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The Joe Biden Presidency Thread


swordfish

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Biden Prepares to Strip College Students of Due-Process Rights

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/03/biden-prepares-to-strip-college-students-of-due-process-rights/

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It’s always worth reminding people that if President Joe Biden were compelled to live by the standards he intends to institute for college students accused of sexual misconduct, he would be presumed guilty of rape, denied any legitimate opportunity to refute Tara Reade’s charges, and tossed from office in disgrace.

 

The New York Times reports today that Biden’s Kafkaesque “White House Gender Policy Council” is “beginning his promised effort to dismantle Trump-era rules on sexual misconduct that afforded greater protections to students accused of assault.” The subhead informs us that, “The Biden administration will examine regulations by Betsy DeVos that gave the force of law to rules that granted more due-process rights to students accused of sexual assault.”

The most disingenuous word here — though the piece is brimming with them — is “more.” History did not begin in 2015, and former education secretary Betsy DeVos did not invent more due-process rights in Title IX; she simply reinstated time-honored fundamental due-process rights that have guided justice systems in the liberal world for hundreds of years. The Constitution says — twice — that no citizen shall be arbitrarily “deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law.” No means no.

It was only in 2011 that the Obama administration instituted fewer due-process rights through the force of law, denying the accused the ability to question accusers, the right to review the allegations and evidence presented by their accuser, the right to present exculpatory evidence, and the right to call witnesses. Basically, the right to mount a defense.

It was the Obama administration that asked schools to institute a system that empowered a single investigator, often without any training and susceptible to the vagaries of societal and political pressures, to pass unilateral judgment on these cases. Also, under the Obama administration rules, colleges were allowed to adjudicate sexual abuse and assault cases using a “preponderance of evidence” rather than a more stringent “clear and convincing evidence” standard.

Now, Jennifer Klein, the “Gender Policy Council” co-chair and chief of staff to First Lady Jill Biden, says “everybody involved” in a sexual complaint, “accused and accuser,” should be entitled to due process.

Okay. Has anyone ever argued that the accuser’s right to come forward should be diminished, or that the accused should be afforded fewer protections than any other American who says they are the victim of a crime? We should never diminish the pain and anguish those who come forward with these charges go through. But the presumption of innocence is a legal term based on a values system. And if the federal government is going to dictate how colleges deal with sexual-assault accusations, it has a responsibility to uphold the norms of the Constitution.

The good news is that between 2011 and 2021, there has been a string of court cases repudiating Biden’s position. Hundreds of lawsuits were filed since 2011. A 2015 study by United Educators found that a quarter of the Title IX statute had been challenged by students who either filed lawsuits in the federal courts or lodged complaints through the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights. Dozens of schools, including Northwestern University, Dartmouth College, and Yale, settled cases, while schools such as USC, Pennsylvania State University, Ohio University, Hofstra, Boston College, and Claremont McKenna all lost decisions.

Schools complained about the costs of implementing due process, yet the average cost of settling these claims was around $350,000, with some going as high as $1 million.

This, not incidentally, also means that some people who are guilty of sexual assault will claim to be victims of flawed hearings or unfair sanctions simply because they can circumvent the norms of justice. Proper due process protects both the accuser and the accused. At the very least, the state should ensure that students are afforded the same impartiality, norms, and protections that every one of us expects in the real world. Either we believe principles are the best means of fairness, or not. Biden, it seems, only believes in them for himself.

 

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Farmers react to billions in COVID-19 relief bill for Black farmers: 'Where did common sense go?': https://www.foxnews.com/politics/farmers-covid-debt-relief-bill-black-billion

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The $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package that President Biden is set to sign includes billions of dollars in debt relief and other assistance for farmers of color.

But the incorporation of race-based criteria for that relief is leaving other farmers scratching their heads. 

"Just because you’re a certain color you don’t have to pay back money? I don’t care if you’re purple, black, yellow, white, gray, if you borrow money you have to pay it back," Kelly Griggs, who runs her 1,800-acre farm with her husband in Humboldt, Tennessee, told Fox News in an interview. 

"My reaction is, Where did common sense go?" Griggs said. "We can’t strike. We can’t stop. That's the part that really sucks. These people in Washington who make decisions for us and our livelihood have probably never stepped foot on a real farm."

The relief package includes an estimated $4 billion to pay up to 120% of Black, Hispanic, Asian or Native American farmers' outstanding debt as of Jan. 1, according to the American Farm Bureau Federation

The package also designates about $1 billion for equity commissions, agricultural training, improved land access and other assistance to advance racial justice in farming.

"By denying or delaying Black farmers the same loans, subsidies and other payments made to white farmers, USDA engaged in systematic racism that led to a dramatic decline in the number of Black farmers. This is not in dispute," John Boyd, president of the National Black Farmers Association, told Fox News in a statement before the House passed the relief package on Wednesday.

Black farmers accounted for approximately one-sixth of farmers in 1920, but less than 2% of farms were run by Black producers by 2017, according to USDA data.

....

 

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With Victoria Nuland Nomination, Biden Signals a Return to Bush-Obama-Era Foreign Policy

https://mises.org/wire/victoria-nuland-nomination-biden-signals-return-bush-obama-era-foreign-policy

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Some things never change in American foreign policy.

While there’s a lot of chatter about a “Great Reset” in terms of rebuilding society along technocratic lines in the wake of covid-19, US foreign policy appears to be going through its very own “reset.” Specifically, it appears to be going back to the neoliberal interventionist order of pre-Trump administrations. One of the most palpable reversions to the neoliberal mean was President Joe Biden’s nomination of Victoria Nuland to the position of under secretary of state for political affairs at the State Department in early January.

Although she’s still going through the nomination process, the very fact that Nuland is being considered for this position at the State Department is a telltale sign that DC has no desire to change its foreign policy ways. Nuland is a neoconservative through and through. Her track record speaks for itself.

During the Bush administration, Nuland was a key foreign policy advisor to Vice President Dick Cheney and would later serve as the US ambassador to NATO, a role in which she frequently made the case for the military alliance’s members to strengthen their contributions to the US’s nation-building excursions in Afghanistan and Iraq. Her next move on the foreign policy ladder saw Nuland become the State Department spokesperson during the Obama administration, when then secretary of state Hilary Clinton was pushing for regime change in Libya and Syria.

Where Nuland truly stood out, though, was in her post of assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, where she helped orchestrate a coup in Ukraine in 2014. Understanding American foreign policy since the Soviet Union’s collapse is key to realizing Nuland is a dangerous foreign policy selection. Post-Soviet Ukraine has been marked by repeated bouts of political instability and widespread corruption. These factors have made the country susceptible to interference from external actors such as Russia, the European Union, and the United States. From one administration to another, Ukrainian presidents have either made gestures toward the West or Russia.

One way the West has tried to extend its influence after the Cold War ended is by using the North Atlantic Treaty Organization as a vehicle for eastward expansion in Russia’s traditional sphere of influence. In the early 1990s, the US initially promised Russian leaders that NATO had no intentions of expanding eastward toward Russia’s backyard. But for a superpower intoxicated with the desire to spread its influence abroad at all costs, the promise of restraint in the ex-Soviet sphere was dubious at best.

NATO’s first geopolitical flex after the fall of the Soviet Union was the bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999, which left many in the Russian security establishment wary of NATO’s geopolitical ambitions in the region. Furthermore, the US pulled an about-face and decided to advocate for the addition of countries such as Poland, Hungary, Estonia, Albania, and Croatia, among others, into NATO’s security umbrella. What started out as an alliance consisting of twelve founding members now comprises thirty nations.

Intoxicated by a triumphalist mindset typical of Western institutions in the post-Soviet era, NATO continued pushing the envelope by wooing countries in Russia’s orbit with the prospect of joining the military alliance. Like all expansionist ventures in geopolitics, NATO’s efforts eventually faced hard limits.

The cases of Georgia and Ukraine were instructive. The American government exerted its influence in both Georgia (2008) and Ukraine (2014) to bring them into the NATO fold. American hopes to add new NATO members were dashed when Russia countered these machinations with its own military actions in South Ossetia and Crimea, effectively ending the West’s monopoly on the use of force in world politics. For Russia, these countries are of strategic importance and within its traditional sphere of influence, therefore it felt justified in its actions to defend its strategic interests from Western influence.

In the latter case of Ukraine, Nuland was intimately involved in fomenting unrest while she was assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs. What was rather ironic about that period was the Obama administration’s original desire to promote a “reset” in relations with Russia. However, Nuland’s machinations as assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs threw a wrench into potential plans for a rapprochement between Russia and the United States.

Toward the end of 2013, Ukraine was mired in protests after the Ukrainian government under the leadership of President Viktor Yanukovych refused to sign an association agreement with the European Union. Instead, Yanukovych opted to strengthen Ukraine’s relationship with Russia and the Eurasian Economic Union—a geoeconomic bloc made up of eastern European, Central Asian, and western Asian countries that Atlanticists are generally hostile toward. The Russian government attempted to sweeten the deal for Ukraine by offering discounted energy prices and $15 billion in economic aid.

Yanukovych’s move raised eyebrows in the West, with the likes of Nuland and associated foreign entities figuring out ways to capsize his government. Taking advantage of the protests that ensued, which were motivated by perceptions of corruption and political abuse by the Yanukovych government, Nuland and co. made sure to crank up the pressure on the sitting president. What started out as an otherwise organic set of protests, morphed into a geopolitical tug-of-war among external actors. In this process, Nuland gained notoriety after a phone call between her and then US ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt was leaked to the public and became available on YouTube. During this call, Nuland and Pyatt had a discussion about who should be Yanukovych’s successor. On February 22, 2014, after protests had spiraled out of control and order had started breaking down across Ukraine, Yanukovych resigned and subsequently fled to Russia for refuge.

Regime change architects expected a smooth political transition in Ukraine but what ensued was anything but stable. Following Yanukovych’s departure, Russia proceeded to annex Crimea. Shortly thereafter, an armed conflict kicked off in Ukraine’s Donbass region. The latter region has substantial ethnic minority Russian populations along with a sizable number of Russophones, while the former is predominantly Russian in ethnolinguistic terms. The protection of its coethnics was a key factor that motivated Russia’s intervention in the aforementioned regions.

The possibility of Ukraine joining NATO following the Euromaidan demonstrations was a risk the Russian state was not going to entertain in light of the two decades of NATO enlargement in its own backyard. So far, the Russo-Ukrainian war has claimed the lives of more than 10,300 people, left 24,000 wounded, and displaced north of 1.5 million people. A crisis that could have been averted had the US not stuck its nose in the internal affairs of faraway lands, foreign policy mandarins like Nuland did not factor in Russia’s very real geostrategic interests and the lengths it would go to defend them.

Let’s ask ourselves this: How would the US respond if rival countries such as China or Russia engineered a coup in Mexico with the intention of installing a preferred presidential candidate contrary to US interests and the wishes of Mexican voters? Similarly, DC would likely go apoplectic if the emerging great powers installed client states right across the border in the Caribbean Basin. But US foreign policy operates on different standards. For the US government, the entire world is a petri dish for extravagant regime change experiments, blowback be damned.

Regime change delusions are deep-seated among the foreign policy class. So much so that orchestrating foreign policy blunders constitutes an example of “failing forward,” whereby political leaders are not held accountable for their failed policies and are instead rewarded with more prestigious sinecures. As a matter of fact, inflicting massive damage abroad is the best way to move up the foreign policy ladder in DC, as evidenced by Nuland’s nomination to under secretary of state for political affairs. Some things never change.

In a similar vein, foreign policy bungles turn out to be lucrative ventures for well-connected interest groups. The US’s misbehavior in Ukraine has been a boon for the ravenous hawks in the Pentagon. Russia’s decisive victory in Crimea and a resurgent China have provided fertile ground for the Pentagon’s 2018 National Defense Strategy, which pivoted America’s foreign policy from combating terrorism to embroiling itself into great power conflict. This means more brinksmanship and fatter budgets for defense contractors.

As with all of the perfidy emanating from DC, there is substantial bipartisan buy-in. Despite Donald Trump’s prorestraint rhetoric on the campaign trail, his administration’s actions told a grimmer story. The Trump administration was more than willing to throw bones at Russiagate hysterics by installing a missile base in Romania, deployed additional troops in Poland, slapped significant sanctions on Russia, provided lethal aid in the form of Javelin antitank missiles to Ukraine, and even escalated tensions with Russian mercenaries in Syria.

Relations between Russia and the US are already deteriorating, and with Nuland in the conversation as under secretary of state for political affairs nominee, we can only expect the status quo to remain firmly in place. It doesn’t help that Joe Biden’s current secretary of state, Antony Blinken, openly stated that the US government will not recognize the Russian annexation of Crimea.

Even worse, while in the nomination process for his current post, Blinken did not discard the idea of incorporating countries like Georgia into NATO’s security blanket. In a hubristic manner typical of US diplomats these days, Blinken glossed over Russia’s objections and previous demonstration of force to defend its interests from perceived Western encroachments in its historical sphere of influence. Blinken’s stances on Russia do not augur well for American relations with the Eurasian power.

The parties in power may change during any given election cycle, but the interventionist policies remain the same, much to the detriment of an American public exhausted after years of perpetual conflict. American policymakers would be wise to stop pretending we’re in Cold War 2.0 with Russia and instead to embrace a policy based on realism and restraint.

Frankly, a sober foreign policy will not materialize with Victoria Nuland in the picture.

Agreed.  Such a nomination is just more fuel for the endless war and endless death of American soldiers.   And we thought Mr. Biden was going to be different?

  

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Biden's Planned Corporate Tax Hike Will Cost Jobs and Reduce Economic Growth. Because That's What Taxes Do.

https://reason.com/2021/03/17/bidens-planned-corporate-tax-hike-will-cost-jobs-and-reduce-economic-growth-because-thats-what-taxes-do/

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President Joe Biden is reportedly considering a plan to hike taxes on individuals and corporations in order to help offset another splurge of government spending. Preliminary analyses of the possible tax hikes show they would transfer as much as $2 trillion from the private sector to the government, likely costing jobs and reducing wages for American workers.

Of course, that's what taxes do. Every dollar the federal government drains from the economy is a dollar that cannot be used to grow a business, cannot be used to purchase new equipment, and cannot be paid to workers or shareholders.

Biden is considering hikes to both the personal income tax and corporate income taxBloomberg reports, citing unnamed White House sources. Advisers are reportedly kicking around ideas like raising the corporate income tax rate to 28 percent (from 21 percent); hiking personal income taxes on individuals and households that earn over $400,000 annually; and imposing a higher capital gains tax for individuals who make over $1 million annually. The higher taxes would be paired with an expected White Houe announcement of what's likely to be a multi-trillion-dollar infrastructure spending package.

We'll have to wait to see the specifics of the proposal, but much of what is under consideration seems roughly in line with the tax policies the Biden campaign published last year. If enacted, those policies would raise federal revenue by about $2.1 trillion over 10 years, according to an analysis by the Tax Policy Center, a nonpartisan think tank. The organization says Biden's plans would reduce America's GDP by between 0.3 percent and 0.7 percent annually for the rest of the decade.

The corporate tax hike alone would reduce long-term economic growth by about 0.8 percent, kill 159,000 jobs, and reduce wages, according to a separate analysis by the Tax Foundation, a nonpartisan think tank. Raising the federal corporate tax rate to 28 percent would make the average state-federal tax burden for American businesses 32.34 percent—the highest rate in the developed world.

"Workers across the income scale would bear much of the tax increase," write the Tax Foundation's Garrett Watson and William McBride. "For example, the bottom 20 percent of earners would on average see a 1.45 percent drop in after-tax income in the long run."

Politically, moving the corporate income tax rate to 28 percent would be a symbolic win for Democrats. That's what the federal government charged American businesses before Republicans pushed through a package of tax cuts in 2017 aimed at increasing U.S. competitiveness with other large economies. Undoing those tax cuts for corporations and high-earning individuals has become a top priority for congressional Democrats.

"Biden will require corporations and the wealthiest Americans to pay their fair share," Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen told senators during her confirmation hearing in January. She said the Biden administration would seek multilateral agreements to set a global minimum corporate tax as part of a strategy to prevent American companies from shifting profits overseas to avoid higher taxes here.

On one hand, any clear-eyed assessment of America's fiscal status must leave room for tax increases as part of an overall strategy to balance the budget. The national debt now exceeds $28 trillion, and the annual budget deficit was already on pace to exceed $2 trillion even before last week's passage of a $1.9 trillion spending bill that will be entirely paid for with borrowing. Both the debt and deficit are expected to grow in the coming years.

But Biden's plan, according to Bloomberg, seems to be aimed at using this tax increase to offset even more spending. That's an approach that Congress should carefully scrutinize with both eyes fixed on the growing, unsustainable national debt.

Policy makers should also keep in mind that many businesses are still feeling the effects of President Donald Trump's tariffs, which continue to function as a sort of stealth tax hike for many businesses. That's especially true for the manufacturing sector, which had slipped into recession in 2019—before the pandemic hit—in large part due to the increased costs and uncertainty raised by the U.S.-China trade war.

Biden has been unwilling to remove those tariffs, even though doing so would help stimulate an economic recovery. In fact, the administration appears to be aiming to make things even harder for American businesses as they emerge from the pandemic.

Trump made it more expensive to purchase the wares and equipment that American businesses need to buy to earn a profit. Now, Biden may be planning to take a larger share of whatever profit they can scratch out.

 

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Senate Democrats’ Short-Lived Opposition to All White Biden Nominees

https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/senate-democrats-short-lived-opposition-to-all-white-biden-nominees/

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On the menu today: Two Democratic senators threaten to vote against all white nominees from the Biden administration, an account of poor logistical planning in New York City’s vaccination effort, and an observation about that awful Atlanta mass shooting at massage parlors.

 

Is there any scenario where you can envision President-elect Joe Biden getting together with his top advisers after the election and declaring, “Now, remember, whatever we do, we’re not going to let any Asian Americans become cabinet secretaries”?

Biden can be an insensitive, ignorant clod. You probably recall the time he blurted out, upon meeting an Indian American at a political event, “You cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent. I’m not joking.” But it’s difficult to imagine Biden deliberately setting out to exclude a particular ethnic group. The man has plenty of flaws, but an instinct to reject others based on race isn’t one of them.

In fact, since winning the election, Biden has nominated:

  • Katherine Tai to be U.S. trade representative
  • Vanita Gupta, daughter of Indian immigrants, to be associate attorney general
  • Nellie Liang to be undersecretary for domestic finance at the Department of the Treasury
  • Julie Su to be deputy secretary of labor
  • Lina Khan, daughter of Pakistani immigrants, to be commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission
  • Uzra Zeya, another daughter of Indian immigrants, to be State Department’s undersecretary for civilian security, democracy and human rights
  • Dilawar Syed to be deputy administrator of the Small Business Administration.
  • Kiran Ahuja to be director of the United States Office of Personnel Management
  • Rohit Chopra to be director of the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau

Neera Tanden is also a child of immigrants from India, and she was nominated to be director of the Office of Management and Budget . . . and we remember what happened with that one.

And those are just the executive-branch positions that require Senate confirmation, so far; this isn’t counting all the Asian Americans working in the Biden White House and administration in presidentially appointed positions.

But Senator Tammy Duckworth spent a chunk of Tuesday contending that Biden and his top advisers were somehow insufficiently committed to having Asian Americans serve in his administration:

Duckworth, an Illinois Democrat and the first Thai American woman in Congress, said it was ‘unacceptable’ that Biden has named no Asian American Cabinet secretaries and vowed to oppose nominees on the floor ‘until they figure this out.’ Her gambit could prove a substantial obstacle to any future Biden nominees in the 50-50 Senate, depending on whether Duckworth holds firm after a two-week Senate recess that starts after this week.

Later on Tuesday, Duckworth and her colleague Mazie Hirono of Hawaii told reporters that they intended to vote against any Biden “nominees who aren’t minorities.”

Instead of judging those nominees by their merits, those senators pledged to judge them by the color of their skin. If only we had a word to describe that phenomenon.

By Tuesday night, Duckworth had backed away from the threat, but not before making comments that suggested certain high-profile figures didn’t meet her threshold for being sufficiently representative of their ancestries:

Duckworth told reporters that a Monday evening call between Senate Democrats and Biden aides was the “trigger” for her holdup plans. After she asked about Asian American representation in the Biden administration, Duckworth recalled, White House deputy chief of staff Jen O’Malley Dillon made a reference to Vice President Kamala Harris’ South Asian American heritage that the senator called “incredibly insulting.”

Oh, was it now?

Kamala Harris doesn’t count because only her mother immigrated from India? How does the vice president feel about a U.S. senator declaring she’s not Asian enough to qualify as an Asian American? Are the self-described anti-racists going to bring back the “one drop rule” in racial purity to ensure sufficient representation? Or is Duckworth hinting that in her mind, Indian Americans don’t really count as Asian Americans? The senator is free to define the term as she sees fit, but let’s set the wayback machine to 2016 and take a look at how the National Council of Asian Pacific Americans addressed the potential nomination of Appeals Court judge Sri Srinivasan to the U.S. Supreme Court:

Judge Srinivasan was born in India and raised in Kansas, and his nomination and confirmation would be historic in several aspects:

  • Judge Srinivasan would be the first Asian American Supreme Court Justice.
  • Judge Srinivasan would be the first Hindu Supreme Court Justice.
  • Judge Srinivasan would be the first immigrant Supreme Court Justice since 1962.

Indeed, Judge Srinivasan already has made history, serving as the first Asian American judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

More importantly, characterizing Judge Srinivasan’s nomination as the first “Indian American” limits how momentous and historic his nomination and confirmation would be for the entire Asian American community — not just for Indian Americans and not just for South Asian Americans.

To be clear, Indian Americans are Asian Americans.

But let’s go back to this notion that Biden has somehow done Asian Americans wrong because he didn’t name a cabinet secretary of Asian heritage. By no measure can you plausibly argue that the Biden cabinet isn’t diverse. The fact that Biden nominated so many Asian Americans to other positions dispels the notion that he’s got some axe to grind with this particular group. In fact, Katherine Tai, as head of the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, is a cabinet-level official; she just doesn’t have the title ‘secretary.’ Duckworth and Hirono had to really narrowly define their categories to find a situation that could even remotely be painted as exclusionary.

How many Asian Americans out there feel as if their sense of value, recognition, and respect depends upon seeing someone who looks like themselves as Secretary of Agriculture or running the Department of Housing and Urban Development? Did Elaine Chao’s presence as secretary of transportation during the Trump years mean that his cabinet was better for Asian Americans than Biden’s is? Was George W. Bush’s better because Chao was his secretary of labor and Norman Mineta was his secretary of transportation?

In fact, Duckworth and Hirono have just made life more difficult for Asian Americans who want to serve in the Biden administration. If, God forbid, some cabinet secretary got hit by a bus tomorrow, and Biden promptly nominated an Asian-American replacement, how would that new nominee be perceived and greeted? Would people believe the new nominee was genuinely Biden’s best choice for the job? Or would they believe the new nominee was the best Asian-American option, and a choice designed to placate Duckworth and Hirono?

Politico’s evening newsletter argued the lesson was that The Democratic Party holds up diversity as a key value and embraces intersectionality — but realizing that vision is much more complicated as more Americans (rightly) demand a seat at the table.”

But does this fight really represent “demanding a seat at the table”? Or is it demanding a particular seat at the table?

Or is the lesson that the likes of Duckworth and Hirono will always be looking for some reason to get mad and will be extremely quick accuse others — even their allies and leaders of their party — of deliberate discrimination, even when it’s absurd?

 

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Biden’s Not‐Really‐Necessary Plan

https://www.cato.org/blog/bidens-not-really-necessary-plan

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President Biden’s proposed infrastructure plan includes $621 billion for transportation. It would spend $115 billion on accelerated road and bridge repairs, $20 billion for “vision zero” and other anti‐auto programs, $85 billion for mass transit, and $80 billion for Amtrak’s backlog and expansion of Amtrak service. It also would spend $174 billion supporting electric vehicle manufacturers, $25 billion on airports, and $17 billion on inland waterways. That’s $104 billion short of $621 billion, but the White House press release doesn’t say where that $104 billion will go.

Non‐transportation items in the plan include $111 billion on safe drinking water, $100 billion for high‐speed internet service, $100 billion on the electrical transmission system, $10 billion on a Civilian Climate Corps, $213 billion on housing, including retrofitting homes to save energy, $100 billion on new schools, $18 billion on new veteran’s hospitals, $10 billion modernizing federal buildings in Washington DC, $400 billion on care for the elderly and disabled, $180 billion on research, $300 billion on manufacturing and small businesses, and $100 billion on workforce development. News reports call this a $2 trillion plan but by my count it adds up to at least $2.26 trillion.

Instead of calling this an infrastructure plan, the White House calls it “the American Jobs Plan.” This is ironic because the only reason why most unemployed people don’t have jobs today is the lockdowns enforced by mostly Democratic governors. End the lockdowns and there won’t be many unemployed people to take the jobs created by the Biden plan.

That should be okay because most of the plan isn’t really necessary. The money for road and bridge repairs isn’t needed because the condition of America’s roads and road bridges has been improving each year without a congressional rescue plan. However, Biden’s plan earmarks funds for some major bridges, which will please politicians representing the states those bridges are in. Although the White House press release mentions the cost of traffic congestion, it isn’t clear that any of the money will be spent actually relieving congestion.

The money for mass transit and Amtrak isn’t really needed either because the pandemic has accelerated the decline in the importance of these systems that was already taking place before 2020. Biden’s plan to double funding for transit and quadruple it for Amtrak rewards agencies for doing a lousy job of carrying few passengers. However, Biden’s plan earmarks funds for new Hudson River tunnels and other projects in the Northeast Corridor, which will please politicians in New York and New Jersey.

Electric vehicle manufacturers, airports, and inland waterways seemed to be doing fine either as private sector operations or with existing funds. But airports and dredging have always been sources of pork barrel and this bill will be no exception.

Biden proposes to spend part of the $213 billion housing funds bribing local cities to end so‐called exclusionary zoning, which has been attacked as causing unaffordable housing even though housing is unaffordable in only a few states and relaxing local zoning hasn’t made housing more affordable. None of it will be spent encouraging states to end growth‐management policies (restrictions on development of rural lands) that are the real cause of unaffordable housing.

I have less expertise on the other programs in Biden’s bill, but it strikes me that many of them—the electrical grid, high‐speed internet, manufacturing, small businesses, and housing — are mostly private and don’t need massive federal subsidies (which will end up being accompanied by massive federal red tape and regulation). What they really need is for government to get out of the way.

While politicians will love it, the huge increase in federal spending proposed by the Biden plan is going to create a serious problem for private employers. Unemployment rates were extraordinarily low before the pandemic and they have quickly declined again in states that lifted lockdowns. Anyone employed with the dollars in the American Jobs Act will be one less person available to employed by private businesses. This will increase consumer costs and could contribute to an inflationary cycle caused by a combination of a labor shortage and printing of money to pay for the federal deficit.

Even the American Society of Civil Engineers admits that it was crying wolf when it claimed that America’s infrastructure deserved a D+ grade, having raised it to a C- in its latest report card. Personally, I would give transit and Amtrak a low grade but give most other infrastructure a B or B+. That’s why I think of Biden’s proposal as the Not‐Really‐Necessary Plan.

Agreed.  It's really just more political slush-funds.

 

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Biden's Infrastructure Plan Would Overturn 'Right-To-Work' Laws in 27 States

https://reason.com/2021/04/01/bidens-infrastructure-plan-would-overturn-right-to-work-laws-in-27-states/

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Buried inside more than $2 trillion in proposed spending on everything from highways to child care, President Joe Biden's "American Jobs Plan" would also force non-union workers to pay union dues even in states that have explicitly said that's not mandatory.

Biden glossed over that detail in Wednesday's speech outlining the particulars of his "American Jobs Plan." He made just a single reference to the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, which passed the House earlier this month, calling it a bill that would "help workers organize."

In reality, the PRO Act strengthens unions by telling workers to pay up. Among other things, the bill would amend parts of the National Labor Relations Act to allow the federal government to stomp out the so-called "right-to-work" laws that forbid unions from forcing non-members to pay a share of union dues. If passed, the PRO Act would roll back the rights of individual workers, who would no longer get to choose whether they want to financially support a union.

Passage of the PRO Act is obviously a major political priority for labor unions—Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO, recently described it as a "game-changer" in an interview with NPRbecause it wold provide a new stream of revenue even as the overall number of unionized workers continues to decline.

But it is a strange way to pursue Biden's ultimate goal improving America's infrastructure as a form of economic stimulus.

"We view this measure as a significant threat to the viability of the commercial construction industry," warns Stephen Sandherr, CEO of the Associated General Contractors of America, an industry group. He predicts that passage of the PRO Act would usher in more labor unrest, and observes that it is difficult to complete large-scale infrastructure projects when "work is idled, workers are unpaid, and projects go uncompleted."

It's also a move that seems to misread obvious economic signals. Not only has the number of states with right-to-work laws been growing, but those states have seen manufacturing employment grow more than twice as fast since 2010 when compared to states without right-to-work laws. If Biden is seeking an economic boost for the country, he'd push to let all workers enjoy the freedom to choose whether to support a union or keep more of their paychecks.

Beyond the right-to-work provision, the PRO Act is a grab bag of policies that would help tip the scales towards unions. It would force employers to turn over employees' private information—including cellphone numbers, email addresses, and work schedules—to union organizers. It would accelerate the National Labor Relation Board's official timetable for union organizing elections in non-union workplaces. And it would codify so-called "card check" elections, removing the protection of the secret ballot when a workplace votes to unionize.

The White House says Biden's "American Jobs Plan" will give workers "a free and fair choice to join a union." But in calling for the passage of the PRO Act, Biden is actually taking that choice away from many workers who currently enjoy it—and transfer money directly from workers' paychecks to labor unions' bottom lines.

"The PRO Act does strengthen unions, but it does so mainly by giving unions more power to force recalcitrant workers to fall in line," says Sean Higgins, a research fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a free market think tank. "The Biden administration wants to strip workers of their right for their own good."

That is one of the mantra's of democrats and progressives: "This is for your own good, because you are too stupid to know otherwise."  

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On 4/1/2021 at 10:16 AM, Muda69 said:

President Joe Biden's "American Jobs Plan" would also force non-union workers to pay union dues even in states that have explicitly said that's not mandatory.

Since they reap the benefits of the CBA that the union bargained for, they shall pay for the labor associated with the negotiation cost. 

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1 hour ago, DanteEstonia said:

Since they reap the benefits of the CBA that the union bargained for, they shall pay for the labor associated with the negotiation cost. 

Why should the federal government decide that’s the best policy everywhere?

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9 minutes ago, DanteEstonia said:

Because commerce and labor agreements cross State lines, and a lot of businesses use "right to work" laws to bust unions.

That merely tells us why the feds can do it. It says nothing about whether they should.

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https://thenationalpulse.com/news/biden-detaining-more-minors-than-trump/?fbclid=IwAR28WohKNRAbY9o8mwZxt6PHsFt6DJfZ8ErRvpsORpdWBay2_Fb28n7Pgys

Under President Biden, nearly seven times as many unaccompanied minors are being detained by either Customs and Border Patrol or Health and Human Services as compared to the Trump administration.

A March 10th report from The Washington Post explains how “more than 8,500 migrant teens and children who crossed the border without their parents are being housed in Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)” and “nearly 3,500 more are stuck at Border Patrol stations waiting for beds in those shelters to open up.”

These numbers constitute “the highest figure ever, according to internal data reviewed by The Washington Post.

In contrast, under the Trump administration, the largest number of unaccompanied minors being detained was roughly 2,600:

Held in grim steel-and-concrete cells built for adults, these young people are spending an average of 107 hours awaiting transfer to an HHS-run shelter, well over the 72-hour legal limit, the data shows. The largest number of unaccompanied minors held this way during the Trump administration was about 2,600 in June 2019, according to congressional testimony and two former Customs and Border Protection officials who were involved in handling that crisis.

That’s nearly five times as many unaccompanied children being held illegally under President Biden as compared to President Trump.

And the disparity is still increasing;

A March 31st report from ABC News reveals there are 17,641 unaccompanied migrant minors in government care, which equals an increase of roughly 50 percent in just three weeks.

“As of a Tuesday report, there are 17,641 unaccompanied migrant minors in government care — 5,606 children are in CBP custody and 12,035 in the care of the Department of Human and Health Services, CBP told ABC News,” the article notes.

The most recent data dump means the Biden regime is detaining nearly seven times as many unaccompanied minors as the Trump administration.

The unearthed numbers also undercut President Biden’s narrative that the current border surge is part of a seasonal migration pattern.

Meanwhile, AOC and her ilk are still silent. 

A "Seasonal Migration Pattern"?  Are we talking about birds here?  Come on man......

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https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9445105/What-Hunter-Biden-left-tell-memoir-revealed.html

EXCLUSIVE: What WASN'T in Hunter Biden's book: How he got unauthorized Secret Service protection, begged Joe to run for WH to salvage his own reputation and made porn films with prostitutes. Forensic experts prove laptop IS President's son's

  • Hunter Biden released his 'tell-all' memoir Beautiful Things on Tuesday, but left out shocking details 
  • DailyMail.com can reveal those secrets after contents of his abandoned laptop - including a cache of 103,000 text messages, 154,000 emails, more than 2,000 photos - were verified by top forensics experts
  • Hunter left his MacBook Pro laptop at a Wilmington, Delaware computer repair shop in April 2019 and never returned for it
  • In texts from 2019, Hunter begged his father to run for president to salvage Hunter's own reputation 
  • Hunter repeatedly dodged police action against him, despite constantly dealing with drug dealers and prostitutes and having multiple run-ins with the law
  • The president's son was guarded by a Secret Service agent while on a 2018 drug and prostitute binge in Hollywood, despite not being entitled to protection at the time 
  • Hunter appeared to be obsessed with making porn films with prostitutes, videos and photos on his laptop show
  •  Texts also show Joe Biden was afraid his conversations with Hunter were being hacked even as they discussed his White House bid 

 

Hunter Biden's 'tell-all' autobiography promised the unvarnished story of his struggles with drugs, family turmoil and his controversial love life.

But there were many shocking details of his debauched life that the president's son chose not to share with readers, including details of his fragile relationship with his father.

Now DailyMail.com can reveal the secrets Hunter chose not to divulge, exposed in the contents of his abandoned laptop and verified by top forensics experts.

The bombshell cache of 103,000 text messages, 154,000 emails, more than 2,000 photos and dozens of videos are packed with revelations conveniently missing from the memoir, including:
  • How he begged his father to run for president in 2019 to salvage Hunter's own reputation
  • How he repeatedly dodged police action against him, despite constantly dealing with drug pushers and prostitutes and having multiple run-ins with law enforcement
  • Hunter was guarded by a Secret Service agent while on a 2018 drug and prostitute binge in Hollywood, despite not being entitled to protection at the time and amid denials from the federal agency
  • Joe Biden was afraid his text conversations with Hunter were being hacked even as they discussed his White House bid
  • How Hunter's laptop is brimming with evidence of apparent criminal activity by Hunter and his associates including drug trafficking and prostitution

A shocking photo obtained from Hunter's laptop shows his badly damaged and worn down teeth - also known as 'meth mouth' -  as he sits in a dentist chair

 

It's a "Red Herring".....

 

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Biden Sets Up Commission To Study Supreme Court Reform: https://www.npr.org/2021/04/09/985738915/biden-sets-up-commission-to-study-supreme-court-reform

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President Biden signed an executive order Friday setting up a bipartisan commission that will study U.S. Supreme Court reform, and, among other things, examine the size of the court and the lifetime appointment, the White House announced.

"The Commission's purpose is to provide an analysis of the principal arguments in the contemporary public debate for and against Supreme Court reform, including an appraisal of the merits and legality of particular reform proposals," the White House said in a statement. "The topics it will examine include the genesis of the reform debate; the Court's role in the Constitutional system; the length of service and turnover of justices on the Court; the membership and size of the Court; and the Court's case selection, rules, and practices."

The announcement marks the culmination of a campaign promise Biden made when repeatedly pressed on whether he would expand the Supreme Court to pack it with justices more aligned with his worldview. The Democratic candidate said he opposed expanding the court but said he favored the kind of bipartisan commission that the White House unveiled Friday.

The commission will be co-chaired by former White House counsel Bob Bauer and former Deputy Assistant Attorney General Cristina Rodríguez. Its other members include legal and other scholars as well as former federal judges and practitioners who have appeared before the court, advocates for the reform of democratic institutions and of the administration of justice, and experts on constitutional law, history and political science.

Friday's announcement comes amid a debate over the composition of the nine-member court that now has a 6-3 conservative majority. Liberal advocates contend that an expanded Supreme Court would give Biden a real chance to implement a legislative agenda, which will otherwise almost certainly be mired in litigation due to conservative legal challenges.

Biden has rejected the idea of "packing" the court, a view that found gained attention this week when Justice Stephen Breyer, one of the court's three liberals, warned in a speech against an expansion of the Supreme Court.

In a speech at Harvard Law School, Breyer said the court's authority depends on "a trust that the court is guided by legal principle, not politics."

"Structural alteration motivated by the perception of political influence can only feed that latter perception, further eroding that trust," Breyer said.

But as a candidate, Biden also said that if elected, he will convene a national commission to study the court system.

"It's not about court packing," Biden told CBS' 60 Minutes in October. "There's a number of other things that our constitutional scholars have debated, and I've looked to see what recommendations that commission might make."

The White House statement said the bipartisan commission will "hold public meetings to hear the views of other experts, and groups and interested individuals with varied perspectives on the issues it will be examining."

The executive order directs the commission to complete its report within 180 days of its first public meeting.

 

Dante's dream may come true.

 

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Biden Set to Push Critical Race Theory on U.S. Schools

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/biden-set-to-push-critical-race-theory-on-u-s-schools/

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The woke revolution in the classroom is about to go federal. In an early but revelatory move, President Biden’s Department of Education has signaled its intent to impose the most radical forms of Critical Race Theory on America’s schools, very much including the 1619 Project and the so-called anti-racism of Ibram X. Kendi. (Kendi’s “anti-racism” — which advocates a massive and indefinite expansion of reverse discrimination — is more like neo-racism.) Biden is obviously co-opting conservatives’ interest in reviving traditional U.S. history and civics to deliver its perfect opposite — federal imposition of the very ideas conservatives aim to combat.

 

Biden’s Department of Education has just released the text of a proposed new rule establishing priorities for grants in American History and Civics Education programs. That rule gives priority to grant “projects that incorporate racially, ethnically, culturally, and linguistically diverse perspectives.” The rule goes on to cite and praise the New York Times’ “landmark” 1619 Project, as well as the work of Critical Race Theorist Kendi, as leading examples of the sort of ideas the Biden administration wants to spread.

The programs immediately targeted by Biden’s new priority criteria for American history and civics grants are small. Once in place, however, those criteria will undoubtedly influence the much larger and vastly more dangerous “Civics Secures Democracy Act.” That bill would appropriate $1 billion a year, for six years, for history and civic education. Support for leftist “action civics” is already written into the priority criteria of the bill itself. I have argued that additional anodyne-sounding priority criteria in the Civics Secures Democracy Act — criteria favoring grants targeted to “underserved” populations and the mitigation of various racial, ethnic, and linguistic achievement gaps — would be interpreted by the Biden administration as a green light to fund Critical Race Theory in the schools. The new draft federal rule for grant priority in American history and civics education makes it clear that this is indeed the Biden administration’s intent.

The Biden administration’s interest in pushing Critical Race Theory on America’s schools could already be gleaned from the president’s repeated endorsement of the notion that America is “systemically racist.” Biden’s statements to that effect are actually cited in the new federal rule. It’s of interest as well that the new rule explicitly endorses the wave of woke Critical Race Theory currently sweeping through America’s schools. Biden’s new American history and civics rule also expresses support for “Culturally Responsive Teaching,” the ultra-woke and utterly politicized pedagogy derived from Critical Race Theory that was recently imposed on teachers in Illinois.

At this point, the sprinkling of congressional Republicans and conservative education establishment figures who have foolishly bought into bogus “bipartisan” efforts to revive the teaching of American history and civics need to repudiate their misbegotten alliances. We needn’t wait to see how the Biden administration will implement federal efforts to support American history and civics. This new rule tells us all we need to know. We are set for a huge showdown over federal efforts to press leftist action civics and Critical Race Theory on the states. Here is what needs to be done.

Above all, the federal “Civics Secures Democracy Act” must be stopped. Just as a combination of Obama’s Race to the Top grant program and federal regulations managed to impose the abysmal Common Core standards in math and English on nearly every state, the Civics Secures Democracy Act is designed to impose leftist action civics and Critical Race Theory on even red states. The state-level grant money is large enough that the leftist education bureaucrats who dominate even in red states will have a clear field to apply for federal funding. If conservative governors push back against grants that commit an entire state’s education system to action civics and Critical Race Theory, they will be slammed by Democrats, the education establishment, and the media for refusing badly needed federal dollars. Former Texas governor Rick Perry managed to hold off Common Core by refusing to apply for Race to the Top grants, but he was mercilessly pummeled by critics for turning down that money. Few red-state politicians will have the guts to stand up to such pounding.

That is why it is urgently necessary for states to pass laws barring action civics and Critical Race Theory from the K-12 curriculum and teacher training. Without such laws in place, it will be almost impossible to resist the carrots and sticks soon to be deployed by the Biden Education Department with the aim of forcing action civics and Critical Race Theory onto America’s schools.

I have offered model state-level legislation published with the National Association of Scholars that would bar action civics and Critical Race Theory training for K-12 teachers. Some legislators in Texas have taken up that proposal and added a bar on Critical Race Theory in the K-12 curriculum.

There are some legitimate concerns about barring the core ideas of Critical Race Theory from the K-12 curriculum. It is a mistake, however, to see such proposals as interfering with free speech or academic freedom. Barring advocacy of Critical Race Theory from courses in public universities would indeed violate academic freedom and freedom of speech. I oppose such state-level moves, although I do think it’s possible to bar Critical Race Theory-based training outside of the classroom for faculty, staff, and students at public universities. At the K-12 level, however, states and school districts enjoy considerable authority over curriculum. K-12 teachers have very limited free-speech rights when carrying out their classroom responsibilities, at which time they are rightly charged with teaching from the approved curriculum.

That is not to say that barring the advocacy of certain theories or ideas from the K-12 curriculum by state law is free of danger. For one thing, it’s important to give due deference to local control over curriculum. The best way to live with our differences is to keep curricular decisions at the local level to the greatest extent possible.

One of the problems with the new, ultra-woke Illinois teaching standards mentioned earlier is that they impose Chicago’s radicalism on conservative districts downstate. That speaks for local control. Yet the Illinois example cuts both ways. Given that state education bureaucrats have gone far beyond what state law actually authorizes and have cooked up an overreaching rule imposing Critical Race Theory on an entire state, it’s clear that legislatures across the country must now consider defensive measures lest state education bureaucrats (almost invariably far more left-leaning than voters) impose Critical Race Theory via statewide standards or regulations.

Another risk of barring certain concepts from the curriculum is that the prohibition could create martyrs; messy enforcement situations with he said/she said accusations between students, parents, and teachers; and a “banned in Boston” glow for ideas that are barred.

Against these risks, however, is the fact that we are talking about teaching young children to feel guilt and anguish simply because of the color of their skin. While I worry about the expansion and abuse of “hostile environment” law, forcing confessions of guilt based on skin color onto a captive audience of public school children really does seem to represent a hostile educational environment in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.

And now, between the massive grant-giving machine authorized by the Civics Secures Democracy Act and the new federal rule boosting American history and civics grants that promote the most radical forms of Critical Race Theory, states would be foolish not to protect their schools from the coming onslaught. States must now adopt laws barring both action civics and Critical Race Theory from K-12 education. With the federal juggernaut bearing down, what choice do states have but to defend themselves?

Yet another reason why the unconstitutional U.S. Department of Education should be abolished.   This blatant attempt to bring race politics into K-12 classrooms across the nation is heinous and immoral.

 

 

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  • 2 weeks later...

https://nypost.com/2021/04/26/iran-foreign-minister-says-john-kerry-met-with-him-during-trump-years/

Iran foreign minister reveals John Kerry kept in touch about Israeli covert operations

April 26, 2021 | 12:22pm | Updated

Iran’s foreign minister claimed in a leaked recording that former US Secretary of State John Kerry told him about over 200 covert Israeli attacks on Iranian interests in Syria during former President Donald Trump’s administration.

Foreign Minister Javad Zarif said in the leaked recording obtained by the New York Times and Iran International that the Revolutionary Guard Corps and the country’s supreme leader kept him in the dark about government negotiations and military operations, and that he was receiving intel from Kerry.

“It was former US Foreign Secretary John Kerry who told me Israel had launched more than 200 attacks on Iranian forces in Syria,” he said.

Zarif made the comments in a March interview with an Iranian journalist that wasn’t supposed to be released until August, when President Hassan Rouhani leaves office.

 

It’s unclear whether Kerry tipped off Zarif while secretary of state, or out of office. Zarif met with Kerry and Obama administration Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz when Donald Trump was in the White House, which Kerry admitted to in 2018.

Kerry denied discussing the Israeli targets with the Iranian foreign minister.

“I can tell you that this story and these allegations are unequivocally false. This never happened – either when I was Secretary of State or since,” he said in a post on Twitter.

Kerry and Moniz were instrumental in negotiating the 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and global powers.

 

Kerry said he met with Zarif and other Iranian officials in an effort to salvage the nuclear agreement.

Trump later that month slammed Kerry for his “shadow diplomacy,” saying the Obama administration officials are who got the US into “this mess” in the first place. 

 

“The United States does not need John Kerry’s possibly illegal Shadow Diplomacy on the very badly negotiated Iran Deal. He was the one that created this MESS in the first place!,” Trump posted on Twitter after reports surfaced about Kerry’s talks with the Iranians. 

 

He pulled the US out of the pact days later.

Kerry at the time defended the nuclear deal.

 “I think every American would want every voice possible urging Iran to remain in compliance with the nuclear agreement that prevented a war,” he said in a statement.

 

“Secretary Kerry stays in touch with his former counterparts around the world just like every previous Secretary of State. Like America’s closest allies, he believes it is important that the nuclear agreement, which took the world years to negotiate, remain effective as countries focus on stability in the region.”

 

Trump in May 2019 accused Kerry of violating federal law by siding with Iran over US interests — and said he should be prosecuted for it.

“You know, John Kerry speaks to them a lot. John Kerry tells them not to call. That’s a violation of the Logan Act, and frankly he should be prosecuted on that,” Trump said at the time.

At what point was disclosing US intelligence relative to Israeli operations to Iran not treasonous?   

 

 

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Y’all still hanging out on here? 

 

It’s been I think about a decade since I checked in with you guys, had to create a new account. I don’t plan on spending a lot of time on here, but nice to see some of the familiar handles.

 

Stay out of trouble, Go Knights! WAF

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7 hours ago, Backer25 said:

Y’all still hanging out on here? 

 

It’s been I think about a decade since I checked in with you guys, had to create a new account. I don’t plan on spending a lot of time on here, but nice to see some of the familiar handles.

 

Stay out of trouble, Go Knights! WAF

Welcome back.  I hope you find the time to participate.

 

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When Joe Biden Talks About Worker Choice, He Means Only 1 Choice

https://reason.com/2021/04/27/when-joe-biden-talks-about-worker-choice-he-means-only-1-choice/

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President Joe Biden believes joining a union isn't merely a right that workers have but something the federal government has an obligation to promote. He repeated this on April 26 as he announced the creation of a special Task Force on Worker Organizing and Empowerment. "Since 1935, when the National Labor Relations Act [NLRA] was enacted, the policy of the federal government has been to encourage worker organizing and collective bargaining, not to merely allow or tolerate them," Biden claimed. (Emphasis his.)

Unfortunately for workers, Biden's stance is a misreading of federal law, and it signals four years of aggressive sales tactics from this administration on behalf of its union allies.

Sen. Robert F. Wagner (D–N.Y.), the primary author of the NLRA, also known as the Wagner Act, thought the government was neutral on the issue. "The malicious falsehood has been widely circulated that the measure was designed to force men into unions, although the text provides in simple English prose that workers shall be absolutely free to belong or to refrain from belonging to any organization," Wagner said in a 1935 radio address.

Here's what the text of the NLRA says:

It is hereby declared to be the policy of the United States to eliminate the causes of certain substantial obstructions to the free flow of commerce and to mitigate and eliminate these obstructions when they have occurred by encouraging the practice and procedure of collective bargaining and by protecting the exercise by workers of full freedom of association, self-organization, and designation of representatives of their own choosing.

So, yes, the law's text does include the word encouraging. However, that word follows a long preamble about preventing "certain substantial obstructions" to commerce, which refer to things like strikes, protests, riots, or any other collective action that could damage a business's ability to operate.

The right to collective bargaining existed only in a very limited fashion prior to the NLRA's 1935 passage. The U.S. was in the middle of the Great Depression and 1934 was a particularly troubled year for labor unrest. The passage of the NLRA was intended to put an end to that by giving workers and businesses a less disruptive way to resolve disputes.

What if there aren't "obstructions to the free flow of commerce"? Workers still have the right to collectively bargain, hence the NLRA's second part about protecting workers' "full freedom of association," which reaffirms the First Amendment's "right of the people peaceably to assemble."

In short, the NLRA was only meant to encourage collective bargaining when that serves the purpose of ending "substantial" disruptions in industries, such as strikes, to avoid harm to the national economy. The NLRA is not a mandate for the government to encourage collective bargaining where there are no disruptions. In those situations, the NLRA says that belonging to a union is solely the workers' choice.

The Biden administration seems to know this because it is trying to rewrite the NLRA to make the law encourage unions. The administration supports passing the Protecting the Right to Organize Act (PRO Act), which would eliminate all state-level right-to-work laws. That would strip many workers in 27 states of the choice to say no to belonging to a union.

Had the drafters of the NLRA meant to encourage workers to join a union, they could have made all organized workplaces "closed shops." They could have prohibited right-to-work laws and instead required all workers to join or otherwise support the union if they wanted to keep their jobs. Some lawmakers originally pushed for that but Wagner rejected it, saying during Senate debate that the legislation "does not force any employer to make a closed-shop agreement. It does not even state that Congress favors the policy of the closed shop."

A decade later, the Taft-Hartley amendments to the NLRA would clarify that individual states could prohibit closed shops. The 27 states that do this are now called right-to-work states.

"All I am trying to do, and I think, you believe me when I say that, is to make the worker a free man to join any organization that he wishes to join," Wagner told a gas station attendant in 1934.

Biden's interpretation that the NLRA encourages unions lacks that nuance. He gives lip service to the notion that the choice is solely left up to workers while focusing on aiding his allies in the union movement. That ought to concern workers who would rather make up their own mind about joining a union.

Mr. Biden and other progressives believe the vast majority of individuals are too stupid to make up their own mind about union membership, therefore government needs to coerce them.

 

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Joe Biden: $6 Trillion Man

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/joe-biden-6-trillion-man/

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President Biden has unveiled another $1.8 trillion government-spending package ahead of tonight’s joint session speech to Congress, bringing the total spending signed or proposed in his first 100 days to about $6 trillion.

Let’s see how we got here.

When Biden took office, he pushed a massive spending package as “COVID relief” even though only about 5 percent of the spending was directly related to fighting the pandemic. That cost $1.9 trillion.

Once that passed, he proposed another bill, pitched as infrastructure legislation, which was mostly made up of provisions that have nothing to do with infrastructure. The proposed price tag is $2.25 trillion.

Today, he has unveiled another grab bag of spending on other liberal priorities. Those include subsidized childcare, an Obamacare expansion, universal pre-K, and two years of free community college. The price tag for this one is pegged at $1.8 trillion.

Taken together, that would add up to $5.95 trillion, not including the interest payments on the national debt.

There will be plenty of time in the months ahead to debate the substance of the proposals. However, it’s worth keeping in mind how extraordinary this spending is.

It is not coming at a time of huge surpluses, but at a time when debt exceeds the annual gross domestic product for the only time in the nation’s history other than World War II. It’s coming as a flood of Baby Boomers are retiring and as health-care costs rise.

This is not a moderate agenda by Biden. It is a radical and reckless agenda.

 

Agreed.  A radical and reckless agenda that will not be paid for by "the rich" but by our children and grandchildren for generations to come.  

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Biden Is Using the Pandemic as an Excuse for Permanent Expansions of Government Power

https://reason.com/2021/04/29/biden-is-using-the-pandemic-as-an-excuse-for-permanent-expansions-of-government/

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President Joe Biden isn't letting a crisis go to waste. 

His administration is using the pandemic as an excuse to push a list of preexisting Democratic policy priorities, few of which have much to do with COVID-19, and some of which were initially pitched as temporary measures. 

But in last night's address to a joint Congress, Biden made clear that he wants to extend some these policies, turning COVID-era emergency measures into permanent expansions of federal power, using the virus as an excuse. For Biden, the pandemic has become a catchall justification for a wide array of big-government programs that he and the Democratic Party already wanted to pursue. 

Take, for example, Biden's push to expand subsidies for health insurance purchased via the Affordable Care Act, the health law commonly known as Obamacare. 

Biden's American Rescue Plan—the $1.9 trillion aid bill passed in March—included $34 billion to temporarily boost subsidies for health coverage purchased through Obamacare's marketplaces. The subsidy boost was set to last for two years. 

One could perhaps argue that a pandemic that left millions out of work would justify a temporary program to make health insurance premiums less directly costly for struggling low-income individuals. 

But Biden's subsidy expansion was structured in a way that would expand subsidy availability to families with quite high incomes. The expanded subsidy is tied to local premiums, and so it varies geographically. In some parts of the country, however, it could make tens of thousands of dollars in annual subsidies available to households earning $350,000 a year

In a pandemic-induced recession whose negative economic effects have been concentrated almost entirely at the bottom of the income ladder, there's no non-ridiculous way to justify that sort of handout to the well-off as pandemic relief. It's just a straightforward bid to make an existing big-government program even bigger. 

And what was initially touted as a temporary subsidy expansion is now being upsold as a permanent upgrade. Last night, Biden announced that he wants to extend the subsidy boost indefinitely, which would cost an estimated $200 billion over the next decade. He then went on to praise Obamacare as a "lifeline for millions of Americans" and insist that "the pandemic has demonstrated how badly it is needed." 

The pandemic, in other words, was a convenient excuse—first for a temporary expansion of an already large federal program, then for an even more expensive permanent expansion of that same program. Big government for now swiftly becomes bigger government forever. 

Biden is using this playbook to extend and expand other programs as well. His $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan also included a one-year expansion of the child tax credit. Much of it is refundable, and the plan allows for it to be paid monthly, meaning that it is essentially a regular check cut to parents by the government. As a New York Times report put it recently: "Though framed in technocratic terms as an expansion of an existing tax credit, it is essentially a guaranteed income for families with children." 

The one-year cost of expanding the child tax credit was about $100 billion. In last night's speech, Biden pushed Congress to extend the boost to 2025, likely costing hundreds of billions more. And while some of the benefits would go to low-income households, this plan, too, is structured in a way that delivers benefits to families with six-figure earnings; the White House fact sheet offers an example of a family of four making $100,000 a year that would see thousands of dollars in benefits from this plan. 

If Biden's cash for kids program is extended through 2025, it would be unlikely to end there. It might be reauthorized and extended on a rolling basis, but it would effectively become an ongoing program, another untouchable entitlement in America's already sizable federal policy firmament. Indeed, some Democrats have already publicly pushed the president to simply make the program permanent. And from there, it's easy to imagine that the next push would be to make the benefit even larger. Big government has already become bigger government, and under Biden, it is on track to grow larger and larger still. 

And somehow it's all justified by the pandemic. His speech last night started with the words, "Tonight, I come to talk about crisis." As he took office in January, he said, he had "inherited a nation in crisis." The speech, and its laundry list of pricey new programs and policies, was thus framed as an extended response to that crisis. 

It's not. In part that's because so many of his proposals are either poorly targeted (large checks for households with stable six-figure incomes) or totally irrelevant to any actual problems stemming from the pandemic (bailouts for union pension funds). 

And in part because the crisis itself is fading from the scene, or at least becoming less severe. Thanks to vaccines, COVID-19 cases and deaths are falling rapidly. And thanks to the improving picture around coronavirus health and safety, the economy is rebounding too. The crisis is, if not entirely gone, much less of one than it was a few months ago, and thus much less of a plausible justification for extreme measures in response. Yet even as COVID fades away, Biden is pursuing massive expansions of federal power premised on crisis response. 

That's because despite the speech's framing, crisis response isn't really the goal—or, at the very least, it's only part of it. Biden is pursuing a historically unprecedented expansion of government spending and power for its own sake. And no one is really trying to hide it either. The post-speech headline at the top of The New York Times main page this morning read, "Biden Makes Case to Vastly Expand Government's Role." It described his speech as an "ambitious agenda to rewrite the American social compact."  

Biden's presidency is barely three months old, but it's already fallen into a predictable pattern: Point to the pandemic. Declare that it's an emergency, and that something must be done. Then insist on an expensive, expansive policy overhaul that Democrats have pushed for years—first, in some cases, as a temporary measure, and then, inevitably, for much longer. It's deceptive and dangerous. And if he keeps this up, he may leave a new crisis in his wake.

It is no longer a "government by the people, for the people."  It is now "government by the government, for the government."

 

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