Author: RealClearWire

Commentary: Biden’s Migrant Policy Worsens Central America’s ‘Root Causes,’ Critics Say

RealClearWire

When Vice President Kamala Harris visited Mexico last year, she cited poverty, crime, and political instability as “root causes” driving millions of migrants to cross the U.S. border. 

But some critics with regional expertise say Biden administration policies, which migrants have interpreted as an invitation to travel north, have severely worsened those root causes, destabilizing large swaths of Central America and Mexico. The torrent of people moving across the region has delivered billions of dollars to the coffers of human smuggling rings and the drug cartels that have taken advantage of America’s overwhelmed border patrol to deliver fentanyl and other deadly substances to the United States.  

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Commentary: With States Hands-Off, Homeschooling Takes Off

RealClearWire

South Dakota epitomizes the rapid growth of homeschooling in America. Guided by the principle that parents, not the government, have the right to determine what and how their kids are taught, homeschooling families have overturned existing rules and batted down attempts over the last decade to impose new ones in many states, including South Dakota. 

What’s left in much of the United States today is essentially an honor system in which parents are expected to do a good job without much input or oversight. The rollback of regulations, coupled with the  ill effects of remote learning during the pandemic, have boosted the number of families opting out of public schools in favor of educating their kids at home.  

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Commentary: Faulty FBI Data Obscures Successful Defensive Gun Use

RealClearWire

With crime such an important issue, Americans depend on the FBI for accurate data. The crime data for 2021 is a mess, with almost 40% of law enforcement agencies around the country not submitting any data to the FBI. In California, 93% didn’t report crime data. In New York, 87% didn’t. Cities are embarrassed by the soaring crime rates, and even when they have collected the data they aren’t transmitting those numbers to the FBI.

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Commentary: Democrats Prepare to Lose as U.S. Senate Race in North Carolina Is Too Close to Call

RealClearWire

The 2022 midterms are less than a month away. With Election Day rapidly approaching, races in Arizona, Georgia, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin have taken the spotlight, and according to most pundits, control of the Senate comes down to these five states. Conspicuously, political analysts in the Beltway have all but stripped North Carolina, a purple, perennial swing state, and its Senate race between Congressman Ted Budd and state Supreme Court Chief Justice Cheri Beasley of its toss up status, and Democrats seem prepared to cede the state to Republicans.

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Commentary: Violent Crime Is Driving a Red Wave

RealClearWire

Two weeks before the 2022 midterms, fear of crime is second only to worries over inflation and recession. Both issues – personal security and economic security – affect voters directly. They arise every time voters ride the subway, walk down a dark street, pay the cashier at the grocery, or fill up their truck. That’s why survey after survey says they are the top issues motivating voters this November. That’s bad news for Democrats. Pollsters say Republicans hold huge advantages on the economy, inflation, and crime, the issues that matter most to voters.

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Commentary: Democrats Race to Save a Blue State Gone Purple

RealClearWire

With Election Day less than a month away, Democrats and Republicans are duking it out to secure majorities in Congress. While both parties funnel record-breaking millions of dollars into several traditional battleground states like Pennsylvania and Nevada, Democrats could lose a state they’ve won since the late 1980s – Oregon.

Though the state is all but guaranteed to re-elect longtime Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden, there’s a real possibility Oregonians might just elect their first Republican governor in nearly 35 years. Thanks to a well-funded independent spoiler candidate and an unpopular outgoing governor, Democrats are facing a tight race with serious implications as major issues like abortion are tossed to the states.

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Commentary: The War over ‘Transgender’ Kids

RealClearWire

America is in the throes of a cultural and political war over gender ideology, featuring high-profile conflicts over everything from school curricula to athletics to pronouns.  

But among the most explosive battles unfolding within the broader war is that over transgender children. In an inhospitable election year for the left, Democrats, far from being on the back foot, have pushed ahead on this front, including this fall in California, New York, and Virginia with moves to curb parental rights. 

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Commentary: Zero Basis Exists for the Claim That Electric Vehicles Have ‘Zero Emissions’

RealClearWire

As California, New York, and other states move to phase out the sale of gasoline-powered cars, public officials routinely echo the Biden administration’s claim that electric vehicles are a “zero emissions” solution that can significantly mitigate the effects of climate change. 

Car and energy experts, however, say there is no such thing as a zero-emissions vehicle: For now and the foreseeable future, the energy required to manufacture and power electric cars will leave a sizable carbon footprint. In some cases hybrids can be cleaner alternatives in states that depend on coal to generate electricity, and some suggest that it may be too rash to write off all internal combustion vehicles just yet. 

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Commentary: The Rise of the Biomedical Security State

RealClearWire

“History doesn’t repeat itself,” said Mark Twain, “but it often rhymes.” This is among the reasons we look to the past, straining as best we can through the deepening fog of time to discern lessons for our own day. Analogies to the events that came before are always imperfect, but nevertheless often useful for understanding our present moment. Thus, only a historical myopia can explain why it’s become so common to describe the events involving the covid pandemic as “unprecedented,” even though pandemics have tended to occur every hundred years or so. This nearsightedness is also perilous given, for instance, the World Economic Forum’s “Great Reset Initiative” and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s recent pledge to spend $200 million on developing international biometric-based digital identifications. 

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Commentary: Republicans Find Their Footing on Abortion

RealClearWire

Earlier this week, Republican Sen. Marco Rubio stood his ground on a debate stage at the Lake Worth campus of Palm Beach College. His opponent is seasoned Democratic lawmaker Val Demings, a black congresswoman and former police chief, and the discussion had turned to abortion rights – terrain that Democrats believe favor them and give Demings and other Senate candidates a chance to alter the expected outcome of the 2022 midterms.

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Commentary: Learning All the Wrong Lessons from America’s Energy Crisis

RealClearWire

Self-inflicted wounds create teachable moments, but the architects of America’s current energy crisis are learning all the wrong lessons.

Skyrocketing energy costs are one of America’s harsh post-Covid realities. And with one in four American households struggling to pay for their energy needs before Covid, policymakers should have set their sights on making energy more affordable for more Americans.

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Commentary: America’s Schools Warm to Climate Activism

RealClearWire

Public school districts are adopting curricula on climate change from well-funded progressive groups casting the issue as a threat to life on the planet that students should respond to through activism. 

As of fall 2020, 29 states and the District of Columbia have adopted standards that require science classes to teach human-caused climate change as a peril beyond dispute, according to K12 Climate Action,  a group that is part of the progressive Aspen Institute. 

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Commentary: Rural Backlash Against ‘Renewables’ Surges

RealClearWire

The hype about wind and solar energy keeps colliding with the hard reality of land-use conflicts. Nowhere is that more obvious than in Ohio, where 41 townships have rejected or restricted the expansion of wind and/or solar projects since last November. In addition, at least eight Ohio counties have implemented restrictions on Big Wind and Big Solar over that same time period. 

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Commentary: The Embarrassing Rhetoric on Russia

RealClearWire

The Ukraine-Russia conflict has spurred debate on how to best resolve the crisis. One thing most people can agree on is that nuclear war could happen. In response, most would hope that the risk of nuclear destruction would bring about grounded debate. Unfortunately, the conflict has brought out name calling and baseless allegations. Much of this coming from people currently in charge of policy or who helped shape policy in the past. The juvenile rhetoric on Ukraine-Russia is undermining the debate and could have grave consequences.

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Commentary: Liberal Arts Colleges Are More Liberal than Universities

RealClearWire

Students often approach me to share the experiences they are having with other faculty on campus. They talk of being deeply uncomfortable asking questions in seminars and share with me how intimidated they are to challenge their professors. They often have real difficulty in sharing views that may run against the progressive, even Marxist, ideas that tend to dominate my campus.

I have been a professor at Sarah Lawrence College—one of the nation’s more elite and politically active campuses—for over a decade now. Liberal activism and ideological infusion into classes have become standard here and at many other liberal arts schools.  

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Commentary: Connecting ‘Energy Inflation’ with ‘Climate Extremism’

RealClearWire

In the approaching 2022 midterm elections, American voters will have the opportunity to decide whether oil industry executives are really to blame for high energy prices—or if it’s instead the political class that needs a shakeup. 

In a new report for Real Clear Energy, Joseph Toomey, a career-management consultant, makes a persuasive case that the energy inflation now victimizing American consumers and taxpayers is the result of deliberate public-policy choices made here at home. Even as President Biden vilifies energy companies, the evidence is overwhelming that the current regime in Washington is beholden to climate extremism at the expense of affordable energy, Toomey argues. 

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Commentary: The Pro-Life Movement Charts a New Path

RealClearWire

For a half-century, anti-abortion protestors have traveled from across the country to Washington for the March for Life, an annual demonstration that starts on the National Mall and traditionally ends at the steps of the United States Supreme Court.

Now, for the first time in 50 years, the route will change. Organizers say they will start in the same place, but they won’t march to the high court. “It is more important that we finish at the U.S. Capitol,” Jeanne Mancini, president of the March for Life Defense and Education Fund, which has organized the march since 1974, told RealClearPolitics. Noting that in the wake of the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade, the question has been returned “to our elected officials and to the people through their elected officials.”

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Commentary: Lawsuit to Block Student Loan Bailout Can Set Stage for Solving Debt Crisis

RealClearWire

“Here’s the thing. People think that the President of the United States has the power for debt forgiveness. He does not…. [H]e does not have that power. That would have to be an act of Congress.”

Is this the perspective of a conservative legal analyst? A Republican politician? Nope. Those are the words of none other than House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, explaining to reporters last year why President Biden doesn’t have the authority to end student debt.

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Commentary: The Monopoly Hiding in Plain Sight

RealClearWire

With persistent inflation and growing concerns over a recession, pundits, policymakers, and the president have expressed concern about an alleged lack of competition lurking in the dark corners of the U.S. economy. As President Biden himself said, “capitalism without competition isn’t capitalism, it’s exploitation.” From Big Tech to baby food, both sides of the aisle are on the lookout for monopoly power. But sometimes the best place to hide is in plain sight.

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Commentary: California Is Evading Fiscal Transparency

RealClearWire

California may have one of the largest economies in the world, but when it comes to keeping tabs on its own spending it’s dead last among the states. For years, all 49 other states have been able to answer a single public records request and show us where they spent taxpayer money – every check to every company, nonprofit, union or other entity.

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Commentary: Race-Baiting, Critical Race Theory Still High on Teachers Unions’ To-Do List

RealClearWire

If you think teachers’ unions were discouraged to learn that nearly two-thirds of American adults hold an unfavorable view of Critical Race Theory (CRT) or that their own outspoken advocacy of the curriculum has proved to be political Kryptonite, you’re either overestimating their concern for what anyone else believes or underestimating their determination to turn schools into liberal indoctrination centers.

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Commentary: The Trans Movement’s New Trotskyist

RealClearWire

The Stonewall Riots of 1969 saw New York City police officers lose control of their attempt to shut down the mafia-run Stonewall Inn, inadvertently ushering in an era of gay actvisim. Today, those early leaders of the gay rights movement might be better off leaving street activism to the next generation, but Fred Sargeant must have missed that memo.

Last month, Sergeant was assaulted at a pride march by radical trans activists and sent to the ER. His thought crime was simply holding a sign that read, “gay, not queer,”and criticizing the march’s sponsor for claiming that the word gay, “erased the breadth of sexual orientations and gender identities within the LGBTQ+ umbrella.” Sargeant’s “outdated” views got him on the receiving end of the trans mob’s wrath. 

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Commentary: Yet Again, New York Is Sticking It to Religious Schools

RealClearWire

New York education bureaucrats are rapidly and gleefully ditching standards for what children in public schools should learn. Why then are they increasing their imposition on private yeshivas?  

The State Board of Regents has finalized new regulatory oversight of yeshivas, and the standards by which these and other private schools can demonstrate that their education is “substantially equivalent” to what is offered in government-run schools.

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Commentary: Key Catholic Demographic Split on Support for Biden

RealClearWire

He wears a rosary on his wrist, attends Mass weekly, and remains the only Catholic president in United States history other than John F. Kennedy. And yet, a clear majority of Catholic voters would prefer that President Biden not return to the Oval Office.

When asked if the president should run for a second term, 58.4% replied “no.” Only 22.2% said “yes.” Rough results, but Biden shouldn’t take them too personally.

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Commentary: Gas Cars May Soon Be as Environmentally Friendly as Electric Vehicles

RealClearWire

A team of engineers from Michigan State University led by Associate Professor Annick Anctil projects that rising fuel efficiency standards for internal combustion engine (ICEV) vehicles in the U.S. could lower their greenhouse gas emissions to be close to those of electric vehicles (EVs) by 2030.

The analysis, published earlier this year in the Journal of Environmental Management, should give pause to EV-obsessed policymakers doling out lavish tax credits for purchasing EVs and banning the sale of new ICE vehicles. At least twelve states aim to phase out sales of new, gas-powered cars by 2035.

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Commentary: Setting Expectations for the House in 2022 Midterms

RealClearWire

As the generic ballot closed over the course of the summer, the battle for the House of Representatives has moved into the forefront of political analysis. House races tend to develop late, and it is too soon to predict with specificity what the outcome is going to be. But we can probably set some reasonable bounds for expectations at this point.

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Commentary: Durham Prosecutes FBI Informants, Protects Their Handlers

RealClearWire

Since being named special counsel in October 2020, John Durham has investigated or indicted several unscrupulous anti-Trump informants. But he has spared the FBI agents who handled them, raising suspicions he’s letting investigators off the hook in his waning investigation of misconduct in the Russiagate probe.

In recent court filings, Durham has portrayed the G-men as naive recipients of bad information, tricked into opening improper investigations targeting Donald Trump and obtaining invalid warrants to spy on one of his advisers.

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Commentary: The Opioids Crisis’ Impact on America’s Economy

RealClearWire

Strung out on drugs half her life, Brandi Edwards, 29, said the longest she held a job before getting sober four years ago was “about two and a half months.”

“I worked at an AT&T call center, a day-care center for a month, fast food places, but I had to take drugs to get out of bed in the morning and when I did show up, I wasn’t productive,” the West Virginia mother of three told RealClearInvestigations. “The first paycheck came along and I was out of there.”

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Commentary: So-Called ‘Ethnic Studies’ Promote Antisemitism, Bigotry in U.S. Schools

RealClearWire

Parents are understandably concerned with the divisive curricula now taught in America’s schools. Ideas like critical race theory and extreme gender ideology often replace the subjects traditionally taught in core classes like science and social studies. Students no longer learn the importance of our nation’s history. They learn a warped worldview that divides us into the oppressors and the oppressed.

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Commentary: Undermining U.S. Citizenship at K-12 Schools on American Military Bases

RealClearWire

Schools on American military bases, educating almost 70,000 children of service personnel, push the same anti-racism curriculum found in America’s most liberal school districts, with the goal of preparing these students for lives dedicated to a global citizenship meant to displace American citizenship and the American way of life.

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Commentary: Phaseout of Oil Cars Show Contempt for Rural America and the Developing World

RealClearWire

America’s big auto companies, less than 15 years since they were bailed out of bankruptcy following the Clinton-Bush recession of 2008, are betraying the American people out of their greed for government cash and favor. Their “net zero” plans – in conjunction with the globalist dictators and the Biden Administration – include eliminating huge numbers of jobs and devastating major segments of the U.S. economy.  

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Commentary: U.S. Farmers Grab the Lobbying Pitchforks as Greens Sow Costly New Reporting Mandates

RealClearWire

Echoing conflicts from Sri Lanka to Canada to the Netherlands, tensions between farmers and green-minded government policymakers are building in the United States, where producers are squaring off against a costly proposed federal mandate for greenhouse-gas reporting from corporate supply chains.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in March proposed requiring large corporations, including agribusinesses and food companies, to report greenhouse gas emissions down to the lowest rungs of their supply chains as a means of combatting climate change, which environmental campaigners contend imperils the planet and life on it.

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Commentary: Advances in Medical Testing Making Health Challenges Easier to Diagnose

RealClearWire

You may suffer from autoimmune pulmonary alveolar proteinosis, or aPAP, but you might not know it yet. Importantly, your doctor may not know it either. 

Thousands of Americans suffer from aPAP, a rare autoimmune lung disease caused by the progressive build-up of an oily substance normally present in the lungs called surfactant. In healthy people, surfactant forms a thin layer that lines the tiny air sacs (alveoli) of the lungs and helps them function while we breath. In people with aPAP, the surfactant over-accumulates, making the layer thicker in some air sacs and filling others, blocking oxygen from moving out of the air sacs and into the bloodstream. 

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Georgia’s Carr Among the GOP Attorneys General Pressing NAAG to Return $280 Million

RealClearWire

A dozen Republican state attorneys general are fed up with what they view as the leftward drift and self-dealing of their nonpartisan national association and are asking the organization to change its ways and return roughly $280 million in assets to the states.

The National Association of Attorneys General was created in 1907 as a bipartisan forum for all state and territory attorneys general. Over the last year, several of the group’s Republican members have asserted that NAAG has become a partisan litigation machine that improperly benefits from the many tort settlements it helps to engineer.

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Unpacking the Apparent Trump-Hillary Double Standard: For Her, the FBI Helped Obstruct Its Own Investigation

RealClearWire

Former Attorney General Loretta Lynch obtained evidence that a computer contractor working under the direction of Hillary Clinton’s legal team destroyed subpoenaed records that the former secretary of state stored on a private email server she originally kept at her New York home, and then lied to investigators about it. Yet no charges were brought against Clinton, her lawyers, or her paid consultant.

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Commentary: Religious Liberty Beyond Red and Blue Divides

RealClearWire

Many American voters head into midterm elections wearied by political polarization. Subjects that might have merely led to an uncomfortable dinner table conversation yesterday are more likely to be relationship-ending today. 

It’s often assumed that political positions come with a Democrat or Republican party label. But beneath many of the most divisive issues of our time – think the COVID-19 pandemic response, the 2020 election, and the overturning of Roe v. Wade – lies an issue that is neither red nor blue. Would you believe me if I said religious liberty is not actually a partisan issue? 

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Commentary: America’s Dominant Abortion Provider Faces a Struggle to Adapt

RealClearWire

Since the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade in June, Planned Parenthood CEO Alexis McGill Johnson has tried to present new state laws restricting abortion as an opportunity for the nation’s largest abortion provider. “Now that we are in a world where we are no longer defending Roe,” she told Time magazine, “we have actually an opportunity to reimagine and reconstruct something better.”

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Commentary: The ‘Gold Standard’ Private Pensions Exposed Now as High-Wire Busts

RealClearWire

Like many retirees, Jesus Nunez knew he was due a pension but was having a hard time tracking it down. Now 66, the Burbank, Illinois, resident had worked as a painter and garage worker for the Checker Taxi Co. Inc from 1978 to 1986 and then another year for its successor concern. But when Checker Motors filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2009, he never got a notice about his anticipated retirement checks. He figures he’s due about $300 per month.

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Commentary: Time to Scrap the Espionage Act of 1917

RealClearWire

According to the FBI’s court-approved search warrant for Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, probable cause existed to believe Donald Trump may have violated three laws by seemingly stealing 300 classified government documents from the White House, some extremely sensitive, and squirreling them away in his Florida mansion. For the public, the most arresting (no pun intended) of these allegedly violated statutes is the Espionage Act of 1917. 

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Commentary: John Podesta’s Ties to Dem Megadonor Back in Spotlight

RealClearWire

Eight years ago, the Obama administration bristled at the word “recusal.” White House Deputy Press Secretary Josh Earnest told reporters that the reason that top presidential adviser John Podesta would not be involved in the decision-making process involving the Keystone XL pipeline was that the State Department, not the White House, was already evaluating it “in an impartial way.” It wasn’t a “recusal,” Earnest insisted – there just was no need for Podesta to be involved.

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