Gadfly: Biden’s Lame Ukraine Game
The Biden “game plan” on Ukraine “appears to be to intermittently try to sound like Winston Churchill while sending weapons systems at a snail’s pace, months and months after the Ukrainians have said they need those weapons systems,” grumbles National Review’s Jim Geraghty.
“Biden’s rhetoric is a lot more triumphalist than the reports on the ground.”
And it turns out “Washington’s foreign-policy establishment actually has a lot of gripes about how the Biden team is handling the crisis.
It just doesn’t want to say so on the record,” per a Puck report that suggests the administration has no real strategy.
It’s reportedly telling Kyiv: “Future aid packages may well be considerably smaller than originally promised.”
Fact is: “ ‘As long as it takes’ turned out to be a lot briefer, and more conditional, than Biden was willing to say. Speak loudly and send the Ukrainians a small stick, half a year after they asked for a big one.”
War watch: Russia Burns, Vlad Fiddles
“All of Russia is beginning to smolder because of Putin’s myopic fixation” on total Ukraine victory, argue Mark Toth & Jonathan Sweet at The Hill.
Among Russia losses: “more than 200,000 casualties, including as many as 60,000 dead. Given Russia’s declining population of 146 million, that level of loss is generational.”
Also lost: “3,595 tanks, nearly 7,000 armored combat vehicles, over 2,638 artillery pieces, 523 multiple rocket launchers, 277 air defense systems, 305 jets, and 291 helicopters.”
And “Russia has been in a recession since November 2022, with annualized GDP dropping nearly 4 percent.”
Meanwhile, “Beijing is slowly beginning to fully subsume Russia’s independence economically, militarily and diplomatically” — all thanks to Vlad’s “delusional, outsized need to win in Ukraine.”
Conservative: Nashville Heroes, Uvalde Cowards
The “bravery, determination, urgency, and skill” of the officers who responded to the Covenant School shooting in Nashville is “a reminder that if Uvalde cops responding to the Robb Elementary school mass shooting last year had shown any urgency or a modicum of bravery,” they likely would’ve “prevented the murders of many, if not all, of the 19 children and two teachers at the school,” fumes The Federalist’s David Harsanyi.
“Maybe I’m being naïve, but I tend to believe most armed Americans would rush into a school to try and save children’s lives.
“As for the police, that’s the job. And Nashville police offered a textbook lesson on how to do it correctly.”
Finance beat: Finking (Yay!) on ESG
BlackRock CEO Larry Fink’s 2023 investor letter “colored in” a “new investment climate,” observes Rupert Darwall at RealClearEnergy.
“Whereas Fink’s 2021 letter to CEOs mentioned net zero” — i.e. “net zero emissions targets” — “22 times and his 2022 letter, nine times, net zero was referred to only once this year.”
“Climate rates five mentions this year, compared with 27 two years ago.” Indeed, Fink admits “it is not the role of an asset manager like BlackRock to engineer a particular outcome in the economy.”
Which suggests “the world is quietly moving on from net zero.”
Good: “It’s high time to end talk about existential crises to be addressed with extraordinarily costly measures” and “turn attention to tackling soluble problems with positive solutions.”
Eye on New York: Phony State Retiree Scare
Public employee unions and Gov. Hochul are pushing a false claim that “more than a quarter of the state workforce is poised to retire,” warns the Empire Center’s Ken Girardin.
Hochul “didn’t provide a source for the 26-percent figure” she cited, which is “more than double what state officials are actually forecasting.”
In reality, “people are choosing to retire at a later age,” the average age of workers has fallen and they’ve been on the job for shorter time.
That supports “the finding that New York faces a smaller, not larger, retirement wave.”
But in Albany, “public employee unions making false claims for their financial gain, and state lawmakers failing to understand” basic state operations isn’t unusual.
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board
