Foreign desk: US-China ‘Collision’ Ahead
The US-China “cold war is getting colder,” argues Nouriel Roubini at Project Syndicate, as the recent G7 summit “magnified Chinese concerns about the United States pursuing a strategy of ‘comprehensive containment, encirclement, and suppression.’ ” The group “devoted a substantial portion of its final communiqué to explaining how it will confront and deter China in the years ahead,” decrying “Chinese policies of ‘economic coercion’ ” and criticizing “Chinese expansionism in the East and South China Seas” while issuing a “warning to China not to attack or invade Taiwan.” Yet Beijing’s leaders “would like to forget that today’s escalation owes as much, if not more, to their own aggressive policies as to US strategy.” “Unless the two countries find a new strategic understanding, they will remain on a collision course.”
Hate beat: Dems’ Anti-Catholic Bigotry
The anti-Catholic bigotry that once dogged John F. Kennedy’s presidential run seems “entrenched among the left-wing elites who control the Democratic Party,” fumes Gerard Baker at The Wall Street Journal. The Biden White House declined comment on the LA Dodgers’ decision to honor the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, a troupe known for its “lewd depictions of sacred Catholic rituals.” Other recent insults: The Obama administration “threw the book at the Little Sisters of the Poor,” a Bidenite FBI memo “called for the investigation of ‘radical-traditionalist’ Catholics as a potential terrorist threat,” plus the time “Sen. Dianne Feinstein told Catholic Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett, ‘The dogma lives loudly in you.’ ” Meanwhile, “political leaders, cultural elites and corporate leaders bleat endlessly about respect for the rights of all Americans” — except Catholics, who are fair game.
From the right: GOP’s Fiscal Wins
“We are witnessing a minor miracle” as “there will actually be some spending reductions as part of” the proposed debt ceiling deal, cheers Mick Mulvaney at The Hill. “It is hard to describe how countercultural” this is for DC, as Republicans also scored some policy reforms, and “even some COVID money” was “clawed back.” “Washington really hates spending reductions. It loathes conservative policy changes. And it almost never, ever claws back money it has already spent.” These minor victories are “a lot better than what conservatives got the last couple of times the debt ceiling was raised.” And that merits celebration: “If the current debt ceiling battle marks a return to the GOP’s fiscally conservative roots, it will be a welcome development. Indeed, later is better than never.”
Education watch: Zero-Credibility Randi
Randi Weingarten “pleads not guilty” for the fact that “nationwide enrollment in K-12 public schools plummeted by roughly 1.2 million” amid the pandemic, notes Stan Greer at RealClearPolicy — insisting “she was never against reopening” despite “viciously attacking supporters of reopening schools in 2020 and 2021” and claiming “that ‘millions of Floridians’ were ‘going to die’ ” because of it. With “27.1% of the entire enrollment drop” coming in “forced-unionism California and New York” — “home to only 17.7% of the nation’s school-aged population” — “Weingarten has become the personification of why state laws handing union bosses monopoly-bargaining power over K-12 public school employees, which are now on the books in well over 30 states, never should have been enacted and ought now to be repealed.”
Libertarian: Blackouts Ahead
The regulator for the nation’s power grid “cast a bit of a chill over the coming warm months when, in mid-May, it cautioned that the country might not generate enough electric power to meet demand,” warns Reason’s J.D. Tuccille. The problem: “Enthusiasm for retiring old-school ‘dirty’ generating capacity is outstripping the ability of renewable sources to fill the gap,” leaving two-thirds of North America at risk of energy shortfalls this summer. Multiple regulators have been flagging the risks, but “until politicians stop putting what they want ahead of what’s feasible,” it may be wise “for the rest of us to shop for generators.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board