Search This Blog

De Omnibus Dubitandum - Lux Veritas

Friday, March 31, 2023

Whose Children? Our Children

By March 31, 2023 @ Sultan Knish Blog

“We have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents,” MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry argued. “Educators love their students and know better than anyone what they need to learn and to thrive,” the NEA asserted. “Parents claim they have the right to shape their kids’ school curriculum. They don’t,” a Washington Post op-ed bluntly asserted.

A Minnesota bill now proposes to take children away from parents who don’t agree to have them sexually mutilated. Similar bills are working their way through other states.

Behind all the identity politics, the graphic sexual materials in classrooms, the covert gender swaps by public school administrators, critical race theory, drag shows and so much else is a showdown between the family and the state. It’s not a new confrontation, but teenage puberty blockers, suicides, sex and racism manuals have made the stakes painfully clear.

At the heart of sexual identity politics is an obsession with dismantling the family. The embrace of transgenderism by the state is no accident of politics. The family, like race and religion, is the chief rival to the state. The state set out to neuter its rivals through identity politics, using race, religion and finally sexuality to define new identities and use them to make the state supreme.

The great struggle between human beings and the state was always going to come down to the question of whether the system or the family would be the central unit of social organization. In a little over a century a question that once seemed as basic to the understanding of humanity as the differences between men and women was muddied. The government took charge of education and demanded oversight of all the nation’s children because the indoctrination of the citizenry was a vital national interest. But so was the existence or non-existence of the children.

The state did not just control what children learned, but whether they lived. It asserts the right to kill unborn children in the womb, and in Canada and Europe to kill them through euthanasia if they are ill or depressed. From eugenics to abortion, the state determined that it had a vital interest in not only how children were raised, but that they lived or died at its command.

Democracy had come to mean not a town meeting and a free press, but the state determining its own future constituencies, rigging elections a generation ahead by controlling demographics, education and all the elements of the lives of children. By controlling children, the state had become a next generation tyranny in the guise of a multi-generational democracy. The Left always looked to the “future” and the “children” because they had already brought it into being.

The new social order remade parents into glorified employees of the state. Birthing and rearing children became labor on behalf of the state subsidized by its institutions with the understanding that at the opportune moment, the state would tell the parents to step back while it takes charge.

When schools secretly change the gender of children or push sexual and racist materials on them, the state is taking charge. And administrations and unions indignantly tell parents to keep quiet and not interfere. Parents, like most taxpayers, under the impression that the system answers to them or at least that it ought to answer to them were confused and enraged.

The shift from the single-income family to the two-income family with preschool encompassing children as young as 18 months and then to an ever more intensive chain of state educational institutions happened gradually enough that most parents thought it was their own idea. But what the Soviet Union and Communist China had failed to accomplish, happened in America.

Children, from even before they could talk, were being raised either directly by the state or by the institutions that it closely regulated. The unintended consequences of that, emotional fragility, a lack of healthy models for interpersonal relationships, and an obsession with ‘snitching’ on others that persists well into adulthood, were only the collateral damage.

The campus safe space and the ghetto are where the experimental testing of the children has been conducted, leaving behind radioactive social wastelands fit only for DEI seminars.

Such children raised by the state become adults who want the state to go on raising them. When they’re hungry, the state feeds them, when they’re cold, the state shelters them and when they’re unhappy, the state tells them whom to blame. When their relationships fall apart or when their feelings are hurt, they turn to the state to soothe them with a dose of revenge.

The state was field testing its transitional model for replacing the family with its communal institutions. This dream, at least two centuries old in western socialist circles, is being realized not only by the primary products of those experiments, single mothers raising children from different fathers on government subsidies, but by much of the next generation.

Teachers and administrators in those institutions are pushing sexual identity politics on children as young as two years old not just because it’s a current leftist fad, but because eliminating the family wipes out any competition. The gradual transitional elimination of the family is rapidly picking up speed. Now the plan is to destroy the family by destroying the children.

Children have an inherent need for a family. Totalitarian regimes have fought the family in the past by turning children against their parents. And yet even in the face of the monstrous propaganda of the USSR, Communist China and Nazi Germany, the family has persisted. The Left has come to realize that the only way to destroy the family is to destroy the children.

The familiar vision of socialism is man as a tabula rasa, a blank state, not just economically or socially as under Communism, but completely empty, ready to fit any mold. He can be a man or a woman, or any hybridized combination of new invented sexes to be determined by the state.

Instead of the people deciding what the state ought to be like, the state will determine what the people will be like down to the smaller granular detail. A democracy of people who have been trained to reshape themselves completely in response to propaganda and their instructors are capable of becoming the willing pawns and puppets of any state no matter how terrible.

Or so it would seem.

This totalitarian utopia requires the extinction of the family as its ultimate precondition and final triumph. That is what is really at stake in this struggle. And it is best summed up by a single question. “Whose children? Our children or the children of the state?” 

 Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.  Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.  Thank you for reading.

 

Daniel Greenfield Unleashed

By Rich Kozlovich

Daniel Greenfield is prolific as well as insightful.  We're seeing a corrupt Democrat DA rewriting criminal law in order to make Donald Trump a criminal, all of which is going to come back to haunt them.  Yet we're seeing case after case where these misfits are not only not enforcing the law, they ordering the police to follow suit.  

The entire federal government has been weaponized to promote insane leftist policies that are destroying the very fabric of America, putting the nation at the precipice, standing on a crumbling edge. 

We need to grasp, thoroughly grasp, this one absolutely incontrovertible foundational fact. Leftism destroys everything it touches.  That's history, and that history is incontestable. 

U.S. Marshals Were Banned From Arresting Leftist Supreme Court Protesters The Trump Indictment, Accelerates America’s National Divorce - A culture of authoritarian lawlessness is one in which there are two very different standards. Everyone has probably seen the videos of gun control activists and transurrectionists storming legislatures. But even well before Jan 6, massive BLM riots, including a direct attack on the White House, had politicians and the media denouncing the use of force against the mostly peaceful rioters. Gen. Milley has spent the rest of his career atoning for walking with Trump to the Church of Presidents which BLM had tried to burn down. Since then, Jan 6 rioters have been tracked down and locked up while BLM rioters are getting multi-million dollar payouts from cities like New York and Philly.........

Biden Admin Boycotts Israel,Straughn informed the organizers that the State Department canceled her authorization to fly. -This is governmental BDS, but it also reminds me of how the Obama administration gamed the shutdown by forcing the cancelation of all sorts of events and venues just to make a point. If this story is accurate, then part of the Biden admin’s pressure campaign on Israel involved the cancelation of completely apolitical events......

Congress Gets a Personal Lesson in Crime, Does Congress have to experience crimes before it’ll stop pandering to criminals? - It used to be that Congress were the biggest criminals in D.C. Now they have competition. In February, Rep. Angie Craig was assaulted by a career criminal in the elevator of her D.C. building. The attacker, who had previously been busted 13 times for assault, decided to go for his 14th outing by punching the congresswoman in the face while trying to force her inside..........D.C. isn’t suffering from “gun violence”, but from criminals running around on the loose..............

$5 Million in Reparations to Every Black Person is “Nothing”, Activists Protest, "$5 million is nothing, and I'll tell you why." - They have a point. Why settle for $5 billion and all the free Ben and Jerry’s you can eat? It should be $10 billion a person and no grocery bills for life. Or $100 trillion. At the rate our inflation is going, it’s all the same.  The California Reparations Task Force had proposed $5 million in reparations for the historic slavery experienced by residents of the southern state that played a key role in the Confederacy. Meeting in Sacramento, the former seat of office for Jefferson Davis, the reparations task force demanded tearing down statues of key confederate leaders like George Moscone, Harvey Milk and Jerry Brown.  More seriously (or perhaps less so), there’s an $800 billion bill for California..............

Closing Comedy’s Bigot Loophole, "And now we’re not allowed to do that.” People in comedy have been complaining about ‘sensitivity’ for a while. First comedians began to stay away from college campuses, but then those students graduated, got jobs and shut down everything else. There’s been plenty of muted complaints..............[except for] comedy’s bigot loophole. You could make politically incorrect jokes as long as you had an Archie Bunker-style character making them who you were meant to disapprove of, but whom audiences secretly liked..........

Biden’s Secretary of Defense Chooses Abortion Over Military Readiness - Biden’s woke brass keep claiming that adopting every leftist agenda from DEI to abortion to sexual identity politics to HIV deployment is not interfering with military readiness in any way. Except when they admit it themselves..............

Biden to Israel: “They Cannot Continue Down this Road” - The leftist mobs shrieking hate and blocking ambulances claimed that they were fighting for “democracy” in Israel by demanding unlimited power for an unelected leftist judiciary that picks its own members. This is what “democracy” looks like..........


Did New Yorkers Die, So a DA Could Target Trump?

By March 30, 2023 @ Sultan Knish Blog 

(Editor's Note:  I know I published this yesterday, but it needs as much coverage as possible now that Trump has been indicted by a corrupt and stupid Democrat DA.  RK)

Than Htwe, a 58-Year-Old Asian American woman, was walking with her son up the stairs of a Chinatown subway station when they were violently assaulted by a violent thug. Than, who had been on her way to a Buddhist temple, had her head smashed into the ground and died. The thug responsible got a mere 1-3 years in prison which effectively amounted to time served.

This has become typical under Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg.

Bragg’s office let a man accusing of raping a teenage girl go with 30 days and probation. A week before sentencing he went on a “sex-crime spree” attacking four different women. One woman stopped his attempt to rape her by hitting him on the head with a hammer: doing the job that the DA wouldn’t.

A gang member facing four grand larceny charges was set loose by Bragg’s pro-crime people before he mugged a 14-year-old boy.

A Muslim thug who took part in a brutal assault on a Jewish man near a pro-Israel rally boasted, “If I could do it again, I would do it again.” Despite that, Bragg’s office offered him a plea deal of six months.

When Bragg took office, he released a Day One memo which told prosecutors not to pursue prison sentences for many crimes including armed robberies and not to ask for life sentences.

As a result of his pro-crime guidelines, more than half of felony cases were downgraded to misdemeanors. Felony convictions fell from 68% to 51%, misdemeanor convictions from 53% to 29% and very few of those ever saw prison. Bragg’s pro-crime prosecutorial pipeline turned felonies into misdemeanors and then the offenders never served a day in prison.

Murders rose 10%, aggravated assaults were up 11% and robberies shot up 25%

Bragg justified his pro-crime policies by arguing that he was trying to use resources more efficiently. He claimed that his Day One memo refusing to prosecute many crimes was about freeing up “prosecutorial resources”. When Bragg’s office dropped most of the charges against a serial shoplifter, they claimed it would have been a “waste of resources” to go forward.

What was Bragg really focusing on?

In 2022, even as violent crimes shot up and the Manhattan DA’s office claimed that it wasn’t prosecuting criminals because it was shorthanded, it hired Matthew Colangelo, a former Biden DOJ appointee and Sotomayor clerk who had headed over to the New York State Attorney General’s office to go after Trump. Colangelo’s current salary isn’t listed, but he was earning $203,000 at the federal level and isn’t likely to have taken a pay cut to work for Bragg.

“Matthew Colangelo brings a wealth of economic justice experience combined with complex white-collar investigations, and he has the sound judgment and integrity needed to pursue justice against powerful people,” Bragg bragged. It was no secret whom Bragg had in mind.

While Bragg hired a legal hit man to go after Trump, crime victims were mourning as their attackers were cut loose because the Manhattan DA’s office claimed not to have the resources.

The investigation of Trump had been led by Susan Hoffinger, the head of the Manhattan DA’s office of investigations, at a salary of $208,600, along with a team of three others. The full cost of the pursuit of Trump and his associates on petty charges likely run well into the millions.

The Mueller investigation’s obscene $32 million price tag was bad enough, but at the federal level, millions and even billions come out of the petty cash drawer. DA Alvin Bragg however told crime victims that he had to free criminals because his office didn’t have enough resources.

Bragg didn’t have enough resources to help crime victims, but plenty to go after Trump.

How many people were killed, how many were robbed, beaten and raped because Bragg made targeting Trump into his priority? Most crimes are committed by career criminals who go in and out of the system until they’re finally prosecuted and locked up for good. Taking one criminal out of circulation for even a few years can save lives. The failure to prosecute however costs lives.

An extra 50 people were killed in Manhattan on Bragg’s watch. How many of those people really had to die?

An extra 159 women were raped.

An extra 3,524 people were robbed.

An extra 4,197 people were assaulted.

How much of that could have been prevented if Bragg had focused his “prosecutorial resources” on pursuing criminals, instead of giving perps a pass, while focusing on political crimes?

Bragg’s war against former President Trump is fully consistent with his attitude.

When Jose Alba, a bodega store worker, was assaulted and defended his life by stabbing the thug, Bragg hit him with the highest possible murder charges and $250,000 bail. Those charges were later dropped. A similar case involving fishmarket workers also played out more recently.

Soros DAs consider criminals to be victims and those who defend themselves to be criminals.

It would be a mistake to imagine that Bragg, like Soros DAs around the country, is reluctant to use the powers of his office. Despite all the chatter about “restorative justice” and “diversion programs”, they gleefully unleash ruthless force against their political opponents. That’s why St Louis’ Kim Gardner came after Mark and Patricia McCloskey who displayed firearms in order to deter an invasion by members of a BLM hate mob. It’s why Bragg is going after Trump.

Progressive prosecutors are really political prosecutors and Bragg is one of the worst of the lot.

Before Bragg, New York State Attorney General Letitia James calmly watched exploding crime rates while going after the NRA and then Trump with a view to running for governor. The Manhattan DA is just following in her footsteps by prosecuting political crimes instead of crimes.

Bragg hopes that maddened Manhattanites hate Trump enough to ignore the fact that he has allowed criminals to run free. And he expects to use the case to run for higher office.

For Manhattanites the question is whether they want public safety or a Trump prosecution.

DA Alvin Bragg is out to redeem a year of criminal terror with a Trump arrest. And if New Yorkers had to die, be beaten, robbed and raped to make it happen, that’s a small price to pay.
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation. Thank you for reading.

Time to (Finally) Defund the OECD?

March 28, 2023 by Dan Mitchell @ International Liberty

Nearly 13 years ago, I narrated this video about the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a Paris-based international bureaucracy that uses American tax dollars to advocate for bigger government and higher taxes.


Everything I said in that video is still true, except now the federal budget is far bigger and the OECD has had about a dozen more years to push for dirigiste policies

It is particularly disgusting (and hypocritical) that the OECD is a big cheerleader for higher taxes, yet its bureaucrats get tax-free salaries.

Not only does the OECD urge higher taxes in countries all around the world (even poor countries!), it also lobbies to undermine tax competition by advocating for policies such as Joe Biden’s corporate tax cartel.

And it adds insult to injury that American taxpayers are subsidizing this nonsense.

But maybe that will come to an end. Reporting for Bloomberg Tax, Samantha Handler and Chris Cioffi explain that Republicans are threatening to end U.S. subsidies for the Paris-based bureaucracy.


Republicans are plotting ways to push back on the landmark global tax deal agreed to by nearly 140 countries, including by calling to pull US funding for the OECD that’s leading the negotiations. …“There’s concerns about the work product of the OECD,” said Rep. Adrian Smith (R-Neb.), the Ways and Means trade subcommittee chairman. …The US currently funds 19.1% of Part I of the OECD’s budget, according to the letter addressed to House Appropriations State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs Chairman Mario Diaz-Balart (R-Fla.) and ranking member Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.). …Chairman Jason Smith (R-Mo.) sent a letterlast month to the OECD Secretary-General Mathias Cormann, urging him to reject all proposals that would affect US jobs and tax revenue. Jason Smith called Pillar Two’s undertaxed profits rule “fundamentally flawed.”

Needless to say, Republicans should defund the OECD. Giving American tax dollars to the bureaucrats in Paris is a subsidy for the left.

For all intents and purposes, this is an IQ test for Republicans. Presumably, they are smart enough to understand that they should not send money to the Democratic National Committee or MSNBC. You would think they would also be smart enough not to subsidize a bureaucracy that advocates for the DNC/MSNBC agenda.

Unfortunately, Republicans have a well-deserved reputation for being the “stupid party.”

  • They had total control of Washington from 2002-2006 during the Bush year. Did they defund the OECD? No.
  • They had todal control of Washington from 2017-2018 during the Trump years. Did they defund the OECD? No.

To make matters worse, Republicans are sometimes so stupid that they actively help the OECD push for bad policy. Here’s another blurb from the article.

Momentum started building on the global tax talks under the Trump administration, with the US participating actively in the negotiations.

To be fair, the Trump Administration sort of proposed to defund the OECD back in 2017, but there was zero follow-through (hardly a surprise since Trump wound up being a big spender).

Instead, his dilettante Treasury Secretary actively supported the OECD.

The bottom line is that I’m happy that some Republicans are threatening to defund the OECD but I’m not overflowing with confidence that they will have the intelligence and diligence to make it happen. Even if they wind up back in power after the 2024 election.

P.S. There is at least one Republican who is very principled on the issue of the OECD.

P.P.S. The OECD sometimes resorts to grotesque dishonesty while pushing for bigger government.

P.P.P.S. I’ve been accused of “trading with the enemy” because I argue against the OECD. Heck, the bureaucrats even threatened to throw me in a Mexican jail.

Thursday, March 30, 2023

P&D Today

Fixing Education in America is Job One

De Omnibus Dubitandum

By Rich Kozlovich 

While I'm no longer sending out notices for P&D, some have expressed the desire to still get my commentaries.  This link to will take you there. 

/div>
Before opening any of the five commentaries appearing in today's P&D, I would like to draw your attention to this American Thinker piece by Patricia McCarthy, Benedict Arnold, Bill Clinton, Joe Biden and Alejandro Mayorkas – liars and traitors all, where she outlines in the clearest possible terms the corruption and damage these sewer trout are doing to the nation.  She calls them all traitors. 
 
The Clintons have been tawdry, brazen liars, devious and corrupt, and the author shows how they became massively wealthy selling out America, and have done all this with impunity. Right along with the Obamas, and especially Joe Biden who:
 
........has been a pathological liar for all his years in Congress, as a representative and then as a senator.  He can’t open his mouth without lies spewing forth; there are far too many to list.  From his early support of segregation to his later denial; his plagiarism, his lies about his academic record, etc., etc.  In truth, Biden has always been a racist, a rather vicious one at that.  See his attempt to humiliate Clarence Thomas at his SCOTUS confirmation.  The man is one of the most greedy, corrupt politicians ever to steal the presidency, which he did, and to end up in the Oval Office. 

And she doesn't stop there.  She calls the entire Democrat party traitors to Americans for their pro-criminal positions, the medical profession for butchering children to appease gender misfits, Republicans for being spineless, and calls them all traitors to America.  She ends with this:
 
A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within.  An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly.  But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rutling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself.   Marcus Tullius Cicero
 
There's only one problem with this quote.  Marcus Tullius Cicero never said it.  But does it matter?  That statement is profound and factual no matter who said it or when.  These people are all traitors, just like Benedict Arnold.  

I'm leading today with Daniel Greenfield's piece on just  how corrupt  the system of justice in America has become under the Democrat party.  They're killing the nation allowing murders, rapists, thieves, drug dealers, and pedophile wolves to run rampant among the sheep, because they're no longer "good shepherds".  We are at the precipice to disaster in every aspect of America society.  Why is that so hard to grasp?
 
  1. Did New Yorkers Die, So a DA Could Target Trump? By Daniel Greenfield
  2. Fossil fuels still dominate security and defense needs By Don Ritter
  3. Let’s Cut the Budget Nonsense By Robert E. Wright
  4. Litigating The Government's Metastasizing Censorship Regime By Francis Menton
  5. More Evidence Against Universal Basic Income By Dan Mitchell
 
Free North Star Clipart, Download Free North Star Clipart ... 
Constant as the North Star
 

Fossil fuels still dominate security and defense needs

That’s why climate policies can seriously harm our defense, economic and security needs

Don Ritter

President Joe Biden says climate change is the greatest threat faced by our country, and the world. It’s a greater threat than nuclear war,  he insists.

Ironically, the proposed “solution” of eliminating essential fossil fuels to mitigate climate change actually increases greenhouse gas emissions and toxic air and water pollution – by requiring that we mine and process up to fourteen times more raw materials per megawatt for wind turbines and electric vehicle or backup batteries than would be required for natural gas-based electricity generation.

Worse, most of that mining, processing and manufacturing would be done overseas – almost all of it using fossil fuels – in countries that have few or no laws for pollution control, wildlife habitat and endangered species protection, land reclamation, child and slave labor, fair wages or other values we hold dear.

Eliminating fossil fuels also reduces our ability to protect our homeland, prevent nuclear war and project Peace Through Strength worldwide. Further, it profoundly weakens America, by creating an imminent crisis for our economy and our military, the two main pillars of a nation’s power.

Fossil fuels are the lifeblood of American military power and serve numerous purposes.

Every iota of military equipment needs fossil fuels to manufacture it, and to run it: from fossil fuel-derived petrochemicals to make thousands of plastic components for infinite uses; to mining and processing minerals into thousands of steel and aluminum alloys for trucks, tanks, guns, aircraft and artillery; to copper and non-ferrous metals for wiring and shell casings; to processing minerals and chemicals into gunpowder and other explosives –

to creating and powering the semiconductor chips for increasingly energy-hungry electronic equipment that is part and parcel of all modern weaponry; to producing and shipping food for members of our Armed Services all over the world; to manufacturing pharmaceuticals and medical equipment to save lives and bring wounded warriors back to health.

Fossil fuels are essential for just about everything the military needs, from nuclear weapons to toilet paper!

This war on fossil fuels is happening at the same time the Biden Administration and Democrat supporters in Congress are spending hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars on deficit-increasing, investment-directing, market-skewing solar, wind, battery-storage, biofuel and other Green Energy schemes.

Given the overwhelming dependence of our military on fossil fuels, this diversion of investments away from fossil fuels will wreak havoc on America’s readiness and defense industrial base.

Where does the lion’s share of raw materials for wind turbines, solar panels, batteries – and the high-tech equipment to produce these and military items – come from? China, and China-invested or China-run African, Asian and Latin American mines that are notorious for child labor, horrendous working conditions, and virtually no concern for the environment or human lives.

America has bounteous oil, gas and coal at home. It lacks the critical materials that go into wind turbines, solar panels, batteries and weapons only because we have made most American mineralized and mining areas off limits – and the administration has rejected almost every proposed mining project it’s seen.

While the push for renewables may be popular in politics, it is problematic in practice. Reliance on our adversaries is highly detrimental to our national security, economy and very existence.

America will be forced to import vital materials from insecure, adversarial nations, such as China, making us dangerously and unnecessarily dependent on foreign sources. China has the technologies (often stolen from the West) and the materials for dominating both “renewables” – solar, wind and battery industries – and defense needs. The harsh reality is that China is totally dominant in renewable energy industries right now. By “going green,” our dependence on China will only increase

Moreover, their electric grid is powered largely by fossil fuels, and thus is set up to back up wind and solar when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow. Meanwhile, ours grid is becoming less reliable as we retire fossil fuel plants. Just think of the freezing of windmills in Texas in the dead of winter, and California’s ultra-green government asking EV owners not to charge their vehicles because doing so could cause widespread blackouts! 

Add Russia as China’s oil and gas station, plus raw materials supplier, and China makes a dramatic leap in both military and economic capabilities. Sino-Russian collaboration could well become the globally dominant force over a fossil fuel-disarming America and West.

Indeed, Russia acting alone is able to invade a large, sovereign European nation – even though Russia’s economy is smaller than Italy’s, a mere 3% of the USA plus Europe. How is that possible?

Because Russia has, produces, uses and sells oil, gas and coal, giving it energy dominance now and into the future. Russia’s war on Ukraine is being paid for by its fossil fuel revenues. And, while energy-weakened Europe reopens a headline-grabbing 27 mothballed coal plants to make up for the lost natural gas from Russia, it still bans fracking for oil and gas, and prays for warm winters.

In the meantime, China is building at least 27 new coal plants every year.

Common sense dictates that America reverse its climate-obsessed anti-fossil-fuel policies, and pursue a future that is “all-of-the-above” energy to ensure economic, technological and national security reality – where all-of-the-above means energy that doesn’t require massive federal and state government subsidies; energy that isn’t weather dependent; energy that is abundant, reliable and affordable every hour of every day, year after year.

Anything less betrays not only our men and women defenders in our Armed Forces, but all of us.

Don Ritter holds a Science Doctorate from MIT and served fourteen years on the House of Representatives Energy and Commerce and Science and Technology Committees. After leaving Congress he created and led the National Environmental Policy Institute.

He was a National Academy of Sciences Fellow in the USSR, speaks fluent Russian, and was Ranking Member on the Congressional Helsinki Commission and founding Co-Chair of the Baltic States-Ukraine Caucus. He is a Trustee of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation and Museum, and Co-chairs its Capital Campaign.

 

Let’s Cut the Budget Nonsense

Robert E. Wright Robert E. WrightMarch 30, 2023 @ American Institute for Economic Research 

 

The Biden administration has floated another bloated budget, one that will put the US national debt at $43.6 trillion by 2033, assuming its optimistic growth and interest-rate projections pan out and the Ukraine war ends. If this budget passes, the debt will hit 110 percent of GDP, federal spending will exceed 25 percent of GDP, and federal revenue will top 20 percent of GDP, with the balance borrowed.

The details induce queasiness. Some $5 trillion in tax increases are slated, including $119 billion by reducing the so-called “tax gap,” code for increased IRS scrutiny of small businesses. Some $3 trillion is to come from increasing the stock-buyback tax from 1 to 4 percent, increasing other corporate taxes, raising the corporate income tax from 21 to 28 percent, and reforming international tax rules, as if large corporations will just pay up and not move out.

Individuals will pay more, too, with the top income tax rate increasing from 37 to 39.6 percent, with capital gains and estate taxes increasing, too. A 25 percent tax on the “unrealized income” of billionaires is projected to raise $437 billion, though its constitutionality appears dubious. The plan also relies on bracket creep – by raising tax brackets more slowly than inflation, nominal taxes for the middle and lower classes will increase, even if their inflation-adjusted wages continue to stagnate.

That might all be palatable, were the money used to pay down the national debt, and not to increase funding for a bunch of stuff that needs to be reformed, not fed with more federal cash. 

At the top of the list is a $600 billion increase to expand funding for pre-K and child care. Fact is, over-the-top regulation and out-of-control occupational licensing has driven up the cost of childcare without any increase in quality. Reverse those policies and daycare costs would drop without costing taxpayers a cent. (Besides, given what is going on, and not going on, in government schools, how many parents are going to want their babies and toddlers attending government-funded daycare and pre-K?)

Next is $325 billion slated to establish national paid family and medical leave, a matter best left to employers and employees.

Then there is $217 billion to offer “free” community college and other higher education subsidies. It has been shown, repeatedly, that the latter simply raises tuition costs. The former will induce many young adults to waste a few years, as everyone knows how people treat things that they do not have to pay for themselves.

Another half-trillion is headed to the Affordable Care Act, which has turned out to be neither affordable nor very caring, and the Indian Health Service, which is so bad that the US government ought perhaps to pay reparations for imposing it on American Indians. Another almost half-trillion goes to other miscellaneous health care, and other spending increases. I’m afraid to delve too deeply into those, for fear I’ll need cardiac care that I cannot afford.

A final $105 billion is slated to support affordable housing. As with childcare, the government’s own rules and regulations are the biggest barriers to improvement. Deregulate mortgage markets, modernize building codes, and reform zoning, and the contractors will build and refurbish enough units to suit everyone.

The Biden administration’s goal seems to be to spend lots of money on new, unnecessary programs or failing, existing programs, and to pay for it with yet more debt and with novel taxes likely to fall more heavily on middle-class Americans and small businesses than on big corporations or the rich. If it does not break America outright, it will strain its fiscal capacity to the point that the government might not be able to respond effectively to a major war or other crisis.

It’s high time that we take seriously Democrat Bill White’s suggestion that US policymakers return to the unwritten fiscal constitution in place between the nation’s founding and the administration of George W. Bush. Its commonsense borrowing and taxing principles encouraged economic growth while keeping some fiscal capacity in reserve in case of emergency.

 
Robert E. Wright

Robert E. Wright is a Senior Research Fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research. He is the (co)author or (co)editor of over two dozen major books, book series, and edited collections, including AIER’s The Best of Thomas Paine (2021) and Financial Exclusion (2019). He has also (co)authored numerous articles for important journals, including the American Economic ReviewBusiness History ReviewIndependent ReviewJournal of Private EnterpriseReview of Finance, and Southern Economic Review. Robert has taught business, economics, and policy courses at Augustana University, NYU’s Stern School of Business, Temple University, the University of Virginia, and elsewhere since taking his Ph.D. in History from SUNY Buffalo in 1997.  

Selected Publications

Find Robert
  1. SSRN: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=362640
  2. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3792-3506
  3. Academia: https://robertwright.academia.edu/
  4. Google: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=D9Qsx6QAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=sra
  5. Twitter, Gettr, and Parler: @robertewright

Did New Yorkers Die, So a DA Could Target Trump?

March 30, 2023 @ Sultan Knish Blog (Emphasis added by me.  RK)

Than Htwe, a 58-Year-Old Asian American woman, was walking with her son up the stairs of a Chinatown subway station when they were violently assaulted by a violent thug. Than, who had been on her way to a Buddhist temple, had her head smashed into the ground and died. The thug responsible got a mere 1-3 years in prison which effectively amounted to time served.

This has become typical under Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg.

Bragg’s office let a man accusing of raping a teenage girl go with 30 days and probation. A week before sentencing he went on a “sex-crime spree” attacking four different women. One woman stopped his attempt to rape her by hitting him on the head with a hammer: doing the job that the DA wouldn’t.

A gang member facing four grand larceny charges was set loose by Bragg’s pro-crime people before he mugged a 14-year-old boy.

A Muslim thug who took part in a brutal assault on a Jewish man near a pro-Israel rally boasted, “If I could do it again, I would do it again.” Despite that, Bragg’s office offered him a plea deal of six months.

When Bragg took office, he released a Day One memo which told prosecutors not to pursue prison sentences for many crimes including armed robberies and not to ask for life sentences.

As a result of his pro-crime guidelines, more than half of felony cases were downgraded to misdemeanors. Felony convictions fell from 68% to 51%, misdemeanor convictions from 53% to 29% and very few of those ever saw prison. Bragg’s pro-crime prosecutorial pipeline turned felonies into misdemeanors and then the offenders never served a day in prison.

Murders rose 10%, aggravated assaults were up 11% and robberies shot up 25%

Bragg justified his pro-crime policies by arguing that he was trying to use resources more efficiently. He claimed that his Day One memo refusing to prosecute many crimes was about freeing up “prosecutorial resources”. When Bragg’s office dropped most of the charges against a serial shoplifter, they claimed it would have been a “waste of resources” to go forward.

What was Bragg really focusing on?

In 2022, even as violent crimes shot up and the Manhattan DA’s office claimed that it wasn’t prosecuting criminals because it was shorthanded, it hired Matthew Colangelo, a former Biden DOJ appointee and Sotomayor clerk who had headed over to the New York State Attorney General’s office to go after Trump. Colangelo’s current salary isn’t listed, but he was earning $203,000 at the federal level and isn’t likely to have taken a pay cut to work for Bragg.

“Matthew Colangelo brings a wealth of economic justice experience combined with complex white-collar investigations, and he has the sound judgment and integrity needed to pursue justice against powerful people,” Bragg bragged. It was no secret whom Bragg had in mind.

While Bragg hired a legal hit man to go after Trump, crime victims were mourning as their attackers were cut loose because the Manhattan DA’s office claimed not to have the resources.

The investigation of Trump had been led by Susan Hoffinger, the head of the Manhattan DA’s office of investigations, at a salary of $208,600, along with a team of three others. The full cost of the pursuit of Trump and his associates on petty charges likely run well into the millions.

The Mueller investigation’s obscene $32 million price tag was bad enough, but at the federal level, millions and even billions come out of the petty cash drawer. DA Alvin Bragg however told crime victims that he had to free criminals because his office didn’t have enough resources.

Bragg didn’t have enough resources to help crime victims, but plenty to go after Trump.

How many people were killed, how many were robbed, beaten and raped because Bragg made targeting Trump into his priority? Most crimes are committed by career criminals who go in and out of the system until they’re finally prosecuted and locked up for good. Taking one criminal out of circulation for even a few years can save lives. The failure to prosecute however costs lives.

An extra 50 people were killed in Manhattan on Bragg’s watch. How many of those people really had to die?

An extra 159 women were raped.

An extra 3,524 people were robbed.

An extra 4,197 people were assaulted.


How much of that could have been prevented if Bragg had focused his “prosecutorial resources” on pursuing criminals, instead of giving perps a pass, while focusing on political crimes?

Bragg’s war against former President Trump is fully consistent with his attitude.

When Jose Alba, a bodega store worker, was assaulted and defended his life by stabbing the thug, Bragg hit him with the highest possible murder charges and $250,000 bail. Those charges were later dropped. A similar case involving fishmarket workers also played out more recently.

Soros DAs consider criminals to be victims and those who defend themselves to be criminals.

It would be a mistake to imagine that Bragg, like Soros DAs around the country, is reluctant to use the powers of his office. Despite all the chatter about “restorative justice” and “diversion programs”, they gleefully unleash ruthless force against their political opponents. That’s why St Louis’ Kim Gardner came after Mark and Patricia McCloskey who displayed firearms in order to deter an invasion by members of a BLM hate mob. It’s why Bragg is going after Trump.

Progressive prosecutors are really political prosecutors and Bragg is one of the worst of the lot.

Before Bragg, New York State Attorney General Letitia James calmly watched exploding crime rates while going after the NRA and then Trump with a view to running for governor. The Manhattan DA is just following in her footsteps by prosecuting political crimes instead of crimes.

Bragg hopes that maddened Manhattanites hate Trump enough to ignore the fact that he has allowed criminals to run free. And he expects to use the case to run for higher office.

For Manhattanites the question is whether they want public safety or a Trump prosecution.

DA Alvin Bragg is out to redeem a year of criminal terror with a Trump arrest. And if New Yorkers had to die, be beaten, robbed and raped to make it happen, that’s a small price to pay.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.  Thank you for reading.

Litigating The Government's Metastasizing Censorship Regime

March 28, 2023 @ Manhattan Contrarian

For years, conservatives have complained of apparent censorship of their voices on the principal social media platforms, like Facebook, Google and Twitter. Posts or tweets get taken down, or de-boosted, or de-monetized, or degraded in search results, or “shadow-banned,” or slapped with content warnings, or otherwise suppressed. But the response from Big Tech has always been, hey, we’re private companies, and we’re not subject to the First Amendment. We can do as we please.

Then Elon Musk took over Twitter, and followed by giving several journalists access to Twitter’s electronic archives to investigate any untoward government manipulation. The result has been the Twitter Files, an ongoing series of Twitter threads laying bare the coordination between pre-Musk Twitter and dozens of government actors to suppress disfavored speech. The most recent nineteenth segment of the Twitter Files series was published on March 20 by Matt Taibbi.

Now that it is clear that the systematic censorship of conservative voices is very real and has been largely directed and coordinated by the government itself behind the scenes, is there anything that can be done about that through litigation? There actually are some significant efforts under way in that regard. Probably the most important is the case titled Missouri v. Biden, pending in the Western District of Louisiana. The case seeks declaratory and injunctive relief against the government under the First Amendment to stop it from continuing to pressure social media platforms to suppress speech that the current government does not like. On March 20, the court issued a major opinion denying the government’s motion to dismiss. That opinion is available here. With the motion to dismiss denied, the case will proceed through full discovery and, presumably, trial.

The plaintiffs in Missouri v. Biden are the states of Missouri and Louisiana, plus a group of private plaintiffs that includes some prominent names in the area of Covid-19 response — most notably Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford and Martin Kulldorff of Harvard. The two states are represented by their offices of Attorney General. The individual plaintiffs are represented by the New Civil Liberties Alliance, the public interest law firm that is recently making a huge name for itself in cutting-edge civil rights litigation.

Being no dummies, the NCLA has brought this case in a Louisiana District Court where it was likely to find a favorable judge, and which is part of the federal Fifth Circuit, known as the most conservative of the federal courts of appeal. It’s the flip side of how the game of environmental and “climate” litigation has long been played by the Left. When climate activists brought federal lawsuits trying to get some judge to declare a constitutional right to shut down use of energy, they went to the federal courts in San Francisco and Oregon, known to be home to multiple activist judges, and both part of the liberal Ninth Circuit. OK, two can play this game.

Although the original Complaint in Missouri v. Biden pre-dates the Twitter Files exposé, the plaintiffs were able to compile substantial information about federal involvement in the suppression of their speech. And, as more information has come out, the plaintiffs have amended their complaint twice. Here are just a few examples from the court’s Opinion of allegations of speech suppressed as a result of threat from or coordination with the government. (The allegations in question come either from the plaintiffs’ Second Amended Complaint, or from declarations submitted by plaintiffs as part of the motion papers.):

  • “The Media Research Center found more than 640 examples of bans, deleted content and other speech restrictions placed on those who criticized [President] Biden on social media over the past two years.” . . . “The list of censorship targets included an array of prominent influencers on social media: Trump; lawmakers like Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA); news outlets like the New York Post, The Washington Free Beacon and The Federalist; satire site The Babylon Bee; and others.”

  • Jay Bhattacharya, one of the Private Plaintiffs, stated in his declaration, “Because of my views on COVID-19 restrictions, I have been specifically targeted for censorship by federal government officials.” . . . [T]he “Great Barrington Declaration,” which Bhattacharya co-authored, was subject to “immediate backlash from senior government officials who were the architects of the lockdown policies” for COVID- 19. . . . Bhattacharya alleges that “Google deboosted search results for the Declaration, pointing users to media hit pieces critical of it, and placing the link to the actual Declaration lower on this list of results.” Further, a “roundtable” discussion between Bhattacharya and others, posted via video to YouTube, was removed from the social-media platform, with YouTube claiming that the video “contradicts the consensus of local and global health authorities regarding the efficacy of masks to prevent the spread of COVID-19.” Additionally, Bhattacharya alleges that he and his co-authors of the Great Barrington Declaration were personally censored on social media, primarily on Twitter and LinkedIn.

  • [Martin] Kulldorff co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration and allegedly “experienced censorship on social media platforms due to [his] views on the appropriate strategy for handling the COVID-19 pandemic.” . . . As just one example, Kulldorff alleged that Twitter censored the following tweet in March of 2021: “Thinking that everyone must be vaccinated is as scientifically flawed as thinking that nobody should. COVID vaccines are important for older, higher risk people and their caretakers. Those with prior natural infection do not need it. Nor children.” Kulldorff echoed Bhattacharya’s belief that the censorship of COVID-19-related opinions on social media was driven by government officials.

There are numerous additional examples in the Opinion, and the Opinion indicates that it has only scratched the surface of the many allegations in the Complaint.

So is there precedent for the proposition that sufficient government involvement in speech suppression can turn what would otherwise be private activity into “state action” that violates the First Amendment? The court cites several precedents that have so found. Notable examples are:

  • Bantam Books, Inc. v. Sullivan, 372 U.S. 58, 67, is a 1963 case from the U.S. Supreme Court. In that case the Court held that a legislatively-created commission, by notifying publishing distributors, on official commission stationary, that certain designated books or magazines had been declared objectionable for sale or distribution, thereby engaged in a scheme of governmental censorship.

  • A more recent precedent is Backpage.com, LLC v. Dart, 807 F.3d 229, 230, from the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals in 2015. That case involved threats by a local law enforcement official against MasterCard and Visa to get them to stop processing payments for the backpage.com website. (Backpage was known as a site featuring advertisements from people in the sex trade, although that was far from its only business.). The Seventh Circuit held “A public-official defendant who threatens to employ coercive state power to stifle protected speech violates a plaintiff's First Amendment rights.”

So it looks like the two states and the individual plaintiffs are going to get the chance to prove their cases. Given the material so far revealed in the Twitter Files, there may be no shortage of evidence of deep government involvement in widespread censorship.

In addition, the Louisiana court is giving the plaintiffs substantial opportunity to take discovery of the government players to explore their involvement in censorship. From November 2022 through January of this year, a series of depositions has already been taken of government officials on this subject. Deponents so far have included the likes of Anthony Fauci of NIAID and Elvis Chan of the FBI. The NCLA has posted the full videos of the depositions on its YouTube channel. The depositions average almost 7 hours in length, so there’s no way I have time to watch them, but I’m sure there are plenty of interesting revelations for those willing to watch.

It may be some considerable time before there is a trial in this matter. However, as discovery proceeds, more and more information about the government censorship regime is likely to come out. Thanks are due to NCLA for undertaking the large effort to expose this completely improper conduct by our authorities.

More Evidence Against Universal Basic Income

March 24, 2023 by Dan Mitchell @ International Liberty

I’ve repeatedly expressed opposition to “universal basic income” and I repeated those concerns as part of a conference at the Acton Institute earlier this week.


If you don’t want to spend two minutes to watch the video, all you need to know is that I’m worried that more redistribution will lead to more dependency and less work.

https://danieljmitchell.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/wizard-of-id-parody.jpg
Do This is captured in this Wizard-of-Id parody, with the only difference being that UBI is a big handout for everything rather than a set of handouts for specific reasons (food stamps, welfare, housing subsidies, etc).

There’s already academic evidence against UBI, as I wrote in 2021 and 2022.

Now we have new evidence this year. Three European academics – Timo Verlaat, Federico Todeschini, and Xavier Ramos – produced a study on the consequences of an experiment in Barcelona.

Here are their main findings, published by the Germany-based Institute of Labor Economics, all of which confirm that a basic income would be bad news.

…we aim to advance the literature on unconditional transfer programs by describing their employment effects in the context of an advanced welfare state. Our analysis uses data from a field experiment in Barcelona (Spain), trialing a generous and unconditional municipal cash transfer program. …we find strong evidence for sizeable negative labor supply effects. After two years, households assigned to the cash transfer were 14 percent less likely to have at least one member working compared to households assigned to the control group; main recipients were 20 percent less likely to work. …Another important finding concerns the persistence of effects. Employment rates in the treatment group remain lower even six months after the last transfer, indicating that households’ labor supply decisions may be hard to reverse.

I have to give credit to Matt Weidinger of the American Enterprise Institute. I did not know about this new study until I saw his article, which also merits a few excerpts.

That program is similar in many respects to universal basic income (UBI) programs proposed in Congress and being tested in multiple locations across the US. It also bears similarities to the unconditional expanded child tax credit payments temporarily made to tens of millions of households with children in 2021, which President Joe Biden’s latest proposed budget seeks to revive. Those similarities suggest American policymakers should take heed of the study’s findings… As Jon Baron, a longtime expert on evidence-based policy, recently described, the findings of the “high-quality” randomized control trial reflected in the study “suggest a need for caution in the design of anti-poverty programs, to avoid discouraging work effort.”

Since I’m a policy wonk rather than an academic, I don’t need qualifiers such as “a need for caution.” I can bluntly state that redistribution programs have a very negative impact on labor supply.

 

The moral of the story is that a basic income would make a bad situation even worse, especially when you consider that politicians almost surely won’t get rid of the handout programs that already exist (this is the “public choice” problem I mentioned in the above video).

Instead of moving in the wrong direction, existing redistribution programs need to be scaled back. But that’s just part of the solution. The federal government should get out of the way.

It’s time to shift all of these programs back to the state level, building on the success of Bill Clinton’s welfare reform from the mid-1990s.

P.S. Back in 2017, Joe Biden said some sensible things about work and dependency. Given what he’s now pushing, he obviously was not being sincere back then. Or maybe he doesn’t remember.

P.P.S. I can’t claim perfect memory. Regarding the Swiss referendum on basic income, I was wrong about the margin of victory (77 percent rather than 78 percent), wrong about the year (it was in 2016 not 2015), and the proposed handouts were even bigger than I remembered.

Wednesday, March 29, 2023

P&D Today

Fixing Education in America is Job One

De Omnibus Dubitandum

By Rich Kozlovich 

While I'm no longer sending out notices for P&D, some have expressed the desire to still get my commentaries.  This link to will take you there.  

 

There are six commentaries in today's edition covering the consequences of lefitst corruption of our society.  Whether it's taxes, socialism, civil rights, or the media, these pieces demonstrate how leftism is a corruption of the system and the human spirit.  The cartoon is a commentary in itself.  Enjoy!

  1. Why Progressive Taxes Are Especially Harmful to Productivity and Harm the Poor, By Brian Belfour
  2. The Failure of Socialism in Venezuela, Part III, By Dan Mitchell
  3. Workplace Political Discrimination is the Civil Rights Crisis of Our Time By Daniel Greenfield
  4. Why the Leftist Media Are Going Belly Up, By Leesa K. Donner
  5. Tell AOC Parental Rights Are Not Fascism By Mychal Massie
  6. Richard Nixon Was Not A Great President. Get Over It!  By Rich Kozlovich 

 Constant as the North Star

  Free North Star Clipart, Download Free North Star Clipart ...