Israel-Hamas war: Team Biden’s Ramadan Nonsense
The “idea that it is wrong to fight an Islamic country during the holy month of Ramadan” is “nonsense,” explains The Wall Street Journal’s Elliot Kaufman, as Muslim nations have regularly started wars during the holiday (which began on Sunday).
Yet “for more than a month,” Team Biden set Ramadan as “the deadline for a deal to release Israeli hostages and stop the war,” meaning: “Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had better cut a deal.” (In the end, Hamas refused any deal.)
Plus, the “administration misread Israel,” whose people are more hawkish than their government.
And all of Hamas’ leaders, fighters, munitions and hostages are likely in Rafah.
Israel is “united on the questions that matter, and it has the will to outlast the Biden administration.”
Media watch: Obsessively Fact-Checking Satire
Why the “constant fact checks” on satirical site the Babylon Bee, wonders HiT’s Christian Toto?
Now Reuters has joined the herd, with the “once-neutral outlet” reaching out “to see if the site’s story about ballot boxes being placed along the U.S.-Mexico border was true.”
“Does anyone remember a fact-checking organization treating The Onion the same way?”
But “there’s a method to the corrupt media’s war on The Babylon Bee” — it’s in service of fighting “misinformation.”
And it happens even as “fact-checkers too often ignore the current Commander-in-Chief, a leader whose trail of whoppers could circumvent the planet.”
For the liberal media, “holding the Bee accountable sometimes matters more than keeping the leader of the free world honest.”
From the right: The Left’s ‘Democracy’ Hypocrisy
“There are two themes in the left-wing assault on American democracy’s rules, protocols, and long-held traditions. One, the left advocates changing or ending an institution only when it has lost control of it. And two, it would charge as ‘insurrectionary’ any similar Republican effort to do the same,” argues Victor Davis Hanson at American Greatness.
Consider “the recent pro-Hamas takeover” of the Capitol rotunda, the left’s “public demonization” of the Supreme Court (which saw “efforts to scare it into ‘correct’ rulings”) and its “radical efforts to alter decades of voting protocols to achieve short-term political advantage.”
“The Left talks grandly of ‘democracy dies in darkness’ as Joe Biden beats the dead horse of January 6 to warn that democracy is in its greatest peril. But all such rhetoric is projection.”
Green beat: Cali’s Push for Nat’l Price Hikes
The “Environmental Protection Agency is now poised to allow Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-Calif.) to raise prices on almost everything you buy,” warn the Washington Examiner’s editors.
“Under California’s proposed rule,” starting in 2042, “half of all [freight] trains must be battery-powered entirely, and by 2047, all trains must be.”
The tech for all-electric-freight-trains “simply does not exist” yet, so Cali’s rule orders every train company serving the state (which is virtually all US ones) to set aside nearly $1 billion for the transition.
That “would mean immediate price increases for almost all [US] consumers.”
All this, when diesel “freight is also already climate-friendly, capable of moving a ton of freight nearly 500 miles on a single gallon of fuel.”
Fact-check: Joe’s Bogus Tax Claim
With his claim that the average federal tax rate for billionaires is 8.2%, the Insights & Issues editorial board scoffs, President Biden “took lying with statistics to a new, otherworldly level.”
IRS data “show that the 400 people with the biggest incomes in America were paying an average tax rate of more than 23%. Congress’ Joint Committee on Taxation figures that the tax rate on the top 0.4% of families is 26%.”
To get his figure, Biden “changes the definition of taxable income to include all unrealized gains from investments.”
So: “If you have money in the stock market, any gains in the value of those stocks would count as income to Biden, even if you don’t sell the stock. Presumably so would any gains in the value of your home.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board