“If President Biden is serious about the future of a sovereign Ukraine,” argues Ed Cox in The Wall Street Journal, “it’s time to act boldly and decisively.” “Decisive presidential action can make the difference between success and catastrophe,” as in the Yom Kippur War in 1973. Rather than be seen as “unwilling to use our military strength to support our allies and strategic partners” as the USSR backed Egypt and Syria, President Richard Nixon “directed the Defense Department to replace all of Israel’s military-equipment losses quickly.” When the Pentagon dithered for days over “which cargo planes to use,” Nixon told then-National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger: “Tell them to send everything that can fly.” This, says Cox, is the leadership needed to defeat “Putin’s Russia and help secure Ukraine’s independence for the long term.” And: “It’s not too late for the U.S. and its Western partners to send Ukraine ‘everything that can fly.’”

“For all the clamor” about district schools losing funding to charters, remember: “Money follows the child,” notes Robert J. Bellafiore, who helped craft the NY charter law, at City Journal. If parents opt not to send their kids to a charter, it isn’t funded. So “districts have nothing to worry about if parents” are happy with their schools. “Yet the minute someone murmurs ‘charter,’ ” unions and lawmakers expect “massive numbers of students to flee district schools as if escaping a tornado.” When kids do leave, unions and schools rarely ask why. “Instead, the titans of New York’s educational-industrial complex flex their political muscle and declare that they want the mostly non-unionized interlopers stopped — parents be damned.”

The federally funded Global Disinformation Index “evaluates news outlets’ susceptibility to disinformation,” aiming “to persuade online advertisers to blacklist” its targets, grumbles Robby Soave at Reason — which made GDI’s “10 riskiest” list. Yet GDI claims Reason failed on three factors: “no information regarding authorship attribution, pre-publication fact-checking or post-publication corrections processes, or policies to prevent disinformation in its comments section.” But Soave notes: “The authorship of Reason articles is clearly communicated to readers. Reason writers link to their sources, and promptly make (and note) corrections whenever appropriate.” As for policing comments: “That is perhaps an area where Reason’s philosophy — free minds and free markets — clashes with GDI’s.”

“Why has publishing grown so doctrinally uniform and gutless?” asks Lionel Shriver at Spectator World. Because “cowardice is contagious, courage rare.” And “publishing doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Obsession with race, gender and manic fairness is in the air, which editors and agents wheezily inhale along with the rest of us.” “Yet safe books are boring books,” as the recent “cancellation” attempt against a work claiming the “British Empire did some good things as well as bad” shows. Don’t forget that “predictable, numbingly virtuous releases narrowly tailored to suit a small political subset — who might themselves be a bit sick of White Fragility knockoffs — only put the industry and its employees in peril” given that “the threat to reading from television streaming is constant.”

Despite President Biden’s vow to stop anyone who “tries to cut Medicare,” snarks Chris Pope at The Hill, “Congress has been constantly pruning Medicare for over four decades.” Indeed, “big cuts to Medicare repeatedly have been the cornerstone of bipartisan budget agreement to rein in the federal deficit.” And: “A 2006 CBO study concluded that Medicare payment cuts over the past two decades had slowed” the yearly per-beneficiary costs from 5.5% above the rate of economic growth to only 0.9%. Those savings went “to create the Children’s Health Insurance Program,” to fund Medicaid expansions and to “pay for over half of the spending in the Inflation Reduction Act.”

Compiled by The Post Editorial Board