Libertarian: Don’t Bully Kids Into Vax
Los Angeles should not punish its 34,000 unvaccinated students by exiling them back to virtual learning, argues Reason’s Robby Soave. “It’s one thing to encourage teenagers to get vaccinated: It’s quite another to threaten them with further setbacks to their social lives and educational careers if they do not comply.” After all, “young people are the cohort safest from COVID-19, whether or not they are vaccinated.” Yet all pandemic long, children and teens have faced “the most stringent and brutally uncompromising pandemic prevention policies of all, especially at public schools.” These “two years of social isolation, school closures, and virtual learning are undoubtedly having a profoundly negative effect” on American kids. “They need their lives to go back to normal.”
Conservative: Biden’s ‘Winter of Peril’ Is Coming
“This American ‘winter of peril’ should not be surprising to anyone who listened to Biden on the campaign trail in 2020,” Claire Brighn warns at AMAC. “Joe Biden embraced the ‘Green New Deal’ as a central component of his policy platform,” and “said he would be willing to ‘sacrifice’ hundreds of thousands of blue-collar jobs to carry out the ‘clean energy revolution.’ ” And now “gas prices are 49.6 percent higher than last year, grocery prices are climbing, and real wage growth has fallen.” Even “natural gas, which nearly half of all American families use to heat their homes, is expected to cost 30% more this winter than last” — all thanks to “ill-advised policies from the Biden administration.”
Foreign desk: Profiting Off China’s Prisons
“The 428-1 vote on the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act” in the House “is the clearest indicator yet” of a “new era in American relations” with China, “where national security and moral concerns find common ground in opposing the oppressive and predatory policies of the Communist Party,” declares Michael Auslin at Spectator World. “Yet while American politicians are at last beginning to grapple with the threat posed by unrestrained engagement with China, American companies remain conflicted, pursuing their bottom lines in the world’s most important manufacturing country.” Apple, Nike and Coca-Cola reportedly “either lobbied against the Uyghur labor bill or (in Washington speak) ‘suggested edits’ to the legislation.” It’s a “particularly nasty irony” since “American workers have lost their jobs over the past decades to oppressed Chinese laborers.”
Kremlin watch: Vlad’s Real Audience on Ukraine
“Despite the estimated 175,000 Russian troops deployed on the Ukrainian border, and contrary to prevailing opinion, Russian President Vladimir Putin is not about to invade Ukraine any time soon,” declares Leon Aron at The Hill. You see, his “main audience” is “internal.” His “paramount goal” is “to become president for life in 2024, when, at 72, he will start yet another six-year term.” Even with his total dominance “of national politics and television” and “the pro-democracy opposition devastated by jailing, exile and murder,” that’s “no easy task” after “the longest economic stagnation in Russia’s modern history from 2009 to 2019.” So he’s posing as “the defender of a motherland besieged by the West. A lifetime presidency, Putin apparently has concluded, can only be a wartime presidency.”
Legal beat: BBB’s $2.5B Gift to Trial Lawyers
Build Back Better’s $2.5 billion “giveaway to trial lawyers” would bring “the Shady Trial Lawyer Pipeline to Capitol Hill,” grumbles O.H. Skinner at National Review. That pipeline, used “to funnel money” from government coffers to left-wing campaigns, usually operates at the local level, but House Democrats couldn’t “restrain themselves”: Their giveaway would let lawyers deduct expenses in advance in contingency cases to lower their tax bills. Politicians like Nancy Pelosi “look out for trial lawyers because they funnel money” to liberal causes; law prof Derek Muller found that 90 percent or more of donations from top trial-lawyer firms went to the left. “The pipeline already does immense damage” at the local level. Pumping in another $2.5 billion in federal money “will not help.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board
