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Tuesday, January 30, 2024

Reversing the Damage Biden has Done

AP Photo/Adam Bettcher

Now entering his fourth year in office, Joe Biden represents the worst president and worst administration in the last 76 years, starting from the time that Truman was elected in 1948.

The damage that the Biden administration has done to our nation and, in many respects, to the world is incalculable. Let's take a walk through just a handful of the various domains in which Biden has created havoc with an eye on what it would take to reverse it.

Education and the Welfare of Young Children

This area is perhaps the most insidious of all Biden’s maneuvers. His demented and incompetent Secretary of Education, Miguel Cardona, has championed wokesters and their policies in education throughout the nation. He is single-handedly trying to decimate women's sports by allowing transgender people to compete at the highest levels against lifelong biological females.

The indoctrination of young children in elementary schools is most troubling as it could take a generation or more before large percentages of them ever come to their senses. They are taught to hate America, to hate themselves, to question their gender, to accept Critical Race Theory, and to engage in identity politics (even before they understand what identity politics is). There is no clear solution to the damage done here. The resolution will take at least a decade, probably two.

The damage wrought by the Biden administration is incalculable. Biden has turned the southern border situation into a ticking time bomb. Nine million line jumpers are in the country now, among them all types of terrorists from the Middle East, soldiers from China, Russian operatives, and Latin American and South American cartel members.

Joe Biden's administration has no idea who is in the country and continues to support our being flooded on a daily basis. The potential for terrorism is high. A strong president, elected in 2024, can help enormously, but rooting out those who are already here will be a monumental job.

Inflation and Economic Squeeze on the Middle Class

With someone who knows anything about economic policy and how to assist vast amounts of our population to regain the spending power that they had say under President Trump, the situation could improve rapidly.

Wages eventually could catch up to the inflation that Biden has brought. Savings could start to improve. Credit card and personal debt could start to fall. A competent Secretary of the Treasury could help considerably. There is hope on this issue.

International Relations and World Peace

Biden has created foreign policy blunders of a catastrophic nature. We are disrespected around the world. The leaders in Russia, China, and elsewhere do not fear Biden and his administration in the least. Combined with a weakened military, we are ripe for attack; the 20+ attacks on U.S. installations in the Middle East by Iranians or Iranian proxies is a testament to this.

A strong leader can rebuild our military within a couple of years. International relations can be improved with a strong leader as well. We have hope here. However, we don't know what steps China, Russia, and Iran will take in the foreseeable future. China is likely to invade Taiwan. Russia and China will continue to support regimes that hate us. Iran must be handcuffed, and it's not going to happen under this administration.

Weaponization of Federal Agencies

This didn't start with Biden. Obama set this in motion. The Department of Justice, the FBI, the State Department, and numerous other agencies must be cleansed from the top down. In addition, those who have broken the law must be held accountable, unlike what has happened in the last ten years.

The American public's faith in our federal institutions and agencies is declining with each passing week. A strong leader who appoints the right cabinet members can make a huge difference, and so, there's hope in this area.

Energy Independence

Biden has reversed the gains that the Trump administration was able to make. We were an energy-independent nation. Now we go with hat in hand to energy producers worldwide, many of whom don't like us at all, and we are required to be beholden to them.

Restoring the policies that Trump initiated, on the part of a newly elected Republican president, will make a huge difference, and the effects will be felt almost immediately.

Corporate Investment in America

Donald Trump was able to induce numerous corporations to relocate back to the States. In doing so, he helped to create meaningful, good-paying jobs and pride in manual American manufacturing. Under Biden, consumer confidence has dropped to the point where people are afraid to make a move. No one knows what's coming down the pike because of the erratic nature of Biden’s economic policies.

Here again, a strong Republican leader can make a huge difference here, and perhaps reverse the damage within a handful of years.

https://townhall.com/columnists/jeffdavidson/2024/01/27/reversing-the-damage-biden-has-done-n2634265?utm_source=thdailypm&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl&recip=28668535

Monday, January 29, 2024

The Domestic Terrorists of Tomorrow are Blocking Traffic Today

The Domestic Terrorists of Tomorrow are Blocking Traffic Today

The "cause" is the process of finding those willing to kill.

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After Hamas supporters were caught screaming “shame on you” at children receiving cancer treatment at a Manhattan hospital (“make sure they hear you, they’re in the windows”) some people wondered what they were trying to accomplish.

Questions like that only reveal the vast gap between the pro-Hamas mob and everyone else.

The pro-Hamas protests, allegedly in pursuit of a ceasefire, but in reality celebrating Hamas and now Houthi terrorism, have picked random fights with Starbucks, Christmas Tree lightings and Alec Baldwin to name a few. They are not so much for anything as they are against things.

Reasonable people, usually old school liberals, still don’t understand the Left. And so they also don’t understand what happened to their movement, their party and their country.

Normal people think that protests are about spreading awareness and winning over others, and they don’t grasp why the rioters are spewing hate at them instead of trying to win them over.

The mobs aren’t there to persuade them but to express their hatred for them. The common denominator of all of these riots is a burning desire to destroy everything around them. They’re not shutting down airports or smashing store windows to bring attention to a cause.

Smashing windows and shutting down airports is their cause.

Before Hamas, they were smashing windows for abortion, BLM and Occupy Wall Street, and against the Iraq War and to protest the World Trade Organization. Some of the same men in black who are smashing Starbucks windows now for Gaza were smashing them back in Seattle in the WTO protests of 1999. Before too long they’ll need to retire and collect Social Security.

A quarter century of smashing Starbucks windows clearly has nothing to do with Gaza.

They don’t care about black lives, the lives in Gaza or Iraq, or the lives of the poor: these are just the pretexts that provide them with moral superiority so they feel justified smashing things.

The pro-Hamas riots are a carbon copy of the BLM riots. Like the eco-terrorists, who have taken to vandalizing classical art in museums, their goal isn’t persuasion through awareness, it’s terrorism. They block traffic, airport holiday travel and holiday events for whatever cause happens to be trending at any given time. Few of these leftists have any real sense of what Hamas is, fewer still know who the Houthis are, but they’ll still scream about an ‘Intifada.”

What they actually want has less to do with Gaza than with right here at home.

“When we finally deal that final blow to destroy Israel. When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism,” Manolo De Los Santos of The People’s Forum, which receives funds out of Communist China and has been linked to many of the pro-Hamas protests, promised.

As David Horowitz frequently reminded us, sixties radicals preached that, “the issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.”

Individual causes, environmentalism, LGBTQ rights, Gaza, Iraq, income inequality, unions, Wall Street, abortion or criminals, are just gateway drugs to radicalize a base for the leftist revolution.

Protests aren’t really “protests” in the sense that liberals think of them as being vehicles to rally for change. They’re the equivalent of Al Qaeda terrorist attacks whose goal is to recruit, radicalize and empower the storm troopers who are going to wage war against the world.

Blocking traffic or airports isn’t really about ending Israeli attacks on Hamas, but about inflicting misery on Americans and making the leftist perpetrators feel powerful and self-righteous by expressing their malice. Don’t think of these as protests: think of them as initiation sessions like those of gangs and cults in which new members prove themselves by hurting someone.

Protest theater rewards leftist activists by making them into the focus of attention. Cameras are on them as they berate anyone in sight, from kids with cancer to Alec Baldwin, for their lack of empathy, and then, justified by the conviction that everyone else is bad, they make them suffer.

Blocking school buses, ambulances and people coming home from working, or shouting, “shame on you” at kids with cancer is just part of the radicalization process. Its purpose is to make the activists cause pain while being so emotionally detached from their victims that they not only feel nothing when inflicting pain, but that doing so makes them morally superior.

The process produces people capable of not only blocking traffic, but planting bombs.

That is exactly how this worked in the sixties. Protest rallies were deliberately turned into violent confrontations with police and guardsmen to radicalize a generation of leftist students. Only a small number of those actually formed organizations like the Weathermen, but millions more romanticized them and defended their cause. When the terrorists went into academia, entertainment and politics, those supporters swiftly put them into positions of power.

The same cycle has been repeating itself since the relaunch of the anti-war movement after 9/11. Those protests were followed by wholly manufactured causes like Occupy Wall Street and BLM that existed purely to radicalize and recruit a generation to fight a war against America.

The pro-Hamas protests are the work of most of the same coalition and the same mission.

There are some members of the coalition, especially Islamists, who are deeply invested in the idea of a Hamas victory and the destruction of Israel, but most, like The People’s Forum, see destroying Israel as part of the larger leftist mission of destroying America and the West.

The pretext for the destruction matters much less than the overriding revolutionary goal.

Communist revolutionaries have exploited wars and food shortages to seize power, only to then inflict even worse wars and food shortages. Obama promised peace in the Middle East, an end to income inequality and the salvation of the planet. And all of these things only grew worse.

But following the Cloward-Piven model, leftists only make things worse. The purpose of leftist governments is to destroy countries by exacerbating every social, economic, geopolitical and cultural problem until they have brought societies to their knees and can seize total power.

Leftist protests, like the terrorists they support, are also not about fixing anything, but staging ugly hostile confrontations with police and the public to recruit the malicious and the disaffected (while playing the victim) and then escalating the violence and using it to take over a country.

It works. Consider who was in the White House before the BLM riots and who’s there now.

Revolutions need causes, but the only real cause of a revolution is its own power. Or as George Orwell wrote in 1984, “One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.”

A revolution requires people willing to kill. And so they need to be given reasons to kill. The ‘cause’ is the process of finding those willing to kill and giving them the reasons to do it.

The same processes of training and recruitment that climaxed in the Oct 7 attacks in Israel are underway in this country. DEI educational activists may not be as blatant about it as Hamas, but they share a similar goal of radicalizing a base until it is willing to commit any atrocity and still consider itself morally superior. The processes that produced men willing to rape and kill for Islam in Israel are also producing men and women in the West who are willing to cheer that and to wage war against their own societies in order to protect those rapists and killers.

The domestic terrorists of tomorrow are blocking traffic in the streets of our cities today.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-domestic-terrorists-of-tomorrow-are-blocking-traffic-today/

Principles of the American Government

Principles of the American Government

Mark Lewis

The state of Texas is 100% correct in its current battle against Joe Biden and the national government. Democrats and Uniparty Republicans can always be counted on to side with the federal government against the states because it is their ideology (like the CCP in China) to centralize more power into Washington, D.C. The Supreme Court, more often than not, supports the feds for the simple reason that it, too, is a branch of the federal government, and more benefits will also accrue to it as power is increasingly centralized.

We need to study the Declaration of Independence to understand the issues involved. That document is where the founding principles of the American government are discovered, not the Constitution. The Constitution specifically defines the power the national government can and cannot exercise. None of those powers—in the original Constitution—violated the principles found in the Declaration of Independence. This is not so today. Except in certain organizational matters (House, Senate, Presidency, etc.), the federal government pays absolutely no attention to its power enumerated in the Constitution. Neither party honors the Constitution, nor do any of the three branches.

But that’s another story to Texas and the principles of the American government. Let’s look at what the Declaration of Independence says and how it applies to this matter.

1. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that their Creator endows them with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” My rights come from God, not the government. The Left—which largely denies there is a God—rejects this, and it is a major source of the battle between “right” and “left” today, though few people truly understand that. My body, from God, is my property, and I have the right to defend my “life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness” (my property rights) from any possible harm. No one has a “right” to take my rights from me as long as I do not abuse them. I am “free” (“liberty”), because of God, not government, to use my body as I see fit, as long as I do not violate the laws of that God Who gave me those rights.

However, because some people DO violate these rights, I can do whatever is necessary to protect mine. Some of the rights God gives me can better be exercised collectively (through “government”) than individually. For example, war. I have the right to protect my individual body with a weapon, but a war is better fought collectively. There are other such matters that are better handled “collectively,” and Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution defines them. Thus, I sacrifice certain of my personal rights to form a government that is able (in the “collective”) to perform certain protections better than I can do individually.

2. “That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed”. As just noted, men form governments to protect better (“secure”) certain of our rights. This is the very purpose of government—the protection of our rights. But the government exists only by our consent. If we don’t consent, the government loses its validity and right to exist. The government has only ONE source of authority—the “consent of the governed.” When it loses that consent, it loses all right to existence. That is what the whole American Revolution was about, folks. We give the government its rights, and whatever rights we give it we can take back whenever we want to.

So, what happens when the government we create no longer does what we tell it to?

3. “That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government.” Jefferson is talking about secession here, which is exactly what our Founders were doing—seceding from the British Empire. Patriots, in America today, aren’t to that point—YET! But the Declaration clearly states that when the government doesn’t do what its purpose is—protect the rights of the people—then the people have a right to “alter” or even “abolish” that government.

There are three levels of government in America—local, state, and national—and all three, ultimately, have the same purpose, i.e., to protect the “property rights” of the people. If any of those governments (local, state, or federal) fail to do what we, the people, “consent” to, we have the right to “alter” or “abolish” any of those governments. In America, we have “altered” our governments many times using the peaceful voting process. Hopefully, we will “alter” it again this year by booting Joe Biden and Democrats out of power. But, right now, the federal government, under Biden, is decidedly NOT doing what it should be doing, i.e., protecting the rights of its citizens from an illegal intrusion by millions of people who have absolutely no cause to be in America. Those people are welcome to try to come legally, but even the federal government cannot allow them to come illegally. If the federal government will not do what it is supposed to do—i.e., protect the people—then the state and local governments must. The American people did NOT give ALL power to the national government—and for this very reason. We don’t trust any area of government, so we divide its powers among the three localities.

The state of Texas not only has the right, it has the DUTY to protect its people. The federal government refuses to do it. Texas says it will. Texas is right. God bless Texas.

https://townhall.com/columnists/marklewis/2024/01/26/the-state-of-texas-and-the-founding-principles-of-the-american-government-n2634212?utm_source=thdailyvip&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl&bcid=15803c7fc8c68b6fd1f0a5e7f4b59fc49df45d48335d4339ad60f7b0a0c7404d&recip=28668535

Is Joe Biden Sabotaging His Campaign Now?

Is Joe Biden Sabotaging His Campaign Now?

MATT MARGOLIS |

I’ve been saying for some time now that the Biden administration made a gross miscalculation by spending more than a year touting Bidenomics. And boy, did the White House go all in.

Joe Biden embarked on a nationwide tour, consistently praising the state of the economy and eagerly assuming full responsibility for it. Time and time again, he gave speeches before banners adorned with the phrase "Bidenomics," and he remained steadfast in his belief that a rosy depiction of the situation would convince people that things were great.

The strategy didn’t work. Not at all. In fact, it backfired spectacularly, as voters chose to believe their eyes and bank accounts more than the White House talking points. Who can blame them? When you’re struggling to make ends meet because of out-of-control inflation, anything short of hypnosis isn’t going to convince you that all is well.

And it’s no guarantee that hypnosis would work either.

In any case, the messaging backfired so badly that House Democrats wanted nothing to do with it as they embarked on their reelection campaigns. Even the White House started to realize it wasn’t helping and stopped using “Bidenomics” around November of last year.

It was a smart move to ditch that messaging, even it was too late to change the fact that he'd taken full ownership of an economy that people are hurting in.

And then Biden decided to resurrect it this week.

"But our plan is delivering for the American people, building an economy from the middle out and the bottom up, not the top down," he said in a speech on Wednesday. "That’s what I said I was going to do—that's what I tried to do as a senator and vice president—but because, when we do that, the poor have a ladder up and the middle class does well, and the wealthy do well. Although they should be paying a hell of a lot more in taxes."

"We all do well," he continued. "It’s called Bidenomics. If you notice, all the major—all the major economists who are talking about 'there’s going to be a recession next week, next month'—they’re all of a sudden—they're seeing the Lord."

Economists are still predicting that a recession could happen in 2024, by the way. TD Securities puts the odds of a recession in 2024 at 65%. George Glover at Business Insider anticipates a recession in Q2-Q3 2024. Charlie Dougherty, a senior economist at Wells Fargo, predicted last year that a recession may happen in the second half of 2024.

But I digress. I suspect that there were plenty of Democrats who collectively gasped when Biden brought that message back to life.

Voters on both sides of the aisle are panning this economy, yet Biden continues to push this Bidenomics messaging even though it's clearly not in his best interests to do so. Is he actively trying to sabotage his campaign? I've been critical of plenty of Donald Trump's campaign decisions, but this could be the most blatant example of political malpractice yet.

And he's doubling down on it. He mentioned it again in a speech on Thursday in Wisconsin, claiming, "That’s our economic plan: invest in America, invest in American products, build in America. That’s what we call Bidenomics."

This is the political equivalent of the Titanic hitting the iceberg, turning around, and then hitting it again. That said, I advise Biden to keep doing it.

https://pjmedia.com/matt-margolis/2024/01/26/is-joe-biden-sabotaging-his-campaign-now-n4925880

Sunday, January 28, 2024

Pro-Biden Newsrooms Debate Censoring Trump

Pro-Biden Newsrooms Debate Censoring Trump

By Tim Graham

Donald Trump's early primary victories have started the "newsroom debates" again. Associated Press media reporter David Bauder penned a story headlined "Trump's live appearances pose a riddle that news executives still haven't solved."

So, when a newsworthy event happens — like Trump's victory speech after the New Hampshire primary — the pro-Biden networks worry "Trump will make false statements that are difficult, if not impossible, to correct in real time — or go completely off script with something entirely unexpected."

Does Trump make false statements? Yes, starting with his refusal to concede he lost the 2020 election. Does Joe Biden make false statements? The name "Biden" never comes up in Bauder's story. There are no fraught newsroom debates over what the president says live. Biden lies and mangles facts on a regular basis, but none of these networks have the slightest resistance to airing him live. This makes them look like naked partisans.

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On Jan. 24, the afternoon this AP story was posted, Biden spoke to accept the endorsement of the United Auto Workers union. CNN aired six minutes of the speech live, and there was no "fact-checking" to be done. They turned to CNN reporters who touted the endorsement as a big deal, and pointed out the UAW president called Trump a "scam." That's lapdog coverage.

But with Trump, Bauder wrote nervously of "the responsibility of giving a potential future president the chance to be heard." Then he mentioned "a disastrous town hall event with Trump on CNN last spring reminded everyone of the implications of airing his appearances live."

How was it "disastrous"? Did anyone die? Did CNN fall apart? Or were they out of third place for an hour? It obviously rocked CNN to its core and marked the beginning of the end of CNN boss Chris Licht. Bauder hinted it was disastrous because "fact-checking on the fly can be extraordinarily hard, and many of Trump's supporters are more inclined to believe what comes out of the former president's mouth than what a news organization declares is true."

The problem here, then, is that the media are frustrated that anyone doubts their "fact-checking," as if it's completely factual and not influenced by their red-hot partisan loathing of their subject.

"I don't know why anyone has to take him live," former CNN President Jon Klein told Bauder. They're so opposed to it that Bauder hints that newsrooms are already faced with a "particularly hard decision" over whether to air Trump's convention acceptance speech live if he's nominated.

At this point, you wonder if Trump and Biden ever debate in the fall, they'll decide Trump's answers will not be aired live.

What remains is the other unspoken, apparent nonissue in newsrooms of access to the candidates. While they are all agitated over granting Trump any access, none of these networks have seemed to offer the slightest public critique of Biden refusing to do news conferences or grant interviews to even liberal outlets. This president has not granted one interview to a national newspaper during his term, and apparently none of them have ever objected.

As usual, Trump grants wide access, and gets cut off. Biden is granting almost zero access to persistent questioning, and he's getting the royal treatment. You never bother the monarch with an impertinent inquiry!

As the public observes this flaming double standard, the media elites keep wondering why no one trusts them and why they are shedding employees. In the end, it's clear they think too many voters are stupid, and won't listen to their sweet reason. That's not helping them gain trust.

https://www.creators.com/read/tim-graham/01/24/pro-biden-newsrooms-debate-censoring-trump#google_vignette

Houthis Sink a Tanker in Gulf of Aden and Give the US a Black Eye but Enjoy the Great Plot Twist

Houthis Sink a Tanker in Gulf of Aden and Give the US a Black Eye but Enjoy the Great Plot Twist

By streiff |

A Houthi terrorist-fired anti-ship ballistic missile hit a petroleum tanker in the Gulf of Aden, and the crew was forced to abandon the ship on Friday. The British-owned, Marshall Islands-flagged 110,000-ton tanker M/T Marlin Luanda was carrying a cargo of Russian naphtha from Greece to Singapore. A second ship, the Panama-flagged 109,000-ton tanker M/T Achilles (ownership is unknown), loaded with petroleum products taken on in Prmorsk, Russia, with no revealed destination, was also targeted but completed its transit safely.

Sal Mercogliano (@mercoglianos) has recorded the engagement from @MarineTraffic and removed the clutter of other ships. At 0:41, you can see the result of the impact as the M/T Marlin Luanda rapidly decelerates. If you are interested in what is happening in the Red Sea/Gulf of Aden or shipping in general, give him a follow.

The crew of the M/T Marlin Luanda tried to save the ship but were overwhelmed and, according to reports, abandoned the ship. The Indian destroyer INS Visakhapatnam was first on the scene to render assistance. Since then other coalition warships have responded.

The loss of the M/T Marlin Luanda was confirmed in an interview with Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman C. Q. Brown on ABC.

Earlier in the day, the USS Carney came under attack from a Houthi anti-ship ballistic missile and shot it down.

Key Points

1. This engagement happened in the same area as the incident on Thursday in which two US-flagged and US-owned container ships and the USS Gravely were forced to beat an ignominious retreat out of missile range.

READ: Houthis Force US-Escorted Convoy to Retreat

2. The Houthis have successfully expanded the battlespace to include the northern half of the Gulf of Aden.

3. The stories do not mention the Iranian intelligence ship MV Behshad. Still, one has to assume it is lurking in the area and providing targeting information to the Houthis.

3. This episode makes Operation Prosperity Guardian more of a joke than it already is. A US carrier strike group in the area does no good if it cannot enforce freedom of navigation.

4. If the pattern established over the last couple of weeks holds, the combination of a US destroyer being attacked and a civilian tanker sunk will draw a response under the aegis of Operation Poseidon Archer

READ: Biden Decides One Strategic Failure in the Red Sea Isn't Enough So He Creates a Second One

5. We need to see if this strike will go after a few launchers or if it will hit command and control nodes that enable the Houthis to engage shipping targets.

6. A point I've made consistently since this fight over the control of the Red Sea began is that Jake Sullivan and Biden's national security team are playing not to lose, rather than to win. They are obviously afraid of offending Iran by thumping their Houthi proxies. This timidity and indecisiveness has emboldened the Houthis. The problem with the Sullivan strategy is that the US Navy has to win 100 percent of the time. The Houthis only need an occasional big day, like today. to make their point to maritime insurance companies that they should avoid the Red Sea.

READ:

Houthis Launch Largest Attack So Far Targeting American-Flagged Merchant Ships With American Sailors

Red Sea Security Coalition Melts Down As Member Nations Refuse to Accept US Leadership

Yemen's Houthis Were So Terrified by Biden's Attack That They've Started Attacking US Ships Again

Biden's Red Sea Strategy Hits High Gear As Insurers Drop US Ships and Suez Traffic Reaches Pandemic Lows

This wishy-washy, grad school style of national security planning, where responses are carefully calibrated, doesn't work in real life. Biden has staked US prestige on keeping the Red Sea open, and it has been proven that he doesn't have the huevos needed to do the job. It will take a generation to undo the damage he's done.

https://redstate.com/streiff/2024/01/26/houthis-sink-a-tanker-in-gulf-of-aden-and-give-the-us-a-black-eye-but-enjoy-the-great-plot-twist-n2169280