Must be a Democrat:
Biological male wins female beauty pageant in Nevada
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Biden called Putin a murderer so Putin challenged Biden to a debate. Biden keeps making himself look like the Dufuss he is and takes America with him:
FEATURE:
THE WORLD KNOWS: Putin challenges Biden to a LIVE debate
And:
Dufuss and Kamala are coming to Atlanta for a massage to show unity?
Biden and Harris to visit Georgia after shootings
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Op Ed's Speak for themselves:
The Immigration
Unpresident
If Joe Biden held a press conference, he
could explain why there’s a border crisis.
By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.
President Biden is not throwing away Donald Trump’s immigration policy. He’s throwing away the border policy of every president since Bill Clinton. When the early 1990s dawned so did the realization behind what became known as “prevention through deterrence”—the U.S. may not be able to control its border but it can influence the incentives of those who seek to cross.
Experiments in the McAllen and El Paso sectors showed that
beefed-up surveillance in urbanized border areas could curtail crossers then
habituated to exploiting border-officer downtime or the presence of crowds.
Constrict these pathways and the risks involved in crossing the open desert or
the Rio Grande would do the job of semi-regulating illegal inflows.
This was hardly a lustrous way
of proceeding. Mr. Trump would come along later with the naive old-school
assumption that first you control the border and then you decide who gets in.
Which brings us to a question. Is
anything deliberate going on in Mr. Biden’s reversal of this approach? His
failure to hold a press conference in more than 50 days, unlike any president
since Coolidge, might not be an issue if the country were confident that he’s
on top of his game. The alternative? That unelected staffers, with no vision
beyond not being Donald Trump and trying to placate progressive Twitter users, have given us today’s border
dynamic.
The same question comes up in relation to a bunch of issues: the wish list that passed Congress under the name coronavirus relief, the excessive investment in trying to relabel Trump’s vaccine policy as Biden’s, the strange alchemy by which Mr. Trump’s leverage over Iran becomes Iran’s leverage over Mr. Biden.
Some bombs were dropped three weeks ago on Syria. Was Mr. Biden
involved in the deliberations or was there a second discussion about when and
how to involve the president?
The press might like to ask but he’s not making himself
available.
If triggering immigration chaos was a plan, the plan must have
included an assumption the press would direct the public’s attention elsewhere
in line with the theme that all such messes are Mr. Trump’s doing. It’s not
working. A media that covered up the Hunter Biden laptop isn’t covering up a
swelling crisis at the border, the deployment of the ill-suited Federal
Emergency Management Agency to handle a deluge of unaccompanied minors, the
release of hundreds of asylum seekers into the U.S. in return for questionable
promises to show up for a court date.
Press coverage of the California road
horror, after a van packed with 25 illegal migrants collided with a semi,
suggests Mr. Biden can’t count on the subject being changed in his favor. As
Mr. Trump fades in the rearview mirror, the media seems to have realized covering
up news isn’t a business model to produce viewership and ad revenues in the
long run.
Let’s back up. My favorite radio
moments are when a sympathetic liberal source says something that goes right
over the head of an NPR interviewer. At the height of the family reunification
furor, an ACLU lawyer not only agreed with
the Trump administration claim that families weren’t letting their children be
returned to them. His solution amounted to: If an unaccompanied minor arrives
at the U.S. border, the entire family should become entitled to emigrate to the
U.S.
The point being that lots of
organized interests by now are attuned to the U.S.’s unworkable, unenforceable,
chaos-producing border policies. The Transnational Institute points out that
the 13 biggest border security companies’ top employees contributed three times
as much in 2020 to Mr. Biden as they did to Mr. Trump—$5,364,994 vs.
$1,730,435. The statistic nobody keeps is how many would-be immigrants lose
their deterrence bet, dying at the hands of traffickers, or in the Sonora
desert or the Rio Grande. The Mexican government once estimated that 450 die
annually on either side of the border.
The Biden strategy seems not devised to improve matters, if
there’s any strategy at all. The administration has only incited a fresh flood
of risk takers. If there’s a strategy, it may be a political strategy—the same
as seen behind two gun-control bills last week passed by House Democrats. Cram
as many gestures to the left as possible into the administration’s first weeks
in hopes of changing the subject when next year’s Congressional midterms roll
around.
Hope too that Congress’s and the Fed’s unlimited spending will
coincide with a post-pandemic boom that an amnesiac media and public will interpret
as the universe shining on Mr. Biden after the Trump darkness.
Ironically, the
image-obsessed Mr. Trump did seem to care about concrete outcomes: a decline in
border arrests, higher wages for unskilled workers, billions in tariffs
collected from buyers of Chinese imports, vaccines—as if Mr. Trump mistily
suspected there was a real world and a president could affect it. If Mr. Biden
has such notions, he might hold a press conference to let us know.
+++
Biden Abandons
Normalcy
In an era of social media’s emotions,
progressive politics is about saving us from constant apocalypse.
By Daniel Henninger
It means more than nothing that President Biden recently could
not come up with the name of the defense secretary standing behind him or even
the Pentagon—“the guy who runs that outfit over there.” But do not confuse
these lapses with the notion that Mr. Biden is unskilled in the art of
political magic. He fooled me—getting nearly $2 trillion of long-term spending
passed under the pretense of a Covid crisis that is fading. He’s taking a
victory-lap tour now, and why not? He earned it.
We’ve said more than once here that
the pivotal event of the 2020 Democratic contest was Rep. Jim Clyburn’s
endorsement of Mr. Biden before the South Carolina primary. We seconded the conventional
wisdom that Mr. Clyburn concluded Sen. Bernie Sanders was too far left to win
the general election against Donald Trump. Mr. Clyburn saw that success ran
through a “moderate” Mr. Biden.
He was right. Where we were wrong—and for this flight from
cynicism, an apology is in order—was in thinking Mr. Clyburn disagreed with Mr.
Sanders’s politics.
Still, many voters believed the Biden campaign was, as
advertised, about rediscovering “normalcy.” It turns out the Biden presidency
isn’t about anything very normal. Now it’s about “going big,” despite his
minimalist election mandate.
Going big began with “Covid relief,” a euphemism to bury the
bill’s non-Covid goals, such as rolling back Bill Clinton’s landmark
welfare-towork reform law. The work part is being eliminated.
Recall as well how last July many thought Mr. Biden was throwing
a sop to the party’s defeated progressives when he tweeted that his
administration “won’t just rebuild this nation—we’ll transform it.” In reply,
Mr. Sanders said Mr. Biden could be “the most progressive president” since
Franklin Roosevelt. Cynics snickered. Wrong again.
Mr. Trump was fond of saying the Democratic establishment
“rigged” the 2016 election against Bernie to favor Hillary Clinton. We now see
that while Mr. Trump plays politics day by day, Mr. Sanders plays long ball.
Mr. Trump lost Georgia and retired to Mar-a-Lago. Mr. Sanders lost South
Carolina and won the presidency.
Much as I hate to eat more crow, a secondary winner in 2020
needs to be acknowledged: Sen. Elizabeth Warren. Her campaign was also an
accurate predictor of what the “normal” Biden presidency would in fact become.
Sen. Warren’s contribution to what our politics have become was
to promote her ideas in the language of the political apocalypse, calling out
one dire crisis after another. She outranted even Mr. Sanders in describing America
as a failed nation requiring radical solutions.
During the campaign, conventional wisdom discounted the chances
that she or Mr. Sanders could win with the claim that the U.S. was in a
sea-to-shining-sea state of catastrophe. Instead, the argument went, the U.S.
electorate remains fundamentally center-left to center-right and wants to be
governed that way. But when 10 Republican senators visited Mr. Biden in the
Oval Office to offer center-right adjustments to his Covid bill, he showed them
the door.
So less than 100 days into the Biden presidency, a question: Mr.
Biden’s centrist or “normal” campaign pitch may have put him in the White
House. But is the Sanders-Warren political model—threaten the country
repeatedly with apocalyptic disasters if “we don’t act”—the way you win at
governing in our time?
Mr. Biden promoted his spending bill
by saying, falsely, that America’s Covid economic crisis is “not getting
better; it’s deepening.” But it was getting better.
Days after the bill passed, a headline in the Journal noted: “Factories
Struggle to Meet Demand.” Amazing how Mr. Biden has re-created the miracle of
the loaves and the fishes. Still, raising the stakes to apocalyptic levels
worked.
The Sanders-Warren over-the-top crisis rhetoric will now be
deployed daily to sell the rest of the party’s agenda.
The Biden climate bill’s estimated cost: $2 trillion, naturally.
We have a “narrow moment,” Mr. Biden says, to “avoid the most catastrophic
impacts of this crisis.”
Nor will we be allowed to forget we’re also in a “systemic
racism” crisis that emerged this past year. Some 55 years after passage of the
Voting Rights Act of 1965, Democrats are selling H.R.1 “to overcome rampant
voter suppression.” Mr. Clyburn, the godfather of normalcy, says the Senate
filibuster shouldn’t apply to H.R.1 because it is “voting right” legislation.
And if a real crisis happens, as with Central Americans flooding
through the southern border, euphemize it as someone else’s mess.
Somebody inside the
Biden team recognized that normalcy wins elections, but sober realism doesn’t
move legislation or public enthusiasm. The new reality may be that in an era of
social media, the most relevant metric is having one’s ever-at-risk heart in
the right place. That means turning every political issue into a referendum on
catastrophe. So far, smiling through the apocalypse seems to be working for Mr.
Biden.
+++++++++++++++++++
As noted in a previous memo, Republicans love being prostitutes also:
Earmarks Are
the GOP’s Bridge to Nowhere
Republicans sign on to the Democrats’
pork-barrel revival.
By The Editorial Board
As Democrats pushed through their $1.9 trillion spending bill,
Republicans lamented the largesse for political interest groups and pointed to
mounting federal debt. Yet on Wednesday the House GOP voted in a secret ballot,
102-84, to resurrect legislative earmarks.
Ay, caramba. The typical argument is that pork fat will
lubricate the gears in Congress. Think of the old days, the nostalgia goes,
when Speaker Tip O’Neill would invite Ronald Reagan over for a tipple and some
story-telling. The high-toned version of this rationale is that earmarks are a
small price to pay to buy votes for larger spending reform, such as
But as the late Tom Coburn of Oklahoma used to say, earmarks are
the “gateway drug” to the habit of bigger spending. The reality today will be
that Democratic committee chairs dole out a few goodies in return for GOP votes
in order to pass progressive policies.
Kevin McCarthy, the House GOP
leader, tried to
argue Wednesday that without earmarks Republicans would cede
their spending power to the White House. “There’s a real concern about the
administration directing where money goes,” Mr. McCarthy said. “I think members
here know what’s most important about what’s going on in their district, not
Biden.”
This sounds superficially plausible—if you block out memories before 2011, when Congress quit earmarks. To refresh recollections, Alaska’s infamous “bridge to nowhere,” earmarked with $223 million, was only one controversy. There was also $50 million for a proposed indoor rainforest in Iowa. Did a planned teapot museum in North Carolina deserve $500,000?
Absolutely, the local mayor adamantly argued. “We got $500,000
out of $29 billion,” the mayor said in 2006. “We don’t think we broke anybody.
The museum will bring more people to town.”
That attitude is the problem: With earmarks, the goal isn’t to
weigh projects rigorously on the merits, or even to ask if they ought to be
federally funded at all. The incentive is to satisfy the loudest voices in the
home district. Multiply by 535, and eventually you have real money, like the
hundreds of billions in the porky highway bills or for military construction.
The sales pitch this time is that there will be more
transparency and accountability. But then why did the GOP Members hide their
earmark vote behind a secret ballot?
The scheme corrodes public trust. Some congressional districts
are huge, including at-large seats for the entire states of Alaska and Montana.
Do elected politicians who cover thousands of square miles—and who throw a fit
anytime military bases or post offices are closed—objectively choose the best
projects amid the clamor for earmarks? Forgive voters for suspecting that
squeaky friends and political allies get the grease.
All of this is the
reason Democrats want to restore earmarks, which is one more argument for
Republicans to refuse. There’s an election in 20 months. Behaving like the
me-too spending party won’t make it easier to run against the Washington status
quo. Mr. McCarthy should be trying to regain a majority, and passing earmarks
is a GOP bridge to nowhere.
But:
When it comes to "whoring" Republicans, try as they will, can never outdo Democrats.
The Pension
Bailouts Begin
Congress spends $86 billion to rescue
multi-employer retirement funds with no demands for reform.
By The Editorial Board
Democrats left no liberal interest group behind in their $1.9
trillion spending bill this month. That includes private unions whose ailing
multi-employer pension plans will get an $86 billion rescue. This is the first
of many such air-drops to come.
It was perhaps inevitable that Congress would bail out
multi-employer pensions for the Teamsters and other private unions after doing
so for coal miners in 2019. But the Democrats’ spending bill does nothing to
fix the structural problems that have made these union pensions funds so sick.
Multi-employer pension funds became common after World War II in
industries like trucking, construction, manufacturing and retail. They allow
employers with a common union to join together and offer collective pension
plans. Labor and management collectively bargain benefits and contributions as
well as jointly administer the plans.
Unions like the plans because workers continue to accrue
benefits if they switch employers. If one business goes bankrupt, others must
pick up the cost for worker benefits. Workers also don’t lose benefits—at least
not immediately—if union-driven costs contribute to putting employers out of
business.
But the plans are riddled with perverse incentives that make
them risky. Employers award generous benefits and make paltry contributions so
they can pay higher wages. Pension funds invest in riskier assets to achieve
higher returns to support generous benefits and low contributions, but their
investments often underperform. As a result, 430 or so multi-employer plans are
now at risk of failing.
The federal Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. (PBGC) insures pension benefits up to $12,870 annually for participants with 30 years on the job. But because more and more multi-employer pension plans over the years have collapsed, the PBGC is also now in imminent danger of failing, which would result in most retirees receiving less than $1,000 per year.
Believe it or not, Congress passed bipartisan legislation in
2014 to head off this tsunami. The Multiemployer Pension Reform Act allowed
ailing plans to reduce benefits and make other changes to avoid insolvency.
Twenty or so plans have taken advantage of the law’s flexibility, but most
haven’t, betting instead on a bailout from Congress.
The Obama Administration also blocked benefit cuts by the
Teamsters’ Central States Pension Fund, which is projected to fail in the
middle of this decade. That fund’s liabilities could take down the PBGC too.
The Democratic spending bill heads off this disaster by allowing the PBGC to
make lump sum payments through 2025 that keep the sickest 185 or so plans
solvent through 2051.
Yet it prohibits the PBGC from conditioning aid on reforms to
governance, funding rules or benefit cuts. There’s also nothing in the law that
forbids benefit increases. The upshot is that many of these bailed out plans
may need another cash infusion not too many years from now. Other sick but not
yet moribund plans will have little incentive to make reforms that could make
them healthier.
The Congressional Budget Office projects this pension rescue
will cost a cool $86 billion, but that’s merely the start. The 430 or so
at-risk plans have some $300 billion in unfunded liabilities. Government unions
in Illinois, New Jersey and Connecticut are also sure to cite the precedent to
demand that their employee pensions be bailed out too.
Perhaps the only
silver lining is that private employers can now more easily exit multi-employer
plans and move to 401(k)s because their “withdrawal liability” will shrink due
to the federal infusion into the funds. But, as usual, taxpayers are getting
stuck with the bill.
++++++++++++++++++
Kim writes McConnell is about to take us from washing dirty linen to scorched earth:
A Day in a
Scorched-Earth Senate
Democrats want to ‘fix’ the chamber by
ending the filibuster. That would break it.
By Kimberley A. Strassel
The Democrat-media complex reserves a special scorn for politicians who burst their bubbles. So little wonder that cabal is dumping so hard this week on Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell. How dare he speak truth to filibuster nonsense?
The cognoscenti has spent years laying the groundwork for the
death of that Senate rule, which requires 60 votes to pass most legislation.
Central to the argument is that the filibuster is the reason we have a “broken”
Senate. Get rid of it, and legislation—nay, democracy!—will flow.
Mr. McConnell’s offense was his Tuesday
speech explaining why this has it completely backward. To blow up the
filibuster—and in the process infuriate 50 “minority” senators—would destroy
the one thing that does in fact make the
Senate function: comity. Democrats wouldn’t speed up their agenda; they would
bury it. The Senate, Mr. McConnell said, would be a “100-car pileup—nothing
moving.”
Trust him. As Majority Leader Chuck Schumer well knows, there
are 44 standing rules of the Senate; the filibuster is but one. A Congressional
Research Service report notes that most are designed to enhance “the rights of
individual senators” at the expense of “the powers of the majority.” To the
extent the Senate functions at all, the report notes repeatedly, it is only
because senators willingly relinquish those prerogatives. Mr. McConnell on
Tuesday described a world in which they don’t, which he called a
“scorched-earth Senate.”
It’s a world without “unanimous consent,” in which a senator asks all 99 colleagues to give up their right to object to a proposal. Senate leaders rely on unanimous consent dozens of a times a day. You need consent to open the Senate before noon, to dispense with the reading of the preceding day’s journal, to move to business, to avoid reading out loud the text of every amendment and resolution, to avoid roll call votes. The Senate functions because most consent requests are granted.
When they aren’t? It takes only one
Republican to object to a request but a majority to overcome most objections.
Mr. Schumer might at any time need all 50 of his members—and the vice
president—on the floor to move things along. Likewise to override a flow of
“points of order.” All day, every day. Republicans could flit in and out, and
it would only take a handful of members to force roll calls for all these
votes, eating up more hours. Democratic senators and Kamala Harris would essentially live at the
Capitol, constantly on call. If even one was absent at a crucial moment, the
Senate would essentially shut down.
Now add in “quorum” calls. Any senator can question, pretty much
any time, whether the Senate truly has 51 senators on the floor (the vice
president doesn’t count). It’s unclear whether a lone Republican could issue a
quorum call, flee and stymie Senate business until the sergeant of arms rounded
him back up. But even if that lone Republican stayed, quorum calls would eat up
hours. The Senate secretary is required in each case to call the roll, of all
100 senators. Anyone who has ever watched C-Span 2 knows this takes ages.
There are even more creative ideas, but these tools alone would
be enough to paralyze the institution. The Senate convenes. Quorum call. The
presiding officer asks for consent to forgo reading yesterday’s journal.
Republicans object. Roll call vote. The officer asks for consent to speed
through “morning business.” Republicans object. Democrats move to get on an
issue. Point of order. Roll-call vote. Quorum call. Republicans object to the
motion. Roll-call vote. A speech. Quorum call. Etc., and so on, until adjournment.
Democrats may be betting that
moderate Republicans would be uncomfortable exercising these tactics,
especially in matters of more routine business. Then again, it takes only one Republican to object or to issue
quorum calls. And don’t underestimate how bitter even moderate GOP members
would be if their “bipartisan” friends across the aisle join the effort to
dismantle minority rights.
The left could demand Senate Democrats kill more rules, stripping that individual power. But members willing to kill a rule primarily to enhance the current majority’s power will be far less keen to kill rules that shred their own rights. And even if West Virginia’s Joe Manchin or Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema could be successfully pummeled into axing the filibuster, would they really be willing to transform the Senate completely? To divest it systematically of every members’ right, privilege and prerogative that has made the institution unique?
The notion that killing the filibuster will make the Senate “work” is pure partisan fantasy. Mr. McConnell’s speech was designed to remind Democratic moderates that killing the rule won’t just destroy the rights of the minority, it will destroy what function still exists in the Senate.
The filibuster
isn’t the problem, and the Senate isn’t “broken.” All that stands in the way of
legislation is a Democratic majority unwilling to compromise on any aspect of a
radical agenda.
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American "woke" colleges and universities keep "skidding more and more" from their mission of encouraging free thought. America, and it's various institutions, has become the land of bias We no longer encourage reasoned debate because we have allowed PC'ism to radicalize our nation.
https://freebeacon.com/campus/
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