Tag: editorial

Biden needs to step up military aid for Ukraine — fast

Does President Joe Biden truly want to end the war in Ukraine? He sure isn’t acting like it — judging from his refusal Friday to supply Kyiv with F-16 fighter jets and his team’s new warnings that it might take up to two years to send over a mere 31 M1 Abrams tanks.

“None of the options” for the tanks, Army Secretary Christine Wormuth said Thursday, involve getting them to Ukraine in “weeks or months,” as the Bidenites promised last month (even then, only after much needless dithering).

Her people are now “exploring” options she “thinks” could take “less than two years.” That’s nuts: In two years, Ukraine might not exist.

Biden then made matters worse the next day, ruling out the F-16s “for now.” How mealy-mouthed.

Ukraine needs both the tanks and the planes now, especially with battlefield action heating up. Soon after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, US factories were turning out an average of 2,000 tanks a month. We can’t get 31 existing tanks to Ukraine in under two years?

And why on Earth would the president be open to sending jets later but not now? And why isn’t he making a clear public case for US support for Ukraine, explaining why it’s plainly in the national interest?

His snail’s-pace, “just trust me” approach only prolongs the war and risks an erosion of US will — though time is not on Ukraine’s (or the West’s) side.


President Biden needs to keep up aid for Ukraine.
AP Photo/Andrew Harnik

In December, Vladimir Putin began mobilizing Russia’s defense industry to ramp up production for a long conflict. Yet with a far smaller population, Ukraine will have a much harder time than Russia replacing lost soldiers as fighting drags on.

Over time, Russia’s advantage is bound to grow — as will the odds of Putin winning part, if not all, of Ukraine, and strengthening positions from which to continue his aggression and further undermine world order.

The Kremlin needs to be defeated not just quickly but completely: A partial win for Putin only kicks the can down the road and confirms his (and other US enemies’) belief that the West has no staying power.

Putin won’t stand down until he’s convinced he can’t win. What will convince him? Massive, overwhelming aid — tanks, jets and whatever other material Ukraine requests — sent quickly.

Biden plainly fears such support might push Putin to go nuclear. Yet a tactical nuke or two wouldn’t actually turn the war, and anything larger guarantees catastrophic reprisals. (Plus, giving in to nuclear blackmail only guarantees more of it, and not just over Ukraine.)

Biden needs to shift gears: Quit the slow-roll, piecemeal step-ups of aid and give Kyiv what it needs for total victory. Now, not later.

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Ronna McDaniel’s pathetic bid to ‘unite’ the Republican Party in 2024

Once again displaying her total obliviousness, Republican National Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel announced Sunday that 2024 presidential candidates will likely have to pledge to support the winner in the general election, or they’ll be kept out of the primary debates. Who cares?

This is nothing but a lame attempt to paper over the party’s stark divisions over ex-President Donald Trump, one of three declared candidates so far. The simple fact is that many GOP voters won’t support him if he’s the nominee, and some of his voters likely won’t show for any other Republican.

And all GOP politicians will jump whichever way they think serves their interests best. That includes the candidates themselves: Coming up with excuses to break your most solemn pledge is Politics 101, all across the spectrum.

The real questions turn on what, if any, third-party challenge the loser(s) mount, and who’s peeved enough to spend the general election dumping on the winner.

The main thing that will change all the calculations is how quickly the voters break either for Trump or some other rival, with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis the early leader to play that role. And the debates (whoever shows) will be key.

Stop pretending you can actually chart Republicans’ course, Ronna. It’s not remotely up to you.

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How farebeating ‘tears the social fabric’

MTA chief Janno Lieber is entirely right: Farebeating “tears at the social fabric,” wreaking damage far beyond the mere theft.

Not that the thefts don’t add up: The practice cost the cash-strapped MTA an estimated $500 million last year. But it’s the more insidious impact that Lieber flagged to The Post editorial board Tuesday.

First, it makes flouting the law these individuals’ first act on entering the transit system, putting them in a frame of mind to act out more. That can go all the way up to terrorizing and assaulting others, both fellow passengers and MTA workers.

Or as Mayor Eric Adams puts it: “If we start saying it’s all right for you to jump the turnstile, we are creating an environment where any and everything goes.”

More, just seeing others getting away with it tells everyone else that law and order are out the window in the transit system. Worse, it encourages others to break the rules: Why be a sucker?

The practice soared during the pandemic and is still far above pre-2020 levels, but the key moment came in 2017, when then-Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance announced an end to prosecuting the crime, a policy other DAs then copied and Vance successor Alvin Bragg continues. Vance argued that a $2.75 offense isn’t worth the prosecutorial resources, blithely ignoring the far larger social costs of tolerating it.


Farebeating rose during the pandemic and is still far above pre-2020 levels.
Paul Martinka; MTA Chair Janno Lieber

In fact, he was appeasing the left, which pretends it’s a “crime of poverty,” as if the fare was out of anyone’s reach. (Bragg has even less excuse, since low-income New Yorkers now qualify for half-price rides.)

And knowing the cases won’t get prosecuted discourages cops from enforcing the law at all. Yet arresting these perps often nabs serious criminals. Last October, for example, a farebeating stop wound up catching a repeat offender linked to a slashing on the 1 train earlier that month. As Lieber then noted, “Overwhelmingly, the criminals are farebeaters.”

Indeed, police who stop farebeaters regularly find them carrying illegal guns.

In fact, the city’s huge turnaround on crime began back in the 1990s when then-Transit Police Chief Bill Bratton started a high-profile, systematic crackdown on farebeating. New York City sure could use the same again today.

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Hochul’s ‘moderate’ budget plan still leaves New York on a path to fiscal doomsday

Gov. Kathy Hochul’s new budget plan includes a record $227 billion in spending, plus at least $1.6 billion in tax hikes. The left wants a lot more, but that hardly makes her a fiscal conservative.

She’d increase taxes on payrolls in the 12-county “MTA region” by $810 million and extend a corporate surtax for three years to raise another $800 million a year.

The plan also boosts the state cigarette tax from $4.35 to $5.35 per pack. (Get set for even more smuggling; this’ll be by far the highest butt-tax in the nation.)

Even if she has no other hikes in there, she’s already far past the “no new taxes” line.

Meanwhile, outlays for schools soar, despite declining enrollment. Medicaid gets a huge bump, too.

We’re all for some small bits of her spending hikes — support for district attorneys and mental-health inpatient beds, for example. But goosing state-funded spending by roughly $7 billion a year, when New York is already staring at a fiscal crisis before her next election, is hardly frugal.

Yes, she’s nixing left-wing demands for vastly more in taxes on the rich and corporations. But the Legislature’s sure to take her budget as just the floor for negotiations. And it’s hard to see what principled objection she’ll make, other than to note that, e.g., the top 1% of taxpayers already cover 40% of the state’s personal-income-tax takes and are the residents most able to skip off to Florida, Texas, North Carolina and so on.

Progressives are eager to kill the Empire State’s golden goose and feast on the corpse. It sure would’ve been nice if Hochul’s opening offer was to bleed the poor bird a little less.

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NY’s disastrous Raise the Age law

Teen violence continues to spiral out of control, yet Gov. Kathy Hochul refuses to lift a finger when it comes to one of its key drivers: the 2017 Raise the Age law, which prevents anyone under 18 from being prosecuted as an adult.

Before Raise the Age, 16- and 17-year-olds could be charged as adults; now such suspects are likely to be sent to Family Court, where they barely face consequences.

Yet New York is facing an ugly surge of teen violence, including terrifying shootings at city schools. Last week, a 13-year-old was charged with opening fire and wounding two other teens at Campus Magnet HS in Queens.

Gangs, as Mayor Eric Adams (an ex-cop) has pointed out, often make younger members their gunmen, knowing they’ll get off easy if caught — a practice Raise the Age encourages.

And the fallout is already clear: Nearly one out of five perps nabbed for robbery last year was under 18, as NYPD brass fumed this month. Over the past three years, the number of under-18 shooters more than doubled, from 48 in 2019 (when Raise the Age took full effect) to 124 last year. The number of teens struck by gunfire mushroomed at a similar rate, from 64 to 153.

And the future looks even worse, with more kids returning to crime after cushy collars. “Nearly half of 16-year-olds arrested in the first year of Raise the Age were rearrested within 15 months,” including a quarter for violent felonies, former Bronx ADA W. Dyer Halpern warned in City Journal last year. The numbers “significantly outpace similar arrests” a year before Raise the Age, as does “the recidivism rate for 17-year-olds arrested over the same period.”


Gov. Kathy Hochul has refused to address the 2017 Raise the Age Law despite the surge in teen violence in New York City.
Kevin C. Downs for NY Post

Hochul talks plenty about gun laws, but ignores Raise the Age: She failed to mention it in her State of the State or in her 277-page program book. It seems the gov’s only too happy to let kids run around with guns in their hands, wreaking havoc on everyone (including themselves).

“We can’t normalize this. We can’t continue to ignore the violence that is really engulfing our young people,” pleads Adams. “If we don’t intervene, they are on a pathway of a career in violence, and we have to stop it.”

He’s dead right. Question is: Can he get Hochul and the hard-hearted leftist ideologues in the Legislature to listen?

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The increasingly murky prospect of an end to Putin’s Ukraine war

How is the Ukraine war going to end?

This question bedevils smaller arguments over Western aid to the brave Ukrainian forces. Bringing it into tighter focus is Vladimir Putin’s decision to pass the winter with ever-more-brutal strikes on Ukraine’s infrastructure and civilian targets — such as last Saturday’s murderous missile attack on a Dnipro apartment building, which killed dozens including six children. 

Putin’s invasion must fail. Anything else represents a serious blow to US interests in Europe, to NATO’s stability and to the larger world order. Atop all Moscow’s brutality, the war on Ukraine is as much an attack on that order as it is a territorial gambit. 

But Washington is mired in a game of escalation that’s lethargic, confused — and reactive. Yes, we’ve sent Ukraine lots of help — including lethal aid — but only after Putin upped his violence first. And even US “escalations” are hesitant. Our meager gift of one Patriot air defense system, for example, carries all the risks President Joe Biden professes to fear, but with minimized benefits: Ukraine needs more Patriots for them to be effective.

We’ve also kiboshed MiG transfers from regional allies, balked at sending tanks and said no to more advanced tactical missile systems that would greatly increase Ukrainian range — all on the theory that helping Ukraine strike inside Russia might prompt Putin to go nuclear.

He and other top Russians keep making that threat, because it works to keep the West from doing more. 

Yet it’s plain that more is required to force Putin to end the war. A military defeat, at the moment, looks like the only real path to freedom and security for Ukraine. A negotiated settlement seems off the table, as the Kremlin’s demands remain “let us win.”

Putin’s insane territorial claims would almost certainly exceed anything Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky might agree to, while Zelensky and his government want everything back, including Crimea. Even if the West threatens to end its support to blackmail Ukraine into some bad deal, Putin’s record shows he’ll break it at his own convenience.

A mild winter (so far) has aided the Ukrainians’ resistance. And the Russian army’s deep-rooted logistical and personnel issues bode ill for Putin’s rumored coming massive troop callup.

Putin plainly means to outlast his way to victory, betting as much on Western will as any battlefield success. Ukraine and its allies can defeat that approach by holding firm.

But ultimate victory relies on a strategy led by the United States that puts Ukraine on the front foot enough to force Russia to give up the fight.

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Another vital criminal justice fix that Hochul’s ignoring

“A glaring weakness in our effort to combat gun violence is the fact that you have Raise the Age that still permits 16- and 17-year-olds to possess loaded firearms,” Albany District Attorney David Soares told The Post in a critique of the public-safety goals Gov. Kathy Hochul outlined in her State of the State speech.

Right on: It’s another huge omission when Hochul’s claiming to put public safety first.

Soares, a George Soros-backed progressive, has long flagged the issues with Raise the Age, a 2018 law that sends most teen criminal defendants to Family Court rather than the adult justice system.

He’s also blasted Hochul and the Legislature over the no-bail law and other reforms that Soares feels have “normalized” violence. “No meaningful legislative action has been taken to address bail reform, and Raise the Age, which have demonstrably impacted violent crime in our most vulnerable neighborhoods,” he thundered after two more fatal shootings in Albany last fall.

Soares criticized Hochul and the state Legislature for the bail reform laws that he claims to have “normalized” violence.
Photo by Michael Brochstein/SOPA Images/Shutterstock

The cookies-and-hot-chocolate approach to teen gun violence just doesn’t work, Soares told The Post.

Last fall, a bombshell NYPD analysis revealed that the number of teen shooters and victims in NYC has tripled in the last five years — a deadly trend that coincides with enactment of the Raise the Age law. The report also noted that teen recidivism has shot up since 2017.

That is: Adolescents are a prime driver of the frightening rise in gun violence across the city. Worse, this means more young people beginning a life of crime — meaning big trouble for the future, with a growing criminal class.

Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie prides himself on being a “numbers guy,” but ignores the data showing that the Raise the Age law has been a disaster for minority teens. Instead, he stands by his theory that teenage brains just can’t learn self-restraint, so it’s just wrong to hold young people responsible — no matter the consequences to society, or to them.

So he won’t consider fixing RTA, and Hochul’s plainly unwilling to force the issue. And the body count of young victims in minority communities around the state will keep rising.

Never mind that the gov holds immense power in budget negotiations to insist on legal changes: She’s determined to work with the Legislature, no matter how little legislators want to work with her on anything besides spending and taxing ever more.

The worst is yet to come, New York.

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New York’s Kathy Hochul still shows no fight

In her first State of the State Address since winning election in her own right as New York’s chief executive, Gov. Kathy Hochul vowed to work with the Legislature — even as lawmakers are working to derail her nominee for chief judge. In short, she’s yet to show even a hint of fight.

She showed she’d heard voters’ concerns about crime, saying, “Public safety is my top priority.” But her only concrete proposals for fixing bail reform are more minor fiddles, not anything dramatic like allowing judges to consider “dangerousness” as they do in every other state.

Worse, in a naked bid to appease progressives, she insisted that bail reform is not the primary driver of crime before saying she wants to “have a thoughtful conversation during the budget process about improvements we can make to the law.”

That’s a hint that she might hold lawmakers’ spending desires hostage to getting real changes, but then she detailed minor ones to give judges a little more discretion to remand defendants accused of serious crimes.

Yes, “dangerousness” is a red flag for the Legislature’s progressives; that’s one reason why Mayor Eric Adams has recently focused on asking lawmakers to simply get tougher on the handful of repeat offenders driving crime. But Hochul didn’t raise the issue.

No: On crime, the best news she offered was a tripling of aid to the state’s 62 district attorney offices to help them handle the huge added costs (under the “discovery” changes enacted along with the no-bail law) of prosecuting every defendant, even those destined for a plea bargain.

She’s also looking in the right direction with her $1 billion plan targeting the most serious mental illness, including restoring lost inpatient psychiatric beds and even adding 1,000 beds statewide (though only 150 for the five boroughs) as well as 3,400 units of supportive housing to foster outpatient care.

Another plus: With a recession in the offing, she vowed no hike in income taxes this year. That’ll mean a fight, as legislators are talking about finding $40 billion in new tax revenue. But it shows she understands the “why” behind the population loss she wants to reverse.

Or does she? Hochul then squashed hopes for an improved business climate by proposing to peg New York’s $15 minimum wage to inflation. That remark brought Democrats to their feet. And her anti-carbon “climate” policies will never build business confidence no matter how much she pretends they will magically lower energy bills.

Plus, she didn’t make any promises about ensuring the “temporary” income-tax hikes passed in 2021 (under the last guy) will actually expire, when temporary hikes have a long habit of becoming permanent in this state.

Hochul claimed that “public safety is my top priority” and gave proposals to fix bail reform laws.
AP Photo/Hans Pennink

Oh, and as Citizens’ Budget Commission chief Andrew Rein noted, “The State of the State presented an expansive menu [of new spending]. We now await the Executive Budget to see the bill.” Where will she find the revenue?

Her goal of getting 800,000 new homes built over the next decade seems fine, but her address failed to mention one key means to that: replacing the city’s 421-a tax credit to make it affordable for builders to construct anything besides luxury complexes.

Yes, that made it into her longer policy handout, but that hardly suggests she’ll go to the mat for it.

Even though her audience theoretically included the whole state, Hochul seemed exclusively determined not to offend the lawmakers hearing her in-person. Yet she’s going to have to if she’s to get even what she’s asking for outright.

That is, she’ll need to at the very least rally moderate Democratic state senators to back her: They actually outnumber the chamber’s progressives, yet the hard left is calling the shots so far in the LaSalle nomination, and plainly intends to keep doing so.

Democrats lost seats in the Legislature last fall, but the left pretends that’s all Hochul’s fault for not somehow doing better against Republican challenger Lee Zeldin — though all he did was hit hard on the issues of crime and the economy. Progressives refuse to see what changes the voters want.

Hochul opted to skirt that reality once again in her closing: “Eleanor Roosevelt once said, ‘You . . . who are going to build a new world must go forward with courage.’ We will build a new world. And we will be courageous.”

All that did was leave everyone wondering when New York’s governor will show that courage.

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Suing Big Guns and Big Oil is just cynical political posturing

Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown announced last week that the Queen City had filed a “first of its kind” lawsuit targeting and blaming firearms manufacturers for the rising gun violence there. It’s not remotely the first, despite invoking a new “public nuisance” state law, and it’ll fail: Suits against Big Guns over crime, like those targeting Big Oil over climate, are just lawyer-enriching, and posturing-pol-promoting, bunk.

“The City of Buffalo is not going to let these gun industry members continue to flood our city with illegally possessed guns. We must hold them accountable,” Brown declared of the case against such gunmakers as Beretta, Smith & Wesson, etc., as well as distributors and local gun shops — plus, ghost-gun retailers like Polymer 80.

Maybe there’s a case against the ghost-gun crew, but all the other targets have weathered similar litigation before, starting in the ’90s. As long as the defendants obey the laws on serial numbers, background checks and so on, they’re not liable for third parties’ illegal use of their products.

The lawsuit blames gun manufacturers for the high number of illegal guns in Buffalo.
Corbis via Getty Images

Blame racist gunman Payton Gendron, not the gun industry, for the Tops Supermarket massacre. Local thugs and gangbangers are responsible for the terrible street violence in Buffalo and urban areas across New York.

Brown, like many pols before him, is trying to dodge his real duty. Lawyers are eyeing fees, or in some cases just hoping friendly judges will ignore the law to help them shut down the “evil” industry.

It’s much the same with litigation pretending that Big Oil has deceived the public about carbon fuels and climate change. Suit after suit has failed because the evidence just isn’t there — which hasn’t stopped New Jersey from filing a new suit because its politicians want to posture.

Reality check: Oil’s used precisely as intended to run our cars, heat our homes and keep the lights on. Lacking practical alternatives, society has chosen the emissions despite environmental costs. (By the way, global coal-burning rose this year, for the same reason.)

And while some petro-companies have questioned some claims of the anti-carbon lobby, they haven’t lied about what’s known, or even about what their private research has found.

Again, the hope here is that ideology will triumph in the courts where it hasn’t when it comes to writing laws. Lawyers get some work, politicians get to wax indignant — and they can all hope for a windfall if enough judges play along.

It’s not a bold struggle for justice; it’s a racket.

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Biden puts feelings of small group of progressives ahead of American needs

President Biden was “furious” about the situation at the southern border, and was “dropping f-bombs” at the lack of solutions, a new book claims.

Oh spare us.

We imagine whoever leaked this anonymous tidbit to author Chris Whipple for “The Fight of His Life: Inside Joe Biden’s White House” thought he or she was humanizing the president, or demonstrating that he cares.

Instead it proves two things: Biden keeps lying to the American people. And he is too afraid of his own political party to do what is necessary. 

On the first point, the administration keeps claiming the border is under control, and that, as White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre said earlier this month, “the president has done the work to deal with what we’re seeing at the border since day one.” 

But Biden’s private tantrum shows that isn’t true. He understands what a problem it is, both for the country and as a political liability. Besides putting Vice President Harris in charge of the “root causes,” a portfolio she’s ignored, he hasn’t done anything to fix it. Every time Biden waves it away as “not a big deal,” he’s lying.

As for being mad over the “lack of solutions,” give us a break. There are plenty of solutions. The most obvious one is telling asylum seekers at the border that they are not allowed to come in. The law says they must apply for asylum in the first safe country they enter. Biden could make diplomatic deals with Mexico to stop the caravans. If the images on the news were people being turned away, how long before they stopped coming?

But these were all things that the Trump administration did, and Biden knows that left-wing activists control the Democratic Party and hate any sensible immigration plan. On his first day in office, in fact, Biden halted construction on the border wall, stopped deporting illegal immigrants and erased every deterrent we had. 

He was then shocked, apparently, that migrants would rush the open border. According to the book, an adviser said, “It’s like, ‘How would you feel if you were me and these were the solutions you had?’ It’s the weight of the presidency, right?’”

It is the weight of the presidency, but Biden has made his choice. He knows what the solution to the southern border is, he just doesn’t want to implement it. He put the feelings of a group of progressive lawmakers over the needs of the American people. 

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