From right: Union Slows NYC commute
The Transport Workers Union just blocked a plan that would have improved commutes and saved the city money without costing union workers a dime. thunders The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board. An arbitrator just sided with the TWU against the MTA and has since blocked “changes to subway schedules” aimed “to cut costs and tailor service to riders’ needs” with “more trains on weekends and busier traffic.” weekdays to reduce waiting times”. few commuters now go to the office on Fridays. The union’s only complaint: “The idea of workers changing their shift schedules was too much to bear.” “Imagine the union, like everyone else, having to adapt to a world changed by the pandemic. I can’t have that.”
Defense Watch: GOP’s Dangerous New Isolationism
“Foolish red meat-type criticism” of US support for Ukraine “threatens to plunder the Republican Party’s traditional advocacy for US world leadership,” despairs ex-Rep. Peter King on the hill. For decades, Republicans have stood “staunchly against this appeasement movement.” Consequences of “enabling Vladimir Putin’s criminal aggression” include: “China will be emboldened to attack Taiwan” while “Japan and South Korea will view the United States as an unreliable ally and more will be accommodating to China.” Republicans must “oppose the policies of surrender and appeasement” or else, those of the failed America First era, “they are relegated to the ash heap of history.”
Libertarian: A CHIPS Act Bait & Switch
The CHIPS Act “provides $52 billion to revive US microchip manufacturing,” but now the Biden Commerce Department has warned companies that they “will have to do (and not do) a bunch of other things if they want the money.” , including providing “high-quality” childcare for factory workers. “These strings will significantly undercut chip production by increasing manufacturing costs,” warns Veronique De Rugy of Reason. For example, “when the administration says high-quality childcare, it really means more expensive childcare because of requirements for caregivers to be college-educated and the like.” Companies must also “make all sorts of financial disclosures and share with the government a portion of any windfall profits.” So much for the real focus on making chips: “Politicians say they want to subsidize this and that to improve production or bolster national security, but invariably sabotage themselves by weighing down policies with rules and requirements that have nothing to do with have with” such goals.
Conservative: Biden Throws House Dems Under Bus
President Biden’s embrace of a GOP bill to override criminal justice reform in Washington, D.C., argues Jim Geraghty of National Review, “exposes a deep rift at the center of the Democratic Party.” Biden’s obvious real complaint: The DC measure is “a law Republicans could use to paint Democrats as soft on crime.” But the 173 House Dems who already voted in return for the bill last month “are about as furious with Biden as they were during his presidency.” The prez has covered his own flank, but “the National Republican Congressional Committee is breaking out the party hats.”
Liberal: The problem of Democrat patriotism
“Only 34 percent of progressive activists say they are ‘proud to be American’ compared to 62 percent of Asians, 70 percent of Blacks and 76 percent of Hispanics, the very groups whose interests these activists claim to represent. ” complaints Ruy Teixeira from the liberal patriot, but the progs’ view defines Democrats thanks to “their strong and often dominant influence in related institutions,” such as “nonprofits, foundations, advocacy groups, academia, old media, the arts—the commanding heights of cultural production.” Dems “have sought to unite the country around the need to dismantle ‘systemic racism’ and promote ‘equality’. . . and failed (and will continue to fail)”; same for “uniting the country around the need to save the planet.” Now, “It’s time for the Democrats to return to something tried and true”: the “American civil religion” built “around national symbols, founding documents and ideals, holidays, heroes, epic events, rituals and stories that are bound — and can bind — Americans together across social and regional divisions.
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board
