Biden Team Makes First Move Towards Promoting Radical National Rent Control Laws
They are always disastrous, greatly reducing the supply of properties to rent
By Steve Straub
As a conservative I am deeply troubled by President Biden’s recent announcement to move forward with radical national rent control policies.
This type of government intervention in the housing market not only undermines the property rights of landlords but also will discourage new construction and investment in housing, thus creating a shortage of rental properties.
Rent control policies have been proven to be ineffective and even harmful in the past.
It creates an artificial market and distorts the natural supply and demand dynamics of the housing market.
It also limits the income of landlords and discourages them from maintaining and upgrading their properties.
Furthermore, it can also make it harder for low-income families to move to better neighborhoods, as landlords are less likely to accept Section 8 vouchers or other forms of government assistance from tenants if they’re not getting the full market rate for their units.
As conservatives, we believe in the importance of a free market economy and the protection of property rights. We must oppose any attempts by the government to intervene and control the housing market.
The solution to the affordability crisis is not to impose price controls but to increase the supply of housing through deregulation, tax incentives and other pro-growth policies.
Furthermore, It’s important to note that rent control doesn’t increase the housing supply and it only serves to protect current renters at the expense of future renters.
Rent control policies tend to benefit long-term tenants at the expense of new renters, who can have a harder time finding affordable housing.
It is a dangerous proposition to impose nationwide rent control laws, as it will hurt landlords, discourage new construction and investment, and make it harder for low-income families to find affordable housing.
We must focus on policies that will increase the supply of housing and promote economic growth.
In conclusion, I strongly urge President Biden and Congressional Democrats to reconsider their support for national rent control policies.
This type of policy will only serve to harm the economy and make it harder for American families to find affordable housing.
We need to focus on solutions that will truly address the housing crisis, such as deregulation and pro-growth policies, rather than harmful government intervention.
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Georgia Police Officer Resigns After Being Put on Leave for Facebook Post on Homosexual Marriage
A Georgia police officer has resigned after he was told by superiors that he could not share his personal religious views on social media.
“If someone somewhere considers an opinion I have—that isn’t a direct quotation from Scripture—to be offensive, then that would be a fireable offense,” Jacob Kersey, the former officer, told The Daily Signal.
Kersey, 19, who began working last May at the Port Wentworth Police Department in a jurisdiction just outside Savannah, says “everything was going well” until the start of the new year.
On Jan. 2, Kersey posted a 20-word message about his view of marriage on Facebook.
“God designed marriage. Marriage refers to Christ and the church,” he wrote, paraphrasing the Apostle Paul’s teaching in the Book of Ephesians. “That’s why there is no such thing as homosexual marriage.”
The next day, Kersey said he received a phone call from his supervisor, who told him that someone had complained about the post and to take it down.
When Kersey refused, the supervisor warned him that failure to delete the Facebook post on marriage could result in his termination.
Kersey said he then was contacted by Lt. Justin Hardy, who told him that the Port Wentworth Police Department didn’t want to be held liable in a “use of force” situation involving someone in the LGBTQ community. Kersey still refused to delete the post.
The police officer received a phone call later that day from the police department’s Maj. Lee Sherrod, ordering him to come to the office the following morning, Jan. 4, and turn in everything he had that belonged to the city.
Kersey told The Daily Signal that he believed he was going to be terminated.
When he arrived at the police station, the young officer met with Sherrod, Hardy, Capt. Nathan Jentzen, and Police Chief Matt Libby.
He was told that he was “being placed on administrative leave while the city investigated to see if I could keep my job,” Kersey said. “I was told that I was wise beyond my years, an old soul, and that they brag on me all the time, but that I couldn’t post things like that.”
Kersey said Libby told him that his Facebook post on marriage was the “same thing as saying the N-word and ‘F— all those homosexuals.’” Kersey said his captain told him that his free speech “was limited due to my position as … a police officer.”
The Port Wentworth Police Department, which serves a city with a population of just under 11,000 in 2020, did not respond to The Daily Signal’s request for comment.
After a week of paid administrative leave, Kersey met again with the leadership of the police department. He says he was informed that he no longer was on administrative leave and would not be fired, but that he could not share opinions on social media that could be considered offensive.
Kersey says he was told he could post Scripture verses, but could not work as one of the department’s officers if he continued to share his “interpretation or opinion on Scripture if it was deemed offensive.”
“Separation of church and state” was the reason given for why he could not post such views, Kersey said.
Kersey said police officials told him that they were developing a new policy to guide officers on what they were and were not allowed to post on social media.
Next, Kersey received a “letter of notification” from Sherrod dated Jan. 13. The letter explained that although Kersey is entitled to his own personal beliefs, he should be “reminded that if any post on any of your social media platforms, or any other statement or action, renders you unable to perform, and to be seen as [unable] to perform, your job in a fair and equitable manner, you could be terminated.”
Four days after the date on the letter, on Jan. 17, Kersey formally resigned from the Port Wentworth Police Department.
“I decided to resign … because I just didn’t think it wise to go back and play their game,” Kersey told The Daily Signal, adding that “the way things went down, I didn’t feel as if my command really had my back.”
Looking back, the former police officer says he felt he was being bullied, through the fear of termination, into taking down his Facebook post:
Even though I resigned, it was made clear to me in the meetings by my command staff that if I was to go back to work, they could fire me at any time for any reason, as I was still in my work test period. Those aren’t very encouraging statements to make to an officer who is on administrative leave after being led to believe he was terminated.
The surprising thing, Kersey said, is that despite having his own Christian conservative podcast for years on which he discussed issues such as gender ideology and election reforms, it didn’t lead to “people complaining about things that I said when I was off duty on my own time on the podcast.”
“I’m sure people disagreed. I’m sure people didn’t agree with everything that I said as a conservative Christian, and that’s fine,” Kersey said of his podcast. “But I came to work, I did my job, I was professional, and I had a great relationship with all my co-workers, who come from all different backgrounds and belief systems
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Reality bites Scottish leader for the crime of woke transgression
Is Nicola Sturgeon a bigot? I ask because this week she said something we’re forever being warned not to say. She expressed an idea that is apparently so hateful that instant cancellation normally awaits those who utter it.
What was her speechcrime? She said trans women are not quite the same as women. Not always. Not in every situation. Transphobe! Ready the stake.
The First Minister of Scotland committed her act of wrongthink in response to questions about violent trans women being housed in women’s prisons. “Are all trans women women?” a reporter asked.
“Trans women are women but in the prison context there is no automatic right for a trans woman …” said Sturgeon, before our intrepid interrogator butted in. “So there are contexts where a trans woman is not a woman?” he said.
There it was: the question that threatened to expose not only Scotland’s folly of putting violent born males in jails full of vulnerable women, but the entire ideological edifice of the trans worldview.
Namely that trans women are women. This is the mantra of our age. It’s become a borderline religious chant. Virtually every individual and institution that wants to be thought of as pure and good has at some point recited this woke catechism.
Failing to genuflect to the idea that a man can transform into a woman is the modern equivalent of refusing to believe that bread transforms into the body of Christ during mass.
It’s heresy. Only today heresy is punishable by social death rather than literal death, which is progress, I guess. So it wasn’t surprising that Sturgeon seemed rattled by the reporter’s query; knocked for six by his suggestion that Scotland’s different prison rules for trans women proves that trans women are not women after all.
She knew how much was riding on her response. Her reputation, her woke credentials and the entire belief system of gender self-ID, which holds that people are whatever sex they say they are.
Sturgeon laughed nervously. Then she said: “There are circumstances in which a trans woman will be housed in the male prison estate …”
Right, said the reporter, so now we know: trans women and women are “not equal”. It was an extraordinary exchange. And an important one.
It might just mark the point at which the trans doctrine started to unravel.
The grilling of Sturgeon sprung from some serious missteps she has taken on the gender issue in recent months. First there was the Scottish parliament’s passing of the Gender Recognition Reform Bill, which would streamline the process by which a person can legally change his or her sex.
The government in Westminster is taking steps to block the bill on the basis that it threatens women’s rights. After all, if it’s made even easier for a man to “become a woman”, what will become of female-only spaces such as changing rooms, domestic violence shelters and, indeed, women’s prisons? All would effectively be thrown open to any man who claimed to be a woman, whether that be a genuine trans person or a chancer, a voyeur, possibly even a predator.
Then there was the prison scandal. Mere weeks after the gender bill was nodded through, a Scottish trans woman called Isla Bryson was found guilty of raping two women. Bryson – whose birth name is Adam Graham – will be looked upon by the vast majority of people as a man. He has male genitalia. And he repugnantly forced his genitalia into two women. And yet following his conviction he was sent to a women’s prison.
There was uproar over this, rightly, and before long Sturgeon announced Bryson was being moved to a blokes’ jail. So it seems this trans woman is not a woman. Not really. And that all trans women, in Sturgeon’s words, do not have an “automatic right” to be treated as women, at least in the context of criminal justice.
Perhaps it’s time we thought the unthinkable. Perhaps it’s time we said the thing you’re not meant to say. Whisper it: trans women are not women.
Of course trans people should be treated with courtesy, as should all people. They should be allowed to dress as they please and refer to themselves as they please without facing any persecution whatsoever.
Trans prisoner pause was to give clarity, says Sturgeon
The decision to pause the placing of transgender prisoners with a history of violence against women in the female prison estate was taken to… provide “clarity”, Nicola Sturgeon has said.
But let us also bring reality to bear on this most tetchy of issues. If you were born male and went through male puberty, can you subsequently be a woman? Literally, legally a woman?
I say no. And it’s not transphobia to say no. My belief in biological science and women’s rights demands that I reject the idea a man becomes a woman simply by declaring himself to be one.
As a lapsed Catholic I no longer believe in transubstantiation. And as a rationalist I don’t believe in transgenderism’s core tenet – that we can choose our sex. If that makes me a blasphemer, so be it. It is important to follow the dictates of one’s conscience, even when the consequences are rough.
For too long, women in particular have been demonised and cancelled for saying sex is real, men are not women, and biology matters. Enough. All voices deserve a hearing in this debate, including those voices, such as JK Rowling’s, that insist womanhood is not some costume any Tom, Dick or Harry can pull on.
Sturgeon’s admission that trans women will sometimes need to be treated differently to born women is a potential game-changer. It’s a tacit confession that the so-called “TERFs” have a point. Maybe reason will finally find its way into this discussion.
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Biden Blocking Airline Merger That Could Boost Competition, Lower Fares
If you want to see a classic case of how President Biden’s regulatory tendencies are strangling the American economy and raising prices, look no further than the latest Justice Department efforts to kill an airline merger that is pro-consumer.
JetBlue has its sights on merging with a smaller and financially ailing airline, Spirit.
JetBlue’s management believes the synergies between the two airlines will save over $300 million in costs. Spirit’s shareholders (i.e., the airline’s owners) have voted to approve the merger.
Spirit is like a cancer patient in chemotherapy. Industry analysts say that there’s a 50-50 chance Spirit will go bankrupt without a suitor.
A bankruptcy would crush Spirit shareholders, cause thousands of airline workers to lose their jobs, and enable other bigger airlines to swoop in and purchase its assets and its valuable airport landing rights at fire sale prices.
No one benefits from that scenario.
So, what’s the holdup here? The Biden Justice Department is holding up the marriage on questionable antitrust grounds.
A strong case could be made that a successful merger between the two smaller airlines will enhance competition and lower prices by creating a larger discount airline. Today, about 70 percent of domestic flights are on four carriers — American, Delta, Southwest and United. JetBlue controls just about 6 percent of the market (while Spirit’s has shrunk to about 4 percent).
A merger like this is hardly going to allow JetBlue to monopolize the market or drive up prices. Regulators are concerned that in certain markets like Fort Lauderdale, Florida, where the two airlines directly compete, ticket prices may rise. This ignores that without the merger, Spirit may simply close.
JetBlue is ranked as one of the best airlines for customer satisfaction. To compete more effectively with the big boys, it needs scale.
According to JetBlue’s merger plans, the airline will leverage the infrastructure, employees and management of Spirit to schedule 1,700 more flights to 125 cities in 30 countries. This benefits — it doesn’t hurt — consumers with more choices.
JetBlue’s market niche has always been to compete in crowded markets by offering discount prices.
A Massachusetts Institute of Technology study has found that when JetBlue enters a market, it reduces airline fares by $32 each way on average.
Federal regulators in the Biden administration don’t seem to understand that mergers and acquisitions are a routine and vital component of an innovative and entrepreneurial economy.
Investors are willing to put millions of dollars at risk to launch startups in the hope that they will have an exit option at some point of being bought out by more sizable competitors.
How many people will invest in a startup airline in the future if the feds would prohibit the company from ever being sold? Or prohibit the company from growing by acquiring other assets as it grows?
The birth of the modern age in air travel began some 40 years ago when airline pricing and routing were almost entirely deregulated.
Thanks to steadily falling airfares, airline travel, which was once the purview of the rich, has become affordable to middle- and even low-income travelers with fares as low as $100.
The irony of all of this is that if the JetBlue-Spirit marriage is prohibited or killed through interminable delays, the people who will be uncorking the champagne bottles will be the executives at American, Delta, Southwest and United.
In the name of helping consumers, the Biden administration may take the side of the biggest and most expensive airlines instead of the pro-competitive forces of a disruptive and lower-price carrier. How this would help consumers is anyone’s guess.
https://www.nysun.com/article/biden-blocking-airline-merger-that-could-boost-competition-lower-fares
***************************************************Women must defend their single-sex spaces
A woman who works for the Australian Defence Force (ADF), has been asked by the Sexual Misconduct Prevention and Response Office (SeMPRO) to find an alternate bathroom to the female toilet if she finds the presence of a male in the facility unsafe. The only other bathroom in her office is for males.
SeMPRO was set up in response to the recommendation of a review into the treatment of women in the ADF and provides advisory services around sexual misconduct in the workplace to staff and service personnel. The review found that sexual harassment and assault existed in the ADF and that there was ‘significant under-reporting of sexually based incidents from victims because of fear of victimisation; concerns about negative impact on career progression; and personal trauma’.
SeMPRO is meant to ‘coordinate timely responses, victim support, education, policy, practice and reporting for any misconduct of a sexual nature’. SeMPRO considers the violence ‘gender based’, but evidence strongly suggests sexual violence is based largely in sex. The key error in government bodies and structures that considers gender to be behaviourally significantly dominant to sex, is causing a cascading list of problems for progressive and conservative politicians alike.
Nicola Sturgeon this week was so tongue tied over the previously simple question of whether ‘trans women are women’, she looked as if she might overheat in the midst of a bitter Scottish winter. Sturgeon had been forced by public outcry to intervene and place a trans identifying man into the male prison. To me, it felt like press were rebelling from draconian editorial guidelines by reporting the man had allegedly raped women with ‘her penis’, echoing Ricky Gervais’ latest controversial Netflix special.
When the ADF employee, (I’ll call her Jane) contacted SeMPRO to seek assistance, she told them that a male was utilising the female toilet facility she had been provided and he was making her feel unsafe in her work environment. SeMPRO allegedly replied with a warning to Jane, that if the male person identifies as a ‘transgender woman’ it would be ‘discrimination’ to deny them access to the female facility. The social worker from SeMPRO, with she\her pronouns, apparently went on to suggest that Jane ‘utilise a different bathroom’.
‘Female’ is now an identity category throughout the Australian government. All males who identify into the category of female, which they can do with a simple declaration, are given the assumption that they are free of male pattern violence.
According to the Australian Bureau of statistics, 97 per cent of all sex offenders are male. Under the doctrine adopted by all our government departments, it is theologically impossible for a male with a ‘trans’ declaration to exhibit male pattern sexual behaviour. Women, however, are doomed to inhabit the mortal world where physical bodies still matter a great deal in interactions.
The ADF is a ‘principal partner’ of ACON’s Pride Inclusion Program, gaining a ranking of ‘bronze’ in their latest Australian Workplace Equality Index (AWEI) publication, having fallen from the dizzy heights of ‘silver’ in previous years. According to ACON the Pride programs:
‘Help make the places where our community members live, work, study and play more inclusive of LGBTQ people, improving the mental health and wellbeing of our community through the reduction of stigma, discrimination and social exclusion.’
The higher your employer is in the AWEI ranking, the less likely they will be to have any accommodations at all for the special needs of female bodies, and certainly not with the security, privacy, and dignity of a facility that is separate from males. The AWEI has a 43 question ‘scoring guide’ for employers to gain ranking toward equity greatness. Item 15 in the ‘advanced’ section of the guide is the question: ‘We have (or are working towards) having “gender neutral” or “all gender” bathrooms.’
The AWEI will not give equity points to a Unisex facility because it ‘reinforces a binary’. Disability facilities are not to gain points for being ‘gender neutral’ because people with disabilities have specific bodily needs. Catering to the needs of female bodies is also without any points benefits in the AWEI, only feminine gender stereotypes are respected, the stereotypes feminist have long been critiquing.
When told to use another facility, Jane asked the social worker from SeMPRO if she should use the male facility or go home to use her own bathroom, to which she was given no response. Jane further inquired as to how serving female soldiers and officers will fare in the field when they are expected to shower and undress in a common facility. Will women be expected to shower naked in front of males? She was allegedly not given a response, although it is a fair question given the history of the ADF in failing to safeguard women from sexual assault and harassment.
A woman like Jane has no way to make her concerns heard about a trans identified male without the accusation of transphobia. Given that SeMPRO already know that under-reporting occurs because of ‘fear of victimisation; concerns about negative impact on career progression; and personal trauma’, it’s a wonder that they appear to continue the same patterns of silencing and shaming women for speaking up.
Sexual coercion, intimidation, and assault of women by trans identified males is impossible in gender identity theology, in the same way that it once was for a sexual predator to be in the priesthood. This is a religious belief, not a factual one. Not all priests were sex offenders, but the assumption that none of them could be, led to more harm than our society was ultimately able to bear.
The logical extension of trans activism and indeed the constant demand on women and their facilities, is that we should normalise the sight of the penis in a female-assigned public space where one might typically expect female nudity. Women and their children must become comfortable with the presence of males in facilities where they attend to personal bodily needs, of which they have many.
Last year, the Wi Spa controversy, saw a man in the women’s section of a Korean Spa, sport a semi erect penis in front of a naked female child. In response, prominent British trans activist Laurie Penny replied to a mother on Twitter asking what a she might tell a girl child to in such a situation by saying she should tell her daughter, to ‘not to stare at other people’s genitals without their permission, because it’s rude’. This advice aims at shaming the girl child for being uncomfortable around a grown man’s semi-erect genitalia.
The trans identified man in the Wi Spa incident was later confirmed to be a registered sex offender and was charged for indecent exposure, even though he had every legal right under California law to be in the facility. The woman who brought the story to the public’s attention, by confronting the staff on video, was vilified in the press and roundly accused of lying and transphobia.
Women are being forcefully recruited into a project of cultural re-engineering that requires women and girls to bury natural instincts and natural trauma responses in the presence of adult males, even if the men are exposing their genitalia.
The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare estimates that 1 in 6 women have been sexually assaulted as adults and more than twice that as children. So, if any given female facility is being used by more than five or so people we can safely assume it is being accessed by a survivor of male pattern violence and specifically sexual assault.
Women have a disproportionate need for facilities in the workplace, not just because of the complexities of the female protective instincts and trauma responses, but because of menstruation, pregnancy, breastfeeding, and the kind of problems that can be caused by birth injuries.
Not many women want to talk to their boss about sexual trauma, incontinence, or heavy bleeding. The dignity of attending to our issues in a single sex environment is a luxury we are being forced to abandon along with our knowledge that humans don’t change sex.
The mental health comfort and ongoing safety of women and girls is never a consideration in any modern equity bench-marking or progressive policy. The policies that now dominate the management of women’s facilities, stand in stark contrast to the reality of sex that women face in workplaces every day. Sexual abuse survivors are given no consideration as to their feelings about having males in female spaces, and no impact studies are being done on the mental health of women who are self-excluding from facilities, services and events that now include males.
What we are being asked for, instead, is to present evidence that Self ID is negatively impacting the lives of women and girls with rising cases of sexual assault. What they want to see is the bodies of raped women and children, and that in vast number, and that peer reviewed, before they will even consider reversing harmful loss of sex-based rights and protections for women and girls.
Girls between 10 and 14 are the most vulnerable individuals in our society to sexual assault, and that is just on conviction statistics. These girls are being told by ‘progressive’ government funded sexuality education that their instincts are discriminatory, and that they have no natural or legal right to seek a space that excludes males. Girls are being told that they must trust the word of a male if they tell you they are a female ‘inside’, and to trust self-declared ‘women’ in the same way they trust a woman.
Government funded groups like ACON, who dominate workplace bathroom policy, should be legally held to account, in my opinion, for the experience of women at work and the lies they teach our daughters. Women need to make political trouble for these organisations. Ask your union if they guarantee single sex facilities, and remember, any shame they place on you for asking for a boundary between you and a male is rape culture and the shame belongs to them.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/02/women-must-defend-their-single-sex-spaces/
****************************************My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair
Bliss: What every woman wants: to feel safe and secure in the arms of her man. Robert Irwin and Rorie Buckey. See 
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