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