Give Biden a C- on his homework

Of the 17 executive orders President Biden issued on the first day of his administration, nine were good, four were bad, two lacked any substance, and two I will admit I don’t know enough about to evaluate.  Overall then, I’d give him a C- on his summer reading:  9 out of 13 correct equals 69 percent but I’m willing to add a point for effort.  Adding in the two non-substantive organizational fluff pieces yields a 73 percent.  Adding one of the rural land use items I don’t really know the details about as correct yields a 75 percent.  I’d prefer to score it as 69 percent, but will entertain arguments.

So, which are the four I mark “Wrong”?  The unconditional re-ups into the Paris Climate Treaty (pct) and the World Health Organization (who) have wasted a chance to negotiate more equitable conditions for the United States and better use these organizations to advance the common, including first the American, interests in moderating the fluctuations in climate without impoverishing us, our children, and our grandchildren unto seven generations in the pct case and making sure that who regulates the rest of the world, including the Chinese, with the same enthusiasm that the unsightly scruff of UN bureaus heckle the United States. As I suspected, and have now seen evidence of, the Biden administration’s international postures will be overly dictated by the raving left wing of the Democratic Party—the wing that spells America with a K and thinks our foreign policy should be multi-lateral, collaborative, and apologetic.

After these two fumbles, the offhanded dismissal of the ban on travel from countries that I suspect are more involved in the terror industry than they care to admit.  I have heard the arguments that only tiny percentages of the populations of these nations have anything to do with terrorism.  This is almost certainly true but it is looking at the wrong population.  My sense, belief if you will, is that these countries provide substantial proportions of the population of terrorists.  What may indeed be an insignificant percentage of a country’s population of tens of millions would be a substantial part of the muster roll of our terrorist enemies.  And we haven’t even touched the subject of locating training camps and indoctrination centers. Just as we have shown ourselves willing to throw millions of Americans out of work to stop a contagion that has affected less than 10 percent of our population, we should be willing to deny visas to a population that is well-represented among the folks that want to come to America to buy guns, rent planes, and scout out tall buildings.  Somebody show me the unclassified information that could allay my concern here and I’ll change my mark.

Finally among the errors, we come to the revocation of the permits for the Keystone XL pipeline.  So, the Biden administration is willing to lick the backsides of the pct climate catastrophists and the who China abettors, but will renege on a projected negotiated very carefully with Canada to provide the world with access to what is still a vital resource underpinning the prosperity of the world.  Serve the Canadians right, I suppose, for having a foreign policy that is multi-lateral, collaborative, and self-effacing.

As far as the two rural land use cases go--the national monuments and Alaska oil and gas issues--I'm not sure the Biden administration fully appreciates how much land there is, how much of it is owned by the Federal government, and how much the Federal government's neighbors out there in the fly-over states resent interference in their land-use decisions.  It's not so much the jerks that refuse to pay their fair share of lease fees that worry me, it's the smaller operator that is trying to squeeze out a little flash of green in the red smear that runs roughly from the east slopes of the Sierra Nevada and the Cascades  to the eastern border (extended) of Montana and Wyoming.  

See the map at Federal lands - Wikipedia

Good luck and good health to us all

 This is just a personal message from me to all of you about the mess we've gotten ourselves into.  I hope to break my annual Rose Bowl to Super Bowl alcohol fast tomorrow at the cocktail hour.  If America makes it to 5:00 post meridiem (EST) tomorrow, Wednesday, January 20, without pitched battles in the streets, I am going to pour myself a large whisky and sip it, even savor it.  Try not to be the one who gets in the way; everyone please act right.

One thing is already back to normal

 The front page of the Business section of my local paper ran two sharply different articles Sunday.  On the right margin, the header was “Trump leaves an expensive legacy of debt.” The tone of the article is, quite properly, pretty disapproving of the $7.8 trillion increase in the Federal government’s debt over the course of the dumpster fire.  

For the first 3 years of smoldering stink, the deficit generally grew along the trendline it followed in the previous administration under Barak Obama.  In 2020, the debt surged as Federal dollars attempted to fill in the hole created to "flatten the curve" of the pandemic.  This timing and objective of this was glazed over in favor of a discussion of the problems swollen debt will cause in the future.  What wasn’t glazed over was a 2018 corporate tax relief provision that the Congressional Budget Office estimated would cost $1.9 trillion over 11 years.  Keep those numbers in mind.

On the left margin of the page, the Business section ran an article headed, “First step to jolt economy: Huge aid bill”.  The article gushed about the President-elect will be arriving in Washington “with an ambitious economic agenda.”  The agenda, it goes on, will kick off with an emergency coronavirus relief bill priced at—wait for it--$1.9 trillion.  The article gushes on about the agenda pushing along with all the usual suspects: infrastructure boondoggles, clean-energy jobs, health care, and other staples of the leftish wish list. (To be fairish, corporate tax relief is a usual suspect on the right side.)

So, it’s back to business as usual.  The Democrats propose a right-now increase in the national deficit of $1.9 trillion and the newspaper celebrates it.  A 3-year-old tax break offering up the same total over a span of 11 years draws scorn and derision right on the same page.  Ladies and gentlemen, watch your wallets.

What's behind mask madness?

 Right-thinking people—in this corrupt day and age taken to mean people with left wing minds—have given little thought to why anyone could ever dare disagree with them about anything at all.  These correct-thinking (perhaps a better word choice) people think that the rest of us are either deplorable or evil, depending on educational attainment; I’m evil and the assembly line operative is deplorable.  As deplorable evildoers, there is no need to consider any potential grievances or criticisms we might have.

On the face of it, wearing a mask is a trivial inconvenience with massive public health benefits.  So why, the keepers of correctness ask, does anyone hesitate to wear one for even a second, never mind make masking part of a doctrine that brings a mob to the Capitol?  This doctrine is real. The Washington Post interviewed participants in the Wednesday riot and led their report with a headline that read in part, “ … the rioters came from all over, angered by masks, lockdowns [sic] and the election”  From the second paragraph on, resentment of the mask mandates was a nearly universal theme among the rioters. wtf? (See Drawn by Trump, the rioters came from all over, angered by masks, lockdowns and the election. - The Washington Post. January 10.)

I think I actually touched on it yesterday without even realizing it.  In the short paragraph about “not simple bigotry” I mentioned a concept of “pandemic social engineering.”  The mask mandate is the central pillar, the kingpost, of that engineering and it was just one micro-aggression too much.  Someone in the madness business once noted that it isn’t usually a major catastrophe that send folks to the asylum, it’s just that one more broken shoelace.

Our cultural commissars, the long-oppressed leftists now rising to power, have broken a lot of shoelaces among those they term deplorable.  Don’t smoke inside. Don’t drink outside. Don’t own a truck. Don’t enjoy nascar.  Don’t work with your hands. Don’t follow President Obama’s advice to finish high school, get a job, and get married (within the species and across the genders) before you have children.  Don’t serve in the armed forces. Don’t use fertilizer on your farm. Don’t own a gun. Don’t go hunting. Only go fishing if you catch and release.  The job you used to have was deplorable, so suck it up and move along. Wear a mask. 

I’m not sure at all, but you have to wonder if  “wear the damned mask” isn’t that last damned broken bootlace south of the Potomac or west of Deep Creek Lake.

Playing catch up

The past few weeks have had my head spinning.  In the 2 lead-off weeks of this year I can barely sketch out a few topics to write on when they are overtaken by events.  So I'm going to run a few of the ones that have managed to remember into my time-patented “bleets” format.  So here are some up-to-280-character nuggets that got stuck on the highly polished bone on the inside of my skull.

$600 stimulus checks are somewhere between slightly irresponsible and not all that bad as a tool for digging out of the hole we dug to “flatten” the pandemic—we are still near 10 million lost jobs deep.  Financing it by deferring new subsidies to state and local governments may have sealed it into the not-bad end of the scale.

$2,000 stimulus checks border on child abuse.  My grandson, age 4, was in town recently.  He doesn’t really understand the10s place yet, so when I told him the wicked Democratic left and Trump conspired to stick him with yet another half a trillion dollars in bills, he just asked “How will Nana bake cookies.”  Shame, shame, shame on ‘em all.

Is it odd that the first time police don’t violently suppress an unruly mob, they get pilloried by the same folks who want them defunded?  Don’t fool yourself about the ruliness of BLM protests.  The police here in DC were pelted with all sorts of stuff to the point reporters have told me it’s much safer to be in the crowd than behind the heat.

Through some tech-left trick, the media’s spellcheckers had apparently been set to add the word “peaceful” before any use of the word protest or any of its derivatives.  I wonder how many hours it took the copy editors to correct this over the past week?

The treasonous violence at the Capitol has to be harshly dealt with.  Track down as many people as may be identified. Try ‘em. Upon any conviction, impose as much of a sentence as the relevant guidelines may suggest—no more, no less.

The gentleman recorded seeking to plant the confederate flag in or on the Capitol of the United States is caught red-handed committing a grossly treasonous act and should be tracked down, tried, and upon conviction, introduced to a tall tree and a short rope. 

Don’t give me that line about the “noble traditions” represented by the confederate flag.  It represents a tradition of treason, bigotry, and chattel slavery.

It’s wrong that the riot was rooted in simple bigotry.  There are kernels of grievance somewhere; Washington Post ran a 2-page piece heaping up a molehill of three: economic shutdown, pandemic social engineering, and disrespect. “For years, … , I’m called a racist, a Nazi, a bigot … it’s not right.” Name calling has consequences.

 CDC stumbles again. They jazzed up a test to unusability early on. Their distribution plan was prey to a jumble of goals.  Our vaccines prevent the disease; it’s unclear if recipients without symptoms can spread the infection. So, once past the health and public safety folks, line us up in reverse order of Covid lethality and jab away.

Even after our shots, we need to stay home as much as possible, mask up and keep what is now a polite social distance if we go out, wash our hands, stop picking our noses, and don’t hang out in bars.  Masks seem much more liberating than ventilators, so stop with the “makes me unfree” bullshit.

The real needs of economic recovery, as I’ve said, are not met by stimulus checks of any size.  Somebody think about the “work-outs” the credit industry—consumer and business—are going to be faced with.  And how to keep those troubled debts from crippling the rating of a bank that’s actually helping.  Democrats, try to live in the real world.

These will also be tweeted on @ Rick Devens (@RickDevens) / Twitter)