Aug. 15, 2022
Permission to republish original opeds and cartoons granted.
Afghanistan’s fall to the Taliban one year ago still reverberates
By Rick Manning
Today, August 15, 2022 marks the one year anniversary of the fall of Kabul to the Taliban. Afghanistan fell to the Taliban directly due to the Biden administration’s withdrawal of American air support against advancing Taliban troops in spring 2021. This was coupled with public assurances to the Afghan leaders that we would back them in the fight, even as we were working directly with the Taliban in their takeover of the country.
The two plus weeks following the fall of Kabul mark one of the darkest moments in U.S. history with images of desperate Afghans falling from airplanes trying to get out and murdered Afghan allies being hung from helicopters and showcased to the city and the world.
And finally, there are at least 84 American citizens who remain trapped in Afghanistan a year later as of last month, according to a House Republican report and finds that the Biden administration left behind hundreds more Americans and thousands more green-card holders in its speedy retreat than previously revealed, who have effectively become hostages of the Taliban or else they’d be home already.
During the second half of August, Americans for Limited Government will have a couple of exclusive interviews with people who worked to protect our nation’s honor and keep our commitments to those Afghan citizens who committed to freedom and were targeted to die as a result. We will also remember the 13 American service members who died on August 26th in a bombing attack by a terrorist released from the prison at Al Bagram Air Base when the Biden administration surrendered it with no apparent plan on how to deal with the fallout.”
It is our goal to highlight some of the many heroes who worked tirelessly to get legitimate allies amongst the Afghan people out of the country. There were some great successes and lives saved as a result. These stories are largely untold, and we will seek to tell a few of them so that America can see what true heroism looks like, even in the most dire circumstances.
Over the next couple of weeks, Americans for Limited Government will have a couple of exclusive interviews with people who worked to protect our nation’s honor and keep our commitments to those Afghan citizens who committed to freedom and were targeted to die as a result. We will also remember the 13 American service members who died on August 26th in a bombing attack by a terrorist released from the prison at Al Bagram Air Base when the Biden administration surrendered it with no apparent plan on how to deal with the fall out.
While the politics of the fall of Kabul and Afghanistan are important, the ramifications around the world as America lost face and standing as a reliable ally cannot be understated. Americans for Limited Government will also seek to examine how a year later, our nation’s position as a world leader in the aftermath of Afghanistan has been effected.
It is important that, as we remember the Biden administration failure that we don’t conflate that with a failure of those who served in Afghanistan. For twenty years, the people of Afghanistan were remarkably more-free than they are today. Girls attended school and were educated, women voted and served in all levels of society, and while in 2020 the poverty rate was 50 percent, recent reports tell us that the poverty rate is now approaching 95 percent in the country.
Afghanistan was a better place due to the sacrifice of America’s service members and others who dedicated themselves to that mission. And no one who served should feel as though it was in vain. The lives improved, and hope created as a result have sewn seeds that may grow into a new freedom in this war torn land. While the mission was not ultimately successful, that does not diminish the nobility of the sacrifice to lift others up so that they might taste freedom.
So it is not just with sorrow, but hope that we will embark on this ambitious project. I hope that you will find the journey interesting, enlightening and hopefully a little bit uplifting.
Rick Manning is the President of Americans for Limited Government.
Cartoon: Boiling Pot
By A.F. Branco
Click here for a higher level resolution version.
To view online: https://dailytorch.com/2022/08/read-to-blow/
Video: Afghanistan Fell to the Taliban One-Year Ago
To view online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWLc9W6Ejfk
Biden’s Education Department seeks to end due process under Title IX for college students
By Rick Manning
Due process is the legal concept that underpins the American legal system as without it, the concept of innocent until proven guilty is null and void.
What the Biden administration is attempting to do to Title IX through their regulatory changes is to turn innocent until proven guilty to guilty without any means of proving your innocence for students in our university systems.
I am an alumnus of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, California and the following short story of the abuse of the student right to due process under Title IX brings me no pleasure to tell you, but it is glaring.
Matt Boermeester kicked the game winning field goal for the USC football team in the 2017 Rose Bowl game against Penn State, but just a few weeks later his life was thrown into turmoil as he was charged by the University with abusing his girlfriend.
Boermeester was dismissed from the University without being allowed to refute the charges and face his accuser in spite of his girlfriend’s denial that the events resulting in his dismissal ever occurred.
From Rose Bowl hero to expulsion in just a few months with nowhere to go to get his side of the story told. But the catch-phrase of the University is to Fight On, and Boermeester did just that, challenging the University’s denial of his due process rights to the California state Court of Appeals where he earned the overturning of his expulsion under the grounds that he was denied any semblance of fairness.
Boermeester’s case against my alma mater continues as he seeks redress for a life ruined due to an out of control system where men on campus are guilty when accused with no opportunity provided to even prove their innocence.
The Trump administration took necessary steps to end this perverse abuse of justice by forcing universities and colleges to provide basic legal protections for the accused and now Joe Biden’s Education Department seeks to end due process on college campuses once more.
Trust me, if a star football player at the University of Southern California can lose everything without the ability to defend himself, your kid doesn’t have a chance.
Individual cases of abuse are tragedies, but the damage being done to our nation is even greater through this guilty with not chance to defend yourself policy. College students are experiencing adult life for the first time. The idea of due process and innocent until proven guilty are philosophical constructs which they likely have never experienced first-hand. Under the Obama guidance and now Biden’s proposed regulation, the concept of justice in America is turned on its head.
When students learn that their classmate was expelled without any recourse or ability to even defend himself, they experience an America without justice. And logically, they assume that this is emblematic of the actual criminal justice system. The rejection of American values that we are seeing by those who we entrust into our higher education system is at least partially fed by the inherent unfairness of this Department of Education mandated kangaroo court.
When a Rose Bowl hero at a football crazy school can be expelled without ever being allowed to confront his accuser, denied the opportunity to offer statements denying the accusation by the person who was allegedly assaulted, what chance does the average student have?
In the world of Title IX under Joe Biden, the answer is none.
That is a lesson of American injustice that we cannot allow the Biden administration to instill into our nation’s future leaders.
And that is why every American must submit comments to the Biden Education Department opposing these Guilty without recourse regulations today.
Rick Manning is the President of Americans for Limited Government.
Adapted from an Aug. 11, 2022 speech delivered in front of the U.S. Department of Education.
To view online: https://dailytorch.com/2022/08/bidens-education-department-seeks-to-end-due-process-under-title-ix-for-college-students/
Allysia Finley: China gets a Great Leap Forward from Congress
By Allysia Finley
China’s economy is limping under the weight of government-created market inefficiencies, draconian Covid lockdown policies, an imploding real-estate bubble, and an aging population. But Congress’s self-defeating Inflation Reduction Act gives President Xi Jinping something to celebrate this November at the Communist Party’s 20th National Congress.
With a single legislative act, Democrats have increased Beijing’s geopolitical leverage, reduced American living standards and global economic competitiveness, and assisted Mr. Xi’s ambitions to dominate biotech. The kicker is that Democrats have told Americans their bill will deal a blow to China. Americans will be in for a rude awakening when they discover the truth.
Take the legislation’s effect on American energy production. The U.S. has become the world’s top oil and natural-gas producer owing to its abundant natural resources, hydraulic shale fracturing and other technological advances. The Inflation Reduction Act, however, effectively concedes American energy supremacy to China by turbocharging the government’s green-energy transition with $370 billion in climate spending.
Renewable energy requires vast amounts of critical minerals such as cobalt, nickel, manganese, lithium and graphite. China controls a large share of the world’s supply of each and also maintains a chokehold on their refining. Its near-total global monopoly extends to the manufacturing of lithium-ion batteries, cells and components as well as solar cells.
Consider that Russia produces about 10% of the world’s crude oil and accounted for 40% of Europe’s natural-gas imports before Vladimir Putin’s February invasion of Ukraine. By comparison, China refines 68% of the world’s nickel, 73% of cobalt, 93% of manganese and 100% of the graphite in lithium-ion batteries. Imagine the supply-chain chaos that Beijing could inflict if it were to use China’s mineral resources as a political weapon the way Mr. Putin has Russia’s natural gas.
Renewable plant construction and electric-vehicle production would grind to a halt. While Americans might not face the immediate threat of freezing during winter, Beijing could freeze a large part of the U.S. economy.
Foreshadowing how the Chinese Communist Party could use its new leverage, Chinese battery juggernaut CATL reportedly held off announcing a multibillion-dollar factory in North America to supply U.S. auto makers such as Ford and Tesla after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan in early August. No doubt U.S. reliance on China for its green-energy transition has contributed to the White House’s wariness of poking the panda.
Democrats might reply that their bill’s tax credits would encourage electric vehicle and renewable manufacturers to “on-shore” supply chains. But subsidies that encourage mineral extraction in the U.S. won’t help if the Biden administration continues to block projects such as a lithium mine in Nevada and a massive nickel, cobalt and copper mine in Minnesota.
Tax credits for U.S. green-energy manufacturing also won’t overcome China’s enormous cost advantage—a product of the country’s economies of scale, lower labor and energy costs, and government support. The U.S. has already tried—and failed—to beat China in a subsidy race to the bottom. President Obama’s 2009 stimulus also provided hefty government loans and grants to U.S. manufacturers of solar panels, lithium-ion batteries and other green technologies. Many recipients, such as Solyndra, A123 Systems, Abound Solar and Beacon Power, later ran into technical problems or were undercut by lower-cost Chinese competitors.
At the same time, the Inflation Reduction Act will set off a subsidy chase by renewable-energy developers that will raise U.S. electricity prices and make it even harder for American manufacturers to compete with China.
Look at Germany, whose industrial output has declined since 2017 amid rising electricity prices owing to the hundreds of billions of euros it has spent boosting renewables. These subsidies have led to an excessive build-out of solar and off-shore wind power, which must be backed up by coal and natural gas. Keeping fossil-fuel plants on idle to ramp up and down on demand is expensive—that’s why even before the Ukraine war Germany’s power prices were the second highest in Europe and about twice as high as those in the U.S. All this is making it harder for German manufacturers to compete globally, and some are planning to move production abroad.
Or consider California, which is further along in the green-energy transition than any state. Its electricity prices are double those in Arizona and Nevada and over the past year have grown twice as fast as the national average as grid operators have scrambled to procure fossil-fuel power at high cost to back up solar. California’s energy-efficiency standards and spending—another focus of the Inflation Reduction Act—have done little to help. Faced with soaring electric bills, the nonaffluent have no choice but to raise their thermostats and find other ways to reduce their electric consumption.
The Democrats’ generous tax credits for alternative energy will also encourage U.S. oil and gas producers to shift more capital investment to biofuels, hydrogen and carbon capture. The result could be rising fuel prices—another dead weight on the U.S. economy.
Finally, the act’s Medicare drug price negotiations—i.e., price controls—will take a $101 billion bite out of the pharmaceutical industry. More important, they’ll reduce the incentive to innovate while Beijing nurtures its home-grown biotech industry with the aim of surpassing U.S. and European drugmakers.
Capitalism and free markets made the U.S. the world’s leading innovator, energy producer and economic superpower. Though alarms about China’s supplanting the U.S. in recent years have probably been overplayed, they could wind up being a self-fulfilling prophecy if Congress keeps passing self-defeating laws.