RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/09/10/bidens-vaccine-mandate-has-nothing-to-do-with-fighting-covid/

As soon as President Joe Biden announced his plan for a widespread vaccine mandate to fight COVID-19, protests erupted. And rightly so. But the real reason Biden chose now to announce it is so he could claim credit for what is already happening with COVID.

In what is almost certainly a vast overreach of his executive authority, Biden declared that he’d develop “an emergency rule to require all employers with 100 or more employees, that together employ over 80 million workers, to ensure their work forces are fully vaccinated or show a negative test at least once a week.”

Of course, this mandate will raise constitutional challenges. Which is no doubt what Biden wants.

After all, if such a move is constitutional – and there are no shortage of “experts” who say that it is – then God help us all. Because that would open the door to federal intervention into our daily lives on an unprecedented scale. All that would be needed is to declare something, anything an “emergency.”

It’s no accident, for example, that the left now calls it a “climate emergency” instead of “global warming.” Why not use that to mandate that Americans working at large companies ditch their gas-powered cars? Biden could declare racism an “emergency” and force any business with 100 or more employees to conduct critical race theory courses.

But there’s another reason Biden is pushing this mandate now.

From the case data, it would appear as though the current outbreak has already peaked. Look at the chart below. The curve has “flattened,” and the seven-day moving average is now on the downtrend.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/biden-partisan-punch-at-west-point-annapolis-military-academies-boards-11631302741?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

The White House this week told Trump appointees to resign or be fired from boards overseeing military service academies, and that is President Biden’s right. But the Biden Administration denies that the military has been compromised by politics even as the President now indulges in acts of petty partisanship in military education.

The Biden Administration asked for resignations from more than a dozen members of the boards of visitors at the U.S. Naval Academy, Air Force Academy and West Point. The boards are roughly akin to the trustees at a college. Members are chosen by the President, Vice President, the Speaker of the House or congressional committees. The President’s nominees serve three-year terms.

The Biden Administration is selling this as removing Trump loyalists installed in sinecures. White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said this week that she’d “let others evaluate” whether Kellyanne Conway and Sean Spicer, asked to leave boards for the Air Force and Naval Academies, respectively, were “qualified, or not political, to serve on these boards.” Mr. Spicer has spent 20 years in the Navy reserves and has a master’s degree from the Naval War College.

But this isn’t merely about replacing a few controversial nominees. The tell is that the White House also booted retired Gens. H.R. McMaster and Jack Keane from the West Point board. Both were eminently qualified Army general officers who influenced President Trump in productive directions. Gen. Keane was a leading architect of the 2007 surge that saved the day in Iraq.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/joe-biden-vaccine-command-osha-mandate-employers-11631311326?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

How far President Biden has come from his campaign and inaugural pledges to unify the country and defeat Covid-19. On Thursday he blamed his fellow Americans and political opponents for the surge of Covid this summer, and he ordered them to be vaccinated or risk losing their jobs.

President Biden says a new OSHA rule will require 80 million workers to get vaccinated or else be tested weekly for Covid-19. What law gives him that power, and could it create a backlash?Read Transcript

“We’ve been patient, but our patience is wearing thin. And your refusal has cost all of us,” he declared in a deeply polarizing speech laying out his orders from the White House. Take that, unvaccinated Americans. You’re costing him. So now he’s sticking it to you.

There were some useful notes in his speech. Mr. Biden is directing the feds to surge healthcare workers, testing and monoclonal antibody treatments to hot spots. Excellent. He’s also ordering federal workers and those employed at contractors to get vaccinated. That’s his prerogative. The federal government doesn’t want its employees getting sick any more than private businesses do.

But his national mandate on business is needless overkill in a free country. He’s forcing all private employers with more than 100 workers—two-thirds of the workforce—to require vaccinations or weekly testing. The non-compliant can be dunned $14,000 per violation.

Many large businesses already require vaccinations or regular testing, and some have offered workers financial incentives to get inoculated. A few have been more forceful. Yet many businesses have been reluctant to mandate shots because they respect individual conscience or worry some employees will quit. Workers have been hard to hire amid the incentives Democrats have created not to work. Mr. Biden thinks that’s not his problem.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/the-vaccine-mandate-assault-on-the-common-good-opinion/ar-AAOirim

As President Joe Biden launches via executive order a sweeping vaccine mandate for all federal government workers, and now a brand-new initiative for private-sector mandates, the issue has once again risen to the forefront of the national dialogue.

United Airlines, for example, recently became the first U.S. airline to mandate COVID-19 vaccination for all its employees. United Airlines’ mandate takes effect on September 27, and it might augur a broader trend: A poll conducted last month by insurance and advisory firm Willis Towers Watson, for example, suggests that 52 percent of private-sector employers surveyed expect to have a workplace vaccine mandate by the end of 2021. As Biden’s brand-new announcement of a Department of Labor rule for private-sector vaccination requirement now makes clear, that poll was prescient.

Against this backdrop, several Republican-leaning states have advanced laws or executive orders that prohibit private-sector vaccine mandates for employees, customers or in some other respect. That tally is now at least eight states: Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Montana, Texas, South Carolina and South Dakota. The legal mechanics and specifics differ from state to state. But the highest-profile and most mechanically straightforward Republican-led assault on vaccine mandates is the one in my new home state, Florida.

In May, Governor Ron DeSantis, who has emerged as a talismanic figure of sorts for those standing athwart COVID-induced hysteria, signed into law S.B. 2006. The legislation bans private businesses, local governments and schools from issuing vaccine mandates for customers or members of the public. On August 27, Florida’s Department of Health announced that it will enforce S.B. 2006 via $5,000 fines “per individual and separate violation.” That rule will go into effect on September 16, though DeSantis had previously already taken aim at mandatory private-sector vaccinations via executive order even prior to the passage of S.B. 2006.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17748/is-it-puppeteers-or-puppets-in-control-in

Under Biden, America now has a national debt that rivals a Black Hole….. Our southern border remains more a suggestion than a checkpoint. And our allies see a nation that has casually condemned to death untold numbers of Afghans who fervently believed in America until they saw our last C-17 depart Kabul.

What all of this might suggest is that there are individuals in Washington who are wielding enormous power without worrying about what Joe Biden might think or do because whatever they decide, it is Biden who will take the fall. If true, it has the makings of a nightmare situation.

[W]e appear to be trapped by a Washington power elite intent on consigning our future to oblivion. In the end, it will be up to the American electorate to halt this slide as they consider who to send to Congress in the next election cycle.

It must be the best of times and the worst of times for our nation’s enemies.

On one hand they have a President in the White House whose actions are reducing America into some befuddled and diminished world power. On the other hand our foes are trying to figure out, as are all Americans, who is actually in charge in Washington?

Is it a shadow government of consultants, lobbyists, and Obama retreads? Or is it really a president who counts success as getting to the presidential helicopter unassisted? One can envision the intelligence chiefs of our sworn enemies being sternly lectured by their supreme leaders to get to the bottom of it because they can’t believe their good fortune that American leadership has fallen so far so fast. It must be a devious trap.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17736/accountability-for-afghanistan

The disappointing fact is that there is a long and rich list of potential targets. It begins with President Joe “The Buck Stops Here” Biden as the obvious choice. The President bears ultimate responsibility for making the decisions that led to America’s surrender and leaving our citizens behind. The President should be held accountable.

Also, near the top of the list of those who must be held accountable are those individuals who hold Senate-confirmed positions. They were the architects of this disaster: Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley. Together, these individuals either counseled the President that they would execute his direction effectively and safely, or they developed and implemented a strategy that they knew would not work. Either scenario would demand that they also be held accountable.

Some may legitimately ask, what about Jake Sullivan, Susan Rice and others? In other attempts to hold people accountable (think recent impeachment actions) the efforts were seen as overreach. The results, partisan bickering and nothing happening.

The alternative is the path we already seem to be heading down, no one being held accountable.

America has just experienced perhaps its greatest foreign policy debacle in modern history by surrendering to the Taliban in Afghanistan. The enemy that the U.S. held accountable for harboring the al-Qaeda terrorist group that attacked us on 9/11 once again governs Afghanistan. The Taliban now holds the keys to whether, how, and when Americans left behind will be returned home safely. The question today is who will be held accountable for this debacle, a debacle in both strategy and execution.