Ex-Russian: ‘Find a Way’ To Save Ukraine
“We are witnessing, literally watching live,” thunders Garry Kasparov on Twitter, “Putin commit genocide on an industrial scale in Ukraine while the most powerful military alliance in history stands aside.” “No treaty forbids NATO nations from fighting to defend” Ukraine; “It’s a choice.” And: “This is already World War III. Putin started it long ago & Ukraine is only the current front.” “It was too risky to stop [Putin], I was told” in 2014, yet: “Here we are, with bombs raining down.” “There is no waiting this out. This isn’t chess; there’s no draw, no stalemate” since “the price of stopping a dictator always goes up. What would have been enough to stop Putin 8 years or 6 months or 2 weeks ago is not enough today, and the price will rise again tomorrow. Fight. Find a way.” Otherwise, the West is “Not unable” but simply “Unwilling.”
Campus beat: The Great College Collapse
College enrollment is down 5.1% from pre-COVID levels, but it’s “not the calamity many might suggest, since college is neither the only — nor inevitably the best — way for young people to prepare for a prosperous future in America,” argues Bruno V. Manno at The Hill. Best “to expand programs that offer young people many career pathways.” Today’s “high schoolers don’t see college through the same rose-colored glasses as prior generations,” while “many employers no longer use a college degree as the gatekeeper credential for jobs. Google, IBM, Apple and Bank of America have shifted from degree-based to skill-based hiring.” We need “multiple pathways to jobs and careers that link education, training and credential-earning to the labor market.”
Neocon: Biden’s Insulting Inflation Answers
“It was . . . reasonable to expect that Joe Biden would lay out a plan” to address inflation in the State of the Union, writes Commentary’s Noah Rothman; “He didn’t.” Instead, he vowed to “arbitrarily cap the price of insulin at $35”, said tax dollars should go to “ ‘buy American’ ” and insisted “his preexisting legislative agenda” will fix the “inflationary pressure [it] already exacerbated”. He made a big deal of the release of “60 million barrels of oil” from world reserves, yet that’s “the equivalent of 18 hours’ worth” of world oil use. So: “Voters who went into the State of the Union address deeply concerned about inflation” left “even more concerned.” Biden “doesn’t have any idea how to relieve the pressure on American wallets” and “doesn’t seem as if he’s even inclined to try.”
From the right: Joe’s Energy Denialism
Biden’s speech skipped over the nation’s “dismal state of affairs and offered no course correction,” complains Spiked’s Sean Collins. On the war in Ukraine, he made “no attempt . . . to connect this major world event with US domestic policy”: Specifically, “Biden has not reversed course on his energy policies — even though these policies have held back US energy production and have led to increased imports of oil from Russia.” Before the Ukraine war, Washington-inflicted soaring energy prices “had already driven up the cost of living for Americans” as Biden pursued “environmental goals at the expense of energy security and abundance.” And not even Russia’s war can shake his faith “in the green religion.”
Elex watch: Zuck Bucks = ‘Bribery’
A special counsel says “Zuckerberg grant funds directed solely to five Democratic strongholds in Wisconsin violated the state’s election code’s prohibition on bribery,” reports the Federalist’s Margot Cleveland. The report did not seek “to challenge certification of the presidential election,” but to secure future voting. But it flagged the Zuckerbergs’ donations “that allowed the Center for Tech and Civic Life to offer nearly $9 million in ‘Zuck Bucks’ to Milwaukee, Madison, Racine, Kenosha and Green Bay counties.” Then “the ‘Zuckerberg 5,’ as the report called the counties, in effect, operated Democratic get-out-the-vote efforts. Those grant funds then paid for illegal drop boxes to be placed in Democratic voting strongholds.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board
