican senators trooped into the Oval Office to seek a compromise with their old chum over his proposed $1.9 trillion “Covid relief” bill. They trooped out with nothing. A day later, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer began the Biden spending avalanche by using budget reconciliation rules.
Currently we are watching a kabuki performance over getting Republican buy-in to a compromise led by West Virginia Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin on Mr. Biden’s $2.3 trillion infrastructure bill. Mr. Biden’s earnest Republican negotiating partners should take the advice Humphrey Bogart’s Sam Spade gave the cops in “The Maltese Falcon”: “Wake up, Dundy, you’re being kidded.”
Bill Clinton redefined the meaning of “is.” Mr. Biden is redefining the meaning of everything—from infrastructure to debt to compromise.
Still, the belief endures in the American mind that a divided political order should be about compromise, so why has Mr. Biden turned serious negotiation into a nullity?
I think I have the answer to this riddle.
Mr. Biden has adopted a benign version of the antifa model of negotiation. That’s right, Antifa, the far-left anarchist movement.
The Antifa model turns on the explicit belief that by refusing to negotiate anything with anyone, eventually you will win. A web posting by the Antifa-related group CrimethInc.com the day of Derek Chauvin’s guilty verdict attributed his prosecution and those against the police in Baltimore to their unforgiving street tactics.
“You put yourself in a weaker bargaining position by spelling out from the beginning the least it would take to appease you,” wrote CrimethInc. “It’s smarter to appear implacable: So you want to come to terms? Make us an offer. In the meantime, we’ll be here blocking the freeway and setting things on fire.”
Mr. Biden won’t be lying down in any freeways, but for those offended by the comparison, consider some history.
It is an article of faith on the Democratic left that Barack Obama made a mistake early in his presidency by trying to negotiate with congressional Republicans, notably over the Affordable Care Act. Negotiating with the opposition, progressives concluded, merely impedes achieving their policy goals.
Negotiating with the opposition, the left concluded, merely impedes achieving their policy goals.
By Daniel Henninger
At 100 days, 90% of Joe Biden’s presidency can be summed up in one sentence: Whatever Donald Trump did, do the opposite.
The reversals have come on taxes, energy, Iran, climate, regulation, the border, the police and press conferences.
And one more thing. Mr. Trump famously wrote “The Art of the Deal.” Joe Biden is perfecting the art of the non-deal.
A hallmark of Mr. Biden’s governing style so far is that the longtime member of the U.S. Senate hasn’t done a deal with anyone. On any given issue, he or the people who do most of the talking for him say they are willing to negotiate. But then they don’t. He’s issued more than 60 executive orders and memos already.
In February, 10 moderate Republican senators trooped into the Oval Office to seek a compromise with their old chum over his proposed $1.9 trillion “Covid relief” bill. They trooped out with nothing. A day later, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer began the Biden spending avalanche by using budget reconciliation rules.
Currently we are watching a kabuki performance over getting Republican buy-in to a compromise led by West Virginia Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin on Mr. Biden’s $2.3 trillion infrastructure bill. Mr. Biden’s earnest Republican negotiating partners should take the advice Humphrey Bogart’s Sam Spade gave the cops in “The Maltese Falcon”: “Wake up, Dundy, you’re being kidded.”
Bill Clinton redefined the meaning of “is.” Mr. Biden is redefining the meaning of everything—from infrastructure to debt to compromise.
Still, the belief endures in the American mind that a divided political order should be about compromise, so why has Mr. Biden turned serious negotiation into a nullity?
I think I have the answer to this riddle.
Mr. Biden has adopted a benign version of the antifa model of negotiation. That’s right, Antifa, the far-left anarchist movement.
The Antifa model turns on the explicit belief that by refusing to negotiate anything with anyone, eventually you will win. A web posting by the Antifa-related group CrimethInc.com the day of Derek Chauvin’s guilty verdict attributed his prosecution and those against the police in Baltimore to their unforgiving street tactics.
“You put yourself in a weaker bargaining position by spelling out from the beginning the least it would take to appease you,” wrote CrimethInc. “It’s smarter to appear implacable: So you want to come to terms? Make us an offer. In the meantime, we’ll be here blocking the freeway and setting things on fire.”
Mr. Biden won’t be lying down in any freeways, but for those offended by the comparison, consider some history.
It is an article of faith on the Democratic left that Barack Obama made a mistake early in his presidency by trying to negotiate with congressional Republicans, notably over the Affordable Care Act. Negotiating with the opposition, progressives concluded, merely impedes achieving their policy goals.
This idea didn’t originate in U.S. politics with Antifa or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. It was discovered in the offices of university presidents that were occupied in the late 1960s by student protesters and their announced strategy of “nonnegotiable demands.”
Mr. Biden knows as well as anyone what the tumultuous era of nonnegotiable demands was about because he served in the Senate alongside one of the most notable figures of that period, California Republican S.I. Hayakawa.
Before his election to the Senate in 1976, Hayakawa was president of San Francisco State University, an institution gripped by student strikes and occupations in late 1968. In testimony to Congress, Hayakawa astutely summarized what happened then—and where we are now.
“I have said repeatedly that impatience with democratic processes is at the heart of student unrest,” Hayakawa testified. They replaced the “unglamorous aspect of democratic decision making” with a “list of nonnegotiable demands.”
Predicting our current moment, Hayakawa concluded: “The way things have gone of late, their system seems to be working too well to abandon it for traditional processes.”
He’s right. Why should the left—whether in the streets, in the corporate boardrooms or at the highest levels of America’s government—abandon a strategy of refusing to negotiate? It’s working. Everywhere today the opposition is being overrun or intimidated into silence.
Al Davis, the legendary owner of the Oakland Raiders, summed up the approach in three words: “Just win, baby.” That’s how Joe Biden sees his presidency. History will recognize his wins, as the media is doing now, and put any political traditions he rolled over to get them in the footnotes.
More interesting is what the American people are making of how Mr. Biden and the Democratic left have transformed their slim 2020 victory into a political bulldozer.
Mr. Biden is no street anarchist, but the political “change” confronting Americans after more than a year living with Covid—constant antipolice protests, migrants streaming across the southern border, D.C. statehood, blowing up the legislative filibuster, packing the Supreme Court and some $6 trillion in new federal spending—is a lot of nonnegotiable bulldozer.
Next year, Mr. Biden and the Democrats will have to negotiate all of this with the American voter.
More interesting is what the American people are making of how Mr. Biden and the Democratic left have transformed their slim 2020 victory into a political bulldozer.
Mr. Biden is no street anarchist, but the political “change” confronting Americans after more than a year living with Covid—constant antipolice protests, migrants streaming across the southern border, D.C. statehood, blowing up the legislative filibuster, packing the Supreme Court and some $6 trillion in new federal spending—is a lot of nonnegotiable bulldozer.
Next year, Mr. Biden and the Democrats will have to negotiate all of this with the American voter.
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Biden’s Cradle-to-Grave Government His latest $1.8 trillion plan rejects the old social contract of work for benefits.
By The Editorial Board
The progressive hits keep coming from the Biden Administration, and the latest is the $1.8 trillion American Families Plan introduced in broad strokes on Wednesday. It’s more accurate to call this the plan to make the middle class dependent on government from cradle to grave. The government will tell you sometime later, after you’re hooked to the state, how it will force you to pay for it.
We’d call the price tag breathtaking, but by now what’s another $2 trillion? Add $2 trillion or so each for the Covid and green energy (“infrastructure”) bills, and that’s $6 trillion of new spending in 100 days. That doesn’t include the regular federal budget of more than $4 trillion a year. No worries, mate, the Federal Reserve will monetize the debt.
But the cost, while staggering, isn’t the only or even the biggest problem. The destructive part is the way the plan seeks to insinuate government cash and the rules that go with it into all of the major decisions of family life. The goal is to expand the entitlement state to make Americans rely on government and the political class for everything they don’t already provide.
The White House talking points pitch this in the smothering love of the welfare state: “making care affordable”; free medical and family leave; “free education”; two years of “universal pre-school”; “invest in the care workforce.” Subsidies and millions of new care givers, all licensed and unionized, will nurture you through the challenge of earning a living and raising a family.
One question to ask is: Haven’t we tried this before? What is Head Start if not government pre-school education and child care? Weren’t school lunches and the Women, Infants and Children program supposed to prevent child hunger? Food stamps, welfare checks, child-care subsidies and a supplement to earned-income, plus public housing. Weren’t all of these programs and more from previous decades supposed to end poverty?
Why did the trillions of dollars spent on those programs fail? And if they didn’t work, why do we need more?
For the candid answer, listen to Rahm Emanuel, the Chicago Democrat who explained the political calculation this week to the Washington Post: “Once everyone’s in, all the parents want in. Then it’s not a poor person’s program or a poverty program. It’s an education program. . . . That to me, that is essential. It changes the center of gravity once it’s for everybody.”
So much for the “safety net” to prevent poverty. This is now about mainlining benefits to middle-class families so they become addicted to government—and to the Democratic Party that has become the promoting agent of government.
Democrats are enamored of this principle of “universality” because it has worked to sustain the popularity of Social Security and Medicare, despite their failing finances. But those programs promise benefits in return for work across a lifetime. The Biden New Deal isn’t a deal at all. Most of its programs are free handouts on the model of the 1960s Great Society.
The new pre-school entitlement will go to all families, as would free community college. The tax-credit expansion to $3,600 per child in the Covid bill, which Mr. Biden wants to make permanent, is on top of the other welfare subsidies. The Biden plan also makes permanent an expansion of ObamaCare subsidies for more affluent adults, eliminating the subsidy cap that was 400% of poverty. A new paid family leave entitlement will be an incentive for companies to drop leave benefits that already cover most workers.
All of this adds up to healthy guaranteed annual income largely untied to the social contract that requires work, which is the real path to independence and self-respect.
The White House is also less than honest about how it will pay for all this. Its short answer is that more taxes on the wealthy and more IRS audits are enough. But that doesn’t come close.
The permanent child-tax credit expansion would cost $1.6 trillion over 10 years, according to our friends at Cornerstone Macro. The White House says it only costs $420 billion, but that’s because it only includes four years through 2025. The new entitlements ramp up slowly but explode in the later years, while the tax increases are immediate and won’t raise the revenue they expect.
That’s especially true of the increase in the top tax rate on capital gains to 43.4%, which would lose money by all historical experience. The White House tries to get around this by eliminating the step-up basis for paying capital gains at death, meaning an heir would pay the tax based on accrued value over a lifetime. This is a back door addition to the current death tax rate of 40%.
The White House also predicts that unleashing thousands of new IRS agents will find $700 billion in unpaid tax bills. But this prediction is based in part on old IRS data, before the 2017 tax reform that removed many tax loopholes, especially in the corporate tax code. The only benefit of the IRS audit army is that its $700 billion bogey replaces what would be another tax increase.
The new taxes are destructive, but their impact will take time to be felt as the post-pandemic economy soars. The GOP shouldn’t ignore the taxes and spending. But a more potent political target may be the bill’s tripling down on a welfare state that disdains the dignity of work and seeks to make Americans the wards of government.
Peter Kreeft (Prof. of Philosophy at Boston College) once wrote, “We are condemned to live in an age of experts. Where have all of the wise men gone.” – paraphrased
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More regarding our deficient Navy and it's inability to successfully defend the varying assigned tasks and responsibilities.
The Pentagon hasn’t spelled out how it would win a maritime war against China.
By Seth Cropsey
The U.S. Navy is at sea, figuratively as well as literally. It has 101 ships deployed around the world—the same number as during the Cold War—yet the entire fleet is only 297 vessels strong. That’s about half the Reagan-era level of nearly 600. The consequences of maintaining current global commitments with a shrunken fleet include long deployments—some sailors spend close to a year at sea—as well as more maintenance and less time for training.
The figurative sense in which the Navy is at sea is more important and more dangerous. The fleet doesn’t have enough ships to meet global commitments, even as the U.S. faces growing naval competition from China, Russia, Iran and North Korea. Each of these potential adversaries possesses missiles and aircraft whose sole purpose is to keep U.S. naval f
Were hostilities to break out between China and the U.S., the conflict would be a naval one. It would test the U.S. ability to move naval and amphibious forces across the 7,000-mile Pacific moat in time to assist American allies and partners, deny China’s use of the shipping lanes between it and the Middle East, and operate effectively to command the South China, East China and Yellow seas. The Chinese Navy would be a formidable foe. It has long-range missiles, a nascent aircraft-carrier force and increasingly modern ships and weapons of all categories, as well as cyber and space capabilities.
Simply building more U.S. ships and submarines wouldn’t be enough to meet the challenge. Strategic thinking and a change in fleet design and tactics will be necessary. In the 1930s, the Navy and Marine Corps identified Japan as a likely future enemy and developed—and practiced—the ideas of naval aviation and island-hopping that eventually won the Pacific War.
On Dec. 17 then-Navy Secretary Kenneth Braithwaite released a document billed as a “tri-service maritime strategy.” Signed by the chiefs of the Navy, Marine Corps and Coast Guard, “Advantage at Sea” correctly identifies China as a “pressing, long-term threat” and calls for traditional—and important—actions such as integrated operations, allied participation, modernization and sea control. But it isn’t a maritime strategy. It offers no suggestions about how to win a naval war against China.
Nothing prevents the Pentagon from articulating a strategy. During the Cold War, the U.S. Maritime Strategy told everyone from Congress to the Kremlin that in the event of war the U.S. Navy would target the enemy’s ballistic-missile submarine bastions and divert Soviet concentration from the central front in Germany by striking its oceanic flanks from the northern seas to the Mediterranean to the Pacific. The Navy used the strategy’s stated goals to argue for the funds to build an enlarged fleet, the cold-water training needed to prepare for conflict in northern seas, and the composition of aircraft carriers’ air wings.
No similar strategy exists today, partly because the Navy hasn’t made it a priority to produce one and partly because turf battles have impeded the interbranch cooperation necessary to make it happen. In a May 1954 article in Proceedings, the U.S. Naval Institute’s magazine, Samuel Huntington argued that the military services must have a “strategic concept,” which he described as “a description of how, when and where the military expects to protect the nation. . . . If a military service does not possess such a concept, it becomes purposeless.” Nothing has changed. Legislation passed in the 1980s placed greater emphasis on coordination between the military services. It didn’t absolve the military services of their obligation to articulate a strategy.
China has a straightforward strategy: Keep the U.S. Navy from using its formidable capabilities to support allies and disrupt the regional—and eventually global—hegemony that China’s rulers seek. The U.S. Navy is caught up in all the derivative issues that a clear strategy would address such as budgets, training, ship numbers and fleet composition. We have no maritime strategy for a conflict that would be waged at sea. There is no more important issue facing the American military.
Mr. Cropsey is director of the Hudson Institute’s Center for American Seapower. He served as a naval officer and was a deputy undersecretary of the Navy in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations.
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Riley tells us what we intuitively know. Democrats must keep repeating race relations are worse because that false and hypocritical narrative remains their road to retaining power. Division among the races and to hell with America is their cynical objective goal.
Riley also gives statistics on what I have preached for years. Growth in intermarriage will help solve most racial issues because minimally speaking all want the same , ie. security, earn a living, support one's family.
Race Relations in America Are Better Than Ever
Obsessed with theories of ‘systemic racism’ and ‘unconscious bias,’ the media ignores good news.
By Jason L. Riley
You wouldn’t know it from recent headlines, but there’s good news about race in the U.S. today. The pessimism peddled on the left by pundits and elected officials is in the service of an ideological agenda, and it’s probably doing more real harm to race relations than any actual racism.
A big part of the problem is that the political press has never come to grips with Donald Trump’s election in 2016. The media didn’t anticipate it, refused to accept it, and have been willfully misinterpreting the reasons for it. Their preferred narrative is that racists, sexists and xenophobes put Mr. Trump in the White House, thus demonstrating that hatred and bigotry in the U.S. are ascendant. But is it true?
First, it’s worth clarifying (yet again) that former supporters of Barack Obama, not white nationalists, were the voters responsible for Mr. Trump’s election. Only occasionally did the establishment media acknowledge this in its reporting. “It’s clear that large numbers of white, working-class voters shifted from the Democrats to Mr. Trump,” reads a New York Times dispatch from 2017. “He flipped millions of white working-class Obama supporters to his side. The voter file data makes it impossible to avoid this conclusion.”
If journalists haven’t avoided this conclusion entirely, they’ve spent far more time pushing an alternative explanation that cites supposed racial retrenchment in the U.S. as the main driver of Mr. Trump’s political success. The fruits of this effort are laid bare by political scientist Eric Kaufmann in a compelling new report from the Manhattan Institute. Using survey data, Mr. Kaufmann notes that racial attitudes have been trending toward more tolerance for well over half a century, even as black politicians (Mr. Obama, Kamala Harris ), professional polemicists (Ta-Nehisi Coates, Ibram X. Kendi ) and major media organs (the New York Times’s “1619 Project”) continue to insist otherwise.
According to Mr. Kaufmann, “at a time when measures of racist attitudes and behavior have never been more positive, pessimism about racism and race relations has increased in America.” Terms like “systemic racism” and “unconscious bias” are increasingly common, but white racist views have been in steady decline, whether with regard to having black co-workers, classmates or neighbors.
Intermarriage trend lines also undermine the notion that racial bigotry in America is a growing problem. “Approval of black-white intermarriage rose among whites from around 4% in 1958 to 45% in 1995 and 84% in 2013,” Mr. Kaufmann writes. “In 2017, fewer than 10% of whites in a major Pew survey said that interracial marriage was a ‘bad thing,’ ” and the “actual share of intermarried newlyweds rose from 3% in 1967 to 17% in 2015.” In fact, intermarriages involving Asians, Hispanics and Jews have all risen sharply over the decades, yet progressive intellectuals want to lecture the rest of us on how to be “antiracist.”
What explains the wide perception of racial retrogression at a time when surveys show that racial attitudes and behaviors have never been better? Mr. Kaufmann cites ideology, partisanship and the media’s ability “to frame events and social trends.” The political left has a stake in overstating both the existence and effects of racism so that it can advocate for more and bigger programs to combat it. And the media has long been willing to do the left’s ideological bidding. Social media allows for wide publicity of statistically rare incidents that are in reality getting even rarer, giving the impression that isolated and infrequent events “happen all the time.”
This research goes a long way toward explaining last summer’s street protests and why the nation was on pins and needles last week while awaiting the George Floyd verdict. The media has fed the public a story line about race and policing that serves the interests of activists and liberal politicians but that cannot be supported by facts and data.
Fatal encounters between police officers and black suspects are always unfortunate and sometimes tragic, but they’re also exceedingly rare. Nor is it rational to conclude, without supporting evidence, that these encounters are driven by racial animus. As Mr. Kaufmann notes, “police killings of African-Americans declined by 60%-80% from the late 1960s to the early 2000s and have remained at this level ever since.” According to a Washington Post database, police shot and killed 999 people in 2019, including 424 whites and 252 blacks. Twelve of the black victims were unarmed, versus 26 of the white victims. In a country where annual arrests number more than 10 million, if those black death totals constitute an “epidemic” of police use of lethal force against blacks, then the word has lost all meaning.
It’s becoming clearer by the day that journalism’s cavalier disregard for providing the necessary context in its coverage of racial controversies, and the willingness of so many in the media to play down or ignore the truth about America’s racial progress, is not simply wrong but also dangerous.
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Let it burn baby! https://townhall.com/columnistAnd: Provide a fire for eating meat? Is this to racist? https://teapartyorg.ning.com/
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A solution to Critical Race Garbage: (highlight, copy , transfer to top and open)
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-p
Finally:
CNN would have prospered in Adolph 'land:
CNN would have prospered in Adolph 'land:
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Salena interviews Mitch:
My interview with Mitch McConnell from the Bluegrass State
By Salena Zito
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By Salena Zito
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