COVID cases, hospitalizations and deaths have fallen. None of that would have been possible without vaccines. The lightning speed at which they were created was on Trump's watch.
Posts tagged as “Column of the Day”
Nearly 75 percent of Connecticut’s public-sector workforce is part of a union, according to new Census Bureau numbers released by Unionstats.com, making Connecticut’s government workforce the most unionized in the country.
Connecticut nosed out runner-up New York by four percentage points.
The Planning and Development Committee of the Connecticut General Assembly held a hearing Monday concerning seven different bills to mandate certain zoning rules for all communities in our state. Similar state-mandate-of-local-zoning bills are also showing up in committees such as Housing, Transportation and even Public Health.
The bills would nearly eliminate public hearings for local zoning applications, thus silencing the public. One bill provides that any party alleging that zoning regulations are noncompliant with its provisions could bypass the local zoning appeals board and go directly to court. If enacted, these legislative proposals would result in a feeble, shrinking local voice on zoning in our communities, a dramatic reversal of Connecticut’s timeless Home Rule tradition.
Former Japanese Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori was fired by an Oympics committee after making sexist remarks. Yet, the IOC ignores China's systematic abuse of women, including mass forced sterilization, forced abortion and forced birth control of Uighur women in its Xinjiang province.
President Biden is on the verge of signing a third “stimulus” bill, costing taxpayers $1.9 trillion. The “American Rescue Plan” comes on the heels of a second “stimulus” passed in December, which cost about $1 trillion, and the first one in March that amounted to $2.2 trillion. But this latest enormous bill is about helping politicians, not about helping the country.
The bill’s first offense is that it will not stimulate the economy in a meaningful way.
Last month, Disney fired actress Gina Carano after she compared Nazi persecution of Jews to the persecution of conservatives in America today on social media. The company called her post "abhorrent and unacceptable," declining to explain why her co-star Pedro Pascal remains employed despite his own posts comparing Trump supporters to Nazis. Distinguished science reporter Donald McNeil was recently ousted from The New York Times for vocalizing the n-word when answering a high school student's question about whether a classmate deserved to be suspended for saying it. Emmanuel Cafferty, a Latino truck driver for San Diego Gas & Electric Company, was fired for accidentally—yes, accidentally—making the "OK" hand gesture used by some white supremacists.
Other examples abound, and they are all cases of religious discrimination—but not in the way you might think.
Pres. Biden has issued an “Executive Order on Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities.” Before the election, VP Harris posted a tweet and video: “There’s a big difference between equality and equity.”
Equality means equal treatment, fair competition and impartially judged outcomes. Equity means equal outcomes, achieved if necessary by unequal treatment, biased competition and preferential judging.
Only a powerful central government could impose the intensive—and expensive—programs of social intervention, ideological re-education and economic redistribution necessary to achieve equal outcomes.
That is why radical claims for unequal treatment must be carefully buried in word salads praising equity and social justice.
These evasions raise a hard question: isn’t equity just a new name for the oldest program for achieving equal outcomes -- socialism?
American governments, federal and state, have made many mistakes in the Covid-19 pandemic. But the great success—the saving grace—was making a financial bet in collaboration with private American industry on the development of vaccines. The Trump Administration's Operation Warp Speed is now letting the country see the possibility of a return to relatively normal life as early as the spring.
During his farewell address in 1796, George Washington said, "However (political parties) may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which... men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion."
It’s time to rethink the role of public employee unions in democratic governance. Public employee unions are politically impregnable, but their corrosion of first principles of democratic governance may leave them open to constitutional attack.