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Posts published in “Guest”

Public Union Takes a COVID-19 Tax Credit. Really?

AFSCME Council 4, one of Connecticut’s largest and most influential public sector unions, took $245,951 in COVID-related employee retention tax credits meant to bolster businesses and organizations that were either forced to close during the pandemic or saw at least a 50 percent decrease in receipts in 2020.

Yet, according to the union’s annual LM2 federal filing, Council 4 saw a $5 million increase in receipts over the course of 2020 and employee pay increased by $1 million from 2019. Union membership remained the same between the two years, as did the number of employees listed on the report.

Read at Yankee Institute

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Irrational Covid Fears

Major media outlets trumpeted new government data last week showing that 5,800 fully vaccinated Americans had contracted Covid. That may sound like a big number, but it indicates that a vaccinated person’s chances of getting Covid are about one in 11,000. The chances of getting a version any worse than a common cold are even more remote.

A car trip is a bigger threat, to you and others. About 100 Americans are likely to die in car crashes today. The new federal data suggests that either zero or one vaccinated person will die today from Covid.

Read in The New York Times

NY Budget Provides $2.1B to Illegals Ineligible for Federal Benefits

New York lawmakers passed a lavish $212 billion budget last week, representing a nearly 10 percent increase. The budget creates a $2.1 billion Excluded Workers Fund to provide retroactive benefits to illegal immigrants otherwise ineligible to receive federal CARES Act money or unemployment insurance. Qualified applicants will get checks totaling $15,600; unqualified applicants, those unable to demonstrate that they lost a job to lockdowns, will get $3,200.

Read in NY Post

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A National Pandemic of Charges of Racism Runs Into the Facts in a Spirited Defense of Greenwich, CT

Walking down Greenwich Avenue on any weekend, I have heard people speaking French, Russian, Japanese, Italian, Spanish, and English with a British accent. Our Town is a virtual melting pot of diversity.

The US Census provides data showing that Greenwich has become more racially and ethnically diverse over the years, with the minority school population reaching 38% in the latest census.

Read in Greenwich Free Press


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CEO’s Selective Virtue Signalling

Major League Baseball’s offices are located in Manhattan and the commissioner, a native of Rome, N.Y., lives in the Empire State. Why is that relevant? Georgia has no-excuse absentee voting by mail, but New York state doesn’t. In neighboring Connecticut only voters who are in the military, ill, absent, disabled, have religious objections or are working at the polls can vote by mail.

Consistency isn’t the goal, the goal is virtue signaling.

Read in Wall Street Journal

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Marin County’s Discriminatory ‘Universal Basic Income’

Some 125 residents in Marin County, Calif., can expect to begin receiving payments of $1,000 a month starting in May in an experiment providing a “universal basic income,” or UBI, to low-income Americans. The program is similar to one recently completed in Stockton, Calif., but with one major difference: race and sex discrimination. Beneficiaries must be “mothers of color.”

Read in Wall Street Journal

Woke Hypocrisy: Companies Bash GA, While Maintaining Supply Chains to Forced Labor Camps in China

A wave of woke corporatism has been sweeping America, with companies lining up to demand boycotts of Georgia, labeling its new voting law inhumane and an abuse of basic human rights.

Coca-Cola CEO James Quincey called GA's law (SB-202) ‘unacceptable’ and ‘a step backward’.

Meanwhile, a Congressional commission has listed Coca-Cola as a major American company with ties to forced labor camps in Xinjiang province in China, along with Nike, Adidas, Calvin Klein, Campbell’s Soup Company, CostCo, Patagonia and Tommy Hilfiger.

Moreover, last November, The New York Times reported that Coca-Cola was lobbying against congressional legislation targeting companies who engaged with China’s forced labor policies.


Read in The Spectator


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At Yale, Cancel Culture Consumes a Celebration of Eli Women

March was supposed to be Women’s History Month, but at Yale University this month they were busy erasing it.

Last fall, the university sponsored a convocation to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the admission of the first women undergraduates as well as 150 years of women attending the university’s graduate and professional schools. Members of the first three undergraduate classes contributed their reminiscences in video compilations as well as essays about their experience. So far, so good.

Two of the 141 women who wrote essays asked to keep their submissions anonymous for personal reasons. But when the books were published, the Yale Alumni Association had deleted the names of all the women – without asking the authors’ permission or even warning them of what had been done to their work.

Read in Issues & Insights

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Cry for City Children

Excuse me, but who died and made United Federation of Teachers honcho Mike Mulgrew both supreme leader and chief scientist of New York?

It has been more than a year since public schools closed in Gotham, and they have yet to ­reopen in a meaningful way. Most elementary kids don’t attend five days a week. Middle schoolers have even fewer days. The few high-schoolers who “attend” school sit in front of laptops, while their teachers zoom in from the comfort of homes.

This isn't school.

Mulgrew, the UFT boss, ­described the new CDC guidelines [requiring in-school social distancing of only 3 feet] as “strange.” Mulgrew added that his union listens to its own, independent doctors, not the CDC.

Read in New York Post


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How Trump Got Control of the Border

In a few months, if it hasn’t already, President Trump’s legacy at the border is going to look much better even to skeptical observers.

As the Biden administration unwinds Trump policies, and a new migrant crisis builds, it is becoming increasingly clear that the Trump team arrived at an approach that, after fits and starts, worked.

Counter to the image of the administration taking a blunderbuss approach to everything related to immigration, the push at the border was a thoughtful, creative, and well-coordinated effort across government agencies and between sovereign countries.

It is worth revisiting because understanding how it came about and the reasons that it made such a difference underlines the mistakes that Biden is making now, no matter how much his officials and allies want to deny it and shift blame.

Read in National Review