Gavin Newsom: the President nobody needs Delusional Democrats should spend a week in California BY Joel Kotkin

https://unherd.com/2023/07/gavin-newsom-the-president-nobody-needs/

For many Democrats, Gavin Newsom has become an object of desire. Aged 55, the Governor of California’s relative youth, coiffed good looks and ability to speak in something close to coherent English contrasts with their bumbling leader, whom as many as two in three Americans feel is not entirely up to the job. As a result, the chorus calling for Newsom to become America’s 47th President has been growing steadily louder.

Not surprisingly, Newsom himself seems to be waging his own campaign to achieve that end. He is, according to Politico, acting “like the president-in-exile”, promoting a new gun control constitutional amendment, working to ban petrol-powered cars and threatening to arrest the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, for “kidnapping” migrants. Indeed, his profile seems to be growing just as Biden’s handlers ramp up their efforts to insulate the President from the media, his poor cognitive state posing a danger both to himself and to his legislative programme.

Yet Newsom’s sparkling ascendency might dim somewhat if the media bothered to consider what is actually happening in his fiefdom. Flicking through the mainstream press, one could be forgiven for realising that Newsom has presided over California’s fall from economic pre-eminence: the Golden State is now home to record homelessness, sub-par GDP growth, the nation’s highest poverty rate, a tech downturn fuelled by the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, and a consistently underperforming public education system. These factors have fuelled a powerful out-migration trend — up 135% in just two years. Recent polls find upwards of 40% of residents are considering leaving, while the rising tide of wealthy emigrees has already taken away $20 billion in adjusted income since 2018.

Biden Trying to Kill Short Term Health Insurance By Deane Waldman, M.D.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/07/biden_trying_to_kill_short_term_health_insurance.html

President Biden has taken to the airwaves to sell his plan to crack down on short-term health insurance policies, which he terms “junk.” Taking away the right to choose is not only bad healthcare policy, it runs counter to the spirit of freedom on which this country was founded. 

The history of short-term, limited duration (STLD) policies is straightforward. In order to coerce Americans to use only government approved (Washington controlled) taxpayer-subsidized policies, the Affordable Care Act of 2010 (ACA) included the individual mandate, an order for all Americans to purchase insurance. Washington restricted STLD policies to non-renewable 3-month plans. The Trump administration expanded public choice by allowing such policies up to 12-months in duration and renewable for three years. Millions of Americans used this affordable vehicle to cover themselves and their families, giving them a viable alternative to expensive and restrictive ACA insurance with its “auto-renewal.”  

Biden wants to quash STLD insurance policies making them illegal, calling them a scam and junk. 

Americans are free to buy junk bonds, including government ones. We are free to buy junk stocks and junk cars. Many happily attend junk events. Shouldn’t the public be able to decide what is junk versus jewel, what is scam and what is savior? Individual Americans are better judges of how to spend their money than Washington. 

In the 2012 challenge to the ACA, NFIB v. Sebelius, the Supreme Court struck down Obama’s individual mandate saying it was unconstitutional to force Americans to purchase what the government commanded them to buy. Now Biden wants to do an end-run and force the public to buy only what Washington allows. If Americans want to have medical insurance, Washington wants to mandate what Americans must purchase. 

Health insurance, any insurance for that matter, is a way to manage risk. A person pays an insurance company a comparatively small amount of money to hedge against the chance the person will need to expend a large amount of money when something unexpected happens, such as a housefire, a flood, or an automobile accident with injuries. Never mind that insurance premiums are already a very large expense, with the average family set to expend $30,065 on healthcare costs this year. More than 80 percent will go to insurance companies. 

Who’s Afraid of Moms for Liberty? A growing cadre of angry mothers is taking over school boards and winning influence as GOP kingmakers. Why are they being called a ‘hate group’? By Robert Pondiscio

https://www.thefp.com/p/whos-afraid-of-moms-for-liberty

In a breakout session in a windowless conference room at last weekend’s Moms for Liberty “Joyful Warrior Summit” in Philadelphia, Christian Ziegler, the chairman of the Florida Republican Party and father of three school-aged daughters, is stiffening spines. Dozens of attendees, mostly women, are nodding and taking notes as Ziegler explains how to work with local news media. 

“Your product is parental rights. Your product is protecting children and eliminating indoctrination and the sexualization of children. You’re the grassroots. You’re on the ground. You’re the moms, the grandparents, the families that are impacted. The stories you tell help set a narrative,” Ziegler coaches them.

One story above us, the ballroom floor of the downtown Marriott is groaning under the weight of crowded press risers, where camera crews have set up for the parade of Republican presidential hopefuls coming here to curry favor with the more than 600 Moms for Liberty members attending—and a few thousand more watching the livestream. 

Ron DeSantis held forth this morning. Nikki Haley is scheduled to speak at lunch. Donald Trump will close things out later this afternoon. Entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy and former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson are on tap for tomorrow. 

It’s an astonishing display of political drawing power, considering Moms for Liberty didn’t even exist three years ago. The candidates have all come to pay obeisance to the animating idea that has galvanized these women: that parents—not the government—should be in charge of how their children are raised and educated. 

If you want to understand why these politicians have come, you need to go to the breakout sessions, away from the camera’s gaze, where, hour after hour, Moms for Liberty chapter leaders and foot soldiers learn how to run for school boards—and if they win, how to advance their agenda even when in the minority. There are talks on messaging strategies and mining school board minutes for signs of “woke indoctrination.” There are workshops on how to file public records requests and navigate the legal system. 

They aren’t messing around. More than half of the 500 candidates Moms for Liberty endorsed for local school board elections last year won their races. “School choice moms” provided the margin of victory in DeSantis’ first run for Florida governor in 2018. Democrat Terry McAuliffe was leading the race for Virginia governor in 2021 before his debate remark that “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach” handed the win to Republican Glenn Youngkin. 

Moms for Liberty is the beating heart of this country’s movement of angry parents—and American education has never seen anything quite like it. 

“Select Colleges: Supply/Demand Imbalance and Other Thoughts” Sydney Williams

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

An unsurprising consequence of the recent Supreme Court decision to expunge race-based affirmative action for college admission was the resolve to sue select colleges for an unfair bias toward legacy students, children of wealthy donors, and, as former Harvard President Larry Summers intoned, those colleges that have a preference “for those who excel in ‘aristocrat sports.’”[1] He added, admissions officers should “resist being impressed by those who have benefitted from high-priced coaching through the admissions process.”

While the suits may have some merit, admitting students on the basis of name and legacy peaked in the 1950s, though money still talks. From my perspective, selection should be based on merit, but universities need support from all stakeholders: alumni, donors, faculty, and students. Those needs are matched against the demands of government, which is a major source of funding. As an aside, it is a curious fact that economic underclasses are rarely considered. Writing in The New York Times last week, David Leonhardt wrote: “The skew is so extreme at some colleges that more undergraduates come from the top one percent of income distribution than the entire bottom 60 percent.” Nevertheless, in the quest for a perfect solution, universities must keep in mind the aphorism that the perfect is often the enemy of the good.

Laws of economics play a role: What happens when supply fails to keep pace with demand? College, over the past sixty years, has been a growth industry. The number of high school graduates has roughly doubled during that time to 3.9 million, while the percentage of each graduating high school class going to college has increased from 7.7% to 37.5%. Despite that ten-fold increase in demand for a university education, select colleges have not increased student bodies commensurate with increased demand. For example, consider the Ivy League, where demand has been augmented by women who now comprise more than 50% of student bodies and by foreign students who today represent about 11% of their student bodies, yet their total student bodies have increased only about 50% from 1960.

The result is a squeeze on supply, especially at elite colleges.

Liz Peek: Did Trump just give DeSantis a boost?

https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/4095744-did-trump-just-give-desantis-a-boost/

Donald Trump just reminded Republican voters — even many who voted for him twice before — why they might want someone else to top the party’s ticket in 2024. Moreover, he may have singlehandedly breathed new life into Ron DeSantis’s struggling campaign.

The former president has picked a fight with Kim Reynolds, Iowa’s popular GOP governor, apparently because she dared get too cozy with DeSantis, Trump’s nearest rival for the 2024 nomination. Reynolds has appeared at several DeSantis events in her state and recently teamed up with his wife in rolling out Mamas for DeSantis, a grassroots effort to bolster the Florida governor’s standing with women.

Reynolds has said she will remain neutral in the Iowa GOP race; she has offered to attend events hosted by front-runner Donald Trump and has appeared with candidate Nikki Haley. Apparently, this is not good enough for Trump, however, who takes credit for her becoming governor because he appointed her predecessor ambassador to China, opening the seat, and also campaigned for her.

This is classic Trumpian behavior — self-centered and imprudent. The Iowa caucuses will not determine who wins the nomination (in 2016 Trump came in second, behind Ted Cruz), but lashing out at the GOP leader in the state, who won reelection by 20 points last year and enjoys high approval ratings, seems foolish.

And, typical. During his four years in office and in the time since, the former president has alienated scores of former allies. While in the Oval Office he churned through staff at historic rates, with one blowup after another sending talented colleagues packing.

Joe Biden’s Ministry of Truth His administration’s censorship regime could be the greatest threat to free speech in American history. Sean Collins

https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/07/12/joe-bidens-ministry-of-truth/

Under President Joe Biden, the US government has undertaken ‘the most massive attack against free speech in United States history’. That was the extraordinary conclusion reached by a federal judge last week. The case of Missouri v Biden has exposed the incredible lengths to which the Biden White House and other federal agencies have gone to bully social-media platforms into removing political views they dislike.

On America’s Independence Day, the Fourth of July, US district judge Terry Doughty issued a preliminary injunction, stipulating that the federal government must cease from communicating with social-media companies for the purpose of ‘urging, encouraging, pressuring or inducing’ them to remove or suppress ‘content containing protected free speech’. Essentially, government agencies are now prevented from getting the likes of Facebook, Twitter and other tech giants to censor content on their behalf.

Judge Doughty didn’t mince his words. He said the evidence presented in Missouri v Biden depicted an ‘almost dystopian scenario’. During the Covid-19 pandemic, the US government ‘seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian “Ministry of Truth”’, he wrote. As the ruling notes, the US government worked with the Silicon Valley titans to suppress reports of the lab-leak theory of Covid’s origin, and to gag those who questioned the efficacy of masks, lockdowns and Covid vaccines.

What’s more, this assault on free expression extended far beyond Covid. Doughty’s 155-page ruling describes how the government squashed social-media coverage of many other inconvenient issues. In fact, the groundwork for what the plaintiffs called a ‘systemic and systematic campaign’ of censorship was actually laid by government officials in 2017, four years before Biden took office. Even when Donald Trump was president, officials suppressed stories that might have hurt his Democratic opponents, including the Hunter Biden laptop story and claims about election integrity in 2020, particularly around the security of postal voting.

Biden’s Latest Student Loan Forgiveness Scheme He keeps flouting the law to buy votes by writing off college debt.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/joe-biden-student-debt-forgiveness-supreme-court-income-based-repayment-plan-11f1c5fa?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

President Biden is determined to make student loans for college a new entitlement even after the Supreme Court struck down his $430 billion cancellation. The Education Department on Friday wrote off another $39 billion in debt. And this is only a down-payment on the President’s bigger plan to sweeten Obama-era repayment plans. Call it debt cancellation on the installment plan.

Obama-era repayment plans cap borrower monthly payments at 10% of discretionary income and let borrowers discharge unpaid debt after 10 to 25 years. Yet the Education Department said Friday that borrowers will receive credit for payments even during months when they weren’t making them. This adds up to $39 billion in new loan forgiveness.

The Administration also boasted that it has approved $116.6 billion in loan forgiveness to date, including $45 billion through “improvements” to public-service loan plans. That’s $68,828 of writeoffs on average for each qualifying government and nonprofit worker. Now the Administration plans to “improve” repayment plans for all borrowers.

The Education Department plans to slash payments to 5% of discretionary income, which would be redefined to exclude more earnings. Borrowers earning less than $32,800 wouldn’t pay a cent. Even years in which they don’t make payments, as during the pandemic, would be counted toward their required payments.

The Administration estimates that a typical graduate of a four-year public university would save nearly $2,000 a year, or about $40,000 over 20 years. That’s several thousand dollars more than the already generous Obama writeoffs, and loan balances wouldn’t grow from unpaid interest as they do now.

A grad earning $50,000 with $50,000 in debt would have to pay only $860 a year compared to some $6,200 under a standard payment plan. Borrowers would have an incentive to take out more debt, and colleges would raise tuition. The Biden plan includes no reforms that would mitigate this debt ratchet.

Biden Administration Funding Iran’s Nuclear Bomb Tests, Threatening Israel for Trying to Prevent Them? by Majid Rafizadeh

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19803/biden-funding-iran-nuclear-bomb

Secret attempts by the Biden Administration to reach an interim deal with the mullahs threaten not only to add an estimated $100 billion into the treasury of the Iranian regime’s struggling economy, but, worse, catapult an Iranian nuclear menace onto the world.

Iran’s aggression threatens not only its own brutalized citizens – Iran has executed more than 200 people in just the first half of this year and deliberately poisoned more than 1200 schoolgirls — but also the entire region, Europe and the United States.

Reports also indicate that the Iranian regime’s illegal nuclear activities have escalated in 2023 under the Biden Administration’s watch.

In spite of these factors and the strong opposition from the Congress — including a warning from U.S. Rep. Michael McCaul that according to the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act of 2015, any agreement, even an informal one, with Iran about its nuclear weapons program, must be approved by Congress and no funds released until after 60 says — the Biden Administration has been holding​ ​secret talks in Oman…

Along with this Iranian plan to join the “nuclear club,” abetted by the Biden Administration, this same Biden Administration, in the face of Iran’s openly stated commitment to Israel’s destruction is, according to one report, now pressuring Israel to “commit suicide” or risk losing American support.

The dangerous legacy the Biden Administration appears to want to leave includes threats to the only democracy in the Middle East while capitulating to the world’s most vicious dictators in Afghanistan, China, Venezuela and Iran — which the US State Department has called the “top state sponsor of terrorism” — and soon, thanks to the Biden Administration, armed with nuclear bombs.

Is Erdoğan Hoping to Bring 84 Million Turks into Europe? by Burak Bekdil

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19802/erdogan-europe

Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan talks about an “evil West” but wants to become part of it — perhaps to “improve” it?

Erdoğan needs money. He needs it now, and preferably from Western markets instead of one-off cash injections from Russia and friendly Gulf states.

Erdoğan aims to… [k]eep within the EU membership process, which he calculates may give Turkey better borrowing options on international markets, as well as the possibility of sending 84 million more Turks into Europe and potentially changing its prevailing religion.

Could [Erdoğan] be hoping that the U.S. Congress will endorse the sale of F-16 Block 70 fighter jets to Turkey? There will be many horse-trading moments during the process, but this is the beginning of a new tactical warfare between Erdogan’s Turkey and the West.

“The Swedes were too eager to receive Erdoğan’s blessing and Erdoğan used that yearning to tie them down. Remember Gulliver in the Land of Lilliput?” — Eugene Kogan, defense expert, Tbilisi, Georgia, to the author, July 10, 2023.

If logic worked in politics, the question to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan should have been: Why has your country had so passionately sought out, in vain, membership in the European Union?

Erdoğan talks about an “evil West” but wants to become part of it — perhaps to “improve” it? Why did Turkey send its 15,000 sons, only to greet with honor 700 dead soldiers in a war that took place 8,000 km away on the Korean Peninsula? Turkey has been a full member candidate for the EU since 1987, but the Korean military campaign earned it NATO membership in 1952.

Donald Trump and the Standard of Evidence John O’Sullivan

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2023/07/donald-trump-and-the-standard-of-evidence/

The headline on the New York Times story of ex-President Trump’s indictment is a wonderfully unintentional guide to the topsy-turveydom of American life in the Biden era: “US Justice System Put on Trial as Trump Denounces the Rule of Law”. To start with, the front-page piece is not a simple factual report—“Trump Indicted on Thirty-Seven Counts”, say—but “news analysis” which signalled Schumpeter’s definition of Marxism (“preaching in the garb of analysis”) even before Wokedom tightened its grip on US journalism.

It’s worse now, of course, and relentless too. An accompanying report inside warns in another headline that “Trump Backers Unleash Wave of Violent Threats, Worrying Some Analysts”. The worries of analysts don’t usually make it into headlines, and we don’t learn about the reactions of “other” analysts. Presumably, if quoted in the NYT, those complacent fellows would argue that the threats—one of which is the simple word “Retribution”—were religious and military metaphors used by all parties at times but, when employed by Republicans, more worrying than the actual if “largely peaceful” riots of the Left.

To revert to the front-page headline, though, Trump did not in fact “denounce the rule of law” unless every indicted man who proclaims his innocence is held to be denouncing it. He said that law enforcement had been “hijacked” by the Democrats, including elected Democratic prosecutors, to take out the most formidable opponent they face in next year’s presidential election, namely himself.

In a few paragraphs I’ll deal with the thirty-seven charges levelled against the former President by the Special Prosecutor looking into, inter alia, his retention of classified national security documents in insecure conditions in his Florida home, Mar-a-Lago. These are serious charges and pose a real threat, namely a long prison sentence. But his claim that the Democrats had hijacked law enforcement to take him out of the 2024 election is largely true.

Largely? Well, Trump is probably not the most formidable challenger Biden could face next year. He may be the strongest candidate in the GOP primaries, but his negatives are so high with the full electorate that he would probably lose to the President where a challenger like Florida’s governor, Ron de Santis, would enter the race as the favourite.