Happy Thanksgiving to all my friends…and we give special thanks to our troops who are giving us the opportunity to live free! God Bless you.
“No people on earth have more cause to be thankful than ours, and this is said reverently, in no spirit of boastfulness in our own strength, but with gratitude to the Giver of good who has blessed us.” -Theodore Roosevelt
Thanksgiving and Wishful Thinking: I was blessed to spend Thanksgiving with family and friends. We were all thankful for our health, family, and blessings.
But as I sat there and happily observed my children and grandchildren, I couldn’t help but hope that our society would return to normalcy. I could only wish that those who perpetuated evil around the world, incited racisms at every turn, looked to divide versus overcome, and stir division for political reasons would just stop.
My wish list seems so far from reality, but I thought I would share it anyway…
- Peace on earth and good will to all
- Stop politicizing the pandemic…enough harm has been done
- A return to education where kids are taught how to think, read, write, and do math
- Re-Fund the police and return to a society that respects law and order
- Balanced Budgets
- Discourse where demonstrators are heard, and rioters are arrested & imprisoned
- Mainstream media that actually reports the news, fairly
- Freedom of Speech and an end to WOKE culture
- Borders that work and patriotic immigration
- A civil society that strives to get better every day rather than destruction of the best system of governance in the world
Am I asking for too much, wishing for too much? I pray not.
–Saul Anuzis
Click Here for Past Commentary from Saul
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Why the Senate should kill the Build Back Better bill
For those who believe in limited government, fiscal responsibility and the free enterprise system, Friday was one of the most ignominious days in the history of the House of Representatives. The House-passed Build Back Better bill was the fourth multi-trillion-dollar spending package that the Democratic-controlled chamber has enacted in just 12 months.
Let us recount: First, in the last days of the Trump administration, the House approved a $1 trillion COVID relief bill. Then, in March, Congress approved a $1.9 trillion bill that mostly bailed out blue states which shut down their economies the year before during the pandemic. Then, last month, the House approved a $1.2 trillion sham infrastructure bill that is mostly subsidies for green-energy programs. And now we have the $2 trillion to $3 trillion social welfare/climate change bill.
Add this all up and you have $6 trillion to $7 trillion of spending — almost all of it being spent during an economic recovery. Oh, and that doesn’t even include the $5 trillion annual federal budget that will be approved next month. All together, Congress will have authorized more spending this year than the combined costs of the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, World Wars I and II, the intercontinental railroad, the interstate highway system, and the Apollo moon landing, adjusted for inflation.
Why are we doing this?
Voter tsunami begins to drown Democrats
If you think I am exaggerating about a tsunami-like anti-Democrat wave, consider recent evidence.
Big earthquakes offshore in Alaska or Chile lead Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders to worry about tsunamis coming from thousands of miles away. People take precautions. They move to higher ground. Faced with a real threat, Hawaiians prepare to make major changes to survive.
Apparently, Hawaiians are more interested in survival than Washington Democrats.
Democrats have now had three weeks of tsunami warnings, and the dictatorship of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., seems determined to force through trillions of dollars of additional spending and a host of radical woke policies – even though the American people are screaming, “No!”
Big government socialism and woke radical policies – and incompetence on issues such as inflation, crime, controlling the border, leaving Afghanistan, and solving logistics problems – are all adding up to an easily repudiated mess. Fed up Americans have a simple battle cry: “It just doesn’t work.”
You may think I am exaggerating about a tsunami-like anti-Democrat wave, but consider recent evidence.
Democrats reeling year before midterm elections – here’s how Republicans stay on top and win big in 2022
It’s not hard to explain why Biden and the Democrats are reeling politically.
I said in March there was going to be a lot of buyer’s remorse when voters saw what Joe Biden and the Democrats were up to with total control of Washington. That was an understatement.
In a recent survey from USA Today and Suffolk University, 46% of voters said Biden has done a worse job as president than they expected. That included 16% of those who voted for him. And in a survey released last week by ABC News and the Washington Post, Republicans held a 10-point advantage in the generic congressional ballot, the largest margin in the 40-year history of the poll.
Here’s what should really scare Democrats vying to maintain control of the majority in the U.S. Senate: in the states that will decide the majority (Arizona, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, New Hampshire, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin), Republicans hold a 23-POINT LEAD in the generic ballot. These numbers are consistent with polling we at the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) have done that shows voters across the board rejecting the Democrats’ agenda.
Poll: 77% of Americans now say inflation is personally affecting them — and 57% blame Biden
More than three-quarters of Americans (77 percent) say inflation is affecting their lives as the holiday season begins, according to a new Yahoo News/YouGov poll — and a clear majority (57 percent) blame President Biden.
The survey of 1,696 U.S. adults, which was conducted from Nov. 17 to 19, also found that more of them selected inflation as the “most important issue facing America” (17 percent) than any other issue, including COVID-19 (15 percent), which continues to kill more than 1,100 Americans each day, on average.
And just 18 percent say Biden is doing enough to address it.
These results explain in part why the president’s overall approval rating has steadily declined to 43 percent in recent months while his disapproval rating has risen to 52 percent — and why, on the economy, Biden’s approval rating is even lower (40 percent).
Since last October, overall prices have soared 6.2 percent amid supply-chain bottlenecks and sky-high demand for goods — the fastest yearly pace in more than three decades.
Biden’s Covid Death Milestone
More Americans have died of the virus in 2021 than in all of 2020.
President Biden may not recall what he said during a 2020 campaign debate last fall, but Americans should: “Anyone who is responsible for that many deaths should not remain as President of the United States of America.” At the time the U.S. had recorded 220,000 Covid deaths.
Covid deaths this year have now surpassed the toll in 2020 with 350,000 since Inauguration Day. It would seem that Mr. Biden has done no better than Donald Trump in defeating Covid despite the benefit of vaccines, better therapies, and more clinical experience. The left politicized Covid by holding Mr. Trump responsible for a disease that was always going to be hard to defeat.
“If the president had done his job, had done his job from the beginning, all the people would still be alive,” Mr. Biden said last fall. That was as false as anything Mr. Trump ever said, but most journalists and experts agreed with the basic premise: Mr. Trump had blood on his hands. The world’s top medical journals called for Mr. Trump’s defeat.
A New England Journal of Medicine editorial headlined “Dying in a Leadership Vacuum” called the Administration “dangerously incompetent” and declared “we should not abet them and enable the deaths of thousands more Americans by allowing them to keep their jobs.” No wonder so many conservatives don’t trust these health experts.
Mr. Biden famously promised “to shut down the virus, not the country,” and he accused Mr. Trump of having “no plan.” Mr. Trump did downplay the virus in the early part of 2020, and he needlessly put himself in the middle of almost every debate over the disease and possible treatments. Politically, he played into Mr. Biden’s hands. But his Administration accelerated the vaccines and therapies that Mr. Biden later took credit for.
The Democratic brand is broken. The infrastructure bill isn’t fixing it.
In the days after the Democratic Party’s collapse in the Virginia governor’s race, party strategists descended on the commonwealth to figure out what went wrong and understand just how bad the national outlook might be next year.
What they discovered, largely through focus groups and polling, was even worse than expected. The problems cut far deeper than the failings of their gubernatorial nominee, Terry McAuliffe, or President Joe Biden’s flagging approval ratings. Rather, the Democratic Party’s entire brand was a wreck.
“Voters couldn’t name anything that Democrats had done, except a few who said we passed the infrastructure bill,” the center-left group Third Way and its pollsters said in a report, obtained first by POLITICO, on focus groups they ran in Virginia.
Most of the voters Third Way spoke with in suburban Virginia focus groups, according to the report, “could not articulate what Democrats stand for. They could also not say what they are doing in Washington, besides fighting.”
And those were just the people who voted for Biden.
Less than a year ahead of midterm elections, in which even Democrats widely expect they will lose the House and, possibly, the Senate, the party is confronting an identity crisis. It isn’t just Biden’s cratering public approval ratings, inflation, or the precedent that the party in power typically loses seats in a president’s first midterm.
The Three I’s That Could Dominate 2022 Midterm Elections
Republicans want voters to focus on subjects that add up to a hazardous combination for Democrats.
Immigration policy remains an issue for voters concerned about enforcement at the Mexico border.
There’s nearly a year to go before the congressional midterm elections, but it isn’t too early to see what Republicans want those elections to be about. They want to focus voter attention on three I’s: inflation, immigration and identity politics—specifically, whether Democrats now are the ones practicing identity politics.
For Democrats, that is a potentially toxic mixture. They need to shift the focus to friendlier terrain, which they think they have started to do with success on infrastructure and social-spending legislation. They still have time, but also need to worry that perceptions can harden long before votes are cast.
This backdrop is important, because in politics as in warfare, the side that succeeds in picking the battlefield and taking the high ground there early on has a big advantage.
Right now, Republicans like the terrain they’ve staked out. Inflation may be the most potent of their issue set, because it is the one voters feel most immediately and most personally.
FEC: 2020 campaign spending doubles 2016
Campaign spending exploded in 2020, with more than double being spent compared to 2016 and likely driven by small-dollar donations solicited nonstop by political action committees and candidates.
A new Federal Election Commission audit showed spending reached $14.5 billion in 2020, up from about $6 billion in 2016, which broke the previous presidential election year, 2012, by a hair.
But while the new FEC auditor seemed to blame the landmark 2010 Citizens United v. FEC Supreme Court case that opened up corporate spending, the real reason might be a very positive development: Small donors are getting into politics.
The Shoplifting Capital of the U.S.A.
Maybe someday San Francisco will stop favoring criminals over law-abiding businesses.
It ought to be possible to operate a retail store in one of America’s largest and most iconic cities, but this most basic commercial proposition is in doubt in San Francisco.
The erstwhile Golden City is beset by an ongoing tide of theft that is closing down retail locations and demonstrating again the city’s unwillingness to govern itself.
Cities around the country dub themselves “the capital” of this or that signature product: artichokes in Castroville, Calif.; earmuffs in Farmington, Maine; spinach in Alma, Ark.; fried chicken in Barberton, Ohio.
San Francisco, and the larger Bay Area, could now easily claim the title of Shoplifting Capital of the U.S.A., should it want the honor.
Rittenhouse Coverage Showcases Left-Wing Obsession With Stoking Race Wars
Those who followed corporate coverage of the Kyle Rittenhouse trial and nothing else might have come away with the belief that Rittenhouse was an avowed white supremacist who shot and killed three black people.
Rittenhouse, the narrative goes, crossed state lines with an illegal firearm to shoot righteous demonstrators rioting in the noble name of social justice. Although the distance traveled was a whopping 20 miles to a community where he’s worked, volunteered, and visited his father, the firearm used was a legally obtained weapon, and the three shot were all white (one survived), that hasn’t stopped the left-wing narrative seizing on Rittenhouse’s case to foment racial tension. It also hasn’t stopped the toxic narrative from feeding ill-guided grievance.
“It’s not okay for a man to grab a rifle, travel across state lines, and shoot three people and walk free,” said self-proclaimed comedian Amber Ruffin moments after a Kenosha jury ruled Rittenhouse acted in self-defense…
… How do you end racism when you’re openly being racist? You don’t, and that’s the point. The entire Rittenhouse trial had nothing to do with racism, but the innocence of a young white man who protected himself from a violent crowd inflamed the racists into crafting a narrative of white supremacy where there was none.
Woke culture has hit our police hard and now it threatens our safety
We have told police that we don’t need them to defend us and they have heard us loud and clear.
A survey of 5,935 New York Police Department officers, released last week, found that a startling 56% would not become cops if they had to do it again.
That’s a travesty.
There’s a certain type of person who is drawn to law enforcement jobs. It is not a glamorous job nor does it pay particularly well for the risks they are asked every day to endure.
But for a long time, the profession was respected. Everyone knew we needed police for a functioning society.
Last year, when the Black Lives Matter protests turned into riots all over the country, police were maligned as the enemy. The foolish idea “Defund Police” spread among the left and took up residence among policy makers. The idea sounded like a joke and yet cities across the country made cuts to their police departments in response to activist demands.
Another month of failure on the southern border
More than 164,000 migrants were arrested after illegally crossing the southern border this October. That is more than twice the number arrested in October last year, and it is an all-time high for the month of October. But President Joe Biden’s Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas thinks that’s A-OK.
Asked to give himself a grade for his job on securing the southern border, Mayorkas told the Senate Judiciary Committee this Tuesday, “I am a tough grader on myself and I give myself an A.”
Almost 1.7 million illegal immigrants have been arrested (or, more often, turned themselves in to apply for asylum) crossing the southern border since Biden became president, a 300% increase from the January through October numbers for President Donald Trump’s last year in office. Hundreds of thousands of these illegal migrants have been released into the United States, tens of thousands of them without even a notice to appear in court.
Even those with court dates know it will take years for their meritless asylum claims to be rejected (and more than 85% of such claims are rejected), so the Biden administration is effectively giving these migrants ample time to disappear in the knowledge that Biden will make no effort to deport them.
Voters have not only noticed the dramatic increase in illegal immigration since Biden became president, but they blame Biden for the crisis, and they want it dealt with immediately.
According to the latest Harvard-Harris poll, 68% of voters believe the crisis at the southern border needs to be addressed immediately. And 65% of voters specifically blame Biden’s executive orders for increasing illegal immigration. Fifty-four percent say that Biden’s policies are “creating an open border.”
At least two thirds of the 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States are Mexicans and Central Americans – and 43% have been living here for 15 years or more
Mexicans and Central Americans represent 67 percent of the 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States.
At least 43 percent of undocumented immigrants have resided in the United States for more than 15 years.
Data was provided by the Migration Policy Institute, World Food Programme and Civic Data Design Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The study shows that Mexicans make up 48 percent percent of the undocumented immigrant population.
A study on migration to the Unites States found that 67 percent of the undocumented immigrants who are living in the country migrated from Central America and Mexico.
The report was released Tuesday by the Migration Policy Institute, World Food Programme and Civic Data Design Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology also revealed that 43 percent of the immigrants have been living in the U.S. for more than 15 years.
The New World of Post-Pandemic Politics
The crisis has hardened attitudes toward government among Republicans and Democrats and created unpredictable dynamics for the elections ahead.
When the coronavirus pandemic began rampaging through American society in the early months of 2020, it was clear that it would set off a public-health crisis. What few anticipated at the time was its far-reaching impact on the country’s politics. Now there can be no doubt: The pandemic and lockdowns have exacerbated the nation’s political tribalism, put new issues atop the public’s priority list, deepened generational differences and fractured social structures that have helped to hold the body politic together.
A nation that was already skeptical about its institutions and leaders has only grown more so, and it may be a long time before experts are trusted as they were before. In the wake of such an unsettling crisis, voters may put greater stock in experience and steadiness in choosing political leaders going forward—or begin tossing aside discredited incumbents in favor of a new wave of post-pandemic leaders.
Either way, the effects are hardly limited to the U.S. The pandemic, which has claimed more than 770,000 American lives, helped to bring down a U.S. president, Donald Trump, but it also contributed to the fall of two Japanese prime ministers, nearly caused the leader of Canada to lose his job and appears to have strengthened populist movements across Europe. “Obviously, we have only begun to discern the long-term effects of it,” says Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster.
Five Trump-Russia ‘Collusion’ Corrections We Need From the Media Now — Just for Starters
Five years after the Hillary Clinton campaign-funded collection of Trump-Russia conspiracy theories known as the Steele dossier was published by BuzzFeed, news outlets that amplified its false allegations have suffered major losses of credibility. The recent indictment of the dossier’s main source, Igor Danchenko, for allegedly lying to the FBI, has catalyzed a new reckoning.
In response to what the news site Axios has called “one of the most egregious journalistic errors in modern history,” the Washington Post has re-edited at least a dozen stories related to Steele. For two of those, the Post removed entire sections, changed headlines, and added lengthy editor’s notes.
But the Post’s response also exhibits the limits of the media’s Steele-induced self-examination. First, the reporters bylined on those two articles, Rosalind S. Helderman and Tom Hamburger, and their editors have declined to explain how and why they were so egregiously misled. Nor have they revealed the names of the anonymous sources responsible for deceiving them and the public over months and years.
Perhaps more important, the Post, like other publications, has so far limited its Russiagate reckoning to work directly involving Steele – and only after a federal indictment forced its hand. But the Steele dossier has been widely discredited since at least April 2019, when Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller and his team of prosecutors and FBI agents were unable to find evidence in support of any of its claims.
