Democrats Are Quite Comfortable Being Violent Extremists

Democrats Are Quite Comfortable Being Violent Extremists

BY STEPHEN KRUISER 

AP Photo/Matt Slocum

Top O’ the Briefing

Happy Wednesday, dear Kruiser Morning Briefing friends. Gareth’s Jello molds have lacked precision and pizazz ever since the disappearance of this pet opossum.

(Write me at morningbriefing@pjmedia.com for a chance to make it into Friday’s Mailbag of Magnificence.)

I don’t know about most of you, but I lead tame life for a guy who is supposed to be a violent extremist. Sure, I yelled a lot at the college football game last Saturday night but there has been a decided lack of setting things on fire, rioting, or plotting my next move as one of the greatest dangers to America.

The Democrats’ ongoing fairy tale about the nonexistent right-wing domestic threat is on my last nerve now, especially since we all know that the real dark evil in this country is lurking on the left. It’s not even on the fringes. A couple of weeks ago we saw the president of the United States deliver an unhinged screed and declare ideological war on half the voters in the country.

As we’ve mentioned here, many of the citizens of this great Republic aren’t wowed by Old Joe’s lack of control over his anger issues. Ryan wrote yesterday that the bad news about that for the Democrats just keeps rolling in:

The speech was divisive, disturbing, and downright scary, and Biden set out to paint “MAGA Republicans” as true enemies of the state. While it might have worked to some small degree among the radical factions of the left, a bombshell new poll has revealed that a majority of Americans — politics aside — believe that Biden’s nasty, evil speech was terrible form.

A new Harvard CAPS-Harris Poll published exclusively at The Hill revealed that a whopping 60% of Americans believe Biden’s speech “divided the country and set it back.” In comparison, only 40% believed his speech “united the nation and moved it forward.”

But wait, it gets worse — for Biden. Fifty-six percent of respondents said they opposed Biden’s speech, and 44% supported it. Those aren’t the numbers an underwater-polling president needs so close to a major election.

Democrats aren’t big on learning from their mistakes these days. Paula has this from the Senate race in Ohio:

But until this week, Ryan was running a disciplined campaign and had even distanced himself from Biden in order to gain the support of Republican and independent voters. Polling shows the race in a virtual tie, with Vance edging out Ryan in the RealClear Politics average by just 2.3 points, a month out from the start of early voting in the state. Ryan’s internal polling must be much worse, because on Tuesday, he turned a sharp corner and went full Joe Biden, lashing out at Trump supporters on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”

“We have to kill and confront [the MAGA] movement,” Ryan told host Willie Geist, adding that only “normal mainstream Republicans” are worth working with. He said this moments after (laughably) proclaiming that he’s “one of the most bipartisan members of Congress” and insisting, “I want to work across the aisle.”

Calling for the death of a movement that represents roughly half of America doesn’t seem like a good strategy if you’re touting your bipartisan bonafides, yet Ryan went there.

Yes, these are the same Democrats who love to blame “Republican rhetoric” for every crime under the sun. A picture of a target on a mailer from Sarah Palin was once blamed for a mass shooting.

Democrats have a lot of things to be angry about these days, to be sure. Biden’s mask is slipping more often, and they are having difficulty pretending that he’s functional. The strain of lying to themselves about this train wreck economy has to be taking its toll as well.

We know that they don’t have the guts to act up in red states and cities, but the commie places are probably ramping up for some election time powderkeg action. The Dems do love a good riot to deflect from their failures.

The domestic threat from violent extremists is very real. What’s really scary about that is that most of them are in the Biden administration.

https://pjmedia.com/columns/stephen-kruiser/2022/09/14/the-morning-briefing-democrats-are-quite-comfortable-being-violent-extremists-n1629363

BIDEN DEMANDS WHITE SUPREMACY

BIDEN DEMANDS WHITE SUPREMACY

BY JOHN HINDERAKER IN FBI, JOE BIDEN, LIBERALS

FBI whistleblowers–in this case, the term is probably warranted–have come forward to say that the Bureau is pressuring them to come up with “white supremacists” to investigate, in order to advance the Biden administration’s agenda:

Current and former FBI agents have come forward saying the Biden administration is deliberately exaggerating the danger posed by white supremacists. They claimed that high-ranking FBI officials were pressuring field agents to fabricate domestic terrorism cases and label people as white supremacists in order to “meet internal metrics.”

To the best of my knowledge, I have never met a white supremacist, so this doesn’t surprise me. What ought to surprise all of us is that the FBI’s politicized hierarchy is so willing to do the corrupt bidding of the Democratic Party.

“The demand for white supremacy” coming from FBI brass “vastly outstrips the supply of white supremacy,” one agent told the Washington Times. “We have more people assigned to investigate white supremacists than we can actually find.”

The FBI agent, who requested anonymity in order to discuss internal bureau politics, said that top officials in the FBI “have already determined that white supremacy is a problem” and established a policy to prioritize investigations into racially-motivated domestic extremism.

“We are sort of the lapdogs as the actual agents doing these sorts of investigations, trying to find a crime to fit otherwise First Amendment-protected activities,” he said. “If they have a Gadsden flag and they own guns and they are mean at school board meetings, that’s probably a domestic terrorist.”

That is consistent with the disgraceful behavior we have seen from the FBI in recent years. The Bureau is one more once-great institution that has been destroyed by the Left.

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2022/09/biden-demands-white-supremacy.php

BIDEN’S PERSONAL GESTAPO

BIDEN’S PERSONAL GESTAPO

BY JOHN HINDERAKER IN FBI

The FBI appears content with its role as the enforcement arm of the Democratic Party, somewhat like–although, so far, not as bad as–the role the Ku Klux Klan played years ago. The Mar-a-Lago raid was a low point, but the FBI has followed up with more intimidation tactics. Subpoenas reportedly have been served on dozens of Republicans, apparently fishing for some evidence of a connection to the almost entirely peaceful protest in Washington on January 6, 2021.

The day after Joe Biden’s notorious Nuremberg speech, three armed FBI agents visited the home of a New Jersey woman named Lisa Gallagher. Why? The FBI had an anonymous tip that Gallagher had something to do with the January 6 demonstration. She also had a pro-Trump sign on her lawn:

A New Jersey woman who voiced her support for former President Trump on Facebook said Monday that three FBI agents showed up at her home last month claiming to have an anonymous tip connecting her to the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, despite her having no involvement.
***
“I was terrified. I’ll be honest with you, when my daughter woke me up telling me there were three armed FBI officers at my door, I thought she was joking. I immediately tried to throw [on] clothes. I called my husband, I was crying, my knees were shaking. And even though I knew I had done nothing wrong, after seeing Joe Biden’s speech the night before, I thought, ‘Oh my God, this is political.’”

She was right, of course.

“I have subsequently called the FBI office in Newark to document or know for sure that it really was FBI agents at my home. It was. They said it was an anonymous tip, but they won’t tell me anything else.”

Such is life in Joe Biden’s America. If I send the FBI an anonymous tip that someone was involved in the infinitely more destructive Black Lives Matter/Antifa riots, will they send three armed agents to his or her door?

Then we have the case of the My Pillow guy, Mike Lindell. He was en route from Iowa to his home in the Twin Cities and pulled into a Hardee’s drive-through in Mankato, whereupon he was surrounded by FBI agents. As far as I know, no one has disputed Lindell’s account:

“I open my door and I say, ‘Who are you?’ And he says, ‘We’re FBI,'” Lindell recalled on his show, the Lindell Report. He said the FBI agents showed him their badges upon request and told him to pull over.

“He goes, ‘We’re taking your cellphone. We have a warrant for your cellphone.’ I go, ‘No.’ I said, ‘My whole company, I run five companies off of that. I don’t have a computer. My hearing aids run off of this. Everything runs off of my phone,'” Lindell said. “I said, ‘If I don’t give it to you, will you arrest me then?” At that point, the agents apparently handed him the search warrant for his phone.

Lindell said he was advised by his lawyer, whom he was allowed to call, to hand over his phone to the FBI.

What is Lindell’s offense? He is a friend of, and donor to, President Trump, and he has argued that the 2020 election was marred by serious improprieties. Which I think is indisputably true, although my list of improprieties would be different from Lindell’s. But why is this any of the FBI’s business? Will they want my cell phone next? Or yours?

Finally–for the moment–the FBI’s role in the worst scandal in American history, the Russia collusion hoax, seems to be expanding. It turns out that both Christopher Steele, the fabricator of the Steele report on behalf of the Hillary Clinton campaign, and Igor Danchenko, the employee of a left-wing think tank who supposedly was the chief source for Steele’s dossier, but turned out to know nothing about it, were paid FBI informants. Every time you think you have gotten to the bottom of the Russia collusion hoax, it turns out to be worse than you thought.

I don’t see how the FBI, in anything like its present form, can be salvaged. The bureau has been so thoroughly politicized, so corruptly placed at the disposal of one of our political parties, that it has lost the confidence of most Americans who pay attention. It will take legislation to abolish or drastically reform the FBI, but that should be a goal when Republicans retake control of Congress.

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2022/09/bidens-personal-gestapo.php

Biden admin makes it more expensive to drill for energy. Again

Biden admin makes it more expensive to drill for energy. Again

JAZZ SHAW 

AP images

During yesterday’s White House press briefing, Karine Jean-Pierre tried to brag about gas prices coming down no less than five times while insisting that there was “more work to be done” and Joe Biden was on top of the problem. That claim seems to come in stark contrast to a different announcement coming out of the Biden administration on the same day. The Interior Department announced yesterday that there will be some changes coming to regulatory policies affecting oil and gas drilling both offshore and on federal lands. If your first guess was to say that these changes won’t be making energy any cheaper, give yourself a cookie. These changes will do the opposite, rolling back new policies implemented under Donald Trump that made the permitting and drilling process less cumbersome. (The Hill)

The Biden administration on Monday proposed to strengthen certain safety regulations for offshore oil and gas drilling that were loosened under the Trump administration.

After the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill that killed 11 workers and released 134 million gallons of fuel into the Gulf of Mexico, the Obama administration implemented new safety regulations.

In 2019, the Trump administration revised those standards, making them more industry-friendly.

On Monday, the Interior Department indicated that it would further tweak the rules, although the new proposal does not appear to be identical to what was put forth during the Obama years.

The Interior Department is heralding these changes as a way to make the working environment on the drilling rigs safer for the workers. But there has been no evidence offered to suggest that workplace injuries or mishaps increased under Trump’s policies.

Under the new policies, any safety equipment failures will have to be reported more quickly than they are at present. Also, the reports will now need to be sent directly to a bureaucrat in the federal government instead of the third-party industry safety experts who currently collect them and compile reports for the government. This decreased timeline will give drilling companies less time to conduct inspections to determine the cause of safety equipment failures and divert more resources to those efforts. The Interior Department’s estimates admit that the changes will cost millions of dollars to the affected energy companies.

The announcement also included the release of a revised offshore drilling plan. At first glance, the plan looks encouraging, saying that the department “could enable as many as 11 new opportunities to drill for oil and gas offshore.” But the word “could” and the phrase “as many as” are doing a lot of heavy lifting here. As the analysis from The Hill points out, the department “could also pursue fewer or no lease sales in the coming years.” So they are announcing new offshore drilling leases while simultaneously reserving the right to hold zero new lease sales. That’s just sheer brilliance, isn’t it?

Over the years, I’ve had the opportunity to visit drilling sites both on land and offshore. This has given me the chance to meet and speak to some of the “bulls” that work on these rigs. In terms of safety, modern drilling rigs are just about as safe as energy companies can make them. But the fact is that drilling is hard work and some aspects of it are potentially dangerous and there’s just no getting around that. This is one of the reasons that jobs on drilling rigs pay so well and it takes a certain type of personality to pursue a career in that field. And none of the changes being implemented here appear to make it any safer.

The bottom line is that the Interior Department is making it more expensive to drill for oil and natural gas at the same time that the White House is trying to take credit for gas prices beginning to creep back down. And those cost increases will not simply be absorbed by the industry. They will eventually show up at the gas pump. This move by the Biden administration is a sleight of hand trick and more people in the media should be calling them out over it.

https://hotair.com/jazz-shaw/2022/09/14/biden-admin-makes-it-more-expensive-to-drill-for-energy-again-n496435

Desperate Democrats Hope Midterms Are A Referendum On Trump, Not Biden

Desperate Democrats Hope Midterms Are A Referendum On Trump, Not Biden

by Ari Kaufman | 

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democrats want referendum on trump

The Aug. 8 Mar-a-Lago Raid and President Joe Biden’s dystopian Independence Hall speech to start September began a transparent autumn effort to thrust former President Donald Trump back into the spotlight. Why you ask? Because Biden and Democrats much prefer to make the crucial midterm elections a referendum on someone not currently holding office than their party’s disastrous policies.

Any Trump-related headline, they believe, can distract not only from Democratic debacles but Republicans’ superior plans for America should the GOP reclaim power.

A recap shouldn’t be necessary, but the Reader’s Digest version includes Team Biden mishandling COVID-19 policies, letting teachers’ unions destroy vulnerable students’ futures, and continuous poor communication on masks, re-openings, and vaccines. Recently the White House botched monkeypox with vaccine shortages and misapplications.

The administration’s profligate federal spending, including two unnecessary recent bills to close the summer, exacerbated inflation, crushed the middle and lower classes, and reduced supplies of food and energy.

Interest rates are now soaring, making homeownership harder for people who want to marry and start families instead of relying on the government.

Small businesses, hampered by COVID lockdowns, still suffer under inflation and cumbersome regulations. But Biden wants to “help” them by adding nearly 90,000 new IRS agents, likely for audits.

Then there’s Biden’s shambolic student-loan “forgiveness” program that even a former top Obama White House advisor admits is atrocious public policy.

Stealing money from folks who eschewed college for work and transferring the funds to mainly upper-middle-class people who majored in puppetry and jetted to Europe is the epitome of left-wing regressive elitism. Of course, it’s also a vote-buying scheme.

Studies from Ivy League universities show that over 70% of the debt forgiven will belong to people in the top 60% of income earners. It’s literally the reverse Robin Hood.

Perhaps cruelest, Biden still refuses to visit or even discuss the southern border to witness the fiasco his inept team allowed. Under their tragic border policy, where hard-working border agents are spoken about in harsher terms than terrorist cartels, millions of illegal migrants have been tossed into the country’s interior with carte blanche.

Owned by execrable eco-lunatics, Biden’s unrelenting war on domestic energy production does zero to help America. It does fund rogue foreign nations, like China, Russia, Iran, and Venezuela. It not only impacted gas prices but also caused food to skyrocket and led to shortages of vital products. It almost makes you wonder which side Team Biden is on.

Finally, Biden’s catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan — a low point in our nation’s proud history, leading to the deaths of 13 young servicemen and tens of thousands of innocent people — alone should cause a crushing midterm defeat for Democrats if any voters care about life, freedom, and liberty around the world.

Suppose people are talking about these embarrassments instead of a cultish obsession with calm weather patterns, proper Supreme Court decisions, or the Orange man not on the ballot. In that case, Democrats will receive their comeuppance for the pain they’ve caused most Americans.

Joe Biden is a failed president. He is also corrupt, petty, and tyrannical, with policies resembling Bernie Sanders, the abominable totalitarian he defeated. Despite what former President Barack Obama mused last week, we are not better off since the Biden regime came to Washington.

If November is a referendum on Biden’s odious record and treatment of everyday Americans the last 600 days — not on the guy who occupied the Oval Office prior —  Democrats will lose badly.

https://lidblog.com/democrats-want-referendum-on-trump/

President Joe Biden and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas look up during a virtual bilateral meeting with Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez from the White House in Washington, on March 1, 2021. (Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)

EXECUTIVE BRANCH

Biden Admin Issues Final Rule to Dismantle Trump’s ‘Public Charge’ Policy

By Jack Phillips

 

0:003:49

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on Thursday issued its final order rescinding the Trump-era “public charge” rule that limited the benefits for immigrants who obtained public assistance benefits like Medicaid and food stamps.

The Biden administration reportedly stopped enforcing the rule within months after President Joe Biden took office.

“This action ensures fair and humane treatment of legal immigrants and their U.S. citizen family members,” said DHS Security Alejandro N. Mayorkas. “Consistent with America’s bedrock values, we will not penalize individuals for choosing to access the health benefits and other supplemental government services available to them.”

The new rule is slated to go into effect on Dec. 23.

“Public charge” rules have been a concept in immigration law for decades, referring to someone who is considered likely to rely on welfare programs as a condition to deny someone permanent residency.

Under the Biden administration’s rule, green card applicants are only considered a public charge if “they are likely at any time to become primarily dependent on the government” for assistance. Homeland Security will not consider public charge determinations for family members of the applicant who are getting government assistance.

Immigrants can receive benefits under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or food stamps, as well as receive benefits provided by the Children’s Health Insurance Program, Medicaid, housing benefits, benefits related to immunizations or testing for communicable diseases, or any other supplemental or special-purpose benefits, according to DHS.

But the new rule will factor in a “noncitizen’s prior or current receipt of Supplemental Security Income (SSI); cash assistance for income maintenance under Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF); State, Tribal, territorial, or local cash benefit programs for income maintenance (often called ‘General Assistance’); or long-term institutionalization at government expense” in considering whether the individual is a public charge, according to the DHS.

More Details

About 1.5 million households with at least one non-citizen member get food stamps, and another  1 million receive Medicaid benefits, according to the rule published Thursday.

Pedestrians crossing from Mexico into the United States at the Otay Mesa Port of Entry wait in line in San Diego, Calif., in a file photo. (By Denis Poroy/AP)

The Trump administration rule had defined a public charge as an immigrant who gets one or more designated public benefits for more than 12 months and within a 36-month period. Officials in the Trump White House said that their rule protected U.S. taxpayers from undue burdens caused by foreign nationals who couldn’t financially support themselves.

“The principle driving it is an old American value, and that’s self-sufficiency,” Ken Cuccinelli, the former acting director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), said in a 2019 interview with Fox News about the Trump rule. “No one has a right to become an American who isn’t born here as an American,” he told NPR around the same time.

In June of this year, the Supreme Court dismissed a bid by Republican state officials to take over the legal defense of the public charge rule.

It came after an appeal by 13 Republican state attorneys general led by Arizona’s Mark Brnovich who sought to defend the rule in court after the Biden administration refused to do so. The state attorneys general had hoped to ask lower courts to throw out decisions that sided with various challengers to the rule, including a number of Democratic-led states.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/biden-admin-issues-final-rule-to-dismantle-trumps-public-charge-policy_4718741.html?utm_source=partner&utm_campaign=BonginoReport