The manager stared at the slowly exiting graduate for a moment, adding that this person’s idea of “truth” seemed little more than a self-rewarding, ideological, cultural, morally empty, uneducated malevolence including antisemitism afflicting Jews through the ages. While these brave, tradition-blessed, self-disciplined people are small in number, they have done enormous good for the world and are still at it, this imagined manager said by way of expressing my opinions for me through a writing trick.

Some sympathizers of the Hamas celebrants have weirdly suggested their savage deeds were more a matter of responsibility than vicious desire. By way of common sense, video viewers may have noticed the enjoyment as these thugs went about their handiwork, acts of uncivilized, inhumane cruelty that their defenders just might imitate.

The way this torture festival in the Middle East has been so widely welcomed in American colleges across the country and among certain other segments of the American population is itself tortuous. It speaks to our decadence, the wasting away of so much of what has been exceptional about us. Consider how higher education has grown greedy beyond the capacity of millions to pay tuition, that it has been downplaying the crucial humanities and mostly junked the once-required study of the miracle of Western civilization.

In America today, the two-parent family is withering away with atrocious consequences for the children. Public schools are well behind educational achievements in other developed countries in the teaching of reading, writing and arithmetic, although they are helping to instruct students on gender decisions. Common sense is hiding out.

Crime is less and less being punished while more and more ruining lives. The federal government has become a mystery with President Joe Biden being the least answerable question.

In the middle of all of this and far more, we have had these anti-Israel protesters all over the country, including at colleges often with special courses emphasizing diversity, equity and inclusion as the modern way of “reform.” Jews don’t seem to be diverse enough for inclusion. Five Middle East nations attacked Israel in 1948 right after the ancient entity was officially named a new nation. A Hamas official, Fathi Hamad, said every Jew everywhere in the world should be “slaughtered and killed.”

To me, the nonchalance among too many Americans about such ambitions and their blaming Israelis for what neighbors want to do to them is solid evidence of American decadence on the march.

Tribune News Service

Yes, it was absolutely horrendous, the Hamas invasion of Israel with thousands of missiles launched as an introduction of massacre intentions. The assault was not for the purpose of combat with largely missing Israeli soldiers as much as for the joyful torture of civilians, including the rape of young women, the killing of children while their parents watched and even cutting off the heads of babies. There was also the taking of hostages Hamas is now threatening to kill If Israel continues to fight back.

These unexpected, cleverly skilled barbarians killed the most Jews assassinated since the Holocaust after inexplicably being able to cross a border supposed to be uncrossable thanks to U.S.-Israeli coordination. Conducted on an Israeli holy day, the invasion was clearly part of the frequently stated antisemitic dream of killing all 9 million Israelis while acquiring their land.

It might seem ironic, but all of this inhumane outburst seems to have happened in part because of an excellent Donald Trump policy, something worthy of a Nobel Prize. He and his coordinators managed to persuade a number of Arab countries in the Middle East to form peace accords — the Abraham Accords — as virtual allies of Israel while also benefitting more from trade. The participants have altered the Middle East balance of power by helping themselves as much as Israel was helped by increased protection and fewer threats. Still, there was the tricky question of what formidable, sizeable, oil-rich Saudi Arabia, a past enemy of Iran, was going to do.

Saudi Arabia worked closely with the United States in oil and military trade under Trump while not caring much for President Joe Biden’s doing endless, billions of dollars-worth of favors for Iran. Lately, however, there were hints that Saudi Arabia might join the Abraham Accords. Iran, which went from limping under Trump to racing fast under Biden, has been more than a little upset. It is the major anti-Israel power in the Middle East, very, very close to obtaining nuclear weaponry and would be set back if Saudi Arabia made that move.

The war does seem to have caused Saudi Arabia to be less likely to make the pro-Israel move, although recent Israeli internal divisiveness, apparently seen by Iran as another advantage, has quickly disappeared.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had upset large portions of the population in wanting to limit supreme court authority, but national unity and enthusiastic support of Netanyahu became the immediate way of things with the Hamas invasion. Biden is standing strongly behind Israel but has given no indication of ceasing his appeasing approach to Iran. He should do as much immediately and definitively.

Tribune News Service

A majority of Democrats, with eight Republicans providing assistance, were responsible lately for ousting Kevin McCarthy from being the Republican speaker of the House of Representatives despite his self-stability and trouncing of crises amidst activist impulses. Looking to both the left and the right, he found compromises that could lead to better answers. Just recently, he stopped a government shutdown that could have led to potential casualties all over the place.

Democrats controlling the Senate said “well, OK, darn it,” to his compromise legislation easing debt destruction, and Republicans in control of the House concurred with House Democrats in going along with the plan. Despite flaws and things left undone, the plan includes room for other decisions over a stretch of weeks.

The trouble is that eight extremist GOP losers said “no” to the compromise and apparently want to set the House on fire. They were easily able, under House rules, to get a vote on ousting McCarthy, and they joined with the 208 House Democrats to defeat 210 Republican votes in achieving the chaotic senselessness of replacing him.

Yes, it’s going to be a mess, this transition and the battles instigated by these eight Republicans who can join with the Democrats in votes to defeat the majority Republicans if it suits their pride. Some of those forever scanning the electoral landscape believe the Democrats are in for a national boost and it will be interesting to see what happens in selecting a new House speaker. Two interesting candidates are out there already. One is Steve Scalise, an intelligent, soft-spoken conservative gentleman who happens to have cancer. The Republicans should go instead for Jim Jordan, who has probably done more than any other recent Republican to expose Democratic malfeasance.

This conservative got a law degree and could have aimed for courtroom confrontations but instead used his master’s degree in education to become a college teacher. He is a good friend of former President Donald Trump, and nevertheless enormously likeable.

The very, very sad truth of the matter is that our beloved country needs rescue from the multiple forces now throwing old norms out the window in the name of philosophies bending toward ultra-centralized, unbelievably powerful, rights-diminishing government and an oppressive, anti-capitalist, socialistically-inclined economy. Even if you buy into the reasoning, look at the results, our country right now looking like one of the biggest failures on the map. We can’t control our borders. We aren’t punishing crime. Our public school students do worse on international tests than those in other developed countries.

Today’s Republicans are hardly heroes one and all, but they constitute the most reliable machine we now have to deal with the Democrats. Right now, Republicans must try endlessly to be their best, playing always by constitutional rules, clinging to our rights and trying to serve others.

Tribune News Service

Legally, it has done away with equality under the law. As a practical matter, it reduces the role of merit facilitating accomplishments. Emotionally, it has been experienced as a lifetime downfall for highly qualified applicants who arrive in all kinds of skin colors.

There’s an ideal behind it all, of course, namely to help lift Black Americans out of the racial discrimination that has constantly encircled them, leaving so very, very many so very, very poor and left out and cursed, surrounded by crime. But affirmative action, which got started under President John F. Kennedy, has been pursued through what itself is an unjustified, discriminatory technique of judging hardship and talent by what is seen on the surface instead of what resides deep within.

A principle, after all, is not something ripped apart for the sake of intended results but an attempt at fairness, justice, integrity and an improved society. Consider, for instance, that Black Americans are hardly the only poor people in America. Far more white people are poor than are Black people even if white Americans, in general, receive preferential treatment with a better chance for high salaries.

Consider, too, that middle-aged working-class white citizens once thrived through the sweat of their manual efforts and were then largely left jobless by interventionist technology. As Democrats deserted them, some turned to Donald Trump and then were assaulted by Hillary Clinton saying they were “a basket of deplorables,” meaning “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic.” President Joe Biden has called such Trump supporters “semi-fascists.”

Yes, there were something like 2,500 white, Trump-devoted rioters at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, but there were also some 74 million people who peacefully voted for him. There were 574 Black Lives Matter riots with 10,000 arrests and maybe a cost as high as $2 billion but also thousands of peaceful protests.

According to at least one studious observer, the chief good of affirmative action has been more Black professionals, such as lawyers, engineers and doctors, but not all that many more. Others say Black progress has slowed down in recent years although we now have a Black middle class, far more Blacks Americans living in suburbs, more wealth and more college attendance.

I have so far neglected something I think hugely important: Asian Americans. They are the best educated and wealthiest large group of Americans, have also faced affirmative-action discrimination and, now that the doors are opening, will contribute more and more and more. Blacks, Hispanics and whites will, too, if we insist on nationwide fairness, esteem and coming together by means or our equality as patriotic, fair, loving human beings.

Tribune News Service

But there’s another worry, namely that Cuba will at some point sacrifice its sovereignty as it becomes a part and not just a partner of the People’s Republic of China, this nation of a billion-plus population wanting to rule the world. China desires more than just a squatting place next door to America; while Cuba does seem to have some doubts about the military center, that may be washed away as China pours billions of dollars into its economy.

This is scary in a variety of ways, considering how it could be a means of China going beyond trade tricks to security tricks and control Latin America. Well, all the best to decent free-world leaders who must resolve this conflict and take note of the news to become aware of still more Chinese bellicosity requiring unified responses.

Consider, for instance, sparkling Taiwan and how it wants to retain its independence and how China recently as much as pretended it was in a full-scale war with this comparative smidgen in the sea. The barrage of warships, jets and live-fire pretty much summed up how a real war would end with no cheers from humane voices. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said he does not support a Taiwanese declaration of independence and President Joe Biden said the United States would intervene if there were a Chinese attack. Compromise?

The trouble is China just won’t stop. Next, as reported by The New York Times, ponder how China has taken its old-style coast guard with relatively restrained safeguard responsibilities and made it into a collection of destroyers bullying other ships around Asia with collision or whatever device is needed. It’s the biggest coast guard in the world and now part of a naval fleet that has more battle ships than any other country, a foremost advantage in a world war, an expert says.

It’s not just with martial means that China is fulfilling its aspirations for conquest. At one point the United States was investigating 1,000 cases of China stealing our technology. It cheats in trade, spies like crazy, takes economic control over smaller nations around the world, has lately been buying up American farmland, has taken over much of the Middle East and is enjoying a virtual marriage with Russia.

Watching out for China especially means watching out for the ultra-powerful, authoritarian President Xi Jinping who thinks human rights are human wrongs, has happily slaughtered Chinese Muslims, is devoted to Communist Party management, has modernized the military and has kept some capitalist notions in a still closely directed economy now in trouble.

Recently, trying to repair U.S.-China relationships, Blinken met with Xi in China and said the half-hour included some banging of heads, that he did mention issues of human rights, that tensions lessened, that there were some small agreements and that Xi decided to continue such cease-fire conversations.

Biden then butted in from long distance, absurdly saying the Chinese spy balloon that carefully hovered over U.S. military sites last February had been blown off course. Maybe he was trying to appease Xi even though Biden then described him as a “dictator” and said he didn’t know what was going on. The word “dictator” outraged Xi, leading a spokesman to make that known and maybe some Americans to wonder about Biden’s diplomatic acuity. He still must oppose the training center.

Tribune News Service

A difficulty for Biden, however, is that the tax rate is more than three times bigger than he said, 25.6%, either demonstrating that he made a major mistake or qualifies to be called a political trickster. I endorse the second possibility, seeing as how the tiny-tax assertion could confuse the public enough for him to seem a hero catching cheapskate billionaires even though the top 1% of taxpayers deliver something like 43% of all federal taxes.

The way Biden arrives at his deception is by saying the billionaires and still other super-rich tax targets pay nothing for the unrealized gains they have in their stock portfolios. In fact, nobody does. The Constitution limits the personal income tax to actual income a person has received, not something that might be converted into income someday. Understand, too, that when stocks are finally exchanged for money, the money is in fact taxed.

But there is this to be said for taxes: If they are fair and honest, they are the best way to finance our government and, if they become egregious, the government should find ways to reduce the costs to what is affordable.

The worst and most common fiscal threat these days is something else: over-borrowing. Our debt has grown to an unbelievable $31.4 trillion with an ever-increasing expense of borrowing having sky-high consequences, a yearly cost of $352 billion in 2021, $475 billion in 2022 and a predicted $640 billion in 2023.

As far back as 1960, Congress decided that the federal government should establish a debt limit keeping spending and taxing within reasonable bounds by allowing no borrowing beyond cautious calculation. Knowing things could still go wrong, Congress also gave itself permission to vote to end the borrowing limit if a majority concurred. Guess what? The limit has been raised 68 times since then.

In 2006, a smart U.S. senator named Barack Obama explained it was a “leadership failure” when the government couldn’t pay its own bills from tax revenue but had to borrow and pay loads of interest. The interest paid that year, the senator said, was more than the costs of Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, education, homeland security, transportation and veterans benefits, all combined.

One of Biden’s biggest mistakes was to spend unneeded trillions on COVID-19 recovery on top of the trillions enacted under Trump that did the job by themselves. Various other factors helped initiate a recent debt-limit crisis that would have led to a ruinous default if we had not paid owed interest to foreign countries.

The catastrophe was averted because the debt limit was dropped by way of a compromise between Biden and Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy who persuaded Biden to reduce some significant costs. What we need now is compromises that adjust taxes and spending in accordance with reason and reality on both sides of the aisle and a new president in 2024 unlike Biden, Trump or the previously cited sagacious senator who broke spending records as a president.

Tribune News Service

He’s a science denier, Biden is, and that’s part of the danger. Scientists agree that atmospheric CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels reflect dangerous heat back to the earth, but not that we will thereby be wiped out. Biden uses the phrase “existential threat” as if climate change will exterminate humankind. Most scientists agree that the hotter it gets, the worse life will be, but don’t go that far.

The power plants can supposedly use their own CO2 solution, although the possibilities are limited, and one recommendation of the Environmental Protection Agency sounds like a command: carbon capture. Here is a truly great idea that has been lousy in action but could be an element of progress if shutdowns weren’t in the path.

What the technology poorly does at far more than the current cost of producing electricity is remove CO2 from the fossil fuel fumes. It then transports the wicked pollutants thousands of miles through wretchedly expensive pipelines to underground, fortified captivity. Lobbyists have told reporters the plants can’t meet the deadlines for this aspiration. The same is true with other possibilities. Experts cite the extreme difficulty of mixing hydrogen with natural gas to thwart CO2, something that vastly outprices natural gas by itself.

The total transition cost could be unaffordable even with subsidies, and the already overregulated plants reduced CO2 more than is sought in this required undertaking by switching from coal to natural gas on their own. If they can’t meet the EPA deadlines and are forced to shut down, imagine candles replacing light bulbs and the matter summed up by the industrial system going back to the Middle Ages and modernity on a stretcher.

The whole thing could be unconstitutional anyway. The federal government can’t just march around the country telling everyone what to do, least of all without congressional backing. President Barack Obama tried to tell states how much to cut emissions with the Supreme Court finally saying forget it. Some think the Inflation Reduction Act will rescue this plan from the court except bunches of state attorneys general say it won’t.

Biden, however, sees this project as the only way to meet his promises of truly significant emission cuts by 2030, and the question for some of us is why something less disastrous than outright shutdowns wasn’t put forward if things don’t work out.

Yes, carbon capture has its magic. If made workable, it would save fossil fuels of which we have plenty. It might also address the health issue the Biden team worries about, namely power plant smokestacks killing hundreds of people and inflicting thousands of illnesses by what they pump into the air. Without governmental threats of blowing up what previously did the job, Texas is beginning to show that renewables can work and Norway has achieved amazing results of producing electricity with ocean tides and waves.

Biden has to be carefully watched, as in his having cut down on our production of fossil fuels before replacements were available and forcing us to purchase them from foreign countries. We lost money and did nothing to lessen climate change threats. Please remember that none of our already strenuous efforts will halt earthly climate change unless adversarial China gets in line, and meanwhile we could cheat ourselves out of the economic means necessary for later dealing with climate change effects, such as building embankments as oceans rise.

Tribune News Service

Well, look, some Biden supporters have said, the fewer restrictions the better. That goal is coming about through the lapse of Title 42 that prevented entries for fear of COVID transmission. Will a surge of additional thousands pouring our way fill the supporters with joy because the poor receiving asylum are thereby rescued even if many don’t qualify, and is the harm to Americans something to ignore?

The Democrats among them might want to notice Eric Adams, the Democratic mayor of New York City now being bashed by endless migrant arrivals. He has caught onto what many border communities have been enduring. The supporters might also want to catch up on a Gallup poll showing 42 million Latin Americans want to live here in addition to vast numbers from around the world.

And don’t forget there are perfectly acceptable, legal ways of entry, such as green visas in which immigrants line up jobs or have a family sponsor within America. Actually, out of fairness, there should be more chances for those with no relatives here. Merit should play a bigger role.

Trump initiated Title 42, applying the national health code to immigration rules. Biden decided to live with it but then tried to get rid of it with courts saying no. Now it’s expiring, trouble is at hand and Biden has been trying to accomplish in a matter of days what he should have started two years ago. In moves that in some ways imitate Trump initiatives he rejected, Biden now will allow no appeals for asylum from those who did not make such appeals to countries they passed through, it’s reported. Anyone who crosses the border without permission will be deported.

The value of these and other new restrictions?

Well, a while back, Biden set a 20-year record for the number of crossings, helping to cause a mighty influx of migrant children arriving at the border without their parents. Something like 130,000 were released into the country last year, and as a New York Times story tells us, many have ended up doing backbreaking work, sometimes for well-known companies and breaking century-old laws. We are talking about children who may be as young as 12 who often send the money back to their parents while also paying their sponsors. The Health and Human Services Department knows what’s going on in this area of its responsibilities and does little, the Times reports.

If our seemingly awakened president sticks to the best of his new ideas, backs off from some overly lenient plans and finally embraces common sense, the multi-targeted threat of Title 42 collapse may ultimately have promoted the good.

Tribune News Service

His name is Alvin Bragg, and, with the aid of a grand jury, he got an indictment in a case he has been pursuing with a look of moral anger on his otherwise ambitious face every time he talked about Stormy Daniels. She is an actress in porn movies who allegedly had a sexual visit with Trump, thereby earning $130,000.

The encounter occurred in 2006 but it was in 2016 when Trump was running for president that she tried to sell her story to the National Enquirer and received the big bucks from Michael Cohen instead. A private lawyer for Trump, Cohen turned against him when he did not become a White House lawyer for Trump, or so it is reported.

Helping her as Daniels went public was her attorney, Michael Avenatti, who hinted about running for president himself, appeared regularly on CNN and is now in prison for cheating clients and other misdeeds. The Federal Election Commission looked into whether this was misspent donation money to help Trump win the election and decided it wasn’t. The Justice Department investigated to no avail.

What we have here is a federal law, not a state law within the reach of state prosecutors. Nevertheless, Bragg, while seeing crime increase in New York as his efforts to stop it have been missing, found this motivating. He got deeply involved in the subject despite his predecessor backing up. Like his predecessor, he looked into such matters as Trump maybe making the payments secretly by illegally messing around with business records. Even if true, this activity would be a misdemeanor, not a felony, and legal time limits have run out on virtually the whole package, if not all of it.

Bragg is therefore left with pretty much nothing except a witness, Cohen, an established liar. Some lawyers, such as the well-known legal commentator Jonathan Turley, say It’s pretty hard to see how Bragg finds his way into sticking Trump into prison for felonious conduct in a federal case, but assuming he got there by means of tricks we haven’t learned about and judges willing to accept them, what do we have? The only criminal case in American history against a former president, and, by the way, it would be difficult to show he was paying Daniels to protect his election instead of his marriage.

Alright then, why not transform our ever-weaker democracy into a police state in which those in power are above the law they hardly notice anyway in going after those with less power? In the past, we have had something different, as in the likes of the honorable President Gerald Ford. A Republican like his resigned predecessor, Richard Nixon, he still knew he’d likely fail in the coming election if he stopped prosecution of the man. He did it anyway. And by the way, Trump’s sexual adventures are not all that unusual for presidents, such as Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Bill Clinton, Warren G. Harding, James Buchanan and Grover Cleveland.

Whether Trump criminally planned the Jan. 6 Capitol riot has not been convincingly demonstrated, but he encouraged and sat and watched some of it on TV while doing nothing. That’s horrendous, and we also have questions about attempted interference in the Georgia vote in 2016 and his possession of classified documents. But the two-year-long Mueller investigation was a farce, as was his House impeachment as a private citizen and now this? It appears at this stage to be as much an assault on America as on Trump.

Tribune News Service

The Disney bosses featured the song in two “Magic Happens” parades a day in Disneyland until the COVID-19 virus hit hard. They are now finally restoring the parades using a Peter Pan song as a substitute. The reasoning is that the snappy, peppy “Zip” tune and lyrics were first sung in a 1946 Disney movie, “Song of the South,” which was racist.

The singer, however, was James Baskett, the first Black actor to win an Oscar. He was not racist and neither is the song, which won an Academy Award. What’s more, few likely know much if anything about the 1946 movie and wouldn’t think the song objectionable if they did. At the end of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln told some musicians he wanted to listen to the Confederacy-boosting song “Dixie,” one of the best tunes he had ever heard, he said. What’s next for dizzy Disney? Cutting off the ears of Mickey Mouse as a signal to never listen to the “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” merriment?

It may seem that I am making too much out of too little. I would reply that this example helps demonstrate the fallacy of woke overreach. Consider some saying that not punishing shoplifters is justice, that fewer police means less crime or that biological men identifying themselves otherwise should be allowed to compete in women’s sports. What’s really incredible is failing to see that weakness in the guarding of our southern border helps kill hundreds of migrants and tens of thousands of drug-consuming Americans.

Woke philosophy means being irrelevant to the point of absurdity on issues big and small. Its grandiose intent is to exhibit a moral sensitivity that’s insensitive while imagining wickedness that isn’t wicked and shielding the future from common sense. The agents of this silly swagger can themselves do harm by misleading others and damaging something worthy.

Concerning the issue of “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” defamation, I would like to say first that Walt Disney filled the childhoods of masses of us with the triumphs of virtue seen in such lovable characters as Bambi, Cinderella, Snow White, Pinocchio and Johnny Appleseed. “Song of the South” was upbeat in all the wrong ways, as in nostalgia for plantation life during Reconstruction. The movie combined two techniques to accomplish its entertainment purposes, animation along with excellent nonanimated performances by Black actors who themselves were disturbed by the cheerful depiction of hateful slavery.

Yes, the company has a right to suddenly prohibit this popular song in its own parades out and about and in its park where the company also redid a ride referencing the movie. That’s their business and does not mean the song will therefore wither, die and go away, never to be heard again. I do, however, think the scowling attitude could diminish its presence and that a practice such as this one encourages similar virtue pretenses that undermine the understanding of right and wrong and give malevolence more of a chance.

Tribune News Service

For 10 days after it happened, he didn’t say anything about the wham-bang train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, even though the crash was accompanied by a raging, prolonged fire, a huge, bulging, satanic-looking, black plume cloud and something else: the release of killer chemicals from train cars to keep the cars from exploding.

In fact, all kinds of chemicals were soon here, there and everywhere and many of the town’s 4,700 residents were evacuated from danger although later told by the government that they were safe. Others said the threats could last for decades. A private charity promised long-term health care monitoring, hardly the concern Buttigieg showed when he earlier said there were 1,000 other such accidents a year nationally, as if none of this was a big deal.

He did then make a visit to East Palestine after Donald Trump got there first, badmouthing him. Buttigieg quickly sought revenge, blaming Trump for all the harm because his administration abandoned an Obama-era safety measure, special train brakes. Well, first off, that measure did not apply to this specific train.

Second, it was experts, not Trump, who decided the brakes were faulty. Third, if Buttigieg thought the brakes did work, he had plenty of time to put the measure back into effect. For the moment, however, he might want to worry about overheated wheel bearings, the cause of this accident.

Buttigieg now wants the whole industry to begin using safer railroad cars within two years and for Congress to mandate tougher fines for regulation violations.

Understand that Buttigieg’s own personal derailments in his job preceded this accident. In 2022, members of his own party got on his case for doing too little to stop airline delays and cancellations and guarantee compensation to customers. When a possible railway strike threatened the nation, he left the nation, going to Portugal for a vacation.

Lately, Buttigieg has been concerned about “racist roads” in America that disadvantage Black people in one way or another in how and where they were built. He wants to spend billions to replace them with different roads. What this expenditure of billions of dollars would actually accomplish strikes some as a dodgy guess.

Buttigieg is definitely a smart guy with academic awards from high school to Harvard to Oxford you wouldn’t believe. He is articulate and charming. His service in the military was admirable and he started out reasonably well in the 2016 Democratic presidential primaries and then crashed. Biden, who obviously believes in him, just maybe has done America an unintended favor by putting his shortcomings on national display.

Tribune News Service

Of course, even with Biden’s history of exceptional deceptions, some deny his misbehavior, and yes, there have been equally errant State of the Union speeches without his excellent moments. That’s still no excuse, and for America’s sake, he must remorsefully return to the pulpit with a second, self-correcting sermon, and, wait, look! In my imagination, there he is! Forget the TV set. Just read my partially fake transcript.

“Hello my fellow Americans and even the MAGA Republicans I have atrociously attacked as anti-democratic semi-fascists while I pretended to be a unifier. Persnickety commentators having afflicted my conscience on such matters, I am here to discuss a few of the faults in my state of disunion onslaught.

“As you may have noticed, for instance, I blamed our inflation on the rest of the world, but I confess that I have been a powerful force in making some of you give up eggs for breakfast. Before I took office, a bipartisan Congress allotted sufficient funds for COVID-19 help and I then allotted dollars enough to create excessive demand with too few supplies, a case of two plus two equaling price increases.

“I misled you by saying that ‘inflation is coming down’ when it is going up, just not as fast as it had been. If you don’t believe me, look it and some other assertions up in the New York Times fact check. I also gave my administration credit for a historic $1.7 trillion deficit drop that happened chiefly because COVID programs were ending. Through my fiscal impropriety, the deficit is once more heading for outer space, however.

“A daily whiner, I couldn’t help insisting the rich are not paying their fair share of taxes. Actually, they pay a ton. We have the most progressive tax system out there, and our middle-class median income is a lot higher than in Europe where the middle classes also pays higher taxes for more welfare. Based on seeming suppositions of a left-wing outfit, I said 55 highly profitable corporations paid no taxes without observing that all corporations put together paid $370 billion in 2022, the highest amount in 15 years.

“I plead guilty to neglect of the southern border. Because of inadequate security, a foremost horror has been Mexican cartels smuggling Chinese-made fentanyl into our country, killing 70,000 mostly young Americans a year.

“I want to say, too, that it was hooey when I made it sound as if Republicans wanted to cut Social Security when they know we Democrats would whack them to pieces if they tried. We’ve played that game to the point where the program is becoming ever less sustainable without economic mayhem.

“Sorry, and so long for now.”

Jay Ambrose is an op-ed columnist for Tribune News Service.

More suited for war preparation than what you’d have at a kid’s birthday party, this Chinese object was white, gas-filled and 11 miles high in the sky. It was unmanned, relied on solar-power and was something like 120 feet tall as well as 120 feet wide. It had gobs of high-tech devices across its bottom enabling it to gather strategically expedient information from military bases on the ground and around the country on a several-day excursion.

The findings, likely meant to help facilitate a U.S. finale, were immediately transmitted back to China whose spokesmen said it was a civilian weather balloon blown off course. This explanation would have you believe it somehow accidentally ended up where bunches of nuclear missiles were kept and then over other military bastions, the wind showing off its cleverness.

Some say President Joe Biden should have blown the thing to pieces before it entered the country or at least early on after it entered, prompting a reply that the debris could then have hit the innocent. He held back on a jet launching a successful missile until the balloon was departing over a stretch of the Atlantic Ocean, which was soon filled with explosion litter and lots of workers doing their watery best to retrieve enough of it to figure out more details.

The first news of this most recent U.S. siting did not come from government officials who were keeping a close eye on the 30-to-40-mile-an-hour object, but from astonished, sky-gazing, video-inclined folks in Montana wondering what this moon-pretender was up to. Answers of the sort already mentioned were soon enough forthcoming.

It may have helped protect Biden from criticism for laggard action to learn there were three balloon invasions during the Trump administration, except the balloons entered and left the continent so quickly as to amount to nothing much. What the New York Times tells us makes this recent visitation far more disturbing, mainly that recent developments have rendered these balloons amazing spy masters of a kind that can make a big difference.

Of course, balloons or no balloons, China has spied on America with a vengeance for years, once digitally collecting scads of personal data on 22 million federal employees. Yes, 22 million. It has used computers to rob our businesses and steal information from federal agencies, and naturally enough uses satellites as revelatory instruments. Satellites, however, are too far away and move too fast to be the equal of balloons, some experts say.

The sure-enough truth about China today is that its leaders want to control the world, consider us a foremost obstacle and deserve loads of diplomatic attention, even though Secretary of State Antony Blinken rightly postponed a planned visit because of betrayal of our sovereignty and international law. We must also be smart, prepare for the worst and beat China at its own games.

Jay Ambrose is an op-ed columnist for Tribune News Service

The calamity is mainly a consequence of you know what: school shutdowns urged by teachers’ unions and the discovery that teaching with computers is about as enlightening as TikTok. Were the shutdowns necessary for virus evasion? Scientists argued with scientists but, as data accumulated, the case grew that classes could be reasonably safe for both students and teachers on certain levels. There were countries with open schools from the start that said hey, look, all is fine. Sadly, nothing counted in this dispute so much as the teachers’ unions that too often put teachers before students and remain persuasive through votes, political donations and propaganda, all prompting the affection of certain politicians.

Congress made $190 billion available in government money in 2020 and 2021 for safety measures when schools opened even as many still stayed motionless. But even though classrooms are now in action, too many are making up for lost time by focusing on gender and gender pronouns.

We learn from a Wall Street Journal editorial that one analysis of learning decay contends the problems actually arose from “classroom disruptions” in, ahem, closed classrooms. Along the same lines, the FBI disregarded the First Amendment protecting freedom of speech by keeping a close eye on parents keeping a close eye on school boards that has paid off in recent elections.

The horror is what’s been done to students since a test just two years ago. We now have far greater numbers of high school dropouts, far fewer numbers going to college, far less in projected lifetime earnings, shorter attention spans and even serious psychological problems, for starters. One of the most frightening statistics is 9-year-old students scoring lower in reading and math than they did two whole decades ago.

Those most in danger are Black, Hispanic and low-income white students, and while there are reasons for a sense of continued tragedy, no hope in sight, there can maybe be some hope if we finally fix our schools. A New York Times expert says a fundamental need is students spending more time learning with tutors and after-school sessions. I think there should be more sessions with parents to get them involved in educational goals. We should have school choice for all. The teaching of history and science should steer clear of woke philosophy. The job of teachers is to teach academics, not to mold personalities or sex identity. Schools should avoid ideology and focus more on reading and math on the elementary level.

The last thing we want is later talk of the COVID generation.

Jay Ambrose is a syndicated columnist.

Now she wants to be president, the same as fellow loser Abraham Lincoln who wiped out slavery and revved up the stumbling nation as a home of the free. He came in second in House and Senate races before his rise to a greatness that Cheney wants to emulate through annihilating Donald Trump’s political career and his hold on the Republican Party. What she calls for is something constitutionally hardy from sea to shining sea.

It would be helpful if she also talked more about the even worse Democrats abandoning any sense of this game having rules. She herself has participated in their shenanigans and is doing so at the moment, although I must say this: She is to me the most inspiring voice of the House’s Jan. 6 committee that has practiced righteous anger along with eloquence in its assault on Trump’s despicable role in the deadly Capitol riot.

The problem is that there is next to no challenge to varied suppositions and arguments and that the proceedings therefore fall short of due process.
Cheney has done something like this before, as in voting with the Democrats in essentially a one-day hearing on Trump impeachment proceedings for his role in Jan. 6 when such procedures can take weeks and months to produce evidence not at hand this time out.

The following Senate trial on Trump inciting the riot was aimed at him as a private citizen when the Constitution clearly states that these eviction procedures are about eviction, about removing an official from office, not just keeping him or her from running again. Another requirement is that the chief justice of the Supreme Court be in charge; Justice John Roberts said no, clearly not approving of such a farcical embarrassment.

Well, Cheney still endorsed the trial and voted to evict this person who was already thrown out of the White House by voters in what he obsessively and destructively called a fraudulent election when it wasn’t.

Nevertheless, this daughter of a mother who wrote 17 books and was head of the National Endowment for the Humanities and a father who was vice president and secretary of defense has demonstrated her own competence in a number of positions. To name two, she was a successful international attorney and served well in the State Department, trying in one undertaking to improve education and economics in the Middle East. First elected to the House in 2016, she climbed to an important leadership post as she fought for conservative causes.

She had just a few problems with Trump early on, but, with the passage of time, grew more and more fretful even as she knew she could thereby alienate herself from fellow Republicans.

Maybe she won’t be elected president, as she concedes, but she will still do all she can for the crucial resurrection of the Republican Party and revivification of the federal government.

Garland said as much about Trump when defending the FBI’s raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home to gather up classified records while Garland himself has too often acted as if the law doesn’t matter.

In this case, facts are still slowly being uncovered, but we know that former presidents just don’t get treated like this, that Trump has over and over again been infamously and traitorously assaulted by the powers that be, and that the shock of the moment seems to reside a lot more with the FBI than him.

Trump, who as president could declassify anything he wanted, is not the first president to take presidential records home with him along with all kinds of personal notes and the like. The National Archives wanted and legally has a right to certain records, which can be important for future presidents and history, and Trump at one point returned a bunch of them while keeping others in a storage room where the FBI put up a lock it broke during the raid.

Trump’s defenders say more negotiations could have accomplished the return of varied reports while others have another thought: The FBI is really after evidence showing Trump feloniously guilty of inciting the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol. This conviction, after all, is what led to the impeachment of Trump after he was already a private citizen and evidence was pretty much nonexistent. The Jan. 6 House committee, convinced of his guilt from the beginning, itself remains short of evidence even as it proceeds with a TV show more nearly prosecuting Trump than engaged in due process.

Presumably, the whole truth about the raid will emerge, but what hits some of us is how much in tune this episode seems to be with the unjustified Mueller probe that pummeled the administration for much of its first two years: Get him no matter what.

As for Garland, the current story is not finished yet, but how about other matters, such as his refusal to enforce a law calling for the arrest of protesters trying to intimidate a Supreme Court justice outside his private home? Their free speech could be otherwise exercised, especially considering that a self-professed assassin was caught near the house of Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Garland put security guards at the scene, but that’s less protective.

Garland also parted with his duties when he sent out FBI agents to keep an eye on parents and others whose complaints about school boards and teachers were sometimes voiced in threatening anger. Sorry, but that’s the job of state and local policemen with no need for FBI communication, and for good reason.

Interestingly, President Trump did send federal agents designated to protect federal courthouses to save one from being burned down by screeching protesters carrying torches in Portland, Ore., and was treated like a dictator. Maybe Garland will get him for that someday — anti-arson overreach? — but meanwhile, what’s he going to do about Hunter Biden?

Back during the 2020 election campaign, The New York Post shared information about the FBI having a laptop belonging to President Joe Biden’s son with all kinds of content that could be judged as incriminating. The New York Times denied it, the Post stuck with its version and the Times came around about the FBI having a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden with interesting content and reviewed some legal issues he faced.

Our administrative state is often partisan and sometimes dishonest, with Democrats the beneficiaries, and while I do not want Donald Trump to be president again, I do not want that kind of disreputable government.

No one is above the Constitution.

Jay Ambrose is a syndicated columnist.

One of the latest moves terrorizing the Times was the court telling the Environmental Protection Agency to quit mutilating private industries on the basis of nonexistent laws. Even the Times concurs that the agency has been acting on vague generalities in the law without getting it that, when you play that game, rule of law becomes rule of anything goes. If new laws are needed for the stifling of CO2 emissions, EPA’s chief concern, persuade Congress to pass them. What we don’t need is Justice Elena Kagan imperiously telling us that the EPA has expertise that members of Congress lack and that they should grin and bear it.

Maybe her greater vision is that there are all kinds of experts out there on all kinds of subjects that Congress flunks and that we should just maybe replace Congress with something called the administrative state that’s already with us and spreading its wings. But understand, please, that there are processes supposed to fix legislative ignorance and that experts can fumble. Kagan clearly objects to the voice of the people, fails to understand the need for checks and balances, and incredibly assumes bureaucratic wisdom. President Biden, by the way, says he will ignore the court, bringing us to the question of what experts will say about impeachment.

On the second subject, abortion, the Times said the current court got rid of a constitutional right of women to have abortions when, in fact, the squashed 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling itself told states they could deny abortions in the last trimester when fetuses were viable. Forty-three states did as much. It’s still true that Roe v. Wade otherwise permitted just about all abortions on the basis of this supposed right that is no more in the Constitution than the word “abortion.” Biden as a senator sought a constitutional amendment to strike down the rule he may now adore as much as higher approval ratings if he gets there.

The last issue of the day is the court saying the Second Amendment gives citizens the right to bear arms and that this means those who are qualified should be able have concealed carry permits even if they cannot cite a specific danger. As much was required in New York and a number of other states. People often say the Second Amendment came about just to enable militias without knowing that the presumed right to bear arms had been around in America for a long time and that the militia business was simply a reason for putting it in the Constitution.

Despite everything you may be hearing, a Rand Corporation study found little to no evidence that concealed carry increases homicides or other violent crime. The court itself absolutely did not tell states to hand out the permits to people without reasonable requirements, and the ruling was not nearly as scary as President Barack Obama. His gun control speeches sold record numbers of guns because of fears they’d soon be unavailable. The New York Times covered this but never had a headline saying, “Obama Speeches Solidify His Lurch to Guns, Guns Everywhere.”

Jay Ambrose is a syndicated columnist. This column was provided by Tribune News Service.

This is absurd. As much a horror as the riot was, there is no way the propagandized rioters could have enabled President Donald Trump to stay in office. Whatever his narcissistic villainy, he did not endanger the American future more than the iniquities of Democrats.

Courts across the nation early on found humongous evidence that Trump was F-minus erroneous in calling the presidential election a fraud. Police would have showed up at the Capitol riot even if he told them to go away. Among those he used to like, his own attorney general and other advisers let him know face-to-face that the real fraud was his yappy mouth, which he pretty much kept closed during the first three hours of watching the riot on TV.

Apparently cheering inwardly, he did nothing to intervene as 114 cops were injured, another died, four others experienced trauma to the extent that they later committed suicide and one unarmed, rebellious woman was shot to death by a policeman. Members of Congress and varied aides ran and prayed for their lives as the marauders sought out a committee verifying state electoral votes, the last step required for the Biden inauguration.

Vice President Mike Pence, chairman of the committee, who was in hiding, did call for police help and was intent on certifying the election as law required in the absence of state mistakes and despite harsh words from his boss. Even if torture had made him invalidate the votes, they would not have stayed invalidated for long. What the Democrats want right now, of course, is for Trump to go to prison and for their party to win the midterms along with the 2024 presidential election. They will never agree that hundreds of riots by Black Lives Matter probably helped inspire what happened at the Capitol.

While he does not have a feather to support him on the voter fraud theory, Trump does not appear technically guilty of riot incitement, and he did have reason to believe Democrats and their friends would resort to treachery to erase his presence. Early on, for example, the Mueller investigation aimed to get him evicted from office for conspiring with Russia in the commission of crimes. Even after two years of putting people in prison for nothing to do with the allegation, the only evidence consisted of falsehoods from the Clinton campaign, aides talking to Russians like aides in other campaigns and Trump seeming to like Russian President Vladimir Putin. As for obstructing justice, Trump was fighting injustice.

No, another Capitol riot should never happen and punishment can be a deterrent. But the mostly partisan congressional impeachment effort after Jan. 6 was aimed not at a sitting president as required by the Constitution, but at a private citizen. Here was a bad joke evident to every literate person except politically indoctrinated legalese schemers. The illicit proceeding also required the supervision of the chief justice of the Supreme Court, who told us by his actions that he saw the whole thing as a con. He refused to participate.

With no applause for troubling Trump, I worry too about the Democrats, their use of power, their disregard for the Constitution and their limited grasp of democracy in a republic.

Jay Ambrose is a syndicated columnist. This column was provided by Tribune News Service.

Think of the bright eyes the parents will never see again, the laughs they will never hear again. Think of the astonished horror endured by 19 youngsters and two teachers in a Uvalde, Texas, elementary school as bullets left punctured, bloody bodies where the majesty of life used to rule.

That was just one of 27 school shootings this year on top of 34 last year, and there is a lot to understand if we are to overcome this evil in a shrunken society. One place to start is with the shooters and what’s welcoming is that all kinds of organizations, governmental and otherwise, have deeply explored their backgrounds, their personalities, their anger and their hatred. Many have arrived at similar explanations for these soulless Americans, and a big one is the raggedy families that produced them.

It’s an atrociously neglected subject in America today that families are disastrously falling apart in huge numbers, that one parent (usually the father) gets lost and the other faces fierce demands that are hard for even two to satisfy. Sometimes things can work out OK, but fatherless children are more likely to drop out of high school, commit crimes, kill themselves and go jobless. The worst households are often dysfunctional to the point that children are not trained but ignored, rejected and abused. Their guidance is left to TV, video games and cell phones, and if the father and mother ever live together again, they may do more hitting than kissing.

A missing father can mean missing lessons in masculinity for the boy, less security, less self-respect, it is said, and this is common for shooters. Researchers say that, when shooters go to school, the door is often open for bullies to harass them as ever more withdrawn tear-soaked wimps. Girls don’t like them and they become resentful. They get depressed, suicidal, more given to guns, drugs and threats, infuriated to the point of explosion. They almost always say they are going to kill people they may not even know before they kill them in supposedly brave, masculine acts.

The 18-year-old Texas killer, Salvador Ramos, never knew his father. He did know his grandfather, who was a convicted felon. He and his mother had fights, according to her boyfriend. Bullies had at him in school because of a speech impediment. He was a disliked lone wolf with a fetish for guns and once told someone he cut his face up for the fun of it. His grandmother owned the house he and his mother lived in and was planning to take it away because of the mother’s drug problems.

Ramos moved in with the grandmother, had arguments with her about dropping out of high school and shot her in the face before he conducted the massacre he briefly advertised online.

We all need to cry for these lost lives, for the parents, for all of those out there wondering if this could happen to them, something like 60% of teachers nationally, according to a poll. We must strive for safety and for the mental health of those who have witnessed these shootings and those who might commit more of them. The good news is that all kinds of alert organizations, public and private, are trying to come up with meaningful solutions, and no doubt they will on some level or the other.

But the final answer, which could take a long, long time, is pretty much up to nearly all of us helping to rebuild the family in this country, fighting for morale, for growth in goodness and love, restoring certain old norms and getting off the path to civilizational destruction.

Jay Ambrose is a syndicated columnist.

If that’s an understatement, not taking account of millions of deaths, I apologize, but many recent, progressive, mostly Democratic miscalculations have likewise done less to produce a brave, new world than to pulverize the innocent. Consider free, often unneeded, $1,400 stimulus checks passed out nationally to help individuals and to excite a COVID-recovering economy when the chief consequence instead has been to increase demand when supply is diminished. Even President Joe Biden has agreed that this particular utopian dream evolved into an inflationary nightmare.

Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, as a living example of intellectual imbalance, profound falls and long-term governmental limping, wants 16-year-olds to be allowed to vote nationally, maybe an ego boost for the unqualified as well as an electoral boost for leftists. Imagination invites all kinds of possibilities, such as more support for a nationally mandated $15-an-hour minimum wage helping teenagers that would likely result in 1 million people losing their jobs, for starters. Each business is different (some with great profits, some with next to no profits), just as each state is its own thing (some would suffer under such a law) and workers come from different circumstances (some the second or third wage earner in a household and some maybe likely to get a quick promotion).

One of the most outlandish mishaps during our engagement with the pandemic was keeping schools closed for too long. The point was to save students from COVID infection when we knew that was not much of a threat, especially for the younger students, and that they would also likely be quick to recover. Experts say they could suffer psychologically and intellectually for years, maybe for the rest of their lives. Thanks, teachers unions.

Climate change is a real problem that we are going to be less capable of handling because of disruption of our fossil fuel production here at home. That handy source will be needed to enable us to have the money necessary for improved technology and decent living conditions with less dependence on untrustworthy international connivers taking advantage of our stupidities.

We ought to keep in mind that we were not affording adequate medical care for veterans until we started having private hospitals and health care providers do more. Socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders was initially furious.

The Biden administration plans to reduce the overweight student loan burden from imprudent students who knew what they were doing when they took the money to often attend schools with unbelievably high tuition as well as nice reputations. Those paying them off through taxes will include responsible students who did not receive loans and went to less expensive, less prestigious schools that they could afford if they also worked at tough jobs at the same time. It can be more complicated than that, but it’s not right.

The denied progressive formula: From each according to politics and ideological misconceptions, and to each according to what’s dishonorable.

Jay Ambrose is a syndicated columnist.

You know what all of this means, right? If he is caught in situations of the kind the late, rightly applauded Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was involved in, he could be thrown to the wolves.

And sorry to say, it has happened. His wife, Virginia (Ginni) Thomas, is a pro-Trump, dedicated, activist right-winger who sent emails to Donald Trump’s chief of staff after the 2020 presidential election arguing that Joe Biden won through fraud. Most of us say phooey to her conclusion, but she had every right to do that. She and her husband received no financial benefit. He stays away from her political doings and therefore does not need to be investigated or recuse himself from a whole bunch of cases in which he will continue his decades-long judicial consistency on the side of truth as he sees it.

Oh, but wait, it is angrily said, he was the only justice to vote against this chief of staff having to turn over certain material related to the Jan. 6 Capitol riot and being sought by the House of Representatives. This material included the Ginni Thomas emails, but they had already been turned over to the House and Thomas’s vote was in harmony with his record of honoring executive privilege.

Compare that to Ginsburg whose husband, a lawyer named Martin Ginsburg, made big money handling cases connected to Supreme Court decisions in which she participated. He did divest himself of stocks in companies that could benefit by such decisions, but understand there are lots of judges who have crossed such lines with no equivalent of divestment, and what about Joe Biden and his son Hunter’s ultra-profitable associations with foreign businesses having special governmental interests? The Jan. 6 House committee is nevertheless now probing Thomas like a skunk that has smelled something funny.

The thing about Thomas is that his political thinking fits a style of despised traditionalism linked to beliefs in liberty, democracy, equality under the law, our precious rights and upholding laws prohibiting public entities from racial discrimination referred to as affirmative action. The humiliation was once forced on Thomas with no evidence of his somehow lacking the merit of his white competitors.

To read his writings is to understand his writings, as opposed to the obscure, confusing legalese justices so often employ by way of warily defending the indefensible. In explicitly saying what he really means, Thomas is like the late, great Antonin Scalia, just as he resembles him in embracing basic principles. Thomas’s integrity shines, even if he did have to survive a disgraceful, often mischaracterized hearing conducted by then Sen. Joe Biden prior to the Senate approving his nomination to the court.

I do not think every time a minority is criticized it is because he or she is a minority, but I do believe racism remains a dreadful sickness to contend with and that the widespread, vitriolic attacks on Thomas have something to do with his being Black. Leftist supremacists of varied skin colors, for instance, have referred to Thomas as an Uncle Tom appeasing racists. What the supremacists really want is to reshape the best of America in the name of unconscious “wokeness” abetting the worst of America.

Thomas’s story is a marvelous story about real improvement in the lives of Black Americans, a story of his being raised by an incredible grandfather who refused to give in to racism, who believed in self-determination, hard work, overcoming obstacles, pride in accomplishments, who passed all of this on to Thomas whose example surely passes it on to others. The people having at him now obviously include those who think differently, who assume their implicitly degrading attitudes about maltreated minorities requires their imagined superiority.

Jay Ambrose is an op-ed columnist for Tribune News Service. Readers may email him at speaktojay@aol.com.

With maybe a wink if you looked carefully enough, Biden said at a televised press conference (no questions allowed) that billionaires in this country were paying taxes on just 8.2% of their income. That’s not true. Biden is counting stock gains not yet converted to money as income. They are therefore not income and, whatever they are worth on the day of collection, they could be worth a fraction of that or nothing the next day. His human targets are not just billionaires, as he wants you to believe, but everyone worth $100 million or more, and he plans to take at least 20% of “income” with the possibility of more hanky-panky.

Taxes on such assets as stocks are known not as income taxes by anyone educated in the subject, but as wealth taxes. That’s what always overreaching Elizabeth Warren cheered for during the Democratic presidential primary even though they have not worked in Europe where most countries have abandoned them. One issue is that they would cause both foreigners and Americans to invest less money in these United States. The consequence could be less capital needed to expand, create jobs, pay employees more and charge consumers less.

And, believe it or not, we right now have the most progressive tax system in the developed world except for tiny Luxembourg. That means the rich in the United States pay higher taxes as a percentage of income per capita and the middle class pay a lot less than in Europe, a model for the left.

It is true as Biden has pronounced, with tears contemplating a run down his cheeks, that our middle class is shrinking, but that has been because people are making more money and moving up in economic status, not because they are making less and moving down. Something else to keep in mind is that 57% of our workers paid no federal income tax at all last year, while the top 10%, bringing in less than 50% of all income, paid 70% of all the taxes.

Our poorer citizens also get a lot more benefits of varied sorts from government than the high and mighty, meaning monetary inequality is nowhere near what it is often said to be.

Of course, average folks still pay a lot in payroll and state and local taxes, the COVID virus has left a mess and our deficit could someday ruin us, but there is good news out there. It is that jobs increased by 431,000 last month as wages grew and unemployment went down to 3.6%. Biden contends his shaky plan would reduce the threatening deficit by $1 trillion over the next decade, but a far more effective plan would be to cut spending, especially given the return of earmarks, also known as pork. This is the practice whereby a member of Congress sells his vote on some issue or the other to get more money for a local project benefiting him or her politically while often being wasteful.

Not a few government programs take more than they give, and reform can reduce deficits, help fight inflation, spur the economy and offer Americans better lives and our children more secure futures. I would suggest Biden and his executive colleagues sweat their way through identifying what spending can and should go away instead of making our amazing country less amazing. If they don’t, the Supreme Court may save us. The words of the Constitution only allow federal taxation on real income, as literacy informs us.

Jay Ambrose is a syndicated columnist.

The context was the Cold War that did have hot-and-bloody outbursts. It was between the Russian-led Soviet Union with its allies and the United States with its allies and lasted from roughly the end of World War II to 1991. At stake were liberty, a decent world and maybe even humanity itself. While the fallout shelter would likely have saved no one, its mere existence symbolized the alarm embedded in what was happening.

But despite political conflicts and errors of varied kinds, our democratic nation and others hung in there. The Soviet Union, at one point running out of money if not cruelty, adopted a well-intentioned leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, who instigated reforms and negotiated a nuclear-control deal with President Ronald Reagan. East Germany’s Berlin Wall came down. The Soviet Union started crumbling. At last, it was done, and now, as the Cold War has just mercilessly returned owing in part to our own laxities, we must hang in there again. We must deal seriously with the murderous, clever Russian President Vladimir Putin, now in the act of viciously squashing innocent, courageous Ukraine.

Another Gorbachev he is not. He is more nearly Joseph Stalin, the Soviet dictator who helped win World War II and agreed at a conference with President Franklin Roosevelt and British Premier Winston Churchill that we would then have independent, liberated countries throughout Europe. Stalin instead practiced domination, oppression and starvation through communism of those Eastern European countries that Russia was supposed to keep an eye on.

He built what Churchill called an iron curtain. To be sure, Stalin once studied to be a priest but didn’t make the grade and learned different tenets from Vladimir Lenin. Some hold him personally accountable for 20 million deaths.

Putin is not there yet and has had to play a far more careful game even though his unhidden ambition is to rebuild the Soviet Union, starting with Ukraine and getting the Baltic nations and others to line up with Russia, whatever it takes. He has enjoyed putting his nuclear weaponry on display while building closer relationships with China and Iran. President Joe Biden has moved on some solid sanctions.

There is no suggestion from any responsible party of U.S. military confrontation with Russia unless Putin tries military moves against NATO countries we have vowed to protect. So far, Europe seems to be pretty much, if not wholly, in agreement with what Biden is inclined to do. While no one is calling for out-and-out war with Russia, some American observers are calling for a far tougher approach while there are also some saying, what the heck, stay out of this thing. Those in this last group don’t seem to get it that staying out of this thing now would mean dealing with far worse things in the future.

We made mistakes in the first Cold War and we will make mistakes in this one, but we and our allies can see this through if we put high principles and care for others above misled ideologies. I will end by saying I had a reporter friend in Germany when the Berlin Wall was coming down and he gave me a hunk I put on a shelf. I just looked at it and was encouraged.

Jay Ambrose is a syndicated columnist.

Now let’s consider deaths by drug overdoses in the United States during just a single 12-month period ending last April. The record, stomach-churning figure is 100,000 — more than all the deaths cited above.

The major poisons afflicting so many are methamphetamine and opioids, one of which is synthetic fentanyl that’s now a chief threat, 20 to 100 times more powerful than heroin and illustrating as much daily.

It comes from Chinese businesses protected by the Chinese Communist Party. The businesses send the drug or the materials necessary for producing it to Mexico, these days considered the most corrupt country in South America as the government adjusts operations to deal more pleasantly with cartels smuggling the drugs up to our porous southern border.

The fentanyl often arrives here in the form of pills that can mislead victims into swallowing them without realizing exactly what they are or that just a couple of milligrams can kill. Varied sources report that, in the summer of 2021, border patrol agents seized 9,337 pounds of fentanyl, a 94% increase over the 2020 bombardment.

Fentanyl is now said to be one of the chief causes of U.S. deaths for Americans between 18 and 42 years of age.

Sadly, the negligent, court-reprimanded Biden administration assumed anything the Trump administration did to deal with drugs and hordes of illegal migrants was irresponsible and then undid much that actually worked. It has now fixed some of its inanities, if with slippage.

For instance, President Joe Biden did get Mexico to reinstate troops at its own southern border, where encroaching migrants are usually from Central America. We are told they are now also arriving from such places as India, Turkey and Ukraine and can get Mexican visas, travel permission slips and pay bribes for their desert treks.

Some seem to think everyone should be allowed in, perhaps not understanding that some 42 million people from Latin America and the Caribbean have told Gallup pollsters how much they desire to live here. The Border Patrol encountered a record 2 million of the eager group evading border laws this past year with multitudes getting past them and others coming by other means.

One should have sympathy for most of these people but also have sympathy for those employing legal means to live in America. They likewise have deep human needs they are less likely to satisfy with illegal migrants taking their place. Orderly, supervised migration has immensely better, more humane results than disorderly, unlawful migration that, among multitudinous culpabilities, makes drug smuggling easier. The tricky, masterful cartels are getting ever bigger and now also operate in networks inside the United States.

We need to rewrite laws and rules, definitely ending catch-and-release and freeing up ICE agents to do their job. We must make more demands of China, Mexico and South American countries, and hire more border agents. Ports of entry have been a favored means for the drug smugglers to get their goods across the border except that now it is getting easier to cross wherever they want, with millions of dollars soon to greet them.

Jay Ambrose is a syndicated columnist. This column was provided by Tribune News Service.

President Joe Biden apparently thinks differently. His standards are that the next justice should be Black and a woman.

That’s what he automatically said when asked about the Breyer retirement, and it is a reflection of what so much of our government and so many progressive politicians have become. They are players of identity politics, trying to serve one group or the other at the expense of other groups while study of the attributes of individuals as individuals comes in second.

The social justice crowd now thinks skin color can be more important than merit in finding people to play specific roles that can have mighty consequences for others. This mindlessness looks down on the selected group by assuming its members cannot otherwise advance and cheats the unselected groups that may include people who attained exceptional capabilities through exceptional effort. There are far better ways to confront racial prejudice than smashing the principle of fair play.

In short, Biden should be looking for the person most able to serve with wisdom in the hugely important position of Supreme Court justice, whatever race or sex that person may be. While there is no absolutely definitive, certain way to go about it, there are a host of techniques proven worthy over time, such as finding someone with lots of experience and success in a given field and widely appreciated by keen, informed observers.

None of this is meant to say that there is no Black woman out there who would be an outstanding Supreme Court justice. In fact, I have been highly impressed in reading about some of those Biden is said to be considering. If he nominated a Black woman as the best possible Breyer replacement without first limiting other possibilities, hurrah.

Especially given the fact that justices favored by their own party are a minority on the court, Democrats have wanted Breyer’s resignation as soon as possible. We will have a midterm election in November and there’s a reasonable chance that Republicans will become the Senate majority and refuse to go along with any progressive nomination. A big issue is Roe v. Wade, whether the Supreme Court should determine abortion rules or turn the job over to the states. Democrats tried to stop President Donald Trump’s nomination of Justice Amy Coney Barrett for fear her religious beliefs would cause her to favor the change. She correctly says the issue is what the Constitution and arguments say.

Keep in mind that Democrats have rejected the wants of Republican presidents and vice versa. Specifically, keep in mind how a Democratic Senate wouldn’t OK President Ronald Reagan’s nomination of the brilliant Robert Bork who later wrote that Sen. Joe Biden, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, relied on a brief that was “world class in the category of scurrility.”

Biden was also chairman of the committee when Justice Clarence Thomas was a court nominee of a Republican president and there was questionable, downright demonizing, sexual-harassment testimony by Anita Hill with the TV-watching public not being convinced by what she said. “It is a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks,” Thomas commented. Biden voted against this judicial master who nevertheless was approved.

Although Thomas had an exceptional academic record and did especially well at Yale Law School, the school said it accepted him because of skin color, otherwise known as affirmative action. Thomas wrote that “it was futile for me to suppose that I could escape the stigmatizing effects of racial preference, and I began to fear that it would be used forever after to discount my achievements.”

Jay Ambrose is an op-ed columnist for Tribune News Service. 

“Will I oink?” he asked, as reported by The New York Times, and I thought here it is: the amazing and profoundly important sense of humor my fellow Americans have even in the toughest situations.

I myself get by with kidding when checking out of Walmart wearing a mask to hide my identity.

There’s one clerk who usually hits first, once asking through his own mask if I knew that the most astounding of all rock stars had never made a record. I said no and asked who he was talking about.

Mount Rushmore, he said.

But recently, in this exceptional land of ours, we have not seemed so exceptional.

Here we are with a polarized culture, polarized politics, inerasable Trump traces, race riots, a Capitol riot, the Afghanistan catastrophe, inflation delivered with a shrug, COVID-19 confusion on just about any and every front, Bernie Sanders’ ideological virus infecting endless Democrats, Russia and China challenging us around the clock, Iran still working on its nuclear weapons and Joe Biden as president.

Well, he’s better than the alternative if he should quit, but let’s get back to Eddie Fisher, once married to Debbie Reynolds and then Elizabeth Taylor, and this wonderful song in which he sang: “Get your chin off the floor, mister you can be a hero, you can open any door.” … “First you’ve gotta have heart.”

With all of that in mind, derive some oomph, if you will, from America still being a scientific wonder in the 21st century.

We learn this particular operation took place in Baltimore, it took eight hours and came about through the long-sought, technically complicated discovery that pigs are a lot more able to provide usable, right-sized organs for humans than other animals if they are genetically modified.

The patient was not allowed to get a heart from a recently deceased human because there are not all that many donors, the demands are great and he was close to death.

The pig heart is his now and so far has been doing its duties faithfully, lending hope that there will come a time when hundreds of thousands of lives can be saved by kidneys and hearts from pigs.

So have hope not just in science, which I believe is going to give us sane, workable solutions to climate change, as one example, but in politics if we can restore faith in what got us to our best days, such as the genius of our founders, the Constitution, the rule of law, free markets, free speech and consent of the governed but also the separation of powers and other means to avoid the tyranny of the majority, which can sometimes happen.

There’s a fairy tale called “The Three Little Pigs,” and remember they were brothers living in three different homes, two made of sticks and straw and one made of brick. The Big Bad Wolf came, threatened to blow the houses down and succeeded with the flimsy ones, eating two of the pigs. The brick house did not go down and the third pig ate the wolf in revenge for his lost brothers.

Our American house is made of brick and we can keep it that way, but in the face of all these troubles, we first gotta have heart and shoo the wolf away, not eat it.

You go to the grocery store and the cost of food encourages the kind of diet no doctor would recommend. Visit a gas station and maybe you’ll decide to buy a bicycle that, sorry, could cost as much as $7,000. Rent is going up, buying a house could put your financial future six feet under and who knows what tents are selling for?

In contemplating how seriously this inflation is already trashing our standard of living, consider these facts: Price increases were up 6.8% in November, the highest yearlong increase seen in almost 40 years. Even some optimists see it lasting into late 2022 and some think a recession could ensue.

Well, it’s said, that’s COVID for you, and, yes, the pandemic disrupted supply chains worldwide, making it difficult to distribute products needed to maintain all kinds of businesses and retail operations in the usual way. When you have less and less to sell, you sell at higher and higher prices for survival’s sake. But will people pay these prices sufficiently to sustain profits? Well, yes, if government has surrounded us with money enough to enable the transactions.

One way the government promotes this end is for the Federal Reserve to provide loans to banks and other institutions at interest rates so low as to enable all kinds of cheap borrowing and spending and demand. The Federal Reserve, which dismissed inflation as much as Democrats when the curtain began rising, now looks as if it might back away if far too slowly, but not President Joe Biden and fellow Democrats in Congress.

Even as we have millions of people not looking for work as another way of erasing supply, they see the answer to every economic woe you have ever heard of as spend, spend, spend. And yes, there was bipartisan congressional spending — $4 trillion worth — in 2020 to deal with pandemic-generated needs. We had to pay for such needs as vaccines, other health care and business loans even as there were fumbles aplenty.

The economy was recuperating, but next came something particularly scary, however, namely Biden’s 2021 $1.9 trillion America Rescue Plan, about as big an emergency bill the nation has ever seen, providing welfare relief of all kinds, throwing thousands of dollars at people who weren’t poor, addressing some essentials, yes, but overall an economic threat. High taxes on corporations are paid by less supply, still higher prices, fewer jobs and lower wages.

Next in line was a bipartisan $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill that again had good points along with bad ones, and now there is the issue of the Build Back Better fraud. Meant to fulfill an accumulation of progressive wishes over the next 10 years in one miswrought package, the House-passed legislative plan is to transform America into a semi-socialist state and questionably address the climate change challenge.

Inflation is already wiping out wage increases and will worsen poverty. What’s happening right now could cost the average family $3,500 a year. How about some real compassion?

Jay Ambrose is a syndicated columnist.

President Joe Biden, more than a little bit upset by this other president and his amassing tens of thousands of troops on Ukraine’s border, says no, no, many times no and recently threatened sanctions in a trans-Atlantic video session with Putin. Biden is falling short, but gets it that Ukraine is now an advancing democracy and wants to go its own way despite once being the most important part of Russia. Ukraine is already combatting Russia-supported rebels and Biden understands that Hungary, Poland and the Baltic states could be next in line for takeovers. The threat is also to Europe, just as Putin sees a threat to the new Soviet Union if he does not ward off NATO and Europe by making sure that certain border nations belong to him.

Yes, it’s the case that Russia is dwindling in population and wealth, with the selling of gas and oil pretty much a definition of its limited economy. What it lacks in money, however, it makes up for in nuclear weaponry, enough to just maybe blow up half the universe, and the development of hypersonic missiles that the United States does not have. Putin himself also possesses an overload of ambition in wanting to restore what Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and President Ronald Reagan helped take apart, a monster instigating war and implanting oppression around the world while threatening the United States by such means as nuclear missiles in Cuba.

And, therefore, Biden said look, Putin, if you move ahead with your plans, the U.S. is going to make it impossible for Russia to deal with financial imperatives by having international banks say go away. Biden said, too, that he would let no gas and oil flow through the recently constructed Nord Stream 2 pipeline to Germany if an invasion took place. A spokesman said major European nations are on board with Biden about economic sanctions as well as his supplying Ukraine with defensive weaponry. Biden agreed with Putin on no offensive weaponry.

Will any of this work? Given Biden’s record of backing up, giving up, carelessness and disappearing from action, probably not. For reasons of averting climate change threats, Biden had previously threatened sanctions against companies building the pipeline, but changed his mind out of courtesy to Germany even as he had terminated an important U.S. pipeline. Afghanistan is the biggest example of his recklessly scooting from the scene; desperate Americans were left behind along with billions in U.S. weaponry after the killing of U.S. troops.

Putin wasn’t deterred from much by President Barack Obama’s sanctions after Russia facilitated Crimea’s separation from Ukraine, and Russia can, to some extent, rely more on China and other parts of Asia if Europe gets tough. As others have suggested, a much, much better way to proceed would be to institute all the mentioned sanctions and far more right now, this minute, a punishment for Russian troops threatening the nation that would go away when the troops went away.

Jay Ambrose is a syndicated columnist.

Yes, say some who note this virus is spreading fast. Others say no, arguing that we don’t yet know whether it’s a terrible danger or nothing much. Excuse me, but do you refuse to put on a seatbelt in your car because you don’t know if you will have an accident? Presidential advisers are reported by the New York Times to have discussed the matter with Biden, saying a ban would not stop the virus’s entry into our homeland. OK, said Biden and others, but even a little extra time could conceivably be consequential.

Politics may play a role here. Forget the ban and encounter tragedy and what will the public think? Of course, more and more, people want to return to normal, maybe fearing that a travel ban could signal such things as lockdowns to come even though Biden says there will be no more lockdowns. It is meanwhile the case that even a short-term travel ban will do economic harm to eight countries while being yet another hit on the worldwide supply chain. America could suffer, too.

Another political factor could be that Biden is trying to recuperate from what he said during the 2020 campaign about President Donald Trump’s China travel ban, namely by referring to it while accusing Trump of “hysteria, xenophobia and fear-mongering.”

Still another issue for Biden has been his mandate that workers in businesses of more than 100 workers should be vaccinated or regularly tested if they want to keep their jobs. His overall purpose was right even if he should have relied on Congress to pass a law with somewhat different rules instead of barking orders. What is on his side are statistics showing that unvaccinated people are many times more likely to be infected than the vaccinated.

Something like 80% of American adults have received at least one shot, and the vaccine has saved us from what could have been more a massacre than a crisis.

It’s true that youthful people without underlying conditions are unlikely to be made terribly sick, but they can be and not everyone in a workplace is youthful or necessarily free of underlying conditions. Vaccinated people can become infected and transmit the infection partly because of the delta variant, but even ex-President Donald Trump has unleashed boos at a rally when he cheered for vaccinations.

Trump is sometimes said to have killed everyone who died under his watch, a grotesque stupidity, especially considering his warp speed program. It sufficiently undid bureaucratic entanglement to produce vaccines at a record rate, then saving vast numbers of lives.

Even with those vaccines, many have died under Biden’s watch, but presidents are just one factor among many in dealing with COVID-19.

Despite omicron, new virus surges overseas and a host of economic worries, such as inflation, supply chain mishaps and unfilled jobs, much is returning to normal. It is pretty easy these days to find toilet paper in stores. Histories may fail to observe that as they nevertheless correct a host of misunderstandings.

Jay Ambrose is a syndicated columnist.

Well, if you do believe as much and don’t realize you were fed balderdash secretly delivered in large part by the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, meet John Durham, a special counsel for the Justice Department.

Appointed by Trump’s attorney general, William Barr, and kept in place by the Biden administration, he has a splendid reputation, uncommon diligence and keeps coming up with verifiable details not only testifying to the political hooey, but disclosing media misadventure and significant FBI lapses.

A chief ingredient in the mishmash to upset America’s basic principles and the best of who and what we are, Durham demonstrates, was the Steele dossier, a 35-page collection of 17 Trump-thumping memos written and assembled by Christopher Steele, a former British spy. For collecting what were mostly falsehoods used in trying to oust a legitimately elected president, he was paid by a firm practiced in villainizing political adversaries of clients that this time out were originally the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee.

One of his informants was Michael Sussman, a lawyer for the Clinton campaign who also told lies to the FBI, according to Durham, who indicted him for allegedly doing so. One of his tales was that there was this constant plotting between Trump and a Russian outfit, none of it meant to make Hillary happy. The only thing missing was verification.

Another conspiracy monger fulfilling Steele’s needs was Igor Danchenko, a native Russian and a Russia expert who worked for the Brookings Institution, a major Washington think tank. He also talked to the FBI without offering evidence of a purported deal between Trump and the Russians. Just recently, he was indicted by Durham on five counts of false claims to the agency that later learned it had been misled.

Please don’t be surprised that Danchenko had closely associated with the Clintons through a favored source named Charles Dolan Jr., someone also closely connected with Russians. He helped Bill Clinton win his two election campaigns and fought for Hillary Clinton in 2008 to no electoral avail. President Clinton had made him vice chairman of a State Department advisory committee, and he was an executive of a PR firm dealing with Russians.

The FBI is a puzzle in all of this. Even though it seems increasingly clear that the dossier’s propagandistic rumors and ludicrous sensationalism played a part in the Robert Mueller spectacle, the FBI says there was other evidence. The investigators, who never mentioned the dossier and never explored the Clinton connection, concluded there was insufficient evidence to assume Trump had conspired with Russians in crimes they did commit, although with minor, if any, effect on the election. The investigation listed instances of Trump at least considering using his powers to stop the investigation, but this is not ipso facto obstruction of justice if his intent was to end proceedings he considered a phony smear.

Durham portrays the FBI as mostly being duped while others argue its leadership was partisan. Counter to what the law allows, the agency used the dossier to spy on a Trump associate without verifying the dossier’s content. After two and a half years, the Mueller investigation found insufficient evidence of Trump collaborating on a crime with the Kremlin. It did not speak out about the dossier or investigate the Clinton campaign’s Russian collusions.

Varied news outlets contributed to the misinformation with some recently saying they apologize. Trump aides did communicate with the Russians, which in and of itself is legal. It was also legal for Democrats to joyfully embrace the preposterous idea that he helped hack Clinton emails, but just maybe political penalties should be considered for what some knew was wrong.

Jay Ambrose is a syndicated columnist.